The Real Meaning of Resolutions (Solo Episode)

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Hi friends. Happy end of 2024. It's wild. I just turned 45 in the last month or so and I'm having those feelings of how did I get to be an adult. I don't understand how this happened. I'm sure many of you can relate, but I still think of myself as a child often or the young one or the up and comer and it makes me laugh because I am not that I am fiercely middle aged. I might even be moving out of the maiden archetype. Well, actually, what am I talking about?

Well, out of the maiden archetype, I might almost be moving from the mother archetype into the Queen. I'm moving through life with some rapidness, so it's end of the year and it's time for New Year's resolutions. And I've always chafed against this idea of resolution. I haven't really made any in the last, I don't know, 10, 20 years. I certainly made them as kids and I always perceive them as I think we all do in this culture, as these fixed ideas about ways to improve or be better and the things that were actually going to get done, et cetera, and so on and so forth. And I would hold those quite harshly, not that I actually accomplished them, but it's always, I'm going to go to the gym more. I'm going to floss my teeth more. I'm going to read more books. For one, the lack of specificity doesn't work.

I think we know that the only things that I've ever managed to do happen when I put some sort of number to them like I'm going to read 50 books or I'm going to read this entire Booker prize winners list, or something weird like that. I used to do stuff like that when I was a kid, which will surprise exactly none of you. But I was thinking about resolutions recently waiting, priming myself to see them all over the internet. And I decided of course to look at the etymology. And it is fascinating because it's actually the opposite. So resolution comes from resolve, resolve, Latin, loosen release. So in some ways, instead of going into 2025 with really fixed ideas about how to be, I'm thinking about it instead as what am I going to not be? What am I letting go of? What am I releasing?

That to me is something to embrace. What can you throw in the fire? What can we give up? And I say this too because one of the things that I recognize about myself is that I sure love complexity and depth. I'm always looking for ways to make things more complicated than maybe they need to be. And I want to give people more and more and more and so on and so forth, go down, down, down. And I love this about myself, and yet I also recognize that it's not always necessary. And so one of the first things that I want to release this year is the automatic searching for complexity and to not to guard against it, but to pause before I make things unnecessarily intense. What I'm really trying to cultivate in the New Year's simplicity and spaciousness. And the other two S's that go with that of course are stability and stillness, simplicity, spaciousness, stability, stillness.

I really struggle with simplicity and spaciousness and I had to laugh because I don't know, four years ago really, I got a lot more spaciousness and simplicity in my life with COVID not having my job anymore and everything being canceled. And I'm not alone in this. Obviously we were all experiencing some variation of it in some ways, but I really needed that simplicity and spaciousness in order to write my book. I had nothing else going on. I had nothing else to do. I didn't have a podcast, I didn't have a newsletter, I didn't have a job, which in its own way was completely terrifying. But because we were all on a collective pause, it wasn't particularly out of the ordinary. And as I've tried to make space to write my next book, which a book that I am so excited about and so full of in many ways, I don't have spacious or simplicity anymore.

I have an incredibly complex life with lots of different streams of income that make my work possible. No single thing supports me, that's for sure. And so I've created a web that gives me stability, but it doesn't give me simplicity or spaciousness. And so I had to laugh as I was ruminating about this and something got canceled, something kind of big, not canceled, but an offer to renegotiate something significant in my life. And I immediately panicked and then I calmed myself down and realize, okay, here's an opportunity to get simpler and to really get tighter and a little bit more considered and to not say so many yeses and can I do less? And what's the opportunity here? Because back in 2020 when I was writing on her best behavior, Carissa had said to me, if you don't create simplicity and spaciousness, she was talking about the divine.

We'll create it for you. We'll start canceling things in your life. And so of course I haven't forgotten that, but I haven't really been brave enough to cancel anything in my life. And now it seems like the divine is maybe doing it for me again. But yeah, it's funny. And my immediate reaction to it was to create a plan. And Kiki, who is working with me again, we used to work together at Goop, she wrote back to me and she said, I love that your response to this is to do more work. I think this is an invitation to do less. So yeah, so I'm getting it reflected back at me in all ways. But as I go into 2025, that is what I am holding deeply is simplicity and spaciousness and do not let complexity automatically creep in. And I'm thinking about this too, recognizing that the next however many years are going to be a ride just as the last decade has been a ride too.

And I can't really respond to the world or anything that's happening if I don't have space. This is true for all of us. This is not true only for me. And so cultivating that spaciousness is really the only way to be able to respond to the world. If you break down responsibility, that's what you get. Response ability, the ability to respond. So meta, I feel like our responsibility to the collective and to each other requires spaciousness. And so say my foremost resolution is holding spaciousness and stillness as my highest ideals again in order to respond and in order to create the work that I really, really want to.

Part of releasing of course as well is to let things go, including thoughts and emotions. And I haven't mastered this. I've definitely become more adept at this over time. I still ruminate, I still obsess. I'm still generally an anxious person, but I am really working on creating a better, deeper understanding of why I do that and what I'm trying to keep at bay by doing that. And I was just interviewing Nicole Sachs. Our conversation comes out at the beginning of February when her book, Mind Your Body, comes out. Highly recommend that you pre-order that, and she's a Dr. Sarno disciple. For those who know Dr. Sarno, he passed, but he was a doctor at NYU who wrote books like Healing Back Pain and he felt that a lot of chronic pain, if not all chronic pain, the solution could not be found in the body, but that the pain is a signal of an over full emotional well.

And he tied it a lot of it to anger. Nicole's work expands this significantly to anxiety as well. She feels like chronic anxiety and chronic pain are synonymous and they manifest in the same pain signals. But anyway, she in her book, puts forward this whole process of journal speak, which isn't just journaling. It's actually getting below to all the things that are haunting us in our subconscious things that we would never dare admit to ourself. And so I've been journal speaking and another version of this is morning pages. Julia Cameron has been on the podcast before. I can link that as well too. But that's this idea that the first thing you do is you just empty your mind. You just write, you're not writing for coherence, you're not writing for story, you're not trying to find the negative truth, you're just letting it out. You're emptying the trash can and you burn it or you toss it.

And same with journal speak. You're not looking for content here of any value. You're just taking that emotional reservoir down. And I think both of these are good practices with slightly different agendas. One is certainly for pain and one is more for clarity. But if you find yourself stuck and repetitive and compulsive thoughts, this is one way to just get it out and get it down, let it go, burn it. Part of this requires in many ways getting closer to my fear. And this is a big one, and this is in some ways one of the core themes of my next book, although it's not as simple as that, but it's definitely the structure function of the workbook that I did with Courtney Smith. We did a podcast episode about it a couple months ago. This workbook is for On Our Best Behavior, and it comes out this summer.

I'm going to talk a bit more about it in a minute, but we are animals who are driven by fear. And there are three core buckets. There are certainly many others, but fear of loss of approval, fear of loss of control, fear of loss of safety and security. You could say that fear of loss of safety and security is the underlying base fear and that fear of loss of approval and fear of loss of control sit on top of them. But if you think about whatever you're ruminating about or whatever is driving you emotionally, that's chasing you in your mind, sometimes you can pause and take it back to that core fear. And there can be, if not an epiphany, a lot of revelation in terms of recognizing, oh, I'm scared I'll be rejected. I'm scared, I'll be left alone. I'm scared. I'll say the wrong thing and I'll be punished.

Or I'm scared that I won't be able to make my kids do what I want them to do in order for them to succeed and survive. Or I'm scared that if I don't make my relationship function in this way, my partner will leave me whatever it may be. Sometimes just getting at the underlying fear is enough to be able to release and let go of the story that's driving you because we're so afraid, ironically, we can't even look at it. We spend all of our energy running away and repressing and suppressing out of fear of that story that it haunts us. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I think if you spend time with it and go into your stories and say, what's the underlying fear? You'll see that that's what's happening. And the more you can sit with that core fear, okay, all right, so what happens?

So let's take this to it's inexorable conclusion, or let's be present with this fear of loss of control. What's really at stake? What's underneath that? So I've been doing a lot of that type of processing with myself and it's been hugely helpful. I'm still figuring out, I'm still learning how to do it because I get so caught up in the story on top of the fear. I love the story as I think so many of us do, but I'm really trying to get closer to my fear in 2025 and this whole process of not projecting, but actually letting it come up and processing it and not repressing it and being present and recognizing that the fear itself is not going to kill us, it just feels like it's going to kill us, is hugely helpful. And it's helped me be far less reactive when I hear something I don't like or I see something that I don't like or experience something that's an affront to me or not how I would want the world to be.

Instead of reflexively reacting typically out of fear, I'm getting much better at being present with it and not rushing to push it away or to make it quote bad or condemn it or judge it, or moving into that drama triangle of blaming and shaming and identifying the victim and the villain and the hero. This is just ongoing work, and you've heard me talk about this before and I will continue to talk about it because it's a never ending process and we always have new content and which to apply it to. The other thing I've really been thinking about, and this goes to this idea of developing these no scripts and finding space to say, I'm sorry, I can't do this right now, or this is a no for me. Or to not reflexively say yes, but to give myself time, run it through my body, flag the email for follow-up.

Is this a yes for me? Is this a no for me? This feels like a no for me. I feel awkward about that and instead of not responding, I'm going to respond with a no, no, thank you. That is really hard for me. It's really big for me and ongoing work. And I recognize many of us struggle with this desire to please this desire to make people happy, this fear that we will never be asked to do something again, that we're missing out, that this is an opportunity that will only come around once in a lifetime, so on and so forth. But I've also learned the cost of saying yes is high when you find yourself going to something that you reflexively said yes to and then feel extremely resentful about or don't have the energy for, don't want to be there. So that's a lot worse I think for everyone.

That's unfair, really to show up in a full body, no to a situation in which you said yes. So I'm really trying to stop doing that and to live my life with a bit more integrity. And it's funny, I love this phrase, I'm the biggest piece of shit that the whole world revolves around. I think that's part of the human condition. And I think about that too with feeling bad about the no and the self-importance of that, of like, oh, this person will be so disappointed if I say no. It's like, no, this person will move on. This person will be fine. This person probably doesn't really care. So just acknowledge it, say no and move on. It's not the end of the world.

So speaking of saying no, I had a really powerful conversation with my therapist in the last month about a lot of the requests that I get and that other people sort of with platforms get about supporting other people's work, which often I'm incredibly grateful and happy to do. And I was saying how, I've been talking to someone who was mentioning that a woman had reached out to her for a connection, essentially wanting to get advice, pick this woman's brain. I hate that phrase by the way. I was looking up where that idiom came from, but had wanted this woman to make an introduction for her, and she had replied, and I thought this was so striking that I had to talk to my therapist about it, like, honey, this isn't how you do business. You're asking me to help you make more money. And I think that as part of this, that the woman who had asked had sort of traded on in the spirit of sisterhood, will you do this work for me for free?

So I was talking to my therapist about it because this other woman had said, that's not how business works actually. And that's not really how men do business. If there's real business afoot, you don't just casually make introductions, et cetera. And I was thinking about that and I was wondering if it was true, but I was also recognizing that there's an instinct, particularly amongst women, to conflate altruism and transactions and to try to use altruism as a way to get needs met and to make asks. So I often, and I've written about this on my substack, but I often get requests under the vein of I know you care about helping women or in the interest of women helping women, and this really hits a nerve for me and triggers me because the assumption is, if you don't help me, you don't care about women.

If you don't help me, you're not here for helping women. Also, that whoever's asking me, a woman is pitching this to me, is manipulating me by making this about altruism, when really this is about the success of her book or her business or her offering. And I think that so many of us, and I recognize, I am sure I do this too, conflate altruism and transaction or that we only feel comfortable selling products or making money if we're convinced that it helps all women somehow, or that by being a woman who's successful, we're helping other women. And I think that there is a great disservice in this for us. I don't think that these are the same things. I don't think we should confuse or conflate these things, and I think we should get really clear if the request is for a blurb or a podcast interview, et cetera, the request is, I would like to use your platform in order to sell more books or increase my financial share.

Not that it's always so cut and dry, but it often is. But I think it gets really confusing when we try to use altruistic ideas as a lever for our own growth. I think if we would all do so much better to be really clear about what we want and to make those requests in a more clear way rather than relying on hitting some sort of altruism button in order to get our needs met. So I've been thinking about that a lot and trying to process it or understand it. And then also by extension, thinking about the new year, getting even more clear about my requests and when it's appropriate to ask someone for something. And when it's not, it's messy friends, it's really messy. I obviously haven't fully come up with an answer. Everything is messy. I think that's the other thing I've been thinking a lot about hashtag Make America healthy again, hashtag MAHA, which is the RFK Junior movement that certainly helped elect Trump.

And I think that this is a really sizable and significant group of people. There was a story in the Atlantic about it this week and the influence of MAHA women in particular. And it was a really good piece because it embraced the complexity and nuance of what's happening. And it sort of spoke to my own uneasiness and feelings of ambiguity around this, which having been in the wellness industry for a while, I certainly have, and I am not hashtag MAHA at all, and I am very concerned when you hear about things like the polio vaccine being rescinded, that's terrifying, et cetera. And I was reading something, I don't remember where, but it was with a professor, like an MD PhD type, someone highly accredited. And he was saying, and this is right, and this goes to this cultural idea that we have that where we reject things wholesale, we see the darkness that's mixed in with the light and we say, oh no, I reject this.

I repress this, I suppress this. Get this as far away from me as possible. That's not a good practice. Everything is a mixed bag of shadow and light, particularly things like the wellness industry. There are a lot of really beautiful ideas and clearly stated needs. We shouldn't be reigning glyphosate, et cetera. We need regulations. We need regenerative agriculture if not for ourselves then for this planet. This is all true. And that's a lot of misguided beliefs and ideas in that movement as well. There's a lot of shadow, but we get into trouble when we try to unequivocally reject these movements and condemn them. We just create greater shadow and light and greater polarity and a deeper binary. Anyway, so this MD PhD was sort of echoing this but in more scientific language, but he was saying the way to evaluate people like RFK Jr or elements of this hashtag MAHA movement are to, I think he had a whole process by which he said, when you look at these individual statements, one way to ascertain whether there's any validity to them is are there other countries that do this, have these past in other countries?

And so I think he was looking at a fluoride in water, and there are countries in Europe that don't fluorinate their water and have other mechanisms for treating dental strength in children, et cetera. But his point was, you cannot wholesale reject without creating equal and opposite force. We need to do a better job of saying, okay, let's look at the evidence. Let's look at the evidence. Let's just embrace, let's let our minds be open to being changed. Let's evaluate these concerns rather than rejecting them. And he's right. That has to happen because there are elements that make sense and there are concerns that are entirely valid, and yet there's a lot in this that's not, and it all that wheat needs to be separated from the chaff and we can't just reject it all wholesale. And so going back to this idea of resolutions, one of the things that I'm trying to carry forward into the new year is just a softer stance and a willingness to listen without just rejecting out of fear that by listening, I'm somehow becoming complicit or I'm, I don't know, all the things that I think if you run through your body, you recognize what I'm saying.

And I wish that collectively we could get better at that. And I also just keep coming back to that line from John Powell who studies belonging and othering and he has this amazing line, which is that in this country we need to be better at being really hard on systems and really soft on people. And instead we practice the converse. We're really hard on people and soft on systems. And so that's the other thing I'm like, how can I look for ways to let people off the hook while addressing the systems that make this all possible? Because I think that we're human and we are that mixture of light and shadow and we are constantly justifying and looking for ways to stay in integrity or at least perceive ourselves as being an integrity and selling ourselves out and selling each other out in that pursuit. And it's just so human. And rather than tearing each other apart, let's focus all of that energy on the systems that make this possible because the systems certainly enable it.

To tell you guys about a little bit of news, which is very exciting. Some of you may have seen this on Instagram, although I feel like nobody sees anything on Instagram anymore, which makes me feel like I really just really want to get off of Instagram. It's one of those gestures towards spaciousness and simplicity that I keep moving towards. But I historically have done a lot of ghostwriting. I think I've ghostwritten 13 or 14 books. I'm not sure I've lost track, but I don't really do it very, I don't really do it anymore. I do it very infrequently. It really has to be the right project with the right person that feels important, and I'm the right person to do it with 'em and that it's co-creative in some way, even if the co-creation comes from my ability to structure other people's thoughts. And I also choose things now based on whether I feel like the person I'd be collaborating with has something to teach me.

So I did a project with Phil Stutz, who you might know from the book that he co-authored with Barry Michaels called The Tools and Coming Alive. He wrote a book called Lessons for Living that came out a year or so ago. He was on my podcast and there was a Netflix documentary about him called Stutz. So I've actually known Phil for a while. He wouldn't really have known me in return, but I interviewed him. And long story short, he wanted to do a workbook to go with the tools. And the tools for those you don't know are these multi-step processes for getting unstuck and becoming more creative and getting unblocked and dealing with fear and so on and so forth. And in the tools, I think there are five tools, five major tools that they delineate and go through, and they're really powerful. There's reversal of desire where instead of running from fear pain, you turn and you embrace it, and then you imagine getting shot out the other side, et cetera.

So anyway, the idea originally was to write a workbook for The Tools. And it's so funny, it was supposed to be a really simple project. And so I went over to with Phil and his assistant sat who I love, and we decided to work together on this project, which was supposed to be really fast and easy. And then, I don't know, 30 meetings later, I can't remember. I was just looking through all the audio files. We did something else entirely instead. It's called True and False Magic, and it comes out in March and Phil will definitely be on the podcast to talk about it and we'll do some other stuff. And this is an unusual project for me because my name is on it, which happened at Phil's behest. And normally it's explicitly in my contract that my name is not on it in part because it's really other people's work, but Phil, and it aligns with the whole workbook in a way because the workbook is about the power of three.

And there were three of us who worked on this, Phil sat and me, and it was really a co-creation, even though it's entirely Phil's work. In fact, as you read it, because it was oral, he dictated, I interviewed him, transcribed, asked him questions, we went back in and it was like a completely nonlinear experience. So it's fully filled. You will feel like he is speaking to you, it sounds like his spoken voice, but it wouldn't have happened certainly without the three of us. And it was so fun and a really moving and meaningful experience, particularly as I've started to go heads down on my next book, which is Tangential to Phil's work. My book is about shadow and binaries. And Phil writes about the shadow and he writes specifically about Part X, which is when the shadow gets distorted. So anyway, true and false magic, it's essentially Phil's philosophy.

And Phil is deeply spiritual. He very much believes in God or universal forces, and this book is an embrace of that. And his previous books haven't been secular per se. They talk about higher forces, but this is a much deeper explanation of the way that Phil sees and understands the universe. And a lot of people think that Phil is a Jungian and he has a beautiful Carl Jung archetype painting in his office, and he is Jungian in some ways, but he is really an accolade of Rudolph Steiner. And so it was interesting to read Steiner while we worked on this book and to see the confluence or how the tools and the model in which the way that they nest into the universe, how that comes to life. So I really hope you guys like it. It's one of those books that it's sort of a book workbook hybrid.

It's coming out in paperback. But I think it's one of those things that readers will either be like, I really get this or huh, but I hope you all really get it. I feel like you really will. And there are new tools and it deals with the three domains or what Phil calls the three faces of God. The three domains are pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work. Those are the three unavoidable, undeniable realities of life. And you cannot resist those if you want to be in flow, if you want to be in communion with the universe, if you want to work with higher forces. So it's really fun and it was a wild experience. I'll write more about it, but Phil has Parkinson's. As many of you might know if those of you who have seen the documentary, we'll certainly know that. And Phil is now on Instagram, so you can engage with him and ask him questions.

But it was really interesting to work with his mind, which is a steel trap, and to start this book. And we would just start or pick up in the random as places and then end up in the same place. I'd go back to my transcripts and the articulation of the core concepts and tools would be exactly the same. It was really fascinating watching the consistency evolve. Anyway, so that's available for pre-order. And I have another collaboration, and this one is really special to me because it's the inverse of what I've always done. And that is that I have a workbook coming out for on our best behavior in summer of 2025. It's coming out in July. It's called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming the Full Self. You can pre-order it now. Please do. And I wrote this one with Courtney Smith who's been on the podcast multiple times.

She has become a really dear friend. We actually met in the weeks leading up to when On Our Best Behavior was published and had this weird aha because our work converges in so many ways. She coaches the Enneagram, but she also coaches so many other tools and the Enneagram and the Seven Deadly Sins share a father of Evagrius Ponticus, which is just one of the ways in which our work converges. But Courtney in the way that as a ghost writer, I go in and structure and organize people's thoughts and help them create books. Courtney’s mind is one in which she sees in a very different structure, and she sees through tools and she sees through processes. She was a management consultant actually. And so she was able to set the container for me, and I've never had that experience before. We first worked together, we did a workshop together last summer in North Carolina, which was an incredible experience.

And the reason that we decided to do this workbook together, I was supposed to do a workbook, but I was going to do it on my own. And I asked Courtney to do the workbook with me because she can set this container in which I get to pour myself, and she brings people through this process that wasn't not clear to me until she did it, and now I can't unsee it. And this process is the structure of our work. We are calling it the core process. It's a set of tools and a set of steps that you can do with any quote story in your life. And I really think that this workbook choosing wholeness over goodness, again, you can pre-order it, include links in the bio. I think it's amazing. And I think I can only say that because I have some distance from it because Courtney also worked on it, but I could not be more proud of it.

And I think when I was asked to do the workbook, my editor was like, oh, just come up with some tools and some thoughts and some practices from all the people you've interviewed over the years, and I could certainly do that. And there's a little bit of that in there, but we really over-delivered, if I'm honest. This thing is I think really powerful and in some ways I think it will have a bigger life than on our best behavior itself. And it was fun. I'm hoping that this new year brings more co-creation because through that there's also more spaciousness and more simplicity, and I think collaborating in the right context can be so incredibly fun. It's not always fun. And there's a certain part of me that feels like I will always, always want to work primarily on my own. Although a lot of my work is a co-creation.

I'm either reading people's books and interviewing them and going deeply into their ideas, or I am bringing, I'm synthesizing different people's thoughts and theories and practices and data sets into my books. So in many ways, well, everything I do is a co-creation. That's another thing that Phil Stutz would say is that you cannot actually do anything alone. You are always conspiring with higher forces or with your shadow or with other people. You cannot create anything by yourself. And so that's true. I don't really create anything by myself either, but this is a very overt co-creative collaboration, and it was really fun, both of them, both the workbook with Phil and the workbook with Courtney. It's funny, as I talk about this, I'm like, yeah, that's why nothing has felt simple or spacious because there's a lot of work coming out, but all worth it. I think you guys will really enjoy it.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for being with me throughout this year and throughout this final collective void. Actually, I don't think it's the final collective void. I think it's the first of many collective voids that we will be experiencing in the coming years, but sure makes it more fun to do it with all of you. So thank you to everyone who listens. Thank you to everyone who supports me on Substack.Come join the party over there. It's certainly where I'm spending a lot of energy. And if you haven't already, please rate and review this show. It helps it be found, and please share it with a friend. I will see you on Thursday and in the new year.

If you like today's episode, please, please rate and review it and share it with a friend.