You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In my one episode sans guest this month, I’m reflecting on: how we might enjoy solitude more (and fear loneliness less), the manifestation program I just finished (called the Money Challenge), how I’m feeling about attention and power these days, and a couple of other micro and macro realizations that are surfacing right now.

Jessica Gill Episode: “A Deeper, Simpler Manifestation Process”

Spiritual Investor Episode: “What Would Happen if We Related to Money Differently?”

To Be Magnetic

On Loneliness: “The Nature of Loneliness”

Carol Tavris Episode: “The Self-Justification Trap”

ELISE:

First, thanks for joining me on these monthly solos. They’re a relatively recent endeavor. I’ve probably done 15 total over the course of this podcast, but I am enjoying them more and more. And it’s interesting, they’re not the most popular episodes. I think I am mostly known as an interviewer, but it feels like those of you who really like the podcast seem to really like the solo episodes. And so for that reason alone, they are more than worth doing.

Even though every month I’m like, what am I going to talk about? And then I sit down with a microphone and what do you know? I can speak extemporaneously for almost an hour. I’ve come to accept this part of myself more and more that that’s actually when I allow myself to be extemporaneous and unscripted. I mean, let’s be honest, I’m rarely scripted, but that that’s where I really actually feel the most alive. It’s the most fun for me. I love creating in the moment and working with whatever is present. And it’s been funny because as I’ve done a few more workshops for choosing wholeness over goodness, sometimes by myself and sometimes with my co-author Courtney Smith, I realize that I really like watching people in groups, but I don’t love facilitating a similar workshop. I like things to be more extemporaneous. This is just something I’m coming to know.

I will be doing some versions of that in the new year, so more to come on that, but I don’t know, there’s something really powerful about being with people in the moment and in presence, and I think that that’s what this type of episode is about. It is about being in the moment and wondering what the hell is going to happen. Alright, so today I have a trajectory in my mind that’s emerging. So earlier this month I was in Australia visiting my friends at Mecca, where I have been doing work for years now. I love that team. It is a female founded, female led company that’s private. It’s never raised outside investment, and they’re doing some really interesting things. And so it’s been so fun to work with them and to drop into their corporate culture and then pull out. It’s funny, every time I work with people in groups, one, I’m reminded how fun it is and I’m reminded of what an office nuisance I am.

I’m just love to chat in that context and distract people from their work. And third, I also realize, wow, I’m really an individual contributor. I’ve always known this about myself, but that’s how I like to work, to go off in a corner and do a bunch of work and then come back and collaborate and then go and do a bunch of work. It’s really good, I think, to come to understand these things about yourself, particularly for the context of this conversation today, which is really about figuring out who you are and then how to bring that to the world. So I was in Australia doing this work recognizing, oh yeah, I love this, and yet I can’t do this for a sustained period of time, which is again, a nice reminder for those moments when I feel nostalgic for a corporate job and I spent a lot of time when I wasn’t with the team, wandering around Melbourne by myself, going to the new Mecca, Berk Street, and just being in throngs of people.

Whenever I travel alone and I’ve traveled alone for most of my career, I find it to be a really intense meditation. First, I will say that I always feel a tremendous amount of homesickness, and as my husband will tell you, every time I need to go on a trip, I feel mournful and I really don’t like leaving my kids and my husband even when trips sound like a good idea when I book them as they approach, I feel like I just want to be home. And yet I really like traveling alone. I love traveling with my family too, but it’s a totally different experience. I love traveling alone because one, there’s something about being solely responsible for yourself and no one else, and being entirely guided by an GPS of what do I want to do? Where do I want to go? What do I want to eat?

What sounds fun is I think sometimes a novel experience for all of us, particularly parents, because we don’t really get to be guided in that way when we’re with other people, right? We’re making sure that we’re meeting their needs. I ate a number of meals by myself, and I was just thinking back to when I was young and I was a magazine editor and I had an improbable job traveling around the globe writing these shopping guides to different cities. That was my job and isn’t that wild? And I remember going to Paris and having one of those paradoxical experiences, which is that I was walking, I was by myself. I was walking probably 12, 14 miles a day, scouting stores, eating by myself. My French is terrible, even though I took French for, I don’t know, 15 years, but just being really alone. And I was very much alone.

I was unpartnered in general, and at that point I did not have an iPhone. I had a Palm pilot, I think, and I really through those types of trips where I would not speak to anyone for sometimes days get so comfortable with my own loneliness, if that makes sense. It’s almost like I had to see the other side of my loneliness because at the time, you couldn’t just sit there and be occupied in your iPhone. You would bring a book or just sit in people watch. And for so many of my friends, the idea of traveling alone like that eating alone was just so scary. And yet I came to love it. At first, I was like, this is so awkward and embarrassing and people are going to look at me. Then you realize nobody’s looking at you really ever. And I came to really enjoy it as this forcing function to be by myself and to learn how to be my own friend, to keep myself company.

I really recommend it. Honestly, if the idea of eating alone, even to the day, eating without a phone is scary, you should try it because it’s like exposure therapy or something. And we think being alone is the equivalent to being lonely, but they’re not the same thing because I think we can all say that you can be with a ton of people. You can be in a crowd and feel lonely. Obviously, you can be in a crowd of people who and feel even more lonely, more isolated, more unseen. I think people who are in bad relationships would say that they feel more alone, more stranded, more isolated than if they were keeping their own company. So they’re not the same thing. But every time I travel and every time I spend massive swaths of time, I’ll buy myself. I think about this idea of loneliness and how I have, in some ways, I think insulated myself from it by not being scared of it or embracing it, or even I guess enjoying it. Again, as much as I miss my family when I’m away from them sort of speaks to this other real profound reality friends, which is that we are all alone and there’s no way around that we are together apart. And you can’t bridge that. There’s no antidote for that. There’s no merging that’s appropriate. And so I think the big piece of work is to actually enjoy solitude and embrace the discomfort that might immediately come up about being by yourself.

So Australia puts a point on it because when I’m home, I’m obviously with my kids and Rob and our four cats, yes, we have four cats now because Rob, I think he does it because he wants me to be the one to go to Petco to pick up cat litter. But he’s the one who’s responsible for the cat litter, and there’s a rescue that puts up cats for adoption. And almost without fail, whenever he goes to Petco to get litter, there’s some kitten that needs to be saved. And so that is how we have four cats. We started with two sisters after our sisters died, Fletch and Dot. And then we adopted a three legged cat before Thanksgiving. Is that two years ago now? August. Then we recently adopted a little Siamese kitten who is of course a total menace and maniac. His awfully cute though.

But all to say that when I’m home in my house, I’m like a peanut butter celery strict, what are those called? Ants on a log or whatever, where the cats just sleep on top of me. They just line up 1, 2, 3, 4 until I’m totally immobilized and incapacitated. And of course, I would never want to disrupt a cat. So often I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m like, how do I change positions without disturbing four cats? It’s a good picture, right? Anyway, as part of this process of really spending time by myself, I have actually been doing what Jessica Gill and Lacey Phillips from to be magnetic, what they would call unblocking work. I have been doing a massive amount of unblocking, and if you don’t know what this means, Jessica was just on the podcast last Thursday because they have a book out called How to Manifest.

And it’s funny, I have interviewed and been interviewed by these guys for years. I interviewed Lacey Phillips, maybe not a decade ago, but it feels like a decade ago. So I’m in many ways, incredibly familiar with their process. And the NV chapter, I write about their concept of expanders, which is that it’s really important to find people who have or are doing what you want to do in the world and use them as models for what’s possible for you. And it’s such a much more powerful model for women than deprecating each other. And this, again, is something I’ve talked about a ton, so I won’t go into it here, but I’ve interviewed them about to be magnetic, and yet I’ve never done it. And then in this last three or four months, I as always have been trying to get ever closer to myself. And what I really want to do and what I really feel called to do, and some of you guys have heard those conversations in previous podcast episodes, but part of what I do, what I find myself doing is creating scarcity for myself in some ways, almost fabricating it in an anxious way in order to overcommit myself to work projects.

So I have eight jobs and no one thing that I do sustains me financially. And I talked about this at length with Elizabeth Ralph in an episode in July, which I will link for you guys. She is called the Spiritual Investor. Essentially, what she said to me, which obviously rings true, is that I am blocking abundance and I’m blocking growth. And of course I know all of this. I do it. And I’m much more conscious of that now. I feel like I have just wanted one to maintain or hold onto as much anonymity as possible and just operate in the way that I’ve operated where people have found me gradually more people over time. And it feels incredibly safe and loving. And this is an incredible community. My friend Carla Schwake is an incredible energy healer who I’ve talked about before. She describes it even as a wave where we’re all moving in the same direction and together we’re creating our own vibrational force.

And yet I’ve also felt both practically sort of on the horizontal lane, oh, I need to make this more real, more material, more sustainable, so that I can actually spend the energy I want to spend on the work That feels really incredibly important, particularly for this moment in time. And to do that, I need to bring more attention, and I need to expand, and I need to grow, and I need to get comfortable with that. And so I have been doing a lot of work around this in the last four or five months, and recently I did, I think that’s called the Money Challenge. It’s in the to Be Magnetic app. It’s a three week challenge, and it is, I think, quite profound, and I highly recommend that you all do it because they structure it in a way where you exist on the spectrum from paycheck to paycheck, scarcity existence to hyper abundance where you feel maybe anxiety or guilt about the amount of money that you have, or you have concerns about people only being interested in you because you have money.

So it speaks to a wide variety of socioeconomic groups. It works on multiple levels, and it’s hard for me to explain, but as you go through it, you’ll understand what I mean, and it’s worth it. It’s really worth three weeks of sustained attention. One, it doesn’t take that much time, but two, the journaling exercises and lists that you make and the meditations, which they call di, they’re these meditations that Lacey leads that are set to binaural beats. So you need stereo headphones. And I found them incredibly moving, and I unlocked a lot of stories from my childhood that I knew consciously. They were just sort of floating around as fragments of memory. But as they came to me in this process, I understood the flavor of each of them and the way that it has shaped my feelings about attention, growth, scarcity, affordability, and so on and so forth.

So I highly recommend doing the process, or at least listen to last week’s episode. And so I did that, and it’s one of those courses where you can go back and re-listen to a DI meditation and or continue to journal. And part of it is making these micro mini and macro manifestation lists to get into a conversation with the universe and start to see what happens. And it is really interesting that I can track it, I can track it. And I also feel like the universe has a really funny joke, or as a jokester, there was one day when you had to write down your, I think it was ceilings, and it was like at what point you would start to feel uncomfortable about receiving abundance and at what point you would start to feel anxiety about an unanticipated bill or expense or a cost.

And so I did the work, and literally the next day guys, I checked the mail and I had received a check in the mail from Smart Cart. Yep, the luggage cart company. They had double charged me and a previous month, and I am a weirdo. And I reached out to them to let them know that they needed to refund me. And in the mail, I received a check for $1. That’s right. I didn’t know you could send a check for $1. And a few hours later, I was filing my corporate taxes and I was going back and forth with my accountant, and I was like, okay, so this is the amount I’m sending this check. Now I’m just following your directions. Can you confirm? And then they wrote back and they said, wait, hold on a second. We messed up and you actually owe an additional $11,000.

Anyway, I had to laugh guys because it felt like a sick joke. And then when that was revised again to an additional $5,000, I was so relieved. And I was like, thank you universe for I don’t know what, but oh, good times. It’s really fun to run a business. Two friends, I got to say. Just love it. So anyway, I’ve been doing all of that work practically in part so that I can double down on the work that I really feel called to do. That feels of greatest service, and I don’t think I’m alone at this moment in time and feeling like that’s the requirement as we navigate these next years and decades of what I can only imagine will continue to be turbulent and interesting times. But suffice it to say that I’m doing a lot of work there and also really I’m blocking around my fear of attention.

And I wrote about that a bit in on our best behavior as well in the chapter on lust. And this feeling that attention is dangerous, which is also part of the pride chapter. And so I’ve been really being with myself while I navigate that and what that means and how I could function through it in a way that makes me feel safe. Which brings me to my next point, which came up in that Elizabeth Ralph conversation as well, which is that this wonderful astrologer, his name is Ravi Carr, and his readings are incredible. They’re an investment, but he is a very special soul. He did a reading for me, and he didn’t tell me this. He told me the person who gave the reading to as a gift that I have the chart of a cult leader. And it’s funny because this, as you can imagine, filled me with anxiety and also annoying because yeah, of course I have the chart of a cult leader.

I’m sure I’ve been a cult leader in past lives, and I know this, and I recognize that I have, again, it goes to this idea of extemporaneous speaking, that I have influence and I have power. And that’s really a little scary to me, particularly when we see power so corrupted and so corrosive and used so poorly throughout our culture. And so I’ve had to sit with that. I’ve been sitting with it for at least a year. And that goes to what I was talking about with Elizabeth Ralph and this idea of abundance and unblocking and allowing it to happen. And then it’s funny because I think for a long time, and again, this is in the pride chapter, I’ve operated under the very reasonable story. If I bring too much attention to myself, I’ll be destroyed. And sure, that’s a really rational and logical thing to think for any woman in our culture.

This is true. We see this all over the place. Of course, this is the reality. And then I realized I know enough now that I can either give power to external people and public perception and whatever to destroy me, or I can create enough protective armor that wouldn’t bother me, or I feel like I can make myself immune to that while still staying open to the valuable feedback that we all need in order to stay aligned with our integrity. So one, I realized what I’ve observed with women is that yes, it comes and some women sort of fold. I completely understand why and remove themselves from the public scene. And some women refuse to be moved, they refuse to yield. This is rarer. We’re seeing more examples. It’s in the masculine vein. The women who do this and are just like, I will not be put down.

So I realize I can believe the story that I will be destroyed, or I can decide I won’t be destroyed. I might encounter resistance, but I can handle it. And as long as my feet are rooted firmly in the ground, I can rely on myself here. So that was one mini revelation of I’m not going to believe this story anymore, and I can stop using this maybe as an excuse, because I was definitely using it as a justification for not trying to get my work out there more. And then the other thing is just the responsibility that comes with being figure of influence in the culture, a quote, cult leader. There are not many positive associations with cult leaders. And actually Amanda Montel, who’s been on the podcast before, she wrote a great book called Cultish, and there are lots of qualities of cults that that’s why she likes the word cultish, which I prefer too, because cults are a different thing altogether that often require money and refusing to let people leave and sometimes violence, et cetera.

So the biggest part of this is that I realized that I’m 46 years old. This is not my first rodeo. I have been adjacent to power and with power, I would say for a long time, decades. And I think I am quite clear-eyed about power. I think that I am quite clear-eyed about who I am, and I feel like I have the training, the mental jujitsu to keep myself safe. And I don’t want to say uncorrupted, but I feel like I have seen enough and done enough to know how to keep myself energetically clean and clear and hopefully as close to my integrity as possible. And I’ve also surrounded myself with people who will always, I believe, tell me the truth. And that includes you guys. I would include you in that.

A friend was telling me that she went to see her therapist. This might be like a cultural story. And she said to her therapist, I’m so worried that I’m a narcissist. And her therapist was like, by virtue of you asking, am I a narcissist? That should reassure you. You’re not a narcissist. Anyway, I pay so much attention and track people’s distortions and corruptions and see where they ricochet or get reactive enough to trust that I don’t think I could go down that path without seeing what I’m up to myself and having other people put me back on my feet and to tell me I’m out of my integrity and to hold me accountable to myself and my own ideals for how I want to show up in the, and it’s funny, I was just talking to my friend Satya about Jordan Peterson, and I was like, what was the point, for example, with Jordan Peterson where he fractured?

And I think we’re seeing a ton of that type of fracturing. He wasn’t always a far right nut. And I think we see this with everyone who’s been radicalized by the culture. And I think that the radicalization starts with criticism. Something happens where they feel betrayed by the culture and their ego, their self isn’t strong enough to grow through that or endure it. And so they fracture and radicalize and polarize against whatever it is that they perceive as an attack. And so anyway, I haven’t stayed close to Jordan Peterson’s career, but I was reading about some of his earlier stuff and it was, oh, he was a pretty reasonable person saying pretty interesting things until he just unraveled. I don’t know if it’s psychedelics. I have no idea if he’s into psychedelics. I do think psychedelics have played their powerful medicine, and I think that they have been abused, and I think particularly by men with power.

I’m sure women too. And I think that they are incredibly crept in corrosive for those who are not doing the integration and growing Upwork. I’ve talked about that a lot, but I think that’s why we have this huge number of Messiah complexes and people who are just untethered from reality. It’s what Ken Wilbur would say. You end up with a bunch of enlightened Nazis, people who haven’t grown up psychologically or empathically or civically, but feel like they are transcendent masters. Anyway, there’s something that happens there. It’s one of the things you probably know I’m really interested in. So to stay on track, part of this manifestation process or allowing myself to grow has been coming to really trust myself and that I am rooted and that I am by virtue of really trying to understand somewhat compulsively what causes these fractures or distortions creating sort of a medicine chest for myself.

And hopefully for all of you to make sure that we, to quote Carol tavr, don’t find ourselves at the bottom of the integrity pyramid, wondering how we’ve gone so astray. And Carol was recently on the podcast, if you miss that episode, highly recommend you listen to it. It was called The Self-Justification Trap. And she and Elliot Aronson, who’s another legendary professor, wrote this book called Mistakes Were Made, but Not By Me. And we really just scratched the surface of the book in our conversation, but it’s about dissonance theory and self-justification and how when we encounter information about the world or about ourselves that feels dissonant with our own self-perception, we will discard that information, malign it, and move as far away from it as possible. And in that process, we are constantly self-justifying that, oh, the rules don’t really apply to me, or I can be trusted, or I’m not like those other people, or I can accept this small bribe from a pharmaceutical company and it won’t change who I am and it’s not going to distort me in any way.

And then those are the people she was writing about, sort of big pharma. She’s like, that’s how you end up with the doctor who accepts the free meal for his staff. And then suddenly he is accepted a trip and then suddenly he is involved in some nefarious stuff and has completely traded away his integrity, doesn’t really know how he’s done it. And it’s theoretically just through these small acts of self-justification. And it goes to what I was just talking about, it’s that belief, a refusal to see one’s own biases and one’s own behavior and to just justify, justify, justify to self justify. And I was talking to her, we didn’t really get to this in our conversation, but she has this line where she says, these courageous individuals take us straight into the heart of dissonance, and its inner most irony. The mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess.

And so I think that’s really true, right? The soul yearns for wholeness, while our ego structure, our constructed personality is self-justifying, so it doesn’t need to fracture and change. But she talked to about the power of accountability and apology, which is so underused in our culture today, right? It’s so wild how scared people are to take ownership of anything that goes awry. I think partly we live in such a litigious culture, and so they think by denying that they will keep themselves safe, but actually it’s the opposite. They write about this one study I’m going to read to you. 556 people were asked to read a scenario in which a pedestrian was injured by a speeding bicyclist. They were asked to imagine that they were the injured party and would be negotiating a settlement with the bicyclist. In one version of the scenario, the pedestrian received no apology in another, a sympathetic apology.

I am so sorry that you were her. I really hope that you feel better soon. And in a third, a responsibility accepting apology, I am so sorry that you were hurt. The accident was all my fault. I was going too fast and not watching where I was going until it was too late. Participants who got the responsibility accepting apology, evaluated the bicyclists more positively. We’re more likely to forgive the bicyclist, and we’re more likely to accept a reasonable settlement. And that’s what we want. I mean, it’s what we want from our leaders. We want accountability, honesty, integrity. We want them to say, I made a mistake. But as Kennedy said, an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. And yeah, we just really long for that. And the people that we look up to that they can own their mistakes, we really want honesty and integrity, and that is obviously in the toilet and must be restored through transparency, through owning, through apology, through accountability, through avowing to move past hypocrisy.

So I guess I’m offering this because it’s one solve for us, which is the more we can look for opportunities to be accountable, and the more that we can stay attuned to our own biases, the safer we can keep ourselves and each other. I’m going to go back to Carol again just to wrap up this episode. They write, social scientists are finding that once people are aware of their biases, know how they work and pay mindful attention to them in effect, once they bring them into consciousness and say, there you are, you little bastard, they have greater power to control them. Then they go on to talk about naive realism, the bias to believe that we see things clearly and therefore have no bias. This bias is the central impediment to negotiations between any two individuals or groups in conflict who see things entirely differently.

So part of it is to just say, I’m biased and I’m biased. One, to protect my own self image, and the more wide-eyed we can all be about who we are and how we show up in the world, the safer we can keep each other and ourselves. And so that’s my promise to you, I guess, even though you didn’t ask for a promise, but it’s to continually engage in this work and to learn and grow in public alongside all of you, and in part to maintain enough mental flexibility and emotional flexibility to evolve and grow rather than fracture, polarize, distort, and get a little nutty. I hope I am never in the defensive crouch like Jordan Peterson for example. I really hope I can stand with and for all of you for a long time. Alright, well that was interesting. At least to me, I hope it was to you. I’m always curious for your thoughts. So send me your questions and we’ll include those in future solo episodes too. Alright guys, I’ll talk to you soon. 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.