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For April’s guest-less episode, I’m looking back on the wild ride that was this month, and trying to make sense of this period of contemplation in my life. I share a few realizations I’ve had about: uncertainty (involving Phil Stutz’s “evil wedding cake” theory); betrayal (involving a special tarot reading with Mark Horn); whether or not I have faith that the universe will support me (involving a group workshop on what women want); and what we’re meant to be doing here (involving a gondola ride with Chelsea Handler). I also answer a couple of listener questions about how I manage my time, and my research and creative processes.

ELISE:

Hi friends. Welcome to the end of April, one of maybe the wildest rides I'd say of the last few years, and that's saying a lot. It's so interesting to think back even since 2020 and to contemplate where we've been and where we're still continuing to go. I, for one, am not expecting anything to get easier in the near future. Though today's episode, what I want to talk to you about is this strange synthesis period of contemplation I'm at in my life and why and how I've come to understand it fundamentally as a question of faith.

Faith in the universe to support me and faith in the universe that there's some collective unfolding that we can, if not rely on, that we can come to trust blindly, rationally in some way. And so I'm going to tell you the story of how all of these threads have come together in my mind. And at the end I'm going to answer a couple of questions about the creative process and the writing process. At some point I mentioned somewhere that I have more or less eight jobs or eight buckets of income, and that was very startling to people. And so I've been getting a lot of questions about how I manage my time and make room for the things that I love in addition to the things that pay my mortgage. And I also continue to get questions about my reading and research and note taking process for books.

So I'm going to get to those two questions at the end. I'm also going to start potentially doing office hours in an ongoing way so that I can work with you all more directly that you can find through my substack, which is eliseloehnen.substack.com. Or you can Google Pulling the Thread, find it. Yeah, I'm still coalescing around what makes the most sense for me to do there and what's most supportive and most what wanted, but I'm going to test some things like that because I recognize there are a lot of creatives in this community who have the same questions and want to understand how to get themselves moving. If you haven't on that note, order True and False Magic, which is the book I just released with Phil Stutz. He co-wrote The Tools.

One of the things that he's most known and beloved for is getting creatives moving, particularly writers, but really anything is a form of creation. And he has a lot of tools for getting people unstuck and back into flow with the universe. And maybe I'll start there actually, because I worked on that book with Phil for a long time, more than a year, and I'm deeply familiar with his work and not only read the tools when it first came out and encountered them throughout my time when I was still at goop, but ever since I was a kid, I recognized this call and response with the universe. I remember being a young editor and just having this dawning, maybe it's obvious, but this moment of awareness where I was like, oh, right, nobody's going to come and pluck me out of obscurity here. I know I need a new job and I know I need to move.

I have to put myself in motion. And that might sound so captain obvious, but I know that so many of us are just waiting to be picked, seems selected. And in that moment I realized, oh, if I don't move, the universe is not going to move to meet me. That was a big awakening for me. As simple as it is though, I often think that awakenings always are quite simple. From there, I just recognize if I want to move, I need to move and I need to get into some sort of flow with the universe and doors start opening and synchronicity start occurring with greater frequency. So that was back when I was in my early twenties and I started to understand my own agency and ability to drive my life to quite a bit of success, I will say, and recognizing, oh, you don't get chosen, you don't really get called.

It's more about finding that calling within yourself and then choosing to respond to it. So I had this early understanding of Phil's whole worldview, which is that you're not exonerated from pain, from hard work or from uncertainty. And I want to talk mostly about uncertainty because I think that's the big one for so many of us, particularly at moments like this where it feels like our whole world is quivering and shaking and on the precipice of some sort of collapse and hopefully reconstitution, but who can really say, right? That's the whole point. Certainty is not real, not true. Nothing that we can legitimately grok or hold onto. And yet so many of us spend our entire lives seeking out control, trying to control the world around us, trying to control our relationships. For many women, we do this unable to actually articulate and express what we want and need.

This is true of me too. This is core to my work with women around on our best behavior. Most of us can't even recognize much less say directly what we want to and need. And so a lot of us spend most of our energy covertly manipulating other people to get our wants and needs met. And I've written about this before. I'm going to come back around to it too because I feel like our transactional world is becoming more and more lit up on this grand stage feels more obvious in the world of 2025 than it ever has before where it's like, oh, I understand. I see all of these transactional relationships playing out on a stage and manipulating the rest of us, but I'll save that for another day. I want to go back to this idea that that's how a lot of women are conditioned to be behave.

It's just in us because we don't have a lot of models of what it looks like to say, I want this. Can you do this for me? I need this. And so we are taught program, really, we do it unconsciously to say, well, if I take care of this person, hopefully they'll think to take care of me. Or if I do this, then maybe they'll do this. Or I hope someday in my relationship my husband will have some sort of new dawning awareness of all the things I do for him and he'll decide to start doing all of these things for me. I don't know how many of us are conscious of doing this, but I catch myself in these sort of stories all the time. Part of it comes down to just this desire for control in a world where we feel like we have very little autonomy and so we control what we can.

The reality of course is that we can really only control ourselves and the way that we respond to the world. That's the end of our dominion. We can influence our children, we can influence the people around us, but I think a lot of women recognize and men, God, that takes an awful lot of energy. I'd rather just engage with the world head. So when he talks about the domain of uncertainty, Phil talks about how living your life searching for proof to verify that you are right. He calls this the evil wedding cake and that the good wedding cake is faith, freely chosen, irrationally chosen in some power, consciousness, wisdom, intelligence, greater than yourself. That's the only real way to move forward. You don't know what's going to happen. You cannot predict what's going to happen. You certainly cannot control what's going to happen. And that's one of the big illusions of our lives that we have all this control.

All you can control is the way that you choose to get up every day and put yourself in motion and make decisions, test your intuition, feel into the world, create. That's it. And that's a lot, by the way. There's nothing sad about that. That's a great reality. But this faith freely chosen irrational faith is actually a really big nut, right? Because I mean, look at the book of Job. Look at all faith. We want to believe I'm a good person. I will get good things. I'm a good person. The world will respond to me kindly. Another big part of Phil's work is you're going to get punched in the face actually over and over and over and over again. This is life, small deaths that force growth, and there's no cause and effect really in life. It doesn't matter. You still choose to move forward.

You still choose to create. You still choose to put yourself in motion despite again, not being able to control the outcome. So that's a bit of context. This all makes so much sense to me. And as I've gotten older, I've become a person of faith, which would probably terrify my mother, who is petrified of organized religion and is somewhat intolerant of religion in general. But I'm not, again, and I've quoted Alan Watts too many times to do it again. But faith to me is very distinct from belief. I think belief is often aligned with certainty, a belief in the way that the world is or how you would like it to be. And faith is freely chosen, irrational, and part of faith is not knowing and handing over to some greater power doing your part, which is really important and we're going to talk about that.

But then recognizing at a certain point you have to have trust, faith to let go and let the world unfold even when it does not meet your preferences. So I am a person of deep, deep faith. I have what I would say, endless faith in the universe, endless faith that we're part of some unwinding pattern. I would go again to Richard Rohrer's work and the wisdom that we're in. We live in the state of a pattern of order disorder, reorder. And I think if you were to go back and look at your life, you could track that pattern, order disorder, reorder. And collectively we are in a time of disorder moving with faith toward reorder. Even though we don't have any certainty about whether that will happen, when it will happen, what it will look like, et cetera. It is requiring an inordinate amount of faith.

So I just want to say that I have that faith and so much of my work is looking for people who can hold down a corner of the tapestry of this faith and offer some insight into their perspective or their field of study on this world so that we can all gather a little bit more faith just like we've seen this, this is part of our collective unfolding. This is what it is to be alive, looking to the past. We can see echoes of the future and so on and so forth. This is my general worldview. And despite everything going on collectively where I tend to feel like I have more solidity, more solidity, when I look at the lives of other people and to look at our world at large, it's much easier for me to find my faith. I had done a reading recently and I wrote about this on my substack, so some of you may already know parts of this, and if you want to read about it, you can go there.

I had done a reading with Mark Horn who's been on the podcast before, who's just an incredible guy, brilliant scholar of Kabbalah and tarot, and the two have a long ancient history to together. And he interprets the tarot in the Pharo, which is the Jewish Tree of Life. And he reads the cards, not really according to the book, but according to Kabbalah, and he tells you stories and his readings are 125 bucks and you come to him with a question. And so one of my big questions as many of you know, is, oh, what am I doing here? And not what am I at least doing on this planet, but what am I supposed I feel like I'm supposed to build something? How do I get more energy around what I'm trying to build? How do I stop spilling my identity across eight or nine different functions and coherent into one thing?

Is that what I'm already doing? I don't really know. I don't have a clear view on myself being myself. And so I had asked him, this is my exact question, what do I need to know about finding support for doing my work in the world? And he pulled my cards and it was a very beautiful reading. I'm not going to go into every card, but essentially it was, yes, you need support. There's a spiritual architecture or plan that needs to emerge. You can't do this alone. You don't have enough strength and you need to be patient and take your time. And there is absolutely no rush. And then the final card of my S Row at the root, which is the spot in the tree of life that represents the indwelling of God in the material world. I had the Five of Swords, which is one of Mark's least favorite cards. He had just pulled it for the collective. And he was telling me how this is the card of betrayal, which can imply betraying yourself sort of an inner saboteur or I would say in the context of Judith and Jesus needing to be betrayed because you need to die to yourself and be crucified to yourself and reemerge as a different incarnation or to let sort of old illusion self parts go in order to be something new.

And I was thinking about Judas not only because Mark mentioned that it's the card of betrayal, but if you look at the card, it's a picture of there are five swords as mentioned. There are two figures in the background who are walking away retreating, and there are two swords on the ground, but the swords look more like crosses to me the way that they're represented. And then there's a man in the foreground with three swords who has a smirk on his face and his gathering up the two swords that have been dropped. And so Mark talked to me, the whole reading was really about how I need to bridge the spiritual and the material. And this is because of the presence of some Pentacles, some cards that the Pentacles used to be the coins. And then they added the five point pentacle in I think 1910 to illustrate that the material and the spiritual are two sides of the same coin.

And that our whole job here really is to bridge the two. And I have a lot of feelings about money not being spiritual. And this is a big piece of work for me, and it's one of the reasons that I think I don't support myself or I can't support myself through the work that has the most meaning to me. I think it's because I refuse to bridge the material and the spiritual. So I pay myself to do the podcast and the newsletter and to write my books by taking on other jobs that's there for context. So this is, I know a big piece of work for me that I'm still working on. But so Mark had said to me in the context of the Five of Swords, this is you betraying yourself and betraying the value of your work by refusing to bridge the spiritual and the material.

I guess you could call that crucifying myself in a different way. And then he also mentioned in the context he had pulled this card for a reading he was doing for the collective, and he was like, there's another really important code in this card, which is that two figures who are disheartened and disillusioned in the foreground, who have dropped their swords and are retreating, are actually making themselves incredibly vulnerable, not only because they don't have their weapons and their defenseless, but this character in the foreground is taking their weapons so they are emboldening and empowering him by refusing to fight. And for him, he felt like this was a danger sign to the collective. And I think many of us can agree with this where it's like, I don't like this. This is unsavory. I don't believe in this. This is base. I will not break these rules.

I will not lower myself to these standards to play this game, so I'm going to retreat and go away. And his point was, we cannot afford to do that. We have to fight on behalf of those who cannot fight for themselves, even though the idea of battle is so egregious, foreign, violent, etcetera. So I hear this reading Carter Betrayal and we're being called to battle even though we refuse to pick up the weapons, which obviously I think feels very intense for this moment of time that we find ourselves in. And it reminded me of this Carissa Yeshua transmission from several years ago about betrayal and being called to be spiritual warriors on a mountain to not fight in the valley, but to be spiritual warriors on a mountain. And so I want you to hold that thought. I'm going to come back to it,

Took me a minute to go and find my notes. And in the interim, I'm part of a group. I go and watch my friend Courtney coach. I'm part of this group of women that she works with, and Courtney is my co-author on choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, which is the workbook for on our best behavior that is coming out later this summer. And we have done some retreats together and we'll be doing more stuff together. And this workbook is truly actually exceptional. I think it's this whole process that I am still doing. You can do it at Infinit and hopefully we can get some energy around it because I think it's pretty transformative. And watching this work with other women, I know it's transformative. So I went up to do this group, and we're at this point in the evolution of the eight or 10 months that we meet where we get into this idea of actually articulating what you want, which is as mentioned at the beginning of this episode, very difficult for women.

It's still difficult for me. And so without betraying anyone's confidence, this is my story from this group I had. I recognize this spiritual material is really what I'm working for. That's what I want. I want to feel what it is to have support. And I just want to also caveat here again, when I say this is personal work, it is because I will manufacture scarcity in my life in order to maintain the kabuki theater of keeping 10 things running. So just I know what I'm up to. I can tell all the other people cross the swamp without getting obsessed with killing every alligator because the alligators are a distraction. And yet I love the alligators. Not only do I need to slay all the alligators, I need to fatten them up before and play with them for a while. I just cannot cross the swamp without finding a million reasons to stay in the water.

I'm just saying that. So my wanting, my initial wanting before we started this process was about wanting financial security because to me that felt like freedom and I wanted that childlike faith in the world that it would support me. And through the process of answering a series of questions and doing this worksheet by myself, I was like, oh my God, that is fundamentally what's happening here. It's a very sad awakening or awareness. I don't have any faith that the universe will support me. I have endless faith as mentioned that we're engaged in a larger tapestry and unfolding that will be painful, but is ultimately for our highest good. I really believe that even though it doesn't feel that way on a day-to-day basis, I have endless faith when I look at my friends' lives and what they're up to, and I can point out all the patterns and the ways that they're disordering and reordering and experiencing that linear growth through small deaths of self and reinvention.

I can look back at my own life and see the ways in which that's been true for me in the past. And yet fundamentally, I realized in that moment I don't have faith that the universe will support me. And so I am constantly engaged in all these mechanisms of control to show I got it, I got it, I got it. I'll do this job and I'll do that job and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. I refuse to hand over the wheel in my own life. And at the end of this process and recognizing, oh, that's fundamentally what's happening here, just isn't it ironic? I just wrote a whole book about uncertainty and faith, rationally chosen, freely chosen faith that I can actually apply this to my own life. And at the end, we had to stand up and in front of the group go through this process of saying what we want.

So for me it was, I want to have faith that the universe will support me. Then you have to step forward saying, I'm willing to have faith that the universe will support me. And then finally, you stand and you say, I commit to having faith that the universe will support me. And everyone was working with their own material. And what's amazing about this practice is that it's very clear very quickly that very few of us were willing or committed. I couldn't do it, friends, I could say, I want this, and yet I could not will it, and I could not commit myself to faith that the universe would support me. And it actually made me very sad, but it was also incredibly clarifying because I realized, oh, this is it. This is the nut of it, this is it. And shortly after the next morning, I flew to Canada to go on a long, long planned ski trip with Chelsea Handler who spends most of her winters there.

And if you missed Chelsea's episode of Pulling the Thread, highly recommend going, listening to it now and reading any of her books or watching her stand up special. And I met Chelsea a long time ago before Covid, after we had dinner with a group of women after this Glor Steinem event downtown. And of course I was totally smitten kitten with Chelsea. I've been a fan for a long time. But she is as hilarious as expected and as terrifying in some ways as expected and yet profound, deep and incredibly loving. She's an Enneagram eight. And for anyone who has an Enneagram eight in their life, you recognize them as forceful personalities who are very protective and will always stand for what they think is right. But they come at the world with a lot of force and all they really want, and the way that they will defend the people that they love, all they really, really want all in eight wants is to be defended and protected and loved in that way.

And so Chelsea's that ultimately so kind, so soft, but it is all protected by a very intense exoskeleton that takes on the world and takes on oppressors and stands for justice and all the things that she is and represents in the culture. So anyway, we had met, and she's an avid skier, and so we have talked about going skiing every single year for six years. I will also add, and we talked about this on the podcast, that Chelsea has stood for me in ways that are very meaningful for me. And she has also in the process of standing for me, demanded that I stand up for myself and has done interventions on me that were very meaningful and impacted my life in really important and essential ways. So I will forever be grateful and loyal to Chelsea for that stand of sisterhood. She really believes it and reps it.

So anyway, all to say that finally got our shit together, and I went to Canada to ski with her for a few days and she has this whole community of friends up in Whistler, wonderful Canadian school teachers, therapists, physios, self storage unit owners, just real people who are incredible skiers, mostly women. She brought me into her community. It was so fun, and I have to say one, obviously it's skiing and it's skiing hard, which I love. And just laughing and being ridiculous and silly and to feeling the protective cloak of an eight. Who's going to make all the decisions for you, including when you're leaving the house and what you're having for lunch was so relaxing. I'm sure other moms understand why being bossed around is the best medicine of all. But really, I got back in touch with my joy and Chelsea's a very serious person.

She's more politically aware and educated than me and is incredibly concerned about what's happening. And yet she is still so deeply connected to her joy and to belly laugh like that and to be silly and wild and slightly chaotic. I didn't know how badly I needed it. I just want to remind you that joy is an essential ingredient. Do not let the world rob you of your joy. I recognize in that moment, oh my God, this is the most vibrant and essential fuel that I have, and I have to stay connected to this. I have to remember to laugh. I have to remember to find the absurd. This is a core part of who I am. And I used to be funny. I don't know that part of me doesn't really get to play or be expressed. And so being able to get into repartee with her and her friends was like, oh, this is an essential part of who I am.

That doesn't actually come out that much and it needs to come out more for my kids too and my husband. So first there was that, and then one of the really close friends that Chelsea and I share is Laurel and Jackson and Laura, for those who don't know, she's been on my podcast, she'll be back later this fall. She has a new book coming, is an incredible medium, just one of the most incredible warriors of light walking this planet. And when Peter died, my brother-in-law died in 2017. I hadn't really thought about any of this. I just didn't care. I didn't at that point, I wouldn't have said, oh, I'm a person of faith even though I understood how to work with the universe and to make things happen. And I write about this in honor best behavior and apologies to people who know this story, but when Peter died and Peter was truly one of my soulmates, a twin flame, maybe I met him when I was in high school, he met my brother his their freshman year of college, and he had been present in my life as adoring and dotting brother, one of the only people who had ever unconditionally taken care of me and loved me.

And he's hilarious and brilliant. So when Peter died, it was devastating, not just for me. He's one of those people who had a thousand best friends. Thousands of people came to his funeral and he was one of those people. So anyway, Laura channeled Peter for me in a way that I'll never forget, and it just blew open my entire world and gave me faith, gave me an understanding that there's so much more out there than what we can perceive. It was to quote Jeffrey Kreel who wrote the book, the Flip. He's been on the podcast a couple times. It was my flip. The flip is about scientists who had that experience and had to reimagine their entire worldview and expand their paradigm to contain what they understand or understood about the world, and then how to make it fit this new awareness. It's a beautiful book. He's an amazing, he's a professor of comparative religion at Rice who runs the Archives of the Impossible. It's a fascinating person and actually one of my favorite people to giggle with, to be fair. Anyway, so Chelsea and I have Laura in common, and Chelsea's brother died as many of when she was a child. And then she writes about this a lot, not in this most recent book, but in the book prior. She also has this fundamental faith that there's more, when we were skiing, we were talking about this.

I was saying to her, I think I feel Peter's presence in my life every day. And I feel like so much that's happened since 2017. Almost everything has been orchestrated in some way by Peter based on his preferences and what he wants for me. But as someone who also loved me more than a lot of, he sort of loved me the best. And I was like, to this point, Chelsea, he loved you and he loved fortune, and I feel like if anyone was going to make me go on a ski trip with you and make this happen, it was Peter. So we were sort of laughing about that, and she was saying, I don't think I'm betraying her confidence. I feel like I've heard her say this publicly. She was like, I absolutely think this is my last time that I'm here. I feel like this is it.

I'm done. This is my last life. I'm retired after this. And I was like, I can see that for you, but I could also see that you weren't supposed to have this life at all and that you were done and that you were called out of retirement and sent down, and that you came with your roster of demands. I want to be rich. I want to be famous. Give me some material in my early life so that I have some jokes to make on stages, but I will come under these conditions. And I was like, I think you're called here for that and the role that you're playing in culture and will continue to play. And I was like, and I similarly as a child, had this very strong feeling of I cannot believe I'm here again. I had a wonderful childhood first of all, and yet I was like, I cannot believe I have to do this.

Get me to where I need to do the thing I'm supposed to do. I'm going to do it. Let's get this going. I cannot believe I'm a kid again. Oh my God, move it along. People. That was a core feeling I've had since I was a child. And I was asking Carissa about this or she mentioned it and she was like, you know, didn't want to come. And I was like, well, yeah, I've definitely had a feeling before. And she was like, yeah, you had a lot of demands about the conditions that needed to be met in order for you to come point is I bet that there are people listening who have this feeling too. And it was an unlock for me in that gondola with Chelsea. I was like, oh, right. And that's why you meet people and you're like, I know you.

I feel we have all of us, everyone who was listening to this conversation chosen this time in this place. I think we all have contracts of varying dimensions. I think from what my understanding of talking to a lot of mediums, intuitives and trying to understand what's happening, there are a lot of souls who are newer, who are like, I want to have an experience. I can't wait to be embodied. I need to learn. And earth is school and you have all these experiences and you learn and then you go back and then you reincarnate and you learn. And that's how karma comes into it. But I think that there are a lot of us here who have been sent in or have chosen to come in for this very interesting time, this transition from old era to new era that's going to be difficult and tiresome and all of those things, and that we're recognizing each other and being reminded of, oh, right, I signed up for this and I have a very specific role to play here.

And so in that gondola with Chelsea, I was like, oh, right. I came here to do a very specific remit, A remit to be fair that I think that I'm doing, and that is my fundamental faith is actually in, I'm supposed to be here for this unfolding and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, and I'm not supposed to know any more than that. And there's my faith friends. I was like, right. I got it. I remember. Then I came back and I found my notes on this Carissa/Yeshua transmission about being spiritual warriors on the mountain and betrayal. And again, we've all been betrayed in our lives, and the way that it was discussed is so beautiful because Carissa was talking about how betrayal is lost. We are all quite comfortable. I mean, even illness can feel like a betrayal of the body, I think for many of us.

But we're used to experiencing loss in some ways, although the death of loved ones can, I think, feel like a betrayal by God or any other faith system. How could you take this person from me? But when we're betrayed by someone we love, whether it's a coworker or a parent, a lover, a partner, it can feel as she was saying, more fundamentally painful than any other type of loss because you have to take off your rose colored glasses, you have to reimagine your entire life, and it disconnects you from your own intuition and discernment like, how did this happen to me and how did I not see this coming right? This betrayal, it took me by surprise shocked me, and I'm stupefied that this could have happened to me. And so resurrection from betrayal, as she was explaining, is sort of this masterclass in regaining trust, intuition and discernment and to letting go of the energy of betrayal, transcending it, finding mercy forgiveness, thanking the person for showing you the truth and creating clarity for you.

This is very difficult to do, just want to caveat that, but that this is how you get up the mountain. It's through these moments of death and resurrection that you slowly get up the mountain and become more capacious spiritual warriors on the mountain, she also gave the second definition of betrayal, which is less known, which is revelation of what's hidden or secret. And this is the idea that we're constantly betraying ourselves by not looking at the truth, not looking at the shadow, not being willing to own what we know is happening, but it's just inconvenient. So we want to look the other way or let it slide, stay in complacency rather than taking the hit, allowing the death, doing the resurrection, moving up the mountain. So that was part of it. And again, this is all in a newsletter if you want to read the notes.

And her point is the spiritual warrior on the mountain, all they have is their nakedness. That's the defensive armor. And they have the sort of truth. And she talks about the weapons in the valley, which are deceit, harsh words. You can imagine the long list and that that's the battle. And she was like, you are moving into a period of time where you can no longer be in passive peace. You must be in active peace. You must discover the offensive power of peace. And that is a presencing, an ability to hold and stand. And again, she was like the sword of truth pierces the sacred heart of the beast. It does this by startling it, but you are not there to slay the dragon. You are there to integrate the dragon. This isn't about winning and discarding and killing. This is about integrating, and it's not about winning and losing, right?

It's not about sending people out of the garden. It is about integration. And that's really hard. Just want to say that that is really hard when all we want to do is send some people to Gahanna, people who are sending people to El Salvador in prisons, send them to Gahanna. But no, that's not what we're being called to do. The offensive power of peace, and this is meta. I don't really quite understand this. I want to get Carissa on the podcast to talk to us about this some more. But it's this idea of deep presence, stillness, stability, surrender, spaciousness, and we get there. We grow ourselves up through this process of betrayal, resurrection, and letting our desire for reclamation, retribution, revenge, go anywho, friends, I am still processing this, but this is what I'm holding. How do I remember? How do I stay connected to this idea that I'm here for a specific purpose at a specific time? This is true for all of us. And then how do I continue to hold this offensive power of peace, this active peace I'm holding, building, just allowing and really working on not only wanting to have faith that the universe will support me, but being willing to have faith that the universe will support me and committing to having faith that the universe will support me. And sometimes you just need to know what you're working on in order to move in that direction. And that's where I feel now.

Okay, I promised to answer two questions. I'm going to do that quick. So the first question that I get all the time is considering the number of jobs that I do, how do I organize my time? So I have a physical planner. I do it more as a mechanism to get my mind organized and then as sort of a guide. And then I use, I just discovered in Google the way that you can do tasks in addition to scheduling events. So I do it in multiple places and I manage my calendar two to three months out, and I block full days for different projects. And so some of the work that I do, board work, for example, there'll be a period of intensity where there's a board meeting that's all day. There's a lot of pre-reading, and then there are calls sporadically here and there.

So I just fit that in and structure my weeks around those moments. Usually I know what's coming and I can plan for it a year in advance. So that's great for ongoing consulting work that's a little bit more half a day here or a day there. I try and just hold space in my calendar for the podcast and work like this. I usually batch produce episodes, so I will create podcast episodes in a frenzy. I do all my own research. I read everyone's book and I'll tell you a bit about my note taking and reading process in a minute. In some ways, a separate question, but I try and always stay ahead. So I always have six to eight episodes in the hopper. I often offer for authors who have books coming out that I know I want to have on, I often offer, particularly if they're good friends, to be their first interviewer in part so we can figure out what the most salient parts are.

I'm gentle. I don't do gotcha interviews and I want everyone to express themselves well, so I can be an easy interviewer at the gate, but I try and batch produce those and then hold episodes so that I'm not frantic about getting the next week programmed. And I have a ton of, again, visibility into what's coming. So I'm never surprised. I'm rarely caught off guard. Sometimes I batch write at newsletters, but mostly I write them on Tuesdays and I block two hours every Tuesday to work on the newsletter and then I send it on Wednesdays. And again, it just comes down to holding time. What gets really difficult for me is finding enough time to work on my books, particularly when I'm ghost writing other books. And I don't like switching, as you can imagine, back and forth. Usually they're entirely unrelated. And with my books in particular, I get into a flow state and I like to have a solid week at a time when I go to this sad, sweet writer's room where we don't speak to each other and you just sit and you write under the peer pressure and watchful eyes of other writers.

I don't know if everyone's a writer and other people are just doing quiet work, but there's literally no talking. It's just desks and power outlets and error on chairs. And I go there and there's minimal. I can't go to the fridge and snack all day. I just can't distract myself, and I get a lot of stuff done. I can draft a chapter in a week. It doesn't mean it's a good draft, but I need to stay in it and stay present with the material. And I have a million index cards and sticky notes and all my book notes all around me, and I need to stay in the material until I'm done and finished and it's all on the page, and then I can take a break. It's important to take a break. Writers will tell you this because you get really high on your own supply and you're like, this is amazing.

I've cracked it. And then you come back and after enough time has passed and you realize you're not following your own arguments. So how could anyone else follow your argument either? So that's important to spend time. I go intensely. I take a break, I come back, I remind myself, clarify, leave it, come back, et cetera. Then I start involving other readers once it's time to do that. But I like to do that with books where I work intensively on my book for several weeks, take a break, get it to a point where I need to step away from it. Then I work on whatever I'm ghostwriting intensively for three weeks. Then I need to step away from it, get some clarity, perspective, et cetera. So that's that process. My research process. So I read, I underline sections or just star and mark parts of books I read very fast in part because I have such an extreme note-taking system that I come back to the material.

In some ways it's almost like I read it twice. I'm really good at reading for what's pertinent or most salient or most the biggest ideas in the book. So I go through, I mark up the side, then I go back when I'm done, I have a whole stack of books next to me that I still need to do this for. And I type up every passage that I've underlined with its page number. So sometimes I end up with 30 pages of notes on a book. If it's really speaking to me. Sometimes I end up with three pages. Some books really are articles that have been blown up into a book size form, but there aren't that many ideas. Just happens with a fair amount of frequency. So I do that, and then before I interview someone, I revisit my notes and sometimes I read passages in the outro, but mostly I'm just very fresh with what I know that their work is about.

Then when it's time to work on a book, I organize, I take all those book notes, I'm sorry, I recognize this is not good for the environment. I turn them into a size 10 font. I send them to Kinko's, and then I end up with thousands of pages of notes I go through with stickies. I index all of my notes, sort them into sort of these tyrex bags that are relevant to each chapter. So when I did honor best behavior, I had a whole bunch of notes for sloth, I had a whole packet of notes for lust, et cetera. Then I go through and I look for studies and other relevant research, et cetera, moments from pop culture, and I have these bags of research so that when I go to this aforementioned sad workroom, I have my bag so I can spread it all around. Then I make outlines. It's a whole thing. It sounds insane. It is kind of insane, but it's the only way for me to keep a million threads alive in my mind is by writing things down and organizing them in that way. And then meanwhile, I have a library of book notes that I can also search as well.

Yeah, so someone had asked me, because I mentioned when I evacuated for the fires recently that I took all my research, I took those bags of physical notes that I had then marked up again in index because it took me a long time to do that. But I do have digital copies of everything as well. And yes, as I'm telling you all this, I realize it sounds insane, but works for me. And part of what can get me frantic is when I'm like, where's that thing that I thought of? So I also am texting myself things all the time. I use sticky notes that feature on the computer where I can keep notes, although I'm sure many of you guys also have the experience, I'll have an epiphany and I'll be like, oh my God, breakthrough. And then I write a note and then I can't decode it maybe more accurately. I can't tap into that energy that came to me, that knowing, that awareness that I thought I was communicating in note form so I would remember, and it's lost. It's okay. I have faith that it will come back to me. Alright, friends, this was a long one. Thanks for hanging with me. I will see you next time.

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