How Do We Get Efficient with Our Energy? (Monthly Solo Podcast)

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In May’s monthly solo episode, I’m reflecting on: motherhood, my mom, the Performance of Parenthood, and what provokes my anger around Mother’s Day. How badly the world needs us all to hold a balance of the masculine and feminine—and how badly we need the feminine to rise in men. What it might look like if we didn’t operate out of fear. Applying my writing process and system to other areas of life. What keeps us from saying no, and what keeps us from saying yes—based on our Enneagram types. And, more.

RELATED LINKS:

Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness (the official workbook companion to On Our Best Behavior)

On Our Best Behavior

Courtney Smith on Pulling the Thread on the Enneagram

The Lies Mothers Tell Themselves and Their Children (NyTimes Op-Ed)

Temple Grandin on Pulling the Thread on Verbal vs. Visual/Spatial Thinkers

Letting Go, Richard Hawkins

Fired Up, Shannon Watts

Mothering the World

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Hi friends and happy May to all the moms who are listening with school-aged children. I feel for you right now. I dunno why May is. Well, I do know why May is such an intense grind. It's a funny month for Mother's Day too, which of course is a manufactured holiday just because it seems when everything starts Venn diagramming and landing on us in really intense ways. It provokes all of my anger and antipathy. A few years ago when On Our Best Behavior first came out, I wrote this op-ed for the New York Times that sort of had its own virality, which was about the deep am ambivalence of motherhood.

And it was about this idea in our culture where we conflate good moms with wanting to be moms all the time. And that wasn't how, that wasn't the mom who raised me. She was full of ambivalence and I knew it and it was quite clear, made quite clear to me my life that it's not necessarily what she wanted. It wasn't her greatest ambition and that she really loved us, but she didn't love being a mother. And that was a really important distinction for her. I think too, my mom was raised, came of age during second wave feminism. And so in some ways she could do anything and in other ways she felt entirely limited by her own circumstances and upbringing and lack of high quality education and all the things. But my mom is brilliant and incredibly competent and she could have done things with her life.

And I think that every day, in some ways my brother and I were the reason that she hadn't. And we carried that. I felt that ambivalence and I felt that maternal envy a lot, an unspoken competition, not even, but just living vicariously through me. And really there was somehow the spell really broke when I was in my twenties. And my mom saw how incredibly hard it was and how much I was struggling both to find a date and also to support myself. It was hard. I was living in New York and living very much paycheck to paycheck. And I'm fortunate that my parents could, when needed bail me out. And yet even being careful with money, I could barely, I couldn't really make ends meet if I'm honest. I wasn't not living large. I lived in a loft with a bunch of other people above the Burger King on Canal Street.

Those were the Times friends, those were the times. But that's when you go and do that. I wouldn't have chosen any other way, but it just wasn't easy and I did not know what I was doing. I didn't know who I was or what I was supposed to be spending my time on. And this was also a little shocking to me because I'd been such a high performing child and had done so much to distinguish myself, whether it was through skiing and becoming nationally ranked mogul skier or a athlete and representing the state of Montana, the National Math Counts competition or getting into Yale or nearly acing my SATs. I was listening to this conversation with, oh God, what's his name? Michael Rubin. My friend Emma Grede launched a podcast called Aspire, and she was interviewing Michael and they work on Off-Season together, and he's a total hilarious nut job.

And he was saying that he had gotten a 780 on his SATs combined. So I am telling you, I nearly aced my SATs and we can look at who is more successful. I think his brand is worth 25 billion or something, 15 billion. I mean, when you're talking about billions, doesn't even matter. Anyway, he's clearly brilliant, brilliant operator. So all of these things, these vanity metrics for people who are like me and are verbal thinkers, this goes to Temple Grandin's work. There's verbal visual spatial thinkers and our school system, our world is really set up for verbal thinkers like me. And the people who are brilliant visually, spatially, engineers, et cetera, often fail out of school because they're not verbal. So even verbal algebra is a verbal math. I love algebra, really good at algebra guys. It's verbal math. I do not understand geometry. I have terrible understanding of space, et cetera.

I can't park. I am entirely indexed in the verbal. So my early life, the verbal stuff was really easy for me and I was really good at distinguishing myself. And then I hit my twenties and it was hard. And to go back to my main point, this was actually good for my relationship with my mother because I think it punctured a fantasy that she had about what her life might've been like. And I think then at that point she looked at her life and said, oh, this is pretty good. This is pretty sweet. I read compulsively. I have really interesting friends. I do work that's interesting in the community. I play bridge, I travel and so on and so forth. Anyway, I'm sure my mom loves being the subject of this podcast, but what was funny about that op-ed is obviously my mom blessed it and read it, read multiple drafts.

There were some parts about my grandmother that she asked me to take out, which of course I obliged. But everything that I said about her she felt was fair game and was an honest telling of our relationship. And half of her friends thought that the piece was hilarious and so very her and loved it and half were really mad at me and thought that I had been incredibly disloyal. And I think that's really interesting because it points to how scared we are of the truth and how protective we are about the stories about, for example, what a good mom is, and then the way that we expect our daughters to be complicit with those stories and not even, not call us out, but just not be honest. And that's a great disservice. I am so curious as my kids get older to hear their version of their childhood, I really can't wait.

I'm sure it's going to be different than mine. And also what was true for them. So anyway, so Mother's Day mothering, it brings up all my feelings. I've been really testy in part because it's funny, my kids go to this progressive school. It's really great. And yet what I have marked and noticed is that everything of course comes down to the moms. There are couple of dads who are very visible. A lot of dads do drop off and whatnot and are visible and are present. And there are a couple of dads who volunteer. There are plenty of dads who are on the board and doing that level of engagement, and yet they're just not present when it comes to all the volunteering and room parenting and whatnot. It's really interesting that even at this progressive school, it's all on the moms and it's not a function of who is working in or out of the home either.

The co-chair of the annual fund and my co-chair, I work more than a full-time job and my co-chair is a single mom who works a full-time job. And it's just interesting. I went to one of the events for all the volunteering and I think there were, I counted two dads, two dads there. And so this enrages me. It enrages me that people come to me and that they never ask Rob to do anything. And that women are the ones who seem to answer the call. And I feel so much guilt and anxiety, and actually Emma Grede, the one I mentioned who launched the podcast, she's been really helpful where she's like, Elise, do your kids care that you volunteer? Is it important to them? No, they don't care. They want me to come on a field trip and they want me to see them perform, but no, they don't care.

And she was like, you're going to have to trade these things off and get really comfortable being uncomfortable if you're not going to drive yourself crazy. And I'm not good at this. I'm going to bring us back to this at the end of this podcast episode because it's so incredibly important for women. But yeah, so every May, this feels incited in me because again, there's a redoubling of asks, there's all this stuff happening for the end of year and it's sweet. And in some ways I'm happy that it is happening. And then I also am like, why are we doing this? And so much of it doesn't feel like it's part of my value set. And also I'm like, why are we exhausting ourselves in this performance of parenthood right now? And so that was top of mind as Mother's Day approached. And I just get salty.

I get really salty about it, all of it. And I wrote about this in a newsletter, but I want to talk about it a little bit here. If you want to read the newsletter. It's called Mothering the World. And the night before Mother's Day, I went to the salon at my friend Chrissy Levinson's house who's a TV writer, and she has been working with NATO actually, they had asked her to assemble TV writers and screenwriters to help with storytelling, which I thought was so interesting. And then she started doing these convenings with it's mostly TV writers and screenwriters and then me and a couple of other little misfits in the room. And we heard from Julianne Smith who is the former US ambassador to NATO under Biden who's a diplomat, career diplomat. And we heard from Oleksandra Matviichuk, who is a Noble Peace Prize winning, leading Ukrainian human rights defender.

And she was stunning. They were both stunning. But she was talking to us about NATO's role in helping Ukraine hold the line against Russia. And that Putin is not after mineral stores and he's not after land, he is after empire, he's after power. And that's his primary motivation and just the incredible cruelty that the Ukrainian people are experiencing, which I know that we know about. But she told us, and this was astonishing, particularly on the eve of Mother's Day, that 20 to 35,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken into Russia and sent into families, stripped of their names and their birth dates and all of their identifying factors. And some of these kids are two years old. They don't know. They will not know. It's similar to what we did to Indigenous populations in the United States. They are being indoctrinated, reschooled, stripped of language, stripped of culture.

It is an intent to wipe a Ukrainian identity and future off the map. It is so barbaric. And she told us many, many stories, many of which are just really upsetting. She told us one positive story of a father who was kidnapped with his three children taken into a Russian prison, tortured, and then somehow released and his oldest child managed to communicate to someone in Ukraine, their location, and that they were going to be separated. The three kids would be separated in five days. And the father who was dropped off in the Russian hinterlands, managed to find his children and rescue them before he lost them forever. So that was one story of hope told to the right audience, of course of TV writers, but it was very, very sobering and really not that we're not all incredibly sobered by what's happening in our world.

And it's just the constant whiplash of looking at disasters and controversies and despair and feeling, oh, so much hopelessness and fear. And we were talking a lot about authoritarianism in terms of this sort of new axis of evil that's emerging between Russia and Iran and North Korea and China and what's at stake here and how we support that in the world. And I was just thinking about how desperately the world needs mothering. And again, I want to dissociate that word. I think it's so unfortunate. I get it because we're dualistic binary thinkers, right? We understand everything as a binary masculine as opposed to feminine light, as opposed to dark. And the two, all of our categories, they can't exist without each other. This is called the Tension of the Opposites. That's a Jungian term. And so we take these ideas like mother and father and we define each of them by an energy and then we give it to to women and men and we say, this is your job.

This is who you are actually, it's your job to represent this energy and it's your job over here to represent this energy. And then we end up with these half-mast people. The reality is that we each carry these archetypal feminine and archetypal masculine energies, each one of us. And ideally we would do it in a balanced way. I think most of the women I meet are very balanced between their masculine and their feminine. And if you don't know, the archetypal feminine is the more internal, this is yin and yang in ancient Chinese philosophy as well represented in various creation myths. This is how we perceive the world. So it's not just a western idea and the balance of the two. You think of the symbol of the yin and the yang, and in the white there is a circle of black and the opposite. So we each carry each. So Carl Jung talked about the anima is the internal feminine, the soul of a external masculine person. The animus is the masculine soul of a woman.

It shows up in its own flavor, but we each carry both. And the feminine, the archetypal feminine is nurturance, creativity, love and care. And that internal holding, that internal sort of the tomb into the womb, the archetypal masculine is more external. It's order structure, law, truth, discipline. But the original etymology of discipline, instruction, knowledge, that's the archetypal masculine. And that is not the provenance of just men. And this caring and nurturance and love is not the provenance of just women. And we do a great disservice to our children if we operate, we pass that down to them as the way it is. Oh, you're a boy, then you are not those things. You are all this thing. And you have to go out into the world and grow and distinguish yourself and individuate and oh, you're a girl, it's your job. This is your provenance and you're not allowed to individuate.

You're just supposed to stay in relationship and care. This is breaking us obviously, and we know what toxically masculine energy looks like. We get a lot of it. It is authoritarianism. It is this extremely restrictive order, this maniacal order, scientism, et cetera. And then the toxic feminine is this irrational swampy. And you could think of every natural disaster as a toxically, feminine retributive force. I think that toxic femininity is scarier and potentially more devastating. I know that sounds insane than the masculine, but what's happening is we have this extreme masculinity in the world and it will be met by a counterforce. It will. And I think our planet could wipe us all off her back if she is pushed. I know we're not supposed to anthropomorphize animals and the planet, but I am sorry, I will. So I think we are really pushing our luck just as a collective, right?

We don't want to reach the point where that's the rebalancing that's required. So to that end, we think about what's happening here right now. And the antidote that we need is mothering. We need the feminine to rise in men. We need women to be balanced or to stay balanced in both energies. But this isn't on women. This isn't on just a women go be more womanly. This is about men getting into their feminine too. I really don't like it when women are admonished to be more like men. I know men, you need to be more like women. Okay? That's the era that we're in now. We're carrying a lot of weight here and we need you to step up.

I shared in the newsletter a bit from David Hawkins book Letting Go about fear and love and that so often we've just been trained in part because we're animals and fear runs our, it's how we're regulated. But we think that we need to stay in fear in order to stay hypervigilant and to act and to defend ourselves and that this is a lie and that love. And again, this goes back to this idea of mothering courage for example, comes from heart. We need to operate out of love, not out of fear, but love can be just as animating, far more energetic, far more maintainable. We can run our systems on love, add infinitum, for infinity in a way that we cannot run our systems on fear. And so I think the call now is can we all mother? And again, mothering is not, we're not restricted to women. We're not restricting this to people who have born a child the best. Some of the best moms, the most mothering people I know do not have children and are not women. So that's the call.

And I've been thinking a lot about this idea of the masculine and feminine too in terms of creativity. And not surprisingly, Phil Sttz still rings in my ears, my buddy still around this idea that the antidote to evil is not goodness. The antidote to evil is creativity. And so part of what we're all being called to do is to keep creating and to keep growing. To keep building despite a world that wants us to be too scared to move despite a world that's immobilizing in inciting panic or making us feel apathetic, right and complacent. And I can't do anything about this, therefore I'll do nothing. No, we are all being called to show up as ourselves. We all serve in different ways. We don't necessarily even understand our service as we're doing it, but we have to keep creating whatever it is that you do, you keep doing it.

And one way I was thinking about this is going back to this idea of the masculine and the feminine and the creative process. And I have a conversation with Shannon Watts coming up a bit about this too, is thinking about all the needs in the world and this need for mothering and Shannon's work with Mom's Demand Action and she has a book coming out that she'll be out on the road talking about and promoting. That's really about finding that spark in each of us that causes us to come alive. I was saying there's just so much that needs to be done and it can feel completely overwhelming to understand where to serve. And we're missing, I know this exists, but it feels to me like we're missing the architecture. And so we're each trying to create it anew. And meanwhile I'm like we need a master organizer.

Someone like Shannon who built the largest grassroots movement in this country, this bipartisan, there are men in the movement as well. Moms Demand Action, which demands common sense gun laws and works throughout state legislatures. They've gotten a lot of stuff done even though it feels like nothing is happening, change is painful and iterative. Anyway, I was like, where's this? We need a massive architecture of we need this sort of baton toss mentality of I'm going to show up for this issue and this is what I'm going to be driving forward on because I know that you're working on this and you're working on this and you're working on this. And we can keep each other aware and say, Hey, I need you to show up. Everyone's going to show up on this day for this issue. But it feels so often in our world we just recreate the wheel and that we're always starting from scratch.

And that instead of saying, okay, let's build one massive organization with a million different arms and different neighborhoods or cities, let's create a million different organizations. And so I'm dying. This is also how my brain works. So we'll surprise you, not at all. But I'm like, where's the divine architecture of activism where one of my best friends, Andrea is incredibly involved with environmental causes and so I know she's on it and I know she's calls me when she needs me. And she's like, you're coming to this dinner. This is what's happening. You're going to go to Sacramento. She's doing that in one vertical in a way that I'm like, can we all get organized into each of our verticals so that we're really impactful and marching collaboratively and not needing everything to be perfectly or done or how exactly how we would do it, but can we actually get together, do this?

So I'm sure this exists, but I bring this up because I was thinking about it as a writer and this idea of masculine energy like that and creative feminine energy. And I just came off of sprint, a marathon on a project where I wrote, I just was full. I was ready to go. I'll tell you a little bit about my process. And I wrote 25,000 words in three days. And that's a lot just for context. And I'm not saying they're Pulitzer Prize winning and this isn't actually my work, this isn't for my book, this is for another project that I'm working on, which gives me a bit of an ego, emotional reserve remove. It's easier to do this work when you're structuring someone else's thoughts. However, I was like, wow. But it was a really good example of what I'm talking about. And I did an office hours last month for substackers in my community, which is also called Pulling the Thread.

And I do these occasionally for people who are in the paid community and it was about the creative process. And I think a lot of writers, they think that you and you can find yourself on the page, but I think of that more like journaling or pre-work like morning pages and you might get some good stuff, but that's not what I'm talking about here. If you're writing a newsletter or writing a book or writing a speech, most of the work that I do I've come to understand is in the masculine first and it is the structuring and the order and the cognitive processing and figuring out the bits of knowledge that need to be imparted. And some of it I commit to paper and I do really intense outlines. It's true, not always, but there's just a tremendous amount of energy happening behind the scenes in my mind and somewhat in a word doc in an outline.

This is the masculine structure. And so rather than writing and digging structure out or looking for the thing amidst sort of the detritus, I do so much structuring and pre-work in the masculine that when it's time to go, it feels like being pregnant for those who haven't ever gone into labor. When you go into labor, you're in labor, this baby is coming out of you and you just have to go with it. There's no stopping it. And so when I'm working, I get to this point where I'm like, oh my God, this is coming. And I get myself to my keyboard and it is coming. And so I just went through one of these experiences last week, so it's top of mind where I had laid out all the tracks I'd created, the architecture that I could just then color in the lines and that's the feminine and it just is coming out of me and it's coming out of me fast.

And it makes the whole process quite effortless even though there's so much labor that comes before, but really the labor is almost in the masculine and in setting the stage in the frame. So I just wanted to offer that for people who are like, I want to write a book, do yourself the favor of you could spend years pre-processing and figuring out the structure and what's the frame and what are the arguments and how do I see this? That's a lot of cognitive pre-work that I would recommend doing before you sit down. I don't know how fiction works, this is for nonfiction, but I wouldn't recommend just forcing yourself to write and being like, I'll find it on the page. I think that would be the equivalent for me at least of writing four books because it wouldn't be efficient. And I guess that's what I was trying to get to when I was talking about an architecture for activism.

We've got to get efficient. I think that's the other thing. We are spilling out our energy and our anger and our tears. How do we get efficient? How do we get organized using the tools that we know are now available to us? How do we take that divine masculine energy and structure our response and then fill it with the feminine, fill it with the mothering. That's what I want to know you guys have, maybe someone's doing this, but if not, I'm hoping someone's listening who knows how to do that? And I know we have it for Emily's List. I know we have it for candidates and maybe something exists. This is exactly what I mean too. Our tendency to be like, this doesn't exist, therefore I'll create it. And then often these things already exist. Here's a concrete example. I do some work to support Americacares, which is this incredible long running primarily first responder.

Medical care works globally and you haven't heard of it. They don't market in the way that Red Cross markets, but they're old and esteemed and they do incredible work. And one of the reasons you haven't heard of it is that they don't tell their story particularly well. And they're so busy responding, they're not putting up banners. And that's the other thing. They don't put up banners. So what they do, the way that it works and the way they deploy aid is that they are incredibly networked into the globe. So when something happens in Ukraine, they're the first ones there because they have all these supply chains into the existing infrastructure, so they know exactly who to support on the ground locally with medicine, supplies, machinery, so on and so forth. And it's a less grand and obvious way to do it, but it is so much more efficient. It's incredibly efficient. That's Americacares. So I'm sure this exists and I just don't know about it.

The other thing that, and this is related I promise, but I was thinking too about these periods that I get into where I'm incredibly effective and efficient and the boundaries that I need to hold in my life and structure into my calendar and my time. And it goes back to this idea of where we started the conversation around where I am very flappable. There are two places where I feel very vulnerable to criticism and pressure and that is around my kids. And am I doing enough for them? And of course I'm not ever doing enough for them, but that's a very, very hot nerve for me around. I think I probably share that with everyone. This mom button is very, very tender and I recognize I need to do a lot of work and I can't care. I just need to get really a lot stronger in my no muscle there so that I can actually really just prioritize what's meaningful to me and to my kids.

And then separately, the other place is around helping other women. And I've talked about this a lot and the transactional nature with which a lot of people, a lot of women, we really struggle to be overt in what we want and overt in what we ask. And often there's a fair amount of manipulation that comes into it where we try to create a transaction even if it doesn't exist. So I get a lot of asks and I can't even read them often, much less respond to them. I promises isn't me bypassing my work, but a lot of people will say in the spirit of I know you care about helping other women, or in the spirit of helping other women, which this has become an increasingly big thing for me, it drives me crazy. One, the assumption that people are owed things from me or that I'm not a good woman if I don't help every woman who asks me for individual assistance.

And then it also gets into this idea that if you cared about women, you would support me, which is a false equivalency, but this is a chord that a lot of us play. I'm just going to say it here, not as an indictment. I'm sure I've done the exact same thing, but just something to be conscious of. We really struggle to and we struggle with disappointment. And so how do we try and get what we want while making it somehow what I want is actually what I want is good for my business, it's good for my book, but I'm going to try and make you feel like it's a social obligation or an obligation as a woman to another woman to help me sell my thing, right? That's really what's happening. But it's gussied up in a lot of language, and I don't hear this from men, so it's something I've become attuned to and it's a watch out for me.

In part I'm like, this isn't how we're supposed to do this guy. Let's do this in a different way. Let's one be really overt with what we want, recognizing let's get really comfortable with the fact that it will probably be a no or you might not even get a response and two, which is fine. Let's become more durable in the face of disappointment and let's be more durable in the face of disappointing other people. So there's that. And then let's just be more clear. Let's be more clearly transactional. Let's not bury the transaction under the auspices of helping quote unquote women. So let's just be clear. I want to come on your podcast to sell my book and not my book helps all women, therefore you should help me. That's the sort of thing that I hear a lot in my inbox. So anyway, I bring that up too because it's some of the personal work that I've been doing around learning how to say no.

I want to just be honest about my response to this, which is often I will just ignore those requests. And to be fair, I don't have someone who goes through my inbox for me and helps me. And that's something that I obviously need to invest in as we grow this whole thing. But I don't have time necessarily to respond to everyone's request. I get a lot of pitches even though I don't really accept pitches. So what will happen is I'll avoid and I cut myself a little bit of slack just again on the time management piece of I can't write everyone back, but separately I get mad. What I've found is that I've gotten mad. You can even hear it. And what I was saying about some of the languaging, I get mad at the people who are asking me. I'm like, how dare you ask me or How dare you put me in this position?

And just to be clear, anyone can really honestly ask anything of anyone. It's that energy of trying to create this transactional energy of you owe me is I think what gets its hooks into me and I have to learn to process. I become more conscious of the fact that I get mad. How could you make me uncomfortable by putting the need to say no on me when this is a very difficult thing for me to do, right? So part of it is just becoming honest with myself. You have no boundaries. And it's funny, I asked my therapist who I've been seeing now for six or seven years, and he read me something from my intake form, which was essentially, what are you hoping to get out of therapy? At the time, I was still at Goop and I was like, what I need help with is everyone approaches me.

This isn't everyone, but it was a good percentage. People approached me because they harbor, they want something from me. And at the time it's like, well, it's not that dissimilar. Now they wanted to be on the podcast or they wanted to be written about or they wanted to be featured or they wanted access or I don't know what everyone wanted, but that was the energy. And so I was like, what I need is I need help with that because it's debilitating and it's funny to go through it. Seven years later, I've certainly developed the muscle and yet it's still a thing for me.

Before we go, I was up in Montecito with Courtney, and this is actually, I'm sharing a little bit from this because it's in our workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, which is the official workbook to On Our Best Behavior which comes out on August 26th. And Courtney Smith, who's been on the podcast with me before talking about fear and being below the line, she also did an episode with me about the Enneagram. Anyway, Courtney's an incredible coach and dear friend, and she did the workbook with me, and it's so good you guys. We'll talk more about it as it approaches, but you can pre-order it now and we'll be doing some workshops and some events in the fall, and we're going to potentially figure out how to do an online cohort with it because it's built around this very possible, very powerful core process. And she's an incredible coach and we're very complimentary.

We really swim in different lanes, but work incredibly well together. I do the cultural context piece and then she coaches it. And one of the things that we included in the workbook is a whole section about saying no along with scripts for saying no, that you can take and use and make your own. But women in general, we really struggle with saying no. And it goes back to this idea of the requests that come at us as moms and this feeling that you should do these things should regardless of what you want to do. I mean, some women really love this stuff and hats off to them because we need women who really want to do this stuff. We need men who really want to do this stuff too. And anyway, so I am part of a group that Courtney coaches and it's really fun.

She teaches me all these tools and concepts, and we did a recent one around aligning our yeses and nos with what we want and our purpose. What was so interesting about it is because she does Enneagram, essentially her point is every time you say yes to something, it means you can't say yes to something else. I think we all understand this, right? That energetic exchange makes sense and that the inability to say no is just running over yourself all the time. She talks a lot about the full body, yes, the full body, no, bringing everything into consideration when you're responding to something that someone wants from you. Is this a yes for me or is this a no? If it's a maybe, it's probably a no, but I definitely need some time to respond. And she breaks it down by Enneagram, which is so helpful.

But we all have these sort of responses to yes and no that are unique to us. I'm going to give you some of mine, but this is really helpful and maybe I'll have her, if this is resonant with you guys, pipe up because I could have her almost do an entire Enneagram episode about this. But I'm a type six for context and I'll give you some of the other types. But this is what keeps type six from saying no. And some of these might resonate with you even if they're not your type. So as a type six, worrying about what may happen if I say no, a sense of responsibility, worry, I will be perceived as disloyal, a bad friend, partner, et cetera, or not a team player. If I say no and a lack of practice asking myself what I want, the lack of practice asking myself what I want shows up for type six, shows up for type nine, it shows up for type two, and then this is what really hits.

This is what keeps us from saying yes, okay? And this is a function that I've played. Anytime I'm on a team, I'm sitting in this seat as a type six. This is what would keep me from saying yes, more focus on what could go wrong rather than what is possible. Feeling stressed and overcommitted by existing responsibilities, identification with the role of the skeptic that is me. And fear that saying yes limits my ability to respond to crisis or emerging needs. So those all really hit for me as a type six. And I've been criticized historically for being to be fair, I'm usually always right, but sometimes you don't want to be right because then when you're right, everyone thinks that you're making things happen so that you can be right. But I'm really good at seeing the whole field and understanding the possibility or probability of something happening and saying, I don't think we should do this because I think this is what will happen and being perceived as negative as a dream crusher, et cetera, negative Nelly, whatever it is.

And then as mentioned, if you end up being accurate, that's not great. Nobody likes this role, but it can be incredibly vital. You want some sixes in your organization calling some of these shots or calling out the plays because we see a much wider and a lot more context than the average person. Alright, so I'm going to give you some examples from other Enneagram types that might be keeping you from saying no or yes, type one. So what keeps us from saying no belief? This is just a smattering. I am not going to give you everything that Courtney wrote down Type one belief that I should say yes, belief that I'm the only one who knows how to do it, right? That sounds like a one to me. The things keeping us from saying yes might be prioritizing responsibility over fun and an unwillingness to deviate from preexisting rules and procedures.

That's also type one behavior. Type two. What keeps the type two from saying no? Wanting to be pleased and liked by others. Fear that they will lose connection if they say no and not wanting to be perceived as selfish. What keeps the two from saying yes? Again, wanting to be pleased, wanting to please and be liked. Fear of loss of connection, not wanting to be perceived as selfish. So those are the exact same thing. Type three. This is what keeps the type three from saying no habit of saying yes to activities and projects highly valued by others. Fear, I won't be valued unless I participate. A need to feel significant and relevant and fear the project will fail or I won't reach my goals if I don't participate. So that's a very type three response. And what would keep a three from saying yes that's different than that, but valuing achievement and getting things done over fun.

Only valuing activities where there is an opportunity to receive recognition and only valuing activities that align with my goals. That's type three. Type four. Oof. This is what keeps a four from saying no fear, I will lose connection if I say no fear I may be perceived as cold and insensitive and a lack of confidence in my own self-led projects. What keeps the four from saying yes? Fear that saying yes makes me look boring or like everyone else. Type four. Strong bias against positivity and a commitment to staying down in negative emotion. And there's also a bias amongst fours against group activities. What keeps a five from saying yes, wanting to avoid conflict, but they will often not follow through on their yes. Anyway. A desire to demonstrate competence and expertise that's important to a five and a lack of practice. Checking in with emotions.

Five. This is what keeps a five from saying yes, beliefs that they have insufficient energy or time to participate. Bias against group activities also shows up identification with the role of contrarian and fear of not yet having sufficient information to make a decision. There are others too, but just trying to paraphrase for you guys, I know we're going long here. Type sevens type is the one that loves fun of type sevens want to keep their options open, they have a fear of missing out. Their intellectual curiosity overrides other no signals, and they have a strong bias against any negativity. They fear of feeling trapped and that they won't be able to pivot or change their mind. That often comes with saying yes, type eight type eights are fierce. What keeps them from saying no? Failure to notice their own personal limits, desire for feelings of intensity and challenge and belief that they're the only ones strong enough to complete a task.

And what would keep an eight from saying yes? Identification with playing the role of provocateur. Desire to feel their own forcefulness through resistance, pushback and conflict. Fear of a loss of autonomy and being subjugated to another's vision or plan and then not slowing down to really check in with what they value. And then the type nine, which is my husband's type, that's the mediator peacekeeper type and the type nines want to avoid conflict really at all costs. And they will often not follow through on their yes, they will not say no because they believe that saying yes is easier. Again, they might not follow through on either. It keeps them from saying no is their ability to merge with and sympathize with others' needs. They're not good at asking themselves what they want and they're really good at giving non-committal answers. I'm sure anyone who's married to a type nine understands what that's like and they don't like saying yes because they don't want to pick a side and they just want to keep their options open and go with the flow.

So anyway, I hope that's helpful. It gives you a sense of all the flavors, all of the voices in our various heads. So that often what would inhibit a type seven FOMO, for example, not my, I don't have FOMO, I don't care about missing out, but I do get worried about everything that might happen if I say yes or if I say no, et cetera. But regardless of that little detour, I think what I'm trying to inspire in my own life again is that masculine energy around boundary structure and order and discipline so that I can use my feminine energy in that mothering energy, that creative energy incredibly well and as impactful a way as possible. And I think the more of us who can get used to assessing circumstances and situations and world affairs through those two lenses and recognizing it's not just the men and it's not just the women, I think that's a more productive conversation and it's definitely the more nuanced and we need nuance even though so many things feel not nuanced at all. All right then. Thanks for sticking around on this ride.

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