Is Fear Driving You? (Courtney Smith)

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Courtney Smith is a highly effective and unique coach who helps people get unstuck using a wide variety of tools, including the Enneagram. After my book On Our Best Behavior came out, people fairly asked me, okay, so now how do I evolve beyond this framework? And that's what I've been creating with Courtney, an actionable workbook with a set of practical tools that will come out next year: Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process to Reclaiming Your Full Self I'll say a little bit more about our workbook, but I wanted to have Courtney back on the podcast in this post-election period to share a perspective and some tools that I think many of us could use right now when collective anxiety is running high. Ee're going to try to get a handle on how we're reacting to situations in this moment. We're going to talk about being below versus above the line and how we can get above the line once we're ready to go there. We're going to talk about recognizing when we're being motivated by anticipatory fear or a desire to prove our goodness and how we might feel and show up if we chose to be motivated by something else. Instead, we'll also do a review of the drama triangle. We did a whole episode on it: Understanding the Drama Triangle. And most importantly, we'll consider when we're willing and not willing to alter our stories and why both positions can be powerful.

MORE FROM COURTNEY SMITH:

OUR WORKBOOK: Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process to Reclaiming Your Full Self

Second Pulling the Thread episode: “Understanding the Drama Triangle”

First Pulling the Thread episode: “The Practical Magic of the Enneagram”

Courtney’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Alright, so obviously we could go in a lot of different directions with this conversation today and I will redirect people to our conversation about the drama triangle,

But I'm thinking since this is coming out in the midst of the holiday season, which already tends to feel quite fraught for people, and we are also coming out of a, let's just call it contentious and taxing election cycle and anxiety is running high in general and grief and rage, aggrievement. I thought it would be really helpful to give people tools for contextualizing this moment and getting a handle on the way that they're reacting to situations and that maybe we could all benefit from a little bit of a refresher. And I'm happy to offer myself to you as someone to coach because I am also dealing with these same things right alongside all of you. So should we do that?

COURTNEY:

Yeah, we can try. I definitely have feelings myself about what's happening too, so I can

ELISE:

I'll coach you right back.

COURTNEY:

Exactly. Exactly.

ELISE:

So let's start with a refresher. Can you explain this key concept of being above versus below the line so we're all working in the same frame?

COURTNEY:

Above the line and below the line is a very simple way of making sense of not what's happening in reality, but how you are approaching reality and above versus below the line is a very simple distinction. Am I approaching reality from a place of threat or a place of trust, curiosity and openness? Below the line is from a place of threat. Above the line is from a place of trust, openness and curiosity. From my perspective, we are hardwired and in fact survived because we over-index on finding things threatening. That's how we stuck around for the millions of years that we have as the evolved primates that we are are not so evolved I guess. But what happens when we are scanning for threat is the physiological cues of threat in the body are very difficult to sustain. They don't feel good and they don't feel good for a reason.

They are designed to not feel good so that they can become primary in how we're making decisions and how we navigate reality. And so when we're actually scared because something is coming at us, we need to slam on the brakes. A kid has just walked out in front of us in front of a car and there's a real need to feel under threat from life. The primacy of the threat response in the body is super adaptive because it causes us to make very quick decisions and to focus all of our attention on making ourselves safe and making others safe. The issue is that this system, at least in modern humans, tends to go off and signal alarms in all kinds of situations. And when we do that, when we start relating to reality from a place of threat rather than from a place of trust, openness and curiosity, our primary driver is about becoming feeling safe again.

And feeling safe is a fundamental human need, but when it's the only thing that we're thinking about, we lose access to other motivations, other drives, other needs that might be more elevated. Things like possibility, creativity, love, connection, unity. We can only think about safety and many of us have developed adaptive strategies to keep ourselves safe. They look like we're responding to reality. Rationally it looks like we're a human being who is showing up in the world, taking care of their family, going about their business, doing their work. But actually everything is coming from an implicit system driving the body of like, I don't feel safe here. What do I need to do in order to secure and make this feeling of threat go away?

ELISE:

And the threat, this idea of fear, it isn't necessarily physical for many of us. You talk about fear of loss of control, fear of loss of safety and security, fear of loss of approval. And so when we think about something like current events in whatever iteration it may or whatever your belief safe system might be, whatever your political leanings might be. I know for a lot of women, and this is a big part of my work, there is this fear that comes from fear of loss of approval, which is of course tied to being kicked out of the group or the tribe for not having the right professed or saying the right thing or being on the quote right side. So this fear bath that we're collectively experiencing, some people are experiencing it acutely or directly. Maybe their relatives are undocumented and they are scared completely reasonably.

Some people might be scared that there will be political unrest that will threaten their survival. We all have I'm sure, many, many, many stories. I think it's also worth it for us, I'm just putting this in the parking lot to go into fact versus story as well and refresh people on that concept. But I think for a lot of us, there's also this anticipatory fear that we feel like we have to keep pushing the button over and over again because we're scared we will miss something, we're scared, we'll authorize something we our silent acceptance, so on and so forth. Even talking about it makes me feel exhausted.

COURTNEY:

I mean a couple really important things that you said there. The first is this idea of fear, of loss, of control, approval or security. We can talk about how that's showing up with respect to this particular moment for people. But one of the reasons I like to emphasize that is because when we first think of fear, we do think about immediate physical harm and that's an appropriate fear response. But our systems are wired to actually also be paying attention to threat of emotional harm, which is also a different loss of security, loss of approval, which as you said is about being rejected by the tribe because we can't survive on our own as social animals. And then the loss of control, which is about a feeling of wanting to have agency or my preferences, I want to get my way because when I feel like I can control and get my way, I feel safe.

And so one of the things that we see in a moment like this with the election is there are some people that are directly experiencing harm and threat in this very moment because of the outcome of the election. And that would actually likely be true regardless of how the election were decided. There would probably be people feeling physically threatened no matter the outcome of the election. So I want to just call that out. But what I think the bigger thing that you feel in the collective is fear is the natural response to the unknown. And we are in a moment of profound unknown where it is true that Donald Trump was president before and we have lots of facts about what he did when he was president before we have him making various decisions about his cabinet appointments. So we have facts that are assembling and at the same time we actually really don't know what is going to happen. And the reality of the unknown is sufficient for many human beings to just experience fear,

Just existential fear. And then we think about that fear as our risk to security, approve or control, and we start searching outside ourselves for a story about why we're feeling scared. Because therefore if we have a story about why we're feeling scared, now we have something we can do to try to make ourselves feel safe again. Because the story shows us, oh, this is what needs to be fixed, this is what needs to be different. If only this were to change, then I wouldn't feel so scared when the reality is. And so I guess this would be the tool is just accepting that we're in a profound moment of uncertainty and it's okay and normal and expected that we would all feel scared and can we be with that and acknowledge we don't know what's going to happen next and just sit with that rather than trying to temporarily secure ourselves in a place of safety by doing the various things that we do.

ELISE:

You mentioned that there are some facts that we know, but ultimately we don't know what's going to happen. And I think people recognize the truth of that statement. Most likely whatever's going to happen is not what we would predict anyway. We're terrible predictors of reality. And this is just a quick sidebar, but as you know court, I've been working with Phil Stutz and one of his tools is called the Science of Reality. And it's very simple. It's just write down what he would call it Part X, the part inside of you that's your counterforce, write down your Part X predictions as they show up all the worst case scenarios. So you write it down and then a week later you come back and you look at the science of reality and then you say, oh, well that's funny. None of this happened. Or maybe some of it happens.

It's not about engineering certainty, it's about actually making your own thinking transparent to yourself so that you recognize, I don't know shit anyway. But you mentioned facts and what's interesting about elections which feel so seismic, far more seismic obviously in the last, I don't know if it's a function of our age and the fact that we have children now, but it didn't feel so consequential. I know it is, it's consequential every single turn, but elections are run on stories, which is also such a fascinating concept. Really, they're one based on the stories, this fantasy creation that candidates make about what they will and will not do regardless of what may or may not be possible considering there are other governing bodies that are involved in all of these decisions. So it's interesting that this entire concept is predicated on confabulation really just who can tell a better story.

COURTNEY:

And I think also the thing that's really interesting is once you become aware that we are primed to feel fear, then you can start looking at media campaigns, speeches, responses to speeches all through the lens of is this person saying this with the goal of stoking fear and anxiety over here? And it's true that I don't remember the Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan election maybe it felt really, really consequential at that moment in time, and I didn't have the consciousness at age five or six to hold it. But I would argue that part of why the elections feel so consequential is because the story making that we are doing as a nation is trying to raise the stakes on the consequence of the election because that's how we scare ourselves. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is one downside to running and responding from fear is it is a short-lived fuel source.

As we all know, it's based on adrenaline and cortisol and it's not something that is a sustainable way of showing up in this world. And so I think some of what we're seeing in contrast to 2016 where, and I can just speak for myself, I was very anxious and very activated and reactive by that anxiety. And one tool that I've been working through with myself is making a list of all of the ways in which I've changed and all of the ways in which the world has changed since 2016, specifically about greater resourcing and capabilities because I think that we all learned, we actually have real time appreciation for when we respond with very hyped up anxiety. There's a physical cost to that and we start feeling burnt out. And so now we have an election result same as 2016. In fact, even more definitive. And what I hear from a lot of people is some more questioning about my response feels slightly different now, not for everyone, but for some people. And I want to argue what's in that, what can we use from that? Not so that we become complacent or apathetic, but so that we can make decisions about how we want to show up not from a place of anxiety, but from something else,

ELISE:

From that above the line place. And just because we didn't really define it, we were talking about stories and facts, and this is such an important distinction, but facts are things that are irrevocably that could be recorded on a video camera, something that incontrovertibly happened, and then a story is a story based on that fact. But you can imagine that there are innumerable stories that we can make up about a single fact. Donald Trump was elected president, this is the best thing that's ever going to happen. He's going to restore America's Honor. And take us back to the 1950s, that single decade when patriarchal values really thrived. I'm kidding everyone, but you should read my book if you haven't. We talk about that time period or Donald Trump won the presidency, we're all going to die. Whatever it is, you can quickly start generating a tremendous amount of stories based on a single fact that exists along a spectrum. And we like to talk in story. We like to take these stories as facts probably because our bodies in some ways can't really tell the difference.

COURTNEY:

And I think whether you like Trump and are excited about it or detest him are really heartbroken. One other distinction we might make between above and below the line is when we're relating to the world from a place of threat, we can say that the world is happening to us. In other words, there are external forces outside ourselves that are determining our wellbeing.

And from above the line, life is happening by us and for us, which means that there is something in this for us to learn something in this for us to grow from something that there potential possibility for the world to be different in a way that we might appreciate after going through this experience. And the reason I brought that up is when you were talking about whether you like Trump or don't like Trump, what both of those narratives hold in common is giving him the power to determine the quality of our lives. Either you like him and he's going to make the world great again or you don't and we're fucked. But both give him power to determine our trajectory. And that's the other issue with approaching life from a place of fear is it is ultimately disempowering. It deprives us of the agency and the ability to say, actually, I'm going to determine the quality of my life. And there are lots of things I cannot control, but I get to control how I relate to the world and how I talk about the world. And so one thing I'm really curious about is there, and I don't want to ignore facts, but is there a way to relate to the election almost from, not apathy, but what if we don't let him be center stage longer? What would that look like if I couldn't blame Trump for the circumstances of our lives? What would I do instead? How would I organize my life? Where would I put my energy? I think that's a really interesting question.

ELISE:

I want to take us on to ground that might feel shifty and scary, but I feel like you're up for it intellectually, which is I've been thinking about social media provocateurs a lot and maybe the prevalence of more dark triad personality types in the people who really thrive on driving people below the line, even if they might profess to be on the right side. And we've had conversations before about the world of NGOs and just how difficult it is to not rely on drama triangle strategies. And this is true for marketing of all companies too, this idea that in any situation there is a villain and there is a victim and the hero and the hero is most likely me and you are most likely the victim or the villain depending. And so I think what's also so prevalent when you say things like I get to decide when I say above the line, I decide I have control over how I respond to the world. I think what we find online is that there are these dark triad provocateurs who would say, how dare you? That is a ridiculous privileged thing to say. How could you possibly talk about having control over how you respond to the world when so many people are fill in the blanks?

And I think this is such a lever in our culture. I've been on the receiving end of it, of weaponizing some of these conversations that sound loving or are within the world of social justice, but that end up creating and thriving on creating and promoting more fear and using the drama triangle tactics to ensure, because otherwise I don't think it's done in this conscious way where they're like, I won't have a cause if this is resolved or if this isn't such a huge deal if people think they can take their feet off the gas. But I don't know how conscious this is. I don't think it's particularly conscious, but it's definitely intense. And how do you coach people to respond to that in a culture where expressing your anxiety has become a virtue signal or a way of showing solidarity or I understand what's happening, don't accuse me of pretending I don't know what's happening. It's almost like we all feel like we have to keep ourselves below the line until there's no more victimization in the world and you're not on social media, so this isn't probably as present for you. You're not witnessing it, but the scolding and shaming and how dare you, that happens all over Instagram and it's unclear what is wanted, if that makes sense.

COURTNEY:

Yeah. So again, I'm not on social media deliberately, but I would sort of argue what you're describing is a person or a group of people when they point the finger at someone else for being or apathetic or Pollyannaish or choose your adjective, what they're doing is that would be the villain move from the drama triangle, which is you are the problem over here. And what I get out of that is a temporary feeling of safety and control and approval because I'm the one now that's pointing out who the bad guy is and what needs to be fixed and changed. And when I do that, I put myself in a role of moral high ground that I get a little goodie from that inside myself. And rather than sitting with, there's suffering, there's harm, there are things happening and we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

And there are all kinds of forces and people and groups and organizations all trying to affect change and it's a tangled mess and morass and I don't know what is going to happen. To be able to sit in that I don't know is really, really difficult for people and the ability to finger point and the ability to say, okay, well I don't know what's going on, but I know I'm on the side of right. That's what people are settling for rather than actually if all of these things are out of my control and the only thing I have to control is my own relationship to reality, what is actually mine to do.

ELISE:

Yeah, I want to shift to more examples of relating to the world from above the line. But before we go, I'm just wondering, putting myself as I'm a Democrat, I'm not a super far left person by any means, and I'm not trying to let conservatives entirely off the hook or suggest that the drama triangle does not apply. Trump is the walking vengeful drama triangle for sure. But looking at the people who historically are independent to liberal and people who are generally very engaged in social justice nonprofit work, and you could almost say that people who are more conservative might be more engaged in cultural institutions or religion. They have their own version of that doing a lot of good work. These are massive generalizations. I get that. But I think on the left it's more of a potentially a more secular social justice nonprofit world or mechanism for identifying the oppressor oppressed and victim victimizer. And you look at the aftermath, you look at what happened and this rejection of identity politics and this rejection of woke or our tendency to make people bad. I write about this a lot, obviously on I was watching it happen and experiencing it along with everyone else, but do you think that we are particularly subscribed to seeing the world from below the line in the drama triangle?

COURTNEY:

I think it's an easier place to be for almost all of us.

ELISE:

Say more.

COURTNEY:

I think it's familiar.

ELISE:

If we know who the problem is and what needs to be fixed, that gives us certainty, right?

COURTNEY:

Yeah. It allows us to escape for looking for personal responsibility and hard conversations with ourselves about in what ways am I out of integrity or in what ways did I play a role in this, if I'm really, really honest. So it's familiar. It allows us to not ask difficult questions of ourselves as you were describing earlier. It also is affiliative a very common way for us to identify and to commiserate and to connect with people.

ELISE:

And to prove our goodness.

COURTNEY:

And to prove our goodness is through conversation that bounces around the drama triangle and we end up feeling connected to people through commiseration. And I started the conversation with, there's a physiological predisposition to looking at the world this way. But I think also when I work with clients a lot, and we talk about moving from below the line to above the line, many people ask, well, what would motivate me then? What would drive me? I have a real fear that I'll just never get out of bed if I'm not driven by fear at some level. Yeah, I relate. Yeah. So that's a really common, at some level, we're all kind of addicted to this cortisol, adrenaline surge crash and don't really trust that something else would arise in its place if we were to commit to catching ourselves in fear and saying, yeah, it's normal to be scared. I see myself being scared. Is there another way I want to relate to this? And we just don't have a lot of practice with that, so we don't actually trust that something else will come in.

ELISE:

Yeah, this might be too heady, but I'm just thinking about this idea of goodness and the way that a more secular left would try to glean this belonging and what I would call this cultural code of goodness, which is the whole book is about from peers, right? It's like a horizontal goodness still found outside of ourselves versus on the right in a potentially, I'm not suggesting that everyone who is conservative is affiliated with a religion, but that code of goodness is arbitrated by God and still exterior and still evasive and elusive and keeping one outside of one's relationship with your deepest self, but you almost have vertical goodness versus a horizontal goodness. So anyway, I'm just working that out.

COURTNEY:

Well, what I think is interesting about that is back to whether you like Trump or hate Trump, most people are still putting Trump at the center of their lives. And that's actually the thing that both sides share in common. And what you're saying here, which really resonates with me, is I'm still looking outside myself for approval, whether it's an institution that's been passed down or a tradition that's been passed down for hundreds of years, or it's the approval of my peer set. It's another reason why being below the line feels familiar to us, and it feels like the easy way for most of us to relate to things because we have to tolerate losing people's approval potentially.

ELISE:

Yeah, yeah. You're susceptible to judgment, blame and shame, and it's just a core reality. And yet at the same time, how liberating it would be to be immune or to have some Teflon as a shield to that, because I think as you even say that or think about that, I think most of us recognize I don't need to move my butt because I'm being judged, blamed or shamed. That actually sounds horrible, but I do think the fear of blame, shame and judgment is a major driver in our lives. I recognize I spend a lot of anxiety guarding against that, particularly as a somewhat visible person in the culture. God, it's a waste of energy.

COURTNEY:

Yeah, I get it. I'm resonating with you and I love that the trifecta of judgment, blame and shame, which are the three horsemen of approval, I guess.

ELISE:

So how do we get above the line?

COURTNEY:

Yeah, so great question. We've already talked about a few things. The first is just seeing that you're scared is a really big one, and allowing yourself to be scared rather than going for the temporary fix of blaming someone else or feeling sorry for yourself or virtue signaling in the way that you were describing. I'm scared. Makes sense. I'm scared. There's a lot that's unknown here. The second thing is that fact versus story delineation is really, really powerful. And just reminding yourself whether you're engaging in media or it's just thoughts like conversations you're having with others or opinions you're having in the little thought bubble in your head is really tracking. That's a story, that's a story, that's a story. And catching yourself in story making, which we do all the time, it just provides a sliver of a window for it may not be true.

And then you can start playing. Would I be willing to consider that the opposite of my story is true? Would I be willing to consider and look for three facts that contradict my story? Would I be willing, not necessarily to throw my story away, but just complicate it? And even asking yourself that question is really interesting because if the answer is yes, and then you can engage in curiosity and chances are you will have a more complex perspective on the world, which is one of the things that when we're trapped in fear, we don't have access to because we think of very oversimplified ways of being. But even just catching like, no, actually I'm not willing to look at my story. That's an important thing to notice because it signals to you, Hey, actually I'm very committed to seeing the world through this perspective and nobody can change my mind about it. And then I need to not pretend that I'm listening to other people. I need to stop that. I need to stop asking other people what they think because actually I'm not open to openness.

So even knowing that about yourself is really important. One of the things that comes from being above the line versus below the line is, as we said, trust, openness, and curiosity. So another shift move is to what can I appreciate about how it's unfolding, even though it's not what I wanted? Can I appreciate? It's not what I wanted, but we had a definitive answer, and can I appreciate that democracy spoke? Can I appreciate that there is going to be harm that comes to people that I am grieving, and at the same time, my story would be, it's more likely we're going to have a peaceful transition. And so are there things I can appreciate about reality while still having my preference? I wish it had gone a different way.

ELISE:

You mentioned something really important, and I've observed this in the work that we've done together at workshops and for people who missed it in the introduction. Courtney and I have written a workbook that's coming out in the new year for honor best behavior that uses some of these tools like Fact versus Story and Drama Triangle to look at the stories that we've used to construct or scaffold our identity. And some of those stories. And I've watched this happen live sometimes, and I have been this person, I think we've all been this person over and over and over again. Sometimes you're not ready to shift out of the story and sometimes you need to hold and nurse the story of grievance or the bad thing that's happened to you or the person who betrayed you or whatever it may be. You need to hold the story for a minute.

You can't always just shift. And that's okay. And it's good to know actually, yeah, no, I'm not open to input. I have no curiosity about this right now. This is how I'm holding this and I'm not ready to do work on this story. Then we all know how, at least in my experience, I've gotten awfully tired of my stories or I've felt like this is inhibiting me and consuming so much energy and I got to drop this thing, take the moral, leave the story, and I've watched people challenge you or come to you with a story, and essentially you arrive at a place where you're like, I see that you're committed to this story. Come back when you're ready. Yes, this is a terrible story and I can't just affirm you in that. If you're telling me you want to move it and you really don't, and it's okay.

COURTNEY:

Yeah, and it's actually me bowing to the person who controls the stories you believe is you. That is your ultimate act of personal responsibility and your most powerful tool in life, the person who controls your stories is you. And so when someone comes to me and it's clear that they're attached to a story I want to honor, that is your prerogative. That's yours. And you're never going to shift out of your story. I persuade you. It has to be an authentic move of your own volition, and that actually is where your power lies.

ELISE:

And we all know what it feels like to try and move prematurely. And then you also know that moment when someone is asking you about something that was so, such a tightly held story and you're like, God, I don't even remember what happened. That happens to me all the time, these egregious details. I'm like, I actually don't remember what happened. It's wild. It just has gone from my consciousness, even though, man, I loved those details at the time.

COURTNEY:

Well, and the other thing that you're reminding me of is the reason we hold onto stories is because sometimes what's required to be above the line is often very painful. It requires us to face our emotions of sadness, anger, fear. Sometimes we're not in a position where we're actually able to do that. Sometimes we have to face a truth about the circumstances of our life that if we were to really see it, it would really shift things for us in a way that we're not willing to do. So there's very, very good reasons why I trust that there's going to be timing over there that tells you when you are in a place where the discomfort that's required to go above the line, your system can handle and is ready to process. And so there's an intelligence sometimes in I'm not ready to shift the story because my body at some level or my heart at some level knows that what I would have to do to shift it, I don't have the, it would undo me at this moment.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and I think that even if there's the question of it undoing someone emotionally, and then there's the question of when stories become interwoven or so core to our identity, that letting it go would require a remodeling of who we are.

And you see this obviously all over the culture, whether it's people who have built brands around parenting and family life who end up in a more shattered version of that, or there are a million examples. And you also see people who build brands around things that have happened to them. And one of my really good friends,

Nora McInerny

, who has the podcast, Terrible, Thanks for Asking and she's so funny and wonderful, and her husband died when they were in their thirties from Neoblastoma. Her father died from cancer a couple of months later. She miscarried simultaneously, et cetera. So she built this entire service brand built around these terrible things that happened to us. And it is such a service and it's such a beautiful and long standing podcast. And she started the Hot Young Widows Club of which my brother benefited greatly. What she's done is a massive service,

And now it's Thanksgiving. This is the terrible month in her life when all of these things happened, 10 year anniversary, et cetera. And she was remarried. She has a blended family, they have a child together, and she doesn't believe in moving on. That's not something that, it's like a terrible, terrible lie. You just move forward. And she's like, who am I? Yes, that's part of my story, but I have to remodel my house because my house is bigger and more complex now, and I don't want this to be the only story that defines everything I do for the rest of my life. So we outgrow stories or we expand into and through them and in ways that it, it's interesting. She gets pushback from people who really like her and her story and it's like, I'm ready for something that contains this, but is more than this.

COURTNEY:

Yeah. I think that question of especially when your brand and your career sort of caught up in a particular identity, that identity which is based on a story actually ends up no longer serving you personally. It's not resonant, it's actually, it's not serving you any longer. There is risk to how growing that story that she's navigating. I was thinking about it 2016, I was on the board for Planned Parenthood in New York City at the time. I was a huge, and still am a reproductive rights activist, but my identity was really wrapped up in it in 2016. It was the place where I put most of my energy and time and attention, and it is useful to think about, let's say that got fixed, would I have been willing to put myself out of a job? Of course, the person who cares about approval says, of course, of course. I would've been willing to let it go, but there's another part of me that knows I got so much of my identity from that. It would've been really, really hard.

ELISE:

Yeah, isn't that interesting?

COURTNEY:

Yeah.

ELISE:

It's worth thinking about for all of us, what underpins our identity and in terms of what we, particularly in a culture. And yes, Courtney, I know you're not on Instagram. I'll just remind everyone, don't go looking for her. She's not on Instagram, but also in a culture that demands right speaking, not necessarily right action because mostly our culture is just people running their mouths on Instagram and not necessarily showing up. I mean, obviously some people really, really do show up. I'm not suggesting that they don't, but so much of it is the signaling and the performance. But I think it's important if we can leave you with one thing in this conversation, well, hopefully we leave with many things, but also just to start recognizing or paying attention to what am I trying to get out of this? Is there a drama triangle that's present? What am I trying to telegraph to people and what parts of my identity am I trying to reinforce by doing this?

COURTNEY:

And for me, once you start acknowledging just how uncertain the world is and how each one of us has very, very little control, then the question becomes, okay, if I can't ever be guaranteed of an outcome, how do I choose to spend my time and why? How do I choose to devote my, allocate my resources? What actions do I choose to take? And then it comes from a place of, because it feels resonant with my values because I want to play in the game and I want to be in it. But now I'm showing up whether it's politically, professionally, personally, not from a place of I'm doing this, I need this, I need this to happen, but I'm showing up because the way I show up is an expression of what resonates with me, who my own personal integrity. And then it becomes, regardless of what's happening outside the world, I know how I'm choosing to show up.

ELISE:

One of the fun things about working with Courtney is that she is a highly structured person, whereas I prefer to wing it. You haven't noticed, I don't like writing questions in advance or knowing exactly what will happen so that whatever happens, happens. But it's nice to work with Courtney because she loves a wonderful container, and we first worked together. We did a workshop last year that was structured around my book because in a highly strange way, even though I met her after my book was done, our work coordinates very intensely except she coaches it and offers tools for what to do with the information. Whereas I tend to provide the context and the content for what is happening. And so there's a really beautiful baton toss that can happen between us that's incredibly relieving for me and really fun to watch. And it is a response to so many of the queries I get about on our best behavior, which is, okay, and now what do I do with this?

How do I move or shift or evolve out of this frame? So to that end, I had been working on a workbook for Honor Best Behavior, and then asked Courtney if she would do it with me. And using the structure of what we did in our retreat, we created this core process, and that's what we're offering in the workbook along with shipped moves for each sin. It's quite a piece of work, I have to say. I love this workbook and I'm very excited for it to land in your hands. It will be out next year, and we will be doing events. We're still sorting it out. We will certainly be doing workshops, maybe some things online, although that's never quite as fun. But we'll be there alongside all of you doing this work. What's really fun about this process is that you can do it over and over and over again because guess what?

There are always new stories emerging to take the place of the stories you've put to rest. Such is life.