Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Dedication to Live with Integrity and Courage | Author, Glennon Doyle
Episode Date: November 18, 2020This week’s conversation is with Glennon Doyle, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller UNTAMED, a Reese’s Book Club selection.She’s also the author of New York Ti...mes bestsellers LOVE WARRIOR (an Oprah’s Book Club selection) and CARRY ON, WARRIOR.An activist and thought leader, Glennon is the founder and president of Together Rising, an all-women led nonprofit organization that has revolutionized grassroots philanthropy – raising over $25 million for women, families, and children in crisis.You might also be familiar with her wife, former U.S. women’s national team soccer star, Abby Wambach, a previous Finding Mastery guest.In this conversation, Glennon shares how getting sober shaped her life’s purpose… an absolute dedication to telling the truth, to not having secrets, to not having shame, to living as close to integrity as she can imagine.For Glennon, integrity just means integrated.Aligning her outer life… her outer words and actions, with her inner self, so that she doesn’t live with two selves. This led her to writing and more importantly, her desire to help others.We touch on the difference between philanthropy and activism, what drove her to start speaking up about racial injustice, and why this can be a good moment for our nation._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com finding mastery. Now this week's conversation is with a legend,
Glennon Doyle, the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Untamed,
a Reese's Book Club selection. She's also the author of the New York Times bestseller Untamed, a Reese's Book Club selection. She's also the author of the
New York Times bestsellers Love Warrior and Oprah's Book Club selection and Carry On Warrior.
She's an activist and a thought leader for sure. Glennon is the founder and president of Together
Rising, which is an all-woman-led nonprofit organization that is revolutionizing
grassroots philanthropy. She's raised, she and her team, raised over $25 million for women,
families, and children in crisis. How about it? You might also be familiar with her wife,
former U.S. Women's National Team soccer star, Abby Wambach. She was a previous guest on Finding
Mastery. So in this conversation, Glennon shares how getting sober shaped her life purpose. It's
an absolute dedication to telling the truth, to not having secrets, to not having shame,
to living as close to integrity as possible. And for clarity, for Glennon, integrity just means being integrated,
aligning her outer life with her inner self so that she doesn't live with two selves.
And this, this is why her writing is so good, because there is a clarity and a clear alignment
of thoughts and words and actions. So, which is by definition, authenticity. And with that,
let's jump right into this week's conversation with the flat out legend, Glennon Doyle.
Glennon, how are you?
All and everything. It's the best of times, worst of times.
You know, I think that sums up just about every day, you know, and it is so trite to say, oh, I'm good.
You know, when we're in the middle of times that are so emotionally charging. And so,
yeah, I appreciate you saying I'm everything. So on that note, where do you spend most of your time?
What emotional, how do I say it? What emotions are you spending most of your time in?
Well, listen, sometime around midweek last week, I just hit this wall.
It's just this kind of depression, and it feels a little bit like claustrophobia.
This COVID time is giving me a feeling of claustrophobia, this idea of,
wait, when is the light at the end of the tunnel and is it even coming?
And is it an eternal tunnel?
There's some kind of fear-based claustrophobia
that has settled in.
I tend to be really, really hopeful in the morning.
Okay?
And I think once the coffee wears off right around noon is when reality sets
in. But truly I'm telling you when people say, how are you right now? It really feels momentary.
Like at some points I'm feeling very hopeful and okay, we can do this. And other moments I,
you know, I'm looking at my kids and their whole lives just we don't know we don't
know if they're going back to school we don't know my kid's a senior I don't know what his last year
is going to look like um but I will tell you that I think for people who have been I've been in the
activist world for a long time and it feels to me like people who are in the activist
lane feel a hope that that we haven't felt before um and i think that comes from all of these issues
that so many of us have been pointing to for a very long time actually coming to the surface
and the whole country having to stare at them that feels like
you know the idea that there's never any revolution until there's a big revelation
right this feels like a chaotic time but it feels like a time of revelation where we're all having
as a country to look at things that we haven't that we've chosen to ignore for a long time. And that feels like maybe the beginning of progress.
So that part's hopeful to me.
Revelation and revolution.
The revelation is sitting square in the psychology of awareness.
And sometimes awareness is the information that is required for change.
It's external, but for most of the time, it's internal awareness
is where it starts. And you've done so much incredible work evidenced on your writings and
how you've shared your story and your insights, internal work. You've done so much internal work
that you've ended up impacting so many lives. So I just want to say before we get deep into the
rolling, like congratulations on your body of work. It feels like you're probably just getting started, but you're doing so good for so many. I just want to make a note there that your purpose in life, I don't want to suppose what it is, but your purpose in life seems so evident to others. So I want to start with that. How do you describe or articulate your purpose?
What a beautiful question.
My purpose in life is to stay sober.
Literally the entire purpose of my life. Now, in figuring out what helps me stay sober, which is an absolute dedication to telling the truth, to not having secrets, to not having shame, to living as close to an integrity as I can imagine, which is, to me, integrity just means, you know,
integrated, like my outer life, my outer words, my outer actions are integrated or aligned with my inner self, right, that I'm trying as hard as I can not to have two selves. And so, you know,
the way I got sober was through recovery meetings. And the magic of recovery for me was finding these spaces where people were.
I mean, the first time I went to a meeting, I thought, oh, my God, these are the first honest people I've ever met in my life.
I just felt like, oh, here's where people tell the truth.
Right. Well, we're all out there smiling and pretending everything's fine and wonderful and easy. Here's where they come to tell the truth, right? While we're all out there smiling and pretending that everything's fine
and wonderful and easy,
here's where they come to tell the truth.
So what I found in recovery
was a group of people who told each other the truth
and who took care of each other.
And so that is what I have transferred into my life, right?
So I'm a writer.
I tell people the truth.
That's what I do in my writing.
When I type words onto a paper,
I feel more like I'm actually looking into a mirror than I ever do when I'm looking into a
mirror. Because I tell people the truth, they tell me the truth back. And that to me is just
as important, right? For me to remember that, you know, when I tell the truth and somebody says
me too, it automatically reminds me that I'm not alone and I'm not crazy and I'm not weird. This
is just a human experience. So that's a part of my purpose is to tell the truth and to hear the
truth from other people. And then the service part, the thing that I found in recovery,
which was these people that just fiercely
take care of each other,
is what I've transferred into activism.
And that started with really just philanthropy,
a group, a nonprofit, Together Rising,
that I created just to help my community
take care of each other
and help each other meet each other's needs.
And then I realized after a while, like any philanthropist who's paying attention,
that so many people writing to me suffering, so many people having trouble just, you know,
keeping food on the table or clothing their kids or paying their bills and I kept every night going to bed
like what is going on all these people are working so hard why is there so much suffering
and then I read one night I just read a quote from Desmond Tutu that changed everything for me and it
said we could only pull people out of the river for so long until we decide to look up river and
find out who's pushing them in right so that's when I started asking tougher questions like creating the connection between wherever there's great suffering,
there's often great profit upstream, right?
So, for example, here I am with my nonprofit working all year to create more and more shelters for LGBTQ kids in this country.
And that's great. That's pulling people out of the river. But when you look upriver,
you start asking, why are all these kids homeless? Right? And the answer is that largely,
that religious institutions are pumping so much shame from their pulpits that families
are having are feeling like they have to kick their children out of their homes right so
so my purpose is the and both right of continuing to pull people out of the river but also looking
upstream as and challenging and giving help to the people who are profiting off of the suffering of others.
Right?
So that's the difference between an activist and a philanthropist for me,
because the wild thing about philanthropy is if you don't start acting,
you know, if you don't start looking upstream,
you actually become codependent with power.
You're like, it's a great system.
Power just gets to keep throwing the people in,
and you're over there saying, don't worry, I'll pull them out. I'll keep pulling them out, right? You're like a foot soldier.
So yeah, that's my purpose is to stay sober. What keeps me sober is telling the truth
and always being something that's part of something that's bigger than me.
So in your efforts with activism, what has driven you to be so vocal
about racial justice? So a while back, a long time ago, I was sitting on my couch with my two girls,
my two daughters. I have a boy and two girls until they tell me different. And I was
talking to them about the civil rights era. I was talking about Martin Luther King Jr. I was
showing them pictures of a march. And my youngest pointed towards a white woman in the crowd of marchers. And she said, um, mommy, would we have been marching back then with them?
And I was opening my mouth to say, yes, of course we would have, like, that's what I was about to
say. And my older daughter leaned over and she said, oh no, Emma, we wouldn't have been
marching with them back then. I mean, we're not marching with them now. And it was just this moment that I thought, oh my God, I am not in this moment who
I think I am in this moment. Right? Like, I imagine myself to be the type of white woman who would have been marching with Martin
Luther King Jr.
Why?
Why do I imagine that about myself?
Because I generally believe in equality as like the right idea, right?
So I started reading so much.
That's what I do when I don't know what to do is I just start reading everything I can
get my hands on. And a few nights later, I came across
the letters from the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr. And he said,
the greatest stumbling block to freedom is not the Ku Klux Klansman. It's the white moderate
who is more committed to order than to true justice.
And that's when I realized,
when I first had language for the kind of person I was,
I was a white moderate, right?
Because we all think that we would have been
standing with Martin Luther King Jr. back then, right?
But, you know, 32% of white people supported
Martin Luther King Jr. back then. So it't ask myself, do I
support him now? I might ask myself, do I support Colin Kaepernick now? Right? And if I want to know
would I have been riding with the Freedom Riders? I don't ask myself, how do I feel about the
Freedom Riders now? I ask myself, how do I feel about Black Lives Matter now? Right? So the way to discover how you would
have shown up in the last civil rights era is just simply to ask yourself, how am I showing up right
now in this civil rights era? So what, this all went down probably, I don't know, eight years ago,
seven years ago. And the more that I read, the more that I learned, the more that I realized how
whitewashed my education had been since the very beginning, the more I realized how little I
actually knew about the way this country was founded and the way it continues to run, right?
The more I realized there's nothing more important that I could do with my life as a white American woman
than to commit myself in every way possible to writing, to being part of writing the wrongs
that have been done for so long and continue to be.
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FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. In Untamed, I pulled out some gems of quotes,
and there's an intersection here I want to share with you, read it back to you, and get you to pull
on this a little bit further. And this was about white women becoming racially sober. And this was on page 219 of your book. But you said, she will need to remind herself
that being called a racist is actually not the worst thing. The worst thing is privately hiding
her racism to stay safe, liked, and comfortable while others suffer and die. There are worse
things than being criticized, like being a coward.
So the intersection here of sobriety and the playing it safe and small and comfortable
at the expense of what others might think of us. And so you've got this beautiful intersection here.
And I'd love for you to comment on that and talk us through why that's so important for you.
Well, it really does.
Again, the whole lens that I see the world is through recovery.
So forgive this continued pattern in everything we talk about.
But I mean, I remember a friend calling me early on after the 2016 election and saying,
this is the apocalypse. What's happening? And I remember thinking, okay, I hope so.
Like apocalypse means uncovering, right? So hopefully this is when all this stuff that we
as an American society has been holding down beneath the surface so that we
can ignore, I hope it's all uncovered, right? So that's what we see now with, you know, with
George Floyd with the emphasis lately on police brutality. It's not that police brutality is
increasing. It's just that cell phones are increasing, right? So we're just seeing things
be revealed that have always been happening. And that's what early sobriety is a lot like it's um it's just a real big reckoning
with all the things you've been trying to keep beneath the surface right so um what felt to me
I am a woman who everything beautiful in my life has come after rock bottoms, right? Like
the lowest I am, I'm going to be pretty sure that no matter how painful it is,
the pattern of my life is that something beautiful is eventually coming on its way,
right? So whether it was the rock bottom of my alcoholism and my individual rock bottom or the
rock bottom of my marriage, I am someone who has seen rock bottom
be the beginning of beautiful things, right?
So that's kind of how I see this moment for our nation,
which is, this is painful.
This is a rock bottom.
But so many, and my jam is white women in this area.
Okay, so that's who I'm speaking to mostly. That's who I,
that's who I am. So that's the experience that I understand. But I think so many white women
are right now finally going, oh my God, how much have I selectively ignored? right? It is a reckoning.
It is a facing of what we have been trained to ignore
and carry on with our lives, right?
So the process of that time, though, is predictable.
It's like, you know, I guess you would call it like newly woke.
Okay.
In this, in our language. So what I would call getting racially sober would be like the first steps of the newly
woke.
Right.
And what, what happens is that white women, we ask ourselves, okay, how do, and white
men, I think, how do we become part of the conversation?
Like how, what do I say?
What is the right thing to say, right?
How do I now enter the race conversation?
And what I have learned, just like in sobriety,
is that there is danger in showing up too verbally,
too loudly, too quickly.
Yeah, you received quite a bit of backlash early on.
Well, I'm always receiving a lot of backlash, but yes, I have.
This is really important is that you said, okay, I'm going to do something.
I want to say something.
I want to be an advocate.
I want to help humanity in the best ways that I can.
And then you receive some of that backlash.
That backlash for many people is the great fear of not being liked, not fitting in, not being okay in the eyes of others.
And so there's two things I want to ask you here, and they're both related to the racial conversation and action behind the conversation.
Let's talk about sobriety for a minute. Some of my favorite people are people that have gone through AA and sobriety because they have really done the work to face and get to know their said, the first, let's call it three days before your first meeting, before you get real, if you will, and three days, 10 days after your first meeting, like those are not easy days. So can you just talk a little bit about like that sobriety mechanism, just that small little mechanism from deep pain to deep fear. And just
talk about that for a moment. Yeah, well, the only reason I even got sober after 15 years,
I became bulimic when I was 10 years old. And then that morphed into alcoholism,
probably when I was around 17. And so by the time I was 25, I was just extremely sick.
I had just burned every bridge in my life.
And the amount and how I was drinking was just,
I think I must have been pretty close to death.
I can't imagine that I had much time left.
And I found out that I was pregnant on mother's day one year. And I, I have spoken to
some sober people who relay an experience like this, but there, I just had sort of a knowing
that this might be my last chance to live. Like that this was sort of like a Hail Mary from the universe, like just, and so I went to my first
recovery meeting that day from the bathroom floor. I called my sister and really, I just had, I was
out of options. I had no idea what else to do. So I went to my first recovery meeting. One of the
challenges of early recovery for me was that because I had been
drinking for so long and because I had hurt so many people, because that's what we do when we're
in that place, everyone in my life was desperate for me to quit drinking. Okay. And so the message
that was given to me was that everything will be okay if you just stop
drinking. I don't know if anyone said that to me, but that's what I told myself, that my problem was
the drinking. If I just quit drinking, I would feel better. Everything would be fine. My life
would be fixed. You would become effectively a dry drunk. Right. Or I just, I don't know,
but the world would be better.
I would, it would be all I got to do. White knuckle it, go to this place where people like they're doing the same thing and then we'll figure it out. Right. And so I was terrified
when I did quit drinking and was miserable. Okay. I was not better. I did not feel at peace. I was early sobriety for
someone who has been addicted is absolute hell. Okay. And it's very, it's because you've been
numb for so long and it's like this defrosting where everything hurts. I just felt like an
exposed nerve walking around the world.
What were you covering up age 10 to 25? What were you afraid of? What was so shameful? What was so
dark that you were damaging yourself to be able to feel fully?
Yeah, well, it's a great question. I mean, there's many lenses that I can look at that with and many answers that I have.
One answer is, you know, I thought that drinking was my problem. And going through recovery,
what I learned was that drinking was not my problem. Drinking was my very ineffective solution to my real problem, which was clinical depression and anxiety. Right. So that's one answer.
Do you think it was biological age 10, biologically depressed, or were there
conditions in your family and or both conditions in your family that were
right. What does, okay. So that's, you know, a diagnosis, Like that's one way of looking at it. The other problem with people who do struggle with mental illness, like I'm okay saying
that, is that who I am as a deeply sensitive human being, who I am as an artist, who I
am as an activist, it's all wrapped in there together, right? Like,
a lot of my friends who are people who would say they struggle with mental illness are
the most creative, sensitive, fantastic, deeply feeling, deeply experiencing people I know. There are people who, if their mental illness diagnoses
could disappear, they wouldn't want it to. Because with it comes this accompanying,
it seems to come that this way of experiencing life that I actually believe in most cultures
and throughout time, there have been people like me,
people like people who have always been sort of pointed out and set apart inside the culture. So
like the medicine men, the shaman, women, the poets, the clergy, who have always seemed a little
different, but in most cultures and throughout time has also been seen as very important to the survival of the tribe, right?
Because they are the deep seers and feelers and hearers of things that can point out danger.
Like, for example, I always laugh when people say, well, why did you become bulimic so early?
Like, why would a little girl develop an eating disorder?
Like, I will never stop laughing at like, why?
Oh, I wonder why in our culture, a little girl would develop an eating disorder when
most of the messages poured into little girls since they're born are about staying small,
staying thin, not having appetites, not being hungry, not, I mean, it, there,
there, as you I'm sure well know, there are a lot of experts who have talked about some
of the girls who develop eating disorders are the most sensitive and most in tune to
the culture's messages, right?
So mental illness, okay.
High sensitivity, okay. Actually responding appropriately to a
culture that told me to stay small and not have a, not have hunger, not have human hunger,
maybe. There's just a lot of different ways to look at why a little girl would fall into
addiction so early. I don't know how much of it was about hiding and how much of it was responding. Okay. So let's pause on that and talk about
what I think one of the great constrictors of human potential is, is fear of other people's
opinions, FOPO, fear of people's opinions, right? So you have a unique insight to that, your sensitivity and your awareness and the collision with the cultural narrative about who you should be.
Can you talk a little bit about the mechanics of fear of people's narcissist who doesn't care about other people's opinions
like when people tell me that they are finally free of other people's opinions I know that that's
a person that is either completely not self-aware or somebody that I don't want to talk to anymore
because it's just bullshit right right? Like we all,
as humans, we're pack animals, right? Like we, this is one of the themes of the book, right?
Is that we are born with these kind of wild individualistic selves. We're all creativity.
We're all imagination. We're all intuition. We're all emotion. Then we, you know, our social
conditioning starts and we start to be conditioned into
our tribe pack, right?
And that can be so many different things.
Like you figure out, okay, I'm a girl and this is how girls act.
And this is how girls don't act.
I'm a boy and this is how boys act.
And this is how good boys, I'm a Christian.
So this is what Christians believe and don't believe in who we hate and who we love.
I am a Doyle, right?
This is how Doyles are. I am an American. So we fit ourselves in to these groups, identities, cultures,
because we are pack animals, right? But the problem is that we are always having to trade
some of our individuality for belonging, right? That's why we end up in these
little cages of gender, sexuality, religion. So, I mean, I think that fear of people's opinions
would mean if you are someone who's trying to break out, who is trying not to abandon yourself,
right? I mean, who has gotten to the point where the protection of the pack
is no longer good enough to continue to abandon yourself, where you feel desperate to
abandon everyone else's expectations of you
instead of abandoning yourself because it often feels like one or the other,
right? A process will happen, which, you know, we all know, which is tribal shaming,
right? It's inevitable. Like everyone who's ever tried to make a decision that's different than
what their family has always expected them to do, right? Every little boy who's ever put on a skirt
or cried in front of people knows what tribal shaming looks like, right? Every woman who's
grown up inside of Christianity and then announces that she's in love with a woman knows what public shaving looks like, right? So for me, part of untaming is just being aware of what will happen
and not always taking it completely personally, right? Because every time I step out of line
with what my pack expects of me, whether for me, whether that's white people, right? Like they expect me to stay in line.
So when I show up for anti-racial justice,
people have feelings about that, right?
When I'm a woman who is actually really opinionated
and bold and loud, people have feelings about that.
They don't even know why they have feelings,
but they do.
And that's because I've stepped outside of the PAC's rules for women, right?
When I'm a Christian who shows up at gay pride parades, who shows up at pro-choice rallies,
when there will be, people will have opinions about it and it becomes more and more survivable.
The more I can see the patterns of human beings and how we all react. And I expect
that tribal shaming and I know exactly what it looks like. Right. So that's what I would say.
I, it will always hurt me. It still does. It scares me every time it happens. It hurts me
every time it happens, but I know it's survivable
because I've been through it enough
and I can see it as a pattern
and not personal.
Which part hurts you?
I am still
unlearning the idea
that my job is to be likable, right? That when, and especially what really hurts
me also is I, I have been outspoken about so many things that I know who I'm usually pissing off.
It's usually like a certain group of people that I'm pissing off that part I can handle. I work that kind of like a badge of honor, but when I screw something up that hurts people who are people that I respect and find myself
aligned with that hurts me. Like when it's like friendly fire.
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Let's unpack these two concepts about cultural shaming and moving from the defensiveness that people are wanting to do right. They want to
embody justice for all and to create an environment and ecosystem where humans are celebrated.
And there's some folks that feel that they've been shamed into they need to do something right
because they're white. And there's some folks that have been down this path for a long time. And now is this beautiful opportunity to be a bit more bold than maybe they
were in the past. And there are some people that are demonstrating resistance. There's a continuum
here. And so cultural shaming and then being boxed into racist or anti-racist has created some challenges for people.
And it's a quite incredible forcing function to say you're either this or that.
And the human experience is not quite as black and white as that, but it's an incredible forcing function to examine, well, okay, what am I doing with my words and my thoughts and my actions towards justice and equality?
So I want to hear the shaming part, the response and defensiveness that some people are feeling,
but then you take it a step further and you get into the conversation about,
yeah, it's not so much about the words. It's about becoming the right thing,
not just saying the right thing.
And so there's incredible, there's a dynamic nature to that insight that it's not about saying the right or wrong, it's becoming the right thing. So could you go from shame,
cultural shame, to the experience that some people are having and maybe even play with that
racism, not anti-racism, and then into the being about it.
Yeah.
And I think that could all come together in the idea that, so what you see happen, let's just take how, let's look at how things end up online.
Okay.
Because that's where a lot of our life is right now, especially with COVID.
Okay.
Fewer things we can do in real life.
A lot of our lives are playing out online.
So let's say people are new to, you know, they
really do want to start showing up. They really are waking up. They really are thinking, oh God,
like I haven't said, I haven't looked at what I should be looking at. I haven't, I haven't been
showing up like I would be if these were my people. Right. And I think that's a good question
to ask. Like, are we showing up in a way that if these were our children, our people,
we would be showing up? Our brothers, our fathers, our sisters, our mothers.
That's the right question to get to the truth for you is how do you show up when you love somebody?
And then can you love people that are not in your immediate family? Well, the answer would be yes.
And can you extend that love to people maybe you don't even know? The answer could be yes. You know, it's a beautiful question to just say, and being ridiculed or saying the wrong thing or
not being good enough or breaking the, the, um, unsaid or sometimes said codes of conduct for the
family or for the community. So you're, that question right there is an important question
to answer because not everybody can do it. And most people that say they can i would double click on that and say can you really yeah and are you practiced at it are you practiced about being about it we can actually see it right
we can see it in front of us because you know i think about the million women march you know
they changed the name but it was the what we did i was there after the 2016 election and so many millions and millions of mostly white
women showed up, right? But like, we're not showing up now, right? So we were there in droves,
you know, flying from all over the country, like pussy hacks on our heads, like signs all over the place because we felt threatened for the first time.
We were scared for our rights to start going away, right? And the reason that that's like
crazy problematic is that the rights that we were afraid were going to be starting to be
stripped away from us had been stripped away from many, many other groups in America forever, right? So
it took us having us, us having to be personally affected to start showing up, which is far from
ideal in like, in a culture where we're all supposed to be, you know, taking care of each
other and showing up for each other on some level, right? Where,
where we literally wave round flags and say liberty and justice for all,
right? I mean, so, so really the, you know, one of the, the big questions is like,
if these were our children, we would be out in the streets. We've already proved that we would. Right? So the question being, we aren't showing up like these are our people. So where did we
get the message that these are not our people? Right? Like those are important questions to ask,
because actually those questions have answers. Right? We know that racism is something that was created by people to keep power for one group of white men,
right? So where did we get this idea? This idea came to us from people who planned it, right? And
so the seeds of racism are not our fault that they were planted inside of us and watered and pruned and grown for our whole lives.
But it is our responsibility now to unearth all of it, right? Because we've been breathing in
these toxins forever and now it is either we choose to actively detox or we don't, but it's
not going to just happen on its own, right? So what happens when people start asking themselves these hard questions
as human beings? And when they start with like a beginner's mind, right? When they let go of all
of their, but I'm, but I was, but I'm being, you know, I'm being oppressed with the shame and the
whatever. When people are brave enough to stop all that shit and just actually get real with
themselves and ask themselves questions about what it means, what is required of us
as human beings that are part of a culture that claims to belong to each other,
then there's a step that comes next, which is this desire to start showing up.
What do you say to folks that say, I am not a racist?
So that model between racism, anti-racism, and not a racist is actually racism, because
you're not doing something about the implicit, complicit ways that have exploited people
of color, black and indigenous people and people of color. And they say, I'm not
a racist. And then they follow on and say, you know, I don't know about Black Lives Matter and
Antifa. And they put those two together and they say, there's something here that I can't support
it right now. Yeah. I mean, that's what Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. That's what Martin
Luther King Jr. talked about in the letters to Birmingham jail.
So the people who say, I'm with you in practice, but I can't support your method of protest right now.
The same people who will say, I can't support these people out there marching,
were the same people who said years ago, said, I will not support Colin Kaepernick for peacefully kneeling. There is no possible way to protest
in a way that makes people who are resistant
to change comfortable, right?
This discomfort comes from, I am afraid that
that action over there is going to cost me something.
Whether people know it or not, that is the gut reaction.
Yeah. Right? know it or not that is the gut reaction yeah right so um so it is telling it is telling just
in that expression just when if someone is uncomfortable with a human being kneeling
beautifully and peacefully in protest then that's really telling of that person's commitment to holding on to status quo
by any means necessary right is how i feel at the seahawks we um it was a beautiful time for us to
re-examine our core value system our belief system individually and collectively when Colin was taking a knee. And it was heated, it was open,
it was challenging emotionally, and it was a radical moment for people to re-examine,
okay, what does this mean to you? And where do you sit for humanness? And can you get past color
in a way that you say hey listen i see your experience
because i didn't know this four years ago like i i would say um i i don't see color and there was
my friends that now there's a time when they're like wait hold on a minute you know like you you
don't really see what it's like to be me then it It was beautiful, you know, for us to sort through some of those. So we've had beautiful conversations that are intense, emotionally charged. And there's a,
there's always this, but that's super unfortunate that I get hung up on, which is the, but which is,
but you can't disrespect the flag or you can't protest with, you know, some aggressive violence whatever it's like if those are my kids to your point
i'd be pissed yeah you know and so um when you stand for something and people say what you stand
for is not good enough i don't know it's it's quite insulting but but the lack of commitment to respect children's lives like
i will never understand the people who are calling for peaceful protests are if you the people who
are calling for people peaceful protests on social media you will look back and find out they've never were calling for peaceful
policing. It's so selective, right? So I think your point about what would you do if it was your
kid? I think about it all the time in terms of, I do a lot of work with reuniting families at the
border. And I hear so often, like, how could they do that? Like,
how could they put that their children at risk? And then I think the same people are the people
who would say, I would kill for my kid. I would kill for my kid. I would die for my kid. So you
would kill for your kid and you would die for your kid, but you wouldn't put your kid on the back and
walk across the desert to find safety and peace and freedom for your kid and you would die for your kid but you wouldn't put your kid on the back and cross walk across the desert to find safety and peace and freedom for your kid it
just doesn't make any freaking sense right like no you would do anything for your kid like those
parents who risk all of that with their babies on their back i've met them i talk to them i
sit with them they're the bravest people i know Like I would hope to God that I would be as brave of a mother
as they are to do that. Right. I would hope to God that I, if my child, every single time they
walked outside, I had to coach them about how to not get shot by a police officer. Right. I would
hope that I would be out in the streets marching,
educating myself, donating, doing whatever it took to make my child safe, which is why I feel
like that's what I should be doing. Because it makes no sense to not, you know, to,
it's the idea of like, is there really such thing as other people's children?
Or is everybody's ours? Right? Do I show up for other people's children or is everybody's ours?
Right. Do I show up for other people's children the same way?
I would hope that they would show up for mine.
How do you bring,
integrate your two selves and there's, you know,
that thought about your inner self and the self that you project to the world around you.
And how do you work to bring those two in alignment?
And, you know, this is a struggle that I've learned from people that are shared this with me is that, hey, there's two people that I present. There's my true self, my inner self, and then there's the self that I've played to for white America. And can I ask about how you do this? How do you organize those two selves? Yeah. I mean, I think that I did learn that, how to do it mostly in recovery.
I think I, the starkest, um, the starkest example I have of this is, so my senior year in high
school, I was put in a, what was a mental hospital because there were no eating disorder clinics back then that my family could afford. So we were, I was in an actual mental hospital and I actually really enjoyed it.
I thought it was, it was a good place.
It was safe and it was, had a lot of structure that I was desperate for and had a lot of
classes that made sense to me, like, you know, art therapy and things that were just,
it felt like, like high school was the hardest place to be in the world. And that I was always
having to act in high school. And then when I got into this hospital, I could finally stop acting,
you know, because when you're in a mental hospital and somebody says, how are you? You can't be like, awesome. Everything's great. I'm just
nailing it. You know, like it's the jig is up, right? So you can kind of just like,
listen, you're struggling. So let's just get real. Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, I don't know. What am I doing here? How did this happen? Right, right, right. So, so, well,
it kind of felt like in the meetings did, you know, like,
like a place where you could just let your, your inner self out,
I guess.
And then two weeks after I got out of the hospital,
I was elected by my high school as leading leader.
Like my superlative was best leader.
So I was, I just found myself sitting on a car in the homecoming parade, just like with a sash that says leading leader in my high school of 5,000, just waving, waving.
And thinking my life is so freaking weird. Like
two weeks ago, I'm in a mental hospital and now they're electing me leading leader. Like what?
Just this two lives that I've, I've always had, like, I don't know how to describe it,
except that I can be, I am a human being who can be suffering deeply on the inside and just on the outside acting like it's just, you want to follow me?
Leading leader.
Like, where do you think you're following me?
Right?
So, so I think I thought of, wouldn't it be magic?
Because I have this outer thing that seems to be a little bit charismatic, magnetic, right? Like,
what if I could tell the truth about the human experience and match those deeply human
feelings that the interior lives that a lot of us are just, you know, living in quiet desperation with this outer thing,
like that could be healing to people, right? So I think when I finally
realized who I was on the inside is when I started committing myself to stillness practices. And that sounds so woo-woo,
but I think that we live in a culture
that is so addicted to exterior things, right?
Like the phones, the podcasts, the TV,
that all of the voices that are constantly coming at us,
that we have forgotten that we have a voice inside of us.
It's just like the noise outside is so constant and
so loud that when you ask somebody who they are, we don't even know anymore. Right. And so
this practice that I learned in sobriety and, and, you know, whenever I start getting weird,
whenever I start losing it again, it's because I have not been sitting in the quiet enough.
I figured out a while back that if I can commit myself to shutting on all the
outside voices, that there is an inner,
it's not a voice, it's not like I'm hearing voices,
but it's an inner knowing it's like a voice, it's not like I'm hearing voices, but it's an inner knowing,
it's like a gravity, it's a compass, it's a settling that is always kind of guiding me
to the next right thing. And it's always, you know, telling me the truth. It's like when you
said the inner dragon, I use that language too. I had this snow globe when I was little
that had this scary dragon in the inside.
And so I would keep it shaken up all the time. Like I was like crazy about keeping it shaken
up because I was so scared of the dragon inside. And that's how I feel about life.
That we all have these fire, these dragons, that is the truth of what we need to heal or what we
need to face or what we need to do or our purpose.
But we just keep ourselves shaken up so we don't have to see it.
It's beautiful.
I talk a bunch about the signal to noise ratio as a psychological construct, right?
And the signal is always in the present moment. And the noise is both internal and external.
And to condition yourself, to be conditioned enough to get to the
knowing to your point the signal it requires a disciplined approach to focusing on one thing at
a time and when you do that the other noise starts to fade away and then at some point you get to
touch and have a connection with that part of you that was the same it is today that it was when it was two and 12 and
22. And, you know, that, that internal space, if you will, that is much bigger than anything.
It's so immense. The internal world is so immense, as majestic as the external world.
And we spend so much time because we're visual creatures, you know, trying to survive.
That's what our brain's dictum is, is to scan the world and find survival triggers that could be a threat to us.
But the internal world is often left unexamined.
And my understanding for best in the world has been that they have a fundamental commitment that they've made or commitments that they've made.
And then they fundamentally organize their life towards those commitments, towards that purpose, if you will. And so one of yours is certainly truth. In your book,
you've got a beautiful passage about it. And you say, the truth feels like an attack
because we have been protected by comfortable lies for so long.
Can you talk about what those lies are?
So this will be a little bit controversial, but I feel like somewhere along the way,
and I won't speak for men.
I don't know how that works for you guys. But I feel like as a white woman that somewhere along the way,
there was a little bit of a deal with the devil that I made.
Right. That was like, OK. I will enjoy my proximity to power.
Right. As a white woman, I have proximity to the power of white men. Right.
I will accept that proximity to power.
But the deal was that if I accepted that proximity to power,
I would not ask too many questions, right?
I would willfully ignore all of the harm and death
and abuse that the system that we are a part of and that i am complicit in is unleashing
on groups who don't look like me right so this is the the constant um identity of a white woman
from the slave from slavery times until now which is like okay so for one example i will accept
the protection and the service of the police because they are here to serve me.
But I will, in return for that protection, I will not ask too many questions about what they're doing out there to them.
And so by what I mean by comfortable lies, what I mean is like this idea that everything's fine.
You're fine.
Everything's fine.
Things are fair.
Things are good.
Things in your life are good and fair.
So that means that things are good and fair everywhere.
Right?
But I feel hollow and empty.
And I feel as though I'm constantly looking to consume something and I'm really internally scratchy because there's an unsettled nature to me that I can't quite satiate.
And because there's something up, right?
Because we know somewhere.
Because look, this system of, but if I start asking questions, then there's the carrots of like, no, no, no, no, no,
you live in a capitalist culture, just buy this next thing, just do this next thing, consume this
next thing, here's the distraction, here's the distraction. But we know something's up, right?
And what's up is that we have, in our deal with the devil, we have sacrificed a large part of
our humanity, right? And so that's why I think that
this moment is not necessarily just about like allyship. That's just not deep enough, right?
It's not like I'm showing up as a white woman just to help you. I'm showing up in this moment to
reclaim my humanity, right? To like become fully human again to like
disentangle myself from this deal that i made which is poison right is causing me to not be
able to live with as much love and truth and um power because by the way, this deal with proximity to power, part of the deal is that
you'll never require any real power, right? I mean, we know that. Like white supremacy always
says to white women, come on, you're with us, you're with us. No, they're not, right? And if
you want to know if they're not, all you need to do is run for something, okay? Because they will
crush you. It's not real power. It's
always a deal that's made. So, um, yeah, I think the comfortable lies are that everything's okay.
And that you are actually valued and that you are special white woman. That's not, that's not real,
right? This culture we're in exists for very, very few people.
Right. And I think that, that my,
my hope is that white women will begin to see that white supremacy,
patriarchy was never for them. Right.
That we are misaligned, that we are aligned with the wrong,
with being aligned with power is not the best place for us.
We need to take all of our training and turn on our trainers
and align ourselves
with the rest of the world
who has been constantly hurt
by the power that we have been complicit with.
Okay, so let me give you a thought stem.
It all comes down to...
Truth.
When you're at the intersection to tell yourself the truth,
and it might be hard to do so because it doesn't feel good,
and it's going to take you down maybe a path that is quite more challenging
because the path to the lie is well-grooved, maybe even greased.
How do you navigate those micro decisions and those micro choices?
So I think I've come to truly believe that the point of being alive
is to constantly be becoming a truer, more beautiful version of the self I just was.
Right? And the only, the best way I know to keep becoming
is to do the thing I'm afraid to do, to say the thing that I'm afraid to say,
to face the thing that I'm afraid to face. I have freaking Joan of Arc all over my medals and t-shirts and all that, just to remind myself
that the deal is you go straight towards the battle every single day. Whatever the battle is, our tendency is to turn our horse and run the other way.
And it will just never work.
So whatever the battle is of the day, of your life, of your relationship, of your parenting,
of your do it first, just get on your horse and just whether you're ready or not,
just go straight towards the battle. And that is
how I, it never is pretty.
I am never doing things in a way where it's like, wow, she just,
it's graceful. She just nailed that one all the way through.
Like I usually just figure it out as I'm going, but I'm always going towards it. The art of being ugly. You know, there is a
freedom in that. Like there, you know, I want to go back to the FOPO idea for a moment is that
you, I know you have moments of freedom of people's opinions. It is also equally as human as,
as the overcoming nature of what people might think. But when we're
completely absorbed in the present moment, where our mind and our body are integrated and connected
to the task, so our mind and our body are in the same place, focused on the same thing,
that there's no space for the other. But when we pop out, like a strobe light effect, we pop out,
like, what are they thinking? I mean, we come back, you know, it's quite disruptive. So I know you've had these moments
of freedom. And so I think part of your freedom is to give yourself permission to say, it's going
to be ugly. I don't, but that ugliness is me straining and striving. And that's my commitment
to myself is to keep straining, striving, becoming, letting go, trusting. And so on that last note of trusting,
what do you trust of humans?
Oh God, that's so beautiful.
I have, being somebody who
has lived the last decade pretty much out loud,
I am a person who announced my engagement to a woman in the middle of a
nationwide Christian church tour.
So, and, and, and during that time,
I had my whole team, my agent, the agents, the editors,
everybody was saying to me, this is career suicide. Like, like, I mean, people were telling me you're, you can do this, but just know
that it's over after this at a largely Christian base. I had a career that was based largely on,
you know, my cute little traditional marriage and family. And I knew that they were wrong.
I just, I sat in those meetings and listened to the death and gloom and how awful people were
going to be and how it was going to be over. And I knew in my gut that they were afraid.
And I was a little afraid of too, but I knew that people, even on the internet, that people don't need perfect. They don't need
shiny. But when they hear the truth, when they hear someone that is actually living in freedom
and maybe doing daring things that are proving what you're saying, that maybe like even that
action, I was proving that I cared
more about living authentically than I did about other people's opinions. That just in that is
inspiring to people. Right. And when I announced that and I was so scared, I was scared. I was
scared. I didn't even look at the computer for six hours. Okay. People, the story about that announcement that day became not just, Oh, Abby
and Glennon are getting married. It was, who is this community that embraced this message? Like
people were so beautiful over and over again. And with Together Rising, I mean, we've raised
$27 million with an average donation of $23 just from people caring enough about the world
in their homes to get. So my entire career is based on this weird dichotomy of, okay,
I don't care what you think. And also I deeply trust you to be good and true. Right? So I don't know what you do with that.
Well, when I hear that, I hear that you've done enough work, which is a lot of internal work
to trust yourself. That no matter what happens to the potential devastating or fear of devastating outcome,
is that you trust that you'll be able to sort it out, to figure it out because of your commitment
to get to the truth. And you had a beautiful line that I'd rather commit career suicide than actual
suicide. And I don't know if you actually meant physical suicide or the idea of death to self, you know, like a full betrayal to life.
And so, I mean, beautiful insight.
Can I shift gears just quickly?
Of course.
So I had the fortune of having your wife on the show.
And what an electric person.
I mean, Abby is like dynamic, you know, and the two of you together is pretty incredible
to imagine.
And she shared this.
This is a quote from our conversation.
She said, my wife, she's an author and a motivational speaker and just the most amazing
human being.
She's my first go-to person for feedback.
And I think that it's really important getting feedback
from the person in your life that you trust the most and that is huge so how do you give feedback
she's held you up on a pedestal and she said this is the person I go to for feedback and I hope
everybody has somebody they can go to whether they're people that they work with or people at
home whatever it might be to get feedback and I'm imagining that feedback is honest. It's true.
Sometimes it's got some barb to it, but for the most of the time, it's delivered in a way that
can be heard, that doesn't create defensiveness because you're not attacking and critiquing,
but you're exploring. And so can you talk about how you provide feedback and the mechanisms for
hopefully others to receive feedback and to potentially give feedback in a more eloquent,
powerful way? Well, it's so beautiful that she said that because feedback can mean so many things
in our relationship. We have worked deeply on, Mike, how do I say this? I tend to be a bit of a
controlling person. Okay. So before Abby, I would have described myself just as a good leader,
but Abby is so, so deeply hurt. She's uncontrollable. is what she is she's uncontrollable all my um
spells and manipulated manipulative um behaviors just stopped working um and actually what happened
one night is that she I was doing one of my things trying to control something she was doing for work
or something.
And she stopped me and she said, Glennon, I need you to know that I see what you're doing there.
I know you're trying to control this. And when you do that, it makes me so sad because it shows me that you don't trust me. And she said, I trust you and respect you so much.
And I just so deeply want you to trust and respect me too.
That is a story about her giving you feedback. And so, and she did it and she modeled that what
you just shared is the absolute epitome of great feedback. My feeling is I care so much this way,
this way, this way, my hurt and pain is this way, this way, this way.
And I just want to share that with you.
And then period.
And like, that's the model, right?
And so how do you do it?
Like, that's brilliant.
That's why I kind of had to flip this around because bless her heart, but I'm actually
not as good at it as she is.
She is a person who has been leading human beings since forever, right?
She's dealt with all of these different types of personalities on the national team. She,
this is what she does. I am an artist. I have big feelings and I just want to share them with you.
I don't always couch it in all the ways that I'm supposed to, she is actually better at that. But from the idea that
she gave me about control and trust, I realized that, okay, I can either control Abby or I can
love her, but I cannot do both because love requires trust and we only control things we don't trust.
Which changed my entire approach to feedback to her.
Okay, I'm going to tell you, it's complicated
because we work together, we live together,
we do all our projects together.
Everything is, we have, our Venn diagram is like
only teeny little slivers on the outside.
But what I realized, if I am somebody who wants to be trusted, who wants to be able
to honor my own intuition, then I have to honor her.
She's doing a different thing in the world than I am.
Right?
So when she shows me something that she's made or she, I have this moment where I'm
like, okay, do not give her feedback as if this is something that
you would do. Right. Like switch yourself into who she is and who she's in, what she's doing,
which is a totally different, because I used to think love is whether it's parenting, whatever
love is, I want to help you make all your dreams come true. So I'll just real quick,
tell you what your dreams are, and then we can all make them come true together right so simple so simple
right i've plotted out these dreams for you and now i'm going to help you make all my dreams come
true for you um so it really is just this beautiful idea of trusting, like taking the control out of love
is what I would say. And I have learned all of my skills about feedback from her. She is the most,
she is the closest human I know to loving unconditionally. She actually looks at people, sees everything
that's beautiful about them and loves them for who they are. It's like, she's almost like,
it's like, she's as close to like a golden retriever as of a person. Like she loves as
fully and without condition as like a puppy. It's just unbelievable to me. It's inspiring.
So it all did come full circle in the zoo for you when there was the Labrador and the cheetah,
and the two were acting too much alike each other.
And you saw the pacing cheetah on the sideline,
and you said in the periphery saying she forgot her nature.
But it's in there.
You could tell that there was a change that she experienced.
That is a full circle moment. That's really pretty cool.
Well done.
Yeah.
Back to the lab. Good job.
Okay. So can I take a moment and share my understanding of how you have conveyed who you are today.
Would that be okay to do?
Wonderful.
So you have this unique intersection between systems thinking and grasping systems,
but at the same time to go inward into the parts of the human experience that are rare because they're dark and they're
scary and sometimes unforgiving.
And you have the ability to swing your attention and your gaze from those two places and then
to be able to put thoughts, words, and actions matched up against your core principles in
life.
So you've done the internal work to know your core principles and then you've done the
skill work to line up your thoughts, words and actions and that is alignment.
And then you've developed the ability to trust yourself by doing that internal
work, by going to the dark places to build trust of self. And that trust of
self has allowed you to no longer control who you are
and control others in return because you have a deep sense that will figure it out. And that's
the ultimate gift of love to others and self. And you're doing it in your home and you're also doing
it at scale across the planet. And then you also have this unique ability to balance optimism with a bit of look into like, hey, but I'm scared. And there's some stuff out there I'm not sure about. And that honesty, like you want to be optimistic, but somewhere in your early experiences in life, you've learned that you need to control and hold back. And that play it safe thing shows up from time to time for
you. And, you know, and then I would say, you've got this ability to be introverted.
Actually, let me pause there. I think you're an introvert, but I'm not sure.
Yes, 100%. You're an introvert. Yeah. And you're a feeler.
And I think you're probably tactile, meaning that you like the fabric and the texture of things to
gather your ideas. And you've actually done the difficult work of externalizing your feelings,
because naturally your feelings are introverted as well. And it feels to me is that you appreciate structure more than kind of flow,
but the artist in you likes the flow,
but the controller in you wants the structure.
And so I don't know if I'm hitting the mark for you on some of these variables,
but this natural positive function that you operate from was earned.
It wasn't natural. And so,
and maybe we get back to like the original knower inside of you. It is natural to be positive, but
you've adopted some of these character traits from social cultural shame that you've examined
and got into that freedom place. So I just, I want to share that that's a bit of my experience
of you now. And I want to say thank you for sharing.
That's how I've understood you.
And if there's anything that I'm off on, I want to be course corrected because this feels
like an incredible gift, this conversation.
I agree.
And no, I was like listening to you thinking you're like a fortune teller of sorts.
That was dead on very good just a listener you know
just a listener yeah and so um all of that has been for activism all this internal work and
struggle you've turned into activism both for um women for um people of color, black, indigenous, and people of color, because you stand for humanness.
And so, yeah, awesome.
And, you know, before we jump, there's one thing that I want to share.
One more thing.
I just want to share this.
No need to respond, but I think it's really cool.
Is this from Abby again?
She says, my wife says to make sure that you don't have a deathbed regret.
Make sure that you don't have bedtime regretbed regret. Make sure that you don't have bedtime
regret. You know that quote about deathbed regret and life regret. That's a remarkable insight.
So go to bed right is I think the takeaway, right? Yeah. That idea that, oh, I hope one day I won't
have deathbed regrets. It's like, well, I think, who was it? The Annie Dillard quote, that's just like how we spend our lives,
how we spend our lives is how we spend our days, right?
Like each day, that's all it is.
We just have a day.
We just have today, right?
So I think that's what I mean when I think about the Joan of Arc thing,
the going towards the thing that will one day turn into your deathbed regret, right?
It's just made up of teeny little daytime regrets.
I mean, I have one right now I'm thinking of like,
when am I going to have that hard conversation?
The hard conversation that I'm thinking about right now
that I need to have with somebody that I love.
I can either do it right now
or it'll get bigger and bigger and bigger
until it's my deathbed regret, right?
Okay, awesome. So Glennon, I want to say thank you for your time, your insight, your courage,
your vulnerability, and your clarity of thoughts and words and, and you're backing up with actions.
So where can folks find out more about your nonprofit efforts? You know, your activism,
where can they get your book, follow you on social? What are the best places to, to intersect?
Um, so on social, my favorite place is Instagram. That's my jam. I'm at Glennon Doyle,
Instagram and together rising is that together rising Instagram. Um, you can follow me on
Twitter, but I suck at Twitter, so I wouldn't bother. Untamed is everywhere.
It's everywhere.
I always say, please, if you can,
buy it from an independent bookstore
because now more than ever,
we really need to keep them in business
because they are just the heart
of so many neighborhoods and communities.
So yeah, look it up at your local independent bookstore.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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