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In this month’s solo episode, I’m exploring the parts of our culture and our collective that we can own—and impact. And I’m sharing more on the power of triangulation, and how you can use certain systems and tools to better understand yourself, your roles, and what you might be trying to do in work and in life.

ELISE:

I just got back late last night from Chicago for a work event that I did at this lovely women’s coworking space called Altar. This was a great trip because it was one of the rare opportunities I had to bring. One of my kids, my oldest came with me not to the event. My kids have really no interest in my work, which I got to respect at this point. They’re little, but my oldest best friend moved to Chicago during COVID, and so they had this incredible reunion, suburban idyllic weekend together, which was so fun and lovely.

And then I ducked out to go and do an event for choosing wholeness over goodness at Altar. And Kathy, who owns the space, opened the day with this quote, which she said is equally attributed to both Barack Obama and Oprah. So pick your favorite person, and it’s this, and I’m paraphrasing, I might not be dead accurate here, but it is, you have to do the work yourself, but you can’t do it alone. And I think this is such a incredibly profound insight that of course rings true, maybe obvious, but I’m going to repeat it because this is really the nut of it all. You have to do the work yourself, but you can’t do it alone. And so today we’re going to talk about that quote both in the context of what’s happening around us collectively and the piece of that that we can each own.

And also I want to talk to you about the role of triangulation, not in the way that you might be imagining it, but in how the resources that we all have to really start to understand ourselves better and the work that we’re each individually being called to do. So that’s my agenda. Hopefully you guys are with me and we can dig into this really important and very difficult idea, but it feels to me this idea that you have to do the work yourself but you can’t do it alone, is at the crux of what’s being called to us from everything that’s unwinding and happening around us, the chaos and the uncertainty that we are facing every single day. And I want to take you back really to the inception of on our best behavior. And the way that I was thinking about that book as I was figuring what that book was even about, and one of the big questions that I wanted to really grapple with and understand was, sure we can look around and we can identify a world that feels deeply inequitable for women and people of color and people who are low on the socioeconomic scale.

I really think classism, and that’s becoming probably more perceptible and more obvious to everyone, but classism is really the root of all of these intersectionalities. We can parse it into conversations about specific identity factors, but what they all generally have in common is less access to money and therefore less access to power. We can talk about that a little bit more in this conversation. So one of the things back to the beginning of on our best behavior that I really wanted to contend with is that yes, I want to rail against any systemic inequities, and I’m not a legal historian or scholar, but when you look at the laws, a lot of the laws have been renegotiated in the last few decades and centuries for more equity. It’s the application of those laws where we start to see the inequities show up. Yes. And in my experience, it’s more about the ways in which we sometimes hold the inequity as a foregone conclusion that shows up in what happens in our lives.

So I want to talk a bit more about what I mean by that because this is the really tough part and this is the part where can we take personal responsibility comes in. And some people hate this because yes, it’s much more satisfying to blame and shame and yell and rage against the machine. And there’s certainly room for that. And I’m not suggesting that there’s not a huge amount of complicity and even evil operating in our world today that we should rage against and blame and shame. And I don’t know how far that that action is going to get us in terms of creating the world that we also desperately want to see. And so that’s really at the heart in some ways of on our best behavior. Yes, there’s patriarchy. No, it hasn’t always been this way. It’s a relatively new evolution in the way that we’ve structured ourselves culturally, and therefore it’s not how it’s always been and it’s not how it always needs to be.

And we need some new imaginings in order to understand what something more affiliative, more partnership based could look like. Because one of the other things that I bristle at is when people say, oh, we need a matriarchy to balance out the patriarchy, but we don’t need a women top-down oppressive structure, we need balance. That’s what we need. And that’s what we came from when we were doing life together, hundreds of thousands if not millions of years ago. We were involved in a quest for survival and we needed to do that in an affiliative way where we were working together supporting each other, dividing tasks, not along a gender binary, but along age, function, capacity, et cetera to survive. And that’s really how humans are structured and what we come from. And it makes so much more sense when you think about who we are today and how creative we are and how multi gifted and multifaceted and variable our capacities are.

This is not a new thing. This is how humans have always been. It’s not that women just suddenly learned how to lead in the workforce or learned how to serve in the military and lacked those capacities hundreds of thousands of years ago. This is all this conception about how society is not that old. Patriarchy is not that old. At the beginning of on our best behavior, when I was really grappling with where it came from and what drives it, what I came to understand is the particularly insidious and pernicious parts of it is that it’s internalized in all of us and we all bear some responsibility for perpetuating it in our culture. And I know that that’s hard to hear, but that’s really what on our best behavior is about me grappling with the ways in which I was policing myself according to these ideas of what it is to be a quote, good woman, and performing that goodness in the world and then expecting similar behavior from other women and sometimes even enforcing it.

And we are all participating in this. Nobody is immune. Culture is so incredibly contagious. And you don’t get to say, I don’t believe this. I don’t choose this unsubscribe. It’s present. It’s in us. And so undoing it is our responsibility too. And the other thing that I think is really important and to understand as part of this conversation in a way to bring more and more people under this tent is that patriarchy, even though it seems to benefit men, we look around patriarchy is killing men. It’s killing all of us. It’s these wounded boys who become wounding men. To quote Terry Real, if you haven’t heard Terry Real’s episodes, I’m pulling the thread. He’s done two one on male depression and won a more recent episode. But I think Terry is just one of the best commentators on culture from the perspective of patriarchy and what it does to the psyches of men.

He’s a profound thinker and therapist on this, and it’s the wounded boys who become wounding men who are creating havoc, which is so interesting, right? Because I think that we get stuck in this mindset of it’s because they have power and yet something’s wrong. Clearly something is deeply wrong and women are not committing these grievous offenses. It’s something like 99% of mass shootings happen at the hands of boys and men. And it’s not that women don’t have access to guns, right? We’re just not participating in those parts of culture. We are typically the victims of those parts of culture. And I mentioned that because I think it’s one of those indicators of there is something mutable, changeable happening here. This isn’t systemic, this isn’t, oh, if women had access to weapons, women would be doing these things too. It is a cultural concept that’s taken root.

It’s a cultural illness. It’s not about a system or a structure. It’s about something more amorphous and therefore something that we can attend to and change if we switch our thinking about it. And I’m just offering this because I think it’s so easy and understandable to feel hopeless in the face of everything that’s happening and to feel powerless, but we are the ones who keep our culture going. We are the ones who are perpetuating these ideas. We are the ones who are modeling behavior for other people, including those closest to us, our children, and so on and so forth. And so we can actually start to shift and change and see the impact of that on the culture. And that might sound wildly naive, but this is, again, it goes back to the framing that we’ve just part of this cultural training that we’ve imbibed, which is nothing can happen until these things change.

I can’t change until everything is perfect out there. I can’t move in my life until the world looks more equitable. And I think that what we’re being pushed to right now, if you take a more expanded view, is that we cannot keep outsourcing our power to these external structures, which let me remind you, we vote for and we pay for with our own dollars, right? We have so much more power than we’ve been led to believe, and we’ve been lulled into complacent enslavement in some ways to this idea that these things are bigger than us and that we cannot impact them. Now, I think that it can be absolutely overwhelming to think, oh, I have the power to change gun laws in this country. But if you look at someone like Shannon Watts and what she’s organized around mom’s demand action, we do have more power, particularly when we work collectively.

And that’s where this quote, you have to do the work yourself, but you can’t do it alone really starts to be impactful because we each need to change. We each need to take responsibility for our own participation and perpetuation of the culture, for our own internalized patriarchy, our own obeyance to these systems. And I can’t do that much by myself, right? We’re all a collective giant wave where if we can all start getting on side with each other, if we can all start moving collectively and together, there’s real impact, there’s real impact there. And culture shifts. If you look back at history, our culture is entirely different than it was 10 years ago, and there’s an opportunity here. It doesn’t feel like that in this moment to dramatically shift. I often think about Jamil Zaki’s book, Hope for Cynics, which is such a great read, and he was on pulling the thread, but I’m going to pull up my book notes here because he writes about how cynicism is misunderstood in some ways as some hyper intelligence, and it’s really not actually. But he also, I think in a more beautiful way talks about what happened at other crisis points in our culture. And I think that we can all agree that we’re at a real crisis point in our culture and very unsure about what’s going to happen. And if you’re like me, you’ve been enjoying watching the Gilded Age on HBO, long lived the Gilded Age. I love that show. But he writes about what emerged out of that moment during the 1890s. So this is right around this Robert Gilded age and just incredible wealth inequity.

He writes, during the 1890s, a lynching occurred somewhere in the US every two days. It’s a stunning statistic. After a chaotic and painful labor, the 20th century gave birth to a vibrant, progressive movement. Activists, workers and civic leaders assembled into a vast array of new organizations. They built power through strikes, lobbying and public engagement and racked up staggering. Here are just some of the policies passed between 1888 and 1920 women suffrage, the income tax, the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, federal Trade Commission and national Forest and park system, child labor laws, the eight hour workday campaign, finance regulation and public kindergarten. He also has this line about how progress has a habit of hiding its tracks. And I know at this particular moment in time, it really feels like we’ve somehow rolled back the clock in a really devastating way. But reminders like this, I really believe, and this gets into Richard Rohr and the wisdom pattern and the process of order into disorder, into reorder, which I’ve written about on my substack.

I can include links to those in the show notes. And Father Rohr has been on the podcast as well, but that we are obviously clearly in a time of violent disorder and there will be a reordering, but we have to endure this moment when we are snails without our snail shell as everything that we’ve come to rely on, even if those systems haven’t been great or fantastic or anything that we’ve necessarily loved, as those are taken apart and in the reordering, they will need to be put back together. And that is a time, an opportunity for great optimism and joy. I really, really foundationally believe this, as painful as this process is that we are going to see the emergence of visionaries across many, many, many, many fields. Again, we are also multi-talented and multi gifted, and that we will be able to coalesce around a world that we want to live in and that we want to leave behind for our children.

And that what’s happening, and I’ll have such a dwell biocon to discuss this, but we’re watching some sort of archetypal bubbles emerge and burst across the globe. There’s something deeper at play here than what’s present even on the most visible public stages. This is a global disordering, and I have to believe that it’s pushing us towards something more durable, more balanced, more affiliative, more sustainable, more loving, more joyful. I really think that that’s where we’re going after whatever shattering we’re experiencing right now resolves itself. I know we’re all being collectively shaken, awake to do our part, both alone and together. And nobody can this work for us. We each have to do our part. But the collective action that comes from hundreds of thousands of people, thousands of people, even shifting and changing has a massive ripple. Not everyone needs to do this work for change to happen, but enough of us need to do this work.

And I actually believe enough people are, I was with this incredible man named Patrick Connor recently, and he was talking about his understanding of the universe, and it just so deeply aligned with what I’ve come to understand as well, that at one point when he was talking, I had a screeching hallelujah response almost. But he was talking about how, and this aligns I think with what Thomas Hubl would say, he’s a frequent pulling the thread guest, but that in moments like this where the fact that there’s so much darkness present and so much shadow is a balance to the fact that there’s also so much more light. I’m not putting these on the binary of good and evil. That’s the meta-story under which we labor, but that we are equipped actually, even though it might not feel that way, but we are equipped to transmute this darkness, to alchemize the darkness, to move the shadow, to metabolize it, to integrate it, and to use it as the base fuel for our own evolution.

And I really profoundly feel that this is true and that this wouldn’t be happening if we weren’t equipped to manage through it. Again, it’s funny, as James Hol says, sort of this follow your bliss, that Joseph Campbell line, he contests that because he thinks that really when we follow our passion and that passion actually means suffering and that growth is only possible. Yes, I think you can evolve through lightness and joy. I think there are paths, but that really the big leaps of growth come through suffering, come through those crucifixion moments where you’re dying to yourself, to your beliefs, to your old relationships, to the old structures that don’t serve you anymore. Carissa would talk about this as the Friday, the tomb going into the womb Friday into the Saturday, which is the crucifixion into the Sunday, which is when you come out on the other side and you’ve been changed and expanded.

Painfully, yes, but expanded. And so I think that we are suffering because we are being pushed to grow and our world as we come out the other side, obviously our democracy has gotten us quite far, but it needs evolution. It needs change. It needs to shift according to the complexities that are facing us across the globe. And this power structure whereby we endow all this power into what’s proving to be a highly corruptible situation is just showing us we’re going to suffer through those cracks and those weaknesses until we can rebuild into something better. And this will be a participatory experience for many, many, many of us no longer, I think, are we allowed to be passive observers of governance and civility and these systems that theoretically sustain us? And that doesn’t have to be onerous because I think that what I often remind myself of, and I am sure many of you listening, can relate to this feeling of, oh, I’m the only one.

Oh is anyone. And then you look around and to quote Mr. Rogers, you see all the helpers, you open your eyes, you see all the people who are devoted across the spectrum of issues using their gifts for good and growth. And that is such a deep, deep assurance that we’re each put here to do our specific thing. And so the task of the individual in our individuation is to recognize our gifts and then use them to serve the world. And my gifts are different than your gifts. Or maybe they’re similar, but not a doctor. I’m not a scientist, I’m not a lawyer. We’re all so different. It’s really stunning. I’m not an activist. I am a writer. And we need our activists, we need our healers, we need our therapists, we need our writers, we need our poets, we need our historians. It’s really quite beautiful. We need the people who sow. We need the people who cook. There are hundreds of archetypes of a community, and I think we’re each born with some sort of imprint, our dharma inside.

So I also wanted to talk to you about how you even figure out what that is. I mean, some of us happen into our career trajectories, and it’s a perfect fit if it’s like a glove. I’ve done this for many lifetimes. I know exactly how to do this, but for many of us, it’s far more torturous to figure out what we’re doing and what we’re supposed to be doing. And I recently had Katie Hendrix on the podcast to talk about zone of genius. And if you haven’t heard that episode, definitely listen to that one. I have another lemon premium episode coming up soon that gets more deeply into exactly what falls into my process of doing it, if that’s helpful. But it can be really difficult. It can be taken an entire lifetime to feel like you’re actually walking in shoes that fit. Carl Young says that we often walk in shoes that are too small for us.

And so often, I think the first half of your life, really, if you’re lucky, you arrive at that halfway point and you’ve built maybe enough stability and structure into your life where you can turn to meaning. Ideally, you’re able to do both of those things simultaneously. That’s the dream. But often it takes the first 40 years to really figure out, oh, this is what makes me feel alive. This is my particular zone of genius, and this is where I’m supposed to spend my energy because this doesn’t feel like work. It feels like life. And I talked in a recent newsletter, which I’ll link about the role of triangulation. And I’m one of those people just by virtue of how I’m trained and how I think that can sit with people. And I do this when I’m ghostwriting books and when I’m collaborating in general or when I’m advising or helping people with brand strategy and marketing strategies, I’m really good.

I’m not alone in this gift at reflecting back to people what they’re up to. And part of this is that I can see their blind spots. I can get a much fuller image of them, particularly in the early days before they filled my mind with themselves. But when I get really fresh eyes on a project or on a person and I listen to them and I see them and I look at the impact of their work on the world, I can say, this is what this is. This is what you’re doing. This is how you structure it. This is why it’s important. This is how to communicate it, et cetera. That’s the role of triangulation. And ideally, you work. If you work in a group, you have colleagues, a boss, maybe HR, who can reflect this back to you or help you structure the way that you are showing up and who you are and what your gifts are.

Not everyone obviously gets that. And my role of doing that for myself, because of course, I’m so sad that I can’t actually do it for myself except in retrospect, but I use time, space, and distance, that level of perspective as the triangulating force and figuring out what I’m up to as well. And by that I mean that in the early days when I was writing on our best behavior and I’d left my job and I was making, just making random Instagram videos and starting to build a following there, I didn’t really know. I was just making what I felt called to make. I was really letting my subconscious in many ways lead my intuition. And then only then could I really, after enough time had passed, look back and say, oh, I see what I’m doing. I see where I come alive. I see what lights me up.

It’s doing etymologies and really understanding the roots of some of these ideas and how they infiltrate our minds, and then shift over time, et cetera. And only through time through making, pulling the thread episodes, through writing books, through writing my newsletter every week, do I see what I’m up to? And it’s still an evolving idea, but if you’re trying to figure it out what you’re up to, I would do that type of process, whether you’re a creative or not, you have to sometimes make things. And that is a creative process. It could be journaling, it could be writing a newsletter about whatever your topic is. It could be leaving yourself audio notes about what’s interesting to you. But if you don’t have someone who can triangulate for you, then that’s a process that I would recommend. And the goal is get your unconscious going, get it running.

And Phil Stutz talks about this too. In the role of creation, you have to get the unconscious going in order to turn on that faucet. He would talk about that as one of the skills of a really potent creator. And again, a creator for him is not necessarily a writer or a screenwriter or a director of a movie. A creator is anyone who is moving forward in their life and making progress. And he would also say that God doesn’t give a shit. That would be the language he would use about what you create. God only cares that you are creating. And I love that idea. It takes a lot of pressure. It puts the pressure always on the process and the gradual unfolding rather than on any fixed final result. And anyone who is a creative will tell you that if you are staking your happiness on a finished result, oh, when this book comes out, everything will be better or different.

Oh, when this episode comes out, my life is going to change. You will invariably be perpetually disappointed. You have to find joy and excitement and thriving in the process of creation and the process of your own evolution and self-development rather than fixating on any certain outcome. There is no finish line. There is no moment where you’re like, oh, that was all worth it. If the process itself isn’t, it’s not the process for you. But I know we live in a very results oriented external authority oriented space. And again, this is about a personal work. This is about evolution that is never ending. And maybe that sounds exhausting, but I actually think it makes it so much richer and so much more fun. So that’s how I would triangulate for work. Now, there’s a question of triangulation in your own personal development, and this is where therapists are critical.

I love my therapist. We have been together for seven years, eight years, almost every single week, and in many ways has a thought partner. But what he also is someone who can point out my blind spots to me, and that’s the unconscious, that’s the shadow material. He doesn’t necessarily go there every week, but he has been observing me over time for a long time, and he’s in many ways, more aware of my patterns than I am. And he can gently show them to me to help me integrate them and potentially, hopefully shift out of them. So if you have a therapeutic partner, even a best friend who’s willing to be honest with you, then that’s one way to get that triangulator role going. You can use systems like sometimes astrology or Enneagram or even tarot as a triangulating force, the I Ching. These are interventions in some way.

You can use them as a way to reflect a question to the universe and then use that to show you something that maybe you weren’t able to see by asking a question of the eing. Every January, Satya and I do an eing workshop, and she came on the podcast to talk about that as well. We can link that. We’ll do it again in the new year. But the other ways are actually along the lines of the I Ching, to use your soul, to use your higher self as a triangulating force. And by this I mean start tuning yourself to signs, to the universe, to synchronicities and recognize that the other side, you can conceive of this in any way that’s helpful to you, could be someone you love on the other side who you see as a guardian angel. It could be a higher version of yourself, it could be God, it can be any triangulating force that you relate to.

I like to think of it as my soul or the divine as a collective. But when you start paying attention to synchronicities signs and you start really establishing a language, there are many great teachers in this. Lauralyn Jackson has a book coming out any day now called guided, which is really about this concept. But when you start working with your higher self in this way and you start paying attention to what happens and you take in the information as gentle nudges to get you onto your highest path or to show you where you’re out of integrity, or maybe where there’s a betrayal or where you need to be paying attention, you can triangulate in that way. It’s a little harder. It takes some skill and some time, but that’s one of my favorite ways to get information when a door is closed in my face instead of getting blamey and Shay and upset and railing against whatever out there isn’t supporting me. It’s what does it mean if this is not for me? What is for me, et cetera. There’s just a different way of reframing it as information that you can use to fuel your own growth and development rather than seeing the world as an indictment on who you are, but just seeing the universe as gently redirecting you and giving you information if you can see it and assimilate it.

The other way, Courtney Smith and I in choosing wholeness over goodness trying to facilitate this process through the workbook is by writing and getting your unconscious working in the same way that when you write as a work output creatively and you start making things, even if you’re writing about being a project manager or you’re writing about engineering, et cetera, that’s one way to see yourself on the page and see yourself with perspective and space and distance. But when you’re doing personal development work and you really let your unconscious mind go and you journal or you do morning pages, which is Julia Cameron’s process, I’ll link that episode as well. You can start to get a new perspective on yourself if you almost look at yourself as a third party. And Courtney and I do, the core process in choosing wholeness over goodness is really a way to get access to those unconscious stories that are driving your behavior in your life and helping you set up your entire personality.

And so the first tool, the core tool, which is from Conscious Leadership Group, which was co-founded by Jim Detmer and Diana Chapman, is called Fact versus Story. And even this tool alone, I’ve talked about this tool with Courtney on the podcast and I write about it on my substack, but we do this very simple exercise in every single one of the workshops like the one that I did in Chicago this past weekend. We do a fact versus story exercise, which you can do it in the workbook alone, and you can also do it with friends or you can do it with strangers. It’s an incredible way to build intimacy. And I’m just going to explain to you how it goes here and then please take it out into your lives. But it starts with you split into a pair, and then one of you is the questioner for 90 seconds or three minutes, however long you want to run the timer and the other one answers, and then you switch roles.

And before that, let me just clarify, A fact is something that is irrefutable that can be recorded on video camera. So I’m the mother of two sons. That’s a fact. I’m a good mother. That’s a story. So a fact is something that can be recorded on video camera that’s irrefutable and a story is pretty much everything else. Courtney would say that culture is a story. Country is a story. Everything’s a story. My kids need me. That’s a story. I’m a great podcast host. That’s a story. The fact I host a podcast called Pulling the Thread, everything else story. So when you do this exercise, you break into pairs, and then the one person says these three things in sequence, tell me a fact about yourself. Now tell me a story you make up about that fact. Thank you. And you repeat this for 90 seconds, three minutes.

Then you switch sides. And this type of process, you can also do this on the page, you can do this in the workbook, gives you pretty immediate access to your unconscious or sometimes conscious or barely conscious stories. And when you really get this going and you get some speed going in this exercise, the stories that you hear yourself making up about facts are pretty stunning. They’re sometimes quite deep. Some of them will really hit you in the gut while others less. And then the point of the workbook is to take those really substantial stories, the ones that have structured your entire personality, and use those in the core process until you can maybe swap them for a story that’s a little bit more helpful at this moment in your life. Some of my stories that I write about in the workbook are if I accept money from someone, then they own me.

I have a story about, as a woman who’s five foot 10, I’ll never be a small person. If something were to happen to me, my husband wouldn’t be able to pick me up and carry me to help. I mean, these are kind of silly stories, but you start to understand, oh yeah, I spend a lot of time trying to minimize myself because I’ve taken up so much space. So you start to understand as you do this process, what’s really taking up room in your psyche as well and what you’ve oriented yourself around for a long time. So when you’re doing this process of triangulation, when you’re really trying to understand what’s driving you or where you need to grow or change or move, exercises like that can be incredibly helpful as well. And again, just to put a bow on this, the more we can shift individually personally, the more resilient we become, the more in some ways immune to the culture we become whereby we don’t let what’s happening in Washington DC dictate how we show up in our days.

There’s so much power in that to not be loyal to the energy of the collective, which right now is just intense fear. And I’m not saying it’s not about bearing your head in the sand either. It’s about becoming durable in the face of chaos and uncertainty and able to stay grounded and centered in yourself and able to act from your heart and not from your fear. And that’s some high level ninja shit that requires a tremendous amount of personal growth and self-management and endurance and durability. But that’s what’s required. We need to become energetic masters of our own selves and masters of our own personal development. One of the things that I always offer too that keeps me going is that I look around not only at all the incredibly gifted people showing up in the world and sharing their gifts, but I think about just women and men who are really in touch with their feminine side, who are really balanced.

There are a lot of really incredibly balanced, wonderful affiliative men doing incredible things in the world, just as there are, as we know, incredibly masculine toxically, patriarchal women as well who are not balanced at all, but there are enough of us, I think, who are balanced, balanced between our masculine and feminine, regardless of our gender. Again, those qualities do not line up with gender. Gender’s kind of irrelevant to being able to master those energies, but I look around and it’s just stunned by how many people are doing this work and in this fight with us. And the more work we can do, the more we can really get behind each other. The more we can manage our fear, I think the faster culture will change. And speaking specifically to women here, women are amazing and women are exceptional, and this is not a new thing.

Again, this is ancient and there is just manifold proof that women and men have been occupying the same domains forever. It’s really only recently that we’ve been split into these two domains. That’s a newer concept, and women were hunters, women were warriors, women were vikings. This isn’t this whole fantasy that we have about man, the hunter really got steam in the 1960s that the Man, the Hunter Symposium, but archeological evidence shows how variable and creative we were and how focused we were on our collective survival through the cultivation of our own individual contributions to the tribe. And women were not just sitting in caves, nursing babies, and housekeeping. It’s an insane idea when you think about it. And men were caretaking and loving and nurturing too.

There’s a sickness that sets into a culture when we get divorced from our full humanity and the full set of those values. So anyway, women are incredible. Women are exceptional, and women, I think the mental health of women, despite the fact that this culture was not really built by us or for us are in much better shape, I think, than men, and I think we’re much more accustomed to doing this work on ourselves and really trying to understand the systems and structures, right? Anyone who is farther from power, any person of color for example, can really tell you about the systems of power in a way that someone who’s in the middle of the system of power can’t see. It’s a blind spot for those guys.

When I look around and I think about women who have been outperforming Boys and Men school for a century, this is not a new statistic, even though it’s getting a lot of attention these days. But women are incredible. So the more work that we can do on our unconscious envy, on owning our wanting, et cetera, the more we can get on side with each other, the more we can let go of this idea that we should do it all and should just actually do the thing that we’re uniquely gifted to do. Instead, I think the world will change so fast. I think we’re the ones that we’ve been waiting for.

Alright, friends, I know we covered a lot of ground, but thanks for hanging. All right, I’ll talk to you later. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you. If you want more in this world, please or consider picking up copies of my book On Our Best Behavior and the new workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. Thanks again, friends.