Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How To Put Yourself First with Glennon Doyle

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

If you feel like your own wants, desires and needs too often fall way down your to-do list, this episode is for you. It’s a conversation with Glennon Doyle: activist, author and the woman who Reese Witherspoon credits with helping her feel strong enough to handle the destabilising uncertainty of life right now. Glennon’s powerful writing on mental health, motherhood and self-discovery has been lauded by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Brené Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow, while her latest book Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living has spent weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Here, she joins Roisín to discuss how she learned to stop chasing other peoples’ goals in order to shoot for the life – and love – she really wanted. And, of course, she shares her road-tested tips for how all of you can do this, too. Glennon’s third memoir, Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living is published by Vermillion and out now Follow Glennon on Instagram: @glennondoyle Follow Roisín on Instagram: @roisin.dervishokane Topics: The mental exhaustion of trying to save a relationship after repeated cheating Why trusting yourself is like a muscle A mind-calming trick to try if you can’t meditate The power of writing down what your dream life looks like Why being a good mum doesn’t mean sacrificing your needs Exclusive Workout Offer   At Women’s Health we have created a 10-week Sweat & Reset workout plan that's available on Fiit. Whatever your fitness level, this 10-week full-body programme will help you cultivate a weekly fitness routine at home. Right now, we're offering you a 14-day free trial plus 25% off the plan of your choice. Sweat & Reset is included with any Fiit Premium membership. Sign up here: getfiit.tv/wh Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Yep, it's the most powerful iPhone ever, plus more peace of mind with your bill over five years. This is big. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro at tellus.com slash iPhone 17 Pro on select plans. Conditions and exclusions apply. Hello, and welcome to Going for Goal, the weekly women's health podcast. My name is Rocheen. I'm Senior Editor on Women's Health and this is your chance to plug in, be inspired and get expert advice on how to achieve the health and wellness goals that matter most to you. This week's episode is for all of you who've been in touch to tell us that you're struggling to put yourself first.

For those of you who want to shake off people pleasing and especially for Katie Louise, who wants guidance on how to check in with herself in order to figure out what it is that she actually wants in the first place. yet this week we are going a little bit introspective but far from being woo-woo trust me this is essential mindset maintenance look is the phenomenally successful joe wicks taught us last week success comes when you go for the goals the life that you authentically want so knowing what that is really matters someone whose whole life is a powerful illustration of this point is the activist and new york times bestselling author glennon doyle She writes so powerfully about topics like mental health, identity and self-discovery, and her memoirs are lauded by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Reese With the Spoon. Her latest, untamed, stop pleasing, start living, is out now.

This conversation was recorded in early May and is blessedly almost coronavirus chat-free. I hope you get from it everything you need to listen in, know what you want, and when the time is right, really unapologetically, go for it. enjoy. Glenn and Doyle, welcome to going for goal. Oh, well, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. And congratulations on writing such a powerful and I think uncomfortable book,

uncomfortable in a good way. Would you agree? Yes. That sounds like my whole life. I am uncomfortable, but in a good way. What got me thinking about doing this episode with you, as well as your brilliant book coming out was that we've had quite a few, we've had Instagram DMs from people. We asked what they wanted help with, like what goals they wanted to achieve.

And actually quite a few of them were saying they want to learn how to stop being everything to everyone. They want to learn how to prioritize themselves. They want to learn how to check in with themselves and see how they're doing. And it made me think that, wow, we talk about goals and we talk about health and happiness ambitions and we have this place where we're shooting for. But actually, if we can't learn how to put ourselves first, then we're probably never even going to get there. And it's also like figuring out what goals are yours and not just the goals of the world put in front of you because half the time I feel like, you know, what most of this book is about is figuring out, it took me 40 years to figure out the reason that I was so exhausted and overwhelmed and

overwhelmed and that I felt unseen and unknown was because I had been chasing somebody else's goals for so long because I had also lost touch with myself. I didn't know how to look inside myself. I didn't know what that was. I had completely lost a self to even check in with, right? So I think it starts before we figure out what our goals are, we got to figure out who we are so we can decide what our goals are so we don't spend our lives chasing somebody else's. Totally. And there's so many ways to lead into this conversation. But I think because we mostly go out to a UK audience, before we come to your untamed life and how you got there, can you tell me a bit about your tamed life, if you will, when you were, as you say,

it kind of maybe chasing someone else's goals, someone else's dreams. Yeah. So I had an interesting childhood in that I became bulimic when I was 10 years old. I think I was really early and I think really early. I understood that I was a super sensitive kid with a lot of big feelings, a lot of big feelings that weren't celebrated or allowed in a little girl, you know, because little girls are kind of supposed to just be happy all the time, but I actually, like a real human being, had, you know, a lot of anger and fear and doubt and rage along with the happy.

And so I figured out how to numb that pretty early with food. And then that turned into alcoholism. And so I was lost to addiction for 15 years. And I found out that I was pregnant when I was 25. And then I was pretty close to, I think I was really sick. And I think that something about that pregnancy test just, Part of me just knew that it might be my last chance to come to life. I got sober and I married the dad of that baby. It was married to him for 10 years and we had two more babies and I was just like

freshly sober and just dripping with children and completely overwhelmed and found myself unable to get those recovery meetings that were saving my life because I felt like it was the only place I could find that people told the truth about how hard life is. And so I decided. okay, maybe I could start, I can't get on my house because there's too many children here. So maybe I could start writing and still use that voice that I was allowed to use in those meetings, you know. So I started writing on the inner webs and the blog and people just started reading and reading and that turned into a book called Carry On Warrior, which was a lot about sobriety and early motherhood and how beautiful and terrible it all is. And then, so I built this career, this writing career, accidentally, but it was building. It was getting big.

And a lot of it was based on a pretty traditional Christian faith that I had then and also my little perfect family. And then a week before I was launching my book about that little family, my husband then, my then-husband told me that he had been unfaithful to me throughout our entire marriage. So that sucked. And several years of my life were just desperately trying to save that little family in that marriage. And then I wrote another book about that time, about desperately trying to heal my marriage. That book was called Love Warrior. And then, a few weeks before launching that book, which was being touted all over the country, was Oprah's Book Club pick.

It was supposed to be the biggest book of the year. And it was the tagline that they made up was an epic marriage redemption story. But right before that book launched, I met and fell madly in love with a woman named Abby Wambach who was very famous. She was a soccer player and very famous. And so that was an unbelievable time. I had to kind of decide whether I was going to hold on to this career and this book and this thing that I had felt or if I was going to follow this love that I had found, which was really the first time I'd ever been in love in my life. And it really did feel like a decision, one or the other, because everyone was telling me,

if you do this thing, your career will be over. Right? So I did. Yes. I guess it's that thing that, and it almost just comes to almost the crux of what we're talking about, that in that moment you had a choice between what you were being told that you should do and what you kind of authentically wanted to do. But you did the thing.

I did the thing. I sure did. I did the thing. And it was not a simple thing and it was not an easy thing. And it was a very hard thing for a lot of people. And it wasn't just about, you know, being in love with one person or another. It was really, it was really a decision to return to myself. Like, when I fell in love with Abby, I heard from a part of myself that I had not heard from ever, maybe.

I just was spent so much of my life doing the things I was supposed to do. And when I got sober, I felt like, okay, I've been bad for so long. I mean, by that point, I had, you know, when you're an addict, I had crushed the people that I loved. And I just felt like, okay, now I'm going to be good, right? I'm going to be a good mom. I'm going to be a good worker. I'm going to be a good wife. I'm going to be, I'm just, and I just almost killed myself with trying to be good, right?

You talk about goals. I mean, culture put in a lot of goals in front of me. I'm supposed to be a perfect mom. I'm supposed to be, this is what perfect means. I'm supposed to be a perfect wife. This is what perfect means. It's supposed to be a perfect woman. This is what perfect means.

And then when I met Abby, this thing inside of myself, it was like, it just rose up and just rattled the bars of all the cages that I was living in. It was really that. Will I abandon myself or will I abandon everyone's expectations of it? me. So it felt like life of death, actually. Even that last sentence just, was that of the point that you think you started to get untamed? And how do you think your untamed life compares to your tamed one? Or are you kind of still on this journey of learning what your expectations are and trying to put those above other people's?

Yeah. I mean, I think that becoming untamed is really just, I think some people hear it and they're like, oh, but we just be wild and crazy and not like that. It's just untaming is just becoming returning to the person you were before the world told you who to be, right? It's just the wild I'm talking about is the wild that is the truest, most beautiful, original nature of who we are, right? Whether that, I mean, I have two daughters and one of them is her wild is quiet and steady and introverted and deeply sensitive. And deeply sensitive. And when she's being tamed, it's when people are throwing her into loud situations and throwing her, you know. And then I have my other daughter, wild.

I mean, she's just like, whoa, out there. So wild, it doesn't necessarily mean loud or it just means a returning to self, right? So I do not think that I became untamed when I met Abby. I think that when I met Abby, I had become used to listening to my internal voice and not abandoning it because I think I still. started practicing that in early sobriety. I think that addiction starts as and continues as a complete abandonment of self, right? And I think that early recovery, recovery is recovering. It's recovering that self that we've buried under all that booze, under all that food, under whatever it is that you use to abandon yourself, right? And I think that I had a decade when I met Abby,

13 years actually of slowly practicing not abandoning myself and starting to reconnect with that inner self and trying to live as her right and it just this thing happens when you start trusting yourself in small ways over time there's just no other way to live like it becomes unthinkable to abandon yourself even in the big thing so even that was a big thing I also had enough practice to trust it, you know. Yeah. I guess you've had an absolutely fascinating journey. But how do you think that many women, the women that have got in touch with us,

but also probably lots of women listening to this, why do you think it is so tough for women to get in touch with what they want and then to prioritize it? Well, I mean, women aren't supposed to want, right? I mean, we're not supposed to want. We're not supposed to desire. We're not supposed to want more. were also trained very early to look outside of ourselves.

So, for example, when I found out about the infidelity in my last marriage, I was in such shock for a little while, and then I was in this panic because I didn't know what to do. I had to make a decision. Was I going to stay? Was I going to go? And I didn't even know what I wanted for dinner, much less what do I want to do in this huge situation. Right? So I did the only thing that I knew how to do to know.

back then, which is that I just asked everyone else on earth what I should do. Okay, so I thought that every single friend, all my friends, even the friends that I wouldn't trust any of their decisions. It doesn't matter. I asked every single one, what would you do? What would you do? What would you do? Then I read every single article that any expert had ever written on the subject, right? Infidelity experts, child psychologist experts, minister, like it didn't matter. I'll read who, whatever. Then at one point I started taking BuzzFeed quizzes, because that's what you do to know. Then I found myself at 3 a.m. sitting on my bed, shoveling ice cream into my mouth and Googling, what do I do if my husband is a cheater but is also an amazing dad? Question

mark. Enter. So this is when I realize I've hit some kind of rock bottom of knowing. Now that I'm pulling a bunch of bots and trolls about what to do with my one wild and precious life. Okay. This is when I realized, wow, at what point was the phone connection cut between me and myself? How did I start trusting everyone else on earth more than I trust myself? Right? And then this is what happened. A few weeks later, my son was having friends over.

and I peeked my head into their room. They were all watching TV and I said, is anybody hungry? And all of the boys without taking their eyes off the TV said, yes. Okay, so they have nailed this Q&A. Okay, I've asked them a question.

They have looked inside themselves, found an answer, and said the answer on the outside. Crushed it. Okay? The girls in this, I will never start. being fascinated by this next few moments. Okay.

The girls, every single one of them took their eyes off the TV. They were silent at first. And then they started looking at each other's faces. Okay? They started looking at their friends' faces to find out if they themselves were hungry inside their own body. Okay? And then through some kind of wild mental telepathy,

they silently elected a spokesgirl. This braided, freckled, haired girl looks over at me and she says, no, thank you, we're fine. And that is when I realized, oh, that's how I forgot to know who I am and what I want. And I forgot how to know when I learned how to please, right? Little boys are taught to look inside themselves for wisdom and say the thing. little girls are taught to look outside of themselves for consensus, for permission, for approval, for group think, right? Yeah, so then that's when I forgave myself. I was like, oh, this is why, you know, a little girl who looks at another friend's face to find out if she's hungry becomes a 42-year-old woman who's Googling, what should I do with my life? which is terrible news that's how we've lost ourselves but it's also amazing because all we have to do

is instead of in moments of uncertainty looking outward we all we have to do is practice reversing that process right we have to practice in moments and uncertainty in our lives stopping and looking inward what are some practices that people can do in order to get in touch with what they want let's start with getting in touch with what they want first? Well, I mean, I think one of the reasons we don't hear that voice inside of ourselves, which actually I hate using the word voice because I just don't have a better word. It's not a voice for me. I don't hear any words.

It's just like this thing that I, when I block out all the voices outside of myself, I think we're so used to living exterior lives. Okay, we just are always, we just, we are trained to just listen, listen, the TV, the people, the all the things, which is always listening to outside voices. So it makes sense that the louder the outside voices get the harder, the inner voices. Okay,

this is why everybody who has any sort of deep connection with self is someone who fiercely protects their solitude at some point in every day, right? So for me, this had a lot to do with, I mean, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Okay, I kind of didn't believe, this is 10 years or 15 years later. Okay, I kind of didn't. believe this idea that there was something inside me that would tell me the way. Like, it sounded very woo-woo, and I didn't do woo-woo in any way. Like, I was just hanging on, you know,

but I was desperate. I was desperate and desperate times make women do things. I was like, I'll try this woo-woo crap. So I, um, the kids would go to school and I would promise myself, I was going to sit in my closet. I had you in my closet because I am like so, freak, I'm like Dory from Nemo, like any, this shiny distraction and I'm gone. So I had to go into the closet, sit on the floor in the closet. And I promised myself, at first it was seven minutes. I would sit for seven minutes with no outside voices, with no distractions, and just try to listen for whatever this thing was. Right. And at first, it was terrible and awful. It was like, like, the more addicted you are to exterior voices, to busyness, the harder the beginning is.

because it's like you're an input junkie and you're being put in detox, right? It's like all I could do is just hate every minute of it. And I suddenly was thinking about like reorganizing my pantry. Like I've never reorganized my pantry in my life. Just like anything but this, anything but stillness. And by the way, the reason that it's so hard to sit in stillness is because it's so hard to sit in stillness. like we will do anything to not sit in the quiet because the truth is in the quiet right all the things all the things we haven't healed all the grudges we're still holding all the terrifying truth of being human

like all of it is in the quiet which is why we do everything we can do to keep that snowballed globe shaken up so we don't have to see the center of things. So the bad news is it's terrible at first in the stillness, but the good news is that there's no way to have a beautiful, true life without facing that stuff. Was it a type of meditation or did it develop into a type of meditation or was it just being quiet? I mean, at this first, at this point in my life, I do do a lot of different kind of meditations when I'm in a good place. I didn't know anything about meditation in the beginning. So there was none of that. It was just like, I'm going to sit here quietly. And then I think about like something. I think about, you know, what happened in the beginning is I was thinking about

my real issue, which was what am I going to do about my marriage? And all I can tell you is that I started feeling. And I just felt like like a nudge. It's like it's not a voice. Like nobody's coming and saying, you should stay with Craig. Like it was like, um, a directional pull maybe. That's how I could describe. It was just this like a nudge that would, it was like gravity. So that's one brilliant way of getting in touch and working out what we want and working out if we're going for our own goals as opposed to someone else's, is this allowing yourself to get quiet and sensing the nudge, sinking into the knowing, as you call it in your book, which is beautiful.

And then something else, which I wondered if you could talk about was, you talk about it. listening to your dreams a little bit more and not and I don't mean dreams as in falling asleep but there's a line in your book where you talk about pipe dreams and how we dismiss them as these silly things but actually maybe they should be our marching orders. Yeah that's my favorite topic. So I think when you return to yourself for a little while you do find that knowing and you also find this other thing inside of yourself which I call imagination but people can call it whatever they want. It's the place where these things, these ideas or desires or dreams or longings are inside of you. There's no perfect way to parent. There's no perfect marriage. There's no perfect way to be a woman. There's no, there's just as many different truest and beautiful ways of doing those things as there are people. Right. And I think that those those blueprints

for our lives are planted inside of our imagination. So bed in, basically sink down into the knowing. Let your, don't dismiss what your imagination is telling you, even if they say you want to go back to ballet classes. If you want to give it a go, do it. And you know what? Maybe even more practical, don't tell yourself you have to do it yet. Pretend you're never going to do it.

You're never going to do it, okay? Just sit down with a pencil and paper and write down, what is the truest most beautiful life for myself I can imagine. What is the truest, whatever your sticking point is right now, whether it's a relationship, a community, a career, just a personal life. What is the true? I have a son who is going into a senior year next year. And I just did this a few weeks ago.

What is the truest most beautiful last year at home I can imagine with my kid? All right. I don't know how much of it I can do, but I can dream it up, right? And what I notice about people who make who actually put their true as most beautiful lives in action is that this thing rarely goes from from imagination to reality all right it's like an architect or a fashion designer or you have to you have to you have to you have the dream and then you have to put it on paper as the next step and then eventually maybe it gets built but nobody no architect goes from the dream inside to the building right it's like the truth most beautiful life has to

come together one dimension at a time but I think you should free yourself from the terror of doing at first and just dream it. Admit that you have longing, admit that you have that inside of you and put it down on paper and just sit with it for a while. I love that. And actually, there's a neuroscientist who I work with quite a lot. Her name is Dr. Tara Swart and she's done, she wrote an amazing book called The Source and it's basically she talks about how things like visualization and so really the things that you're talking about, like tapping into your imagination, writing things down, vision boarding, all this kind of stuff actually does fire up. I'm not a neuroscientist, so my knowledge is pretty patchy, but it actually does fire up those parts of your brain that start

to make, that start to nudge you in the direction of actually doing it. So what she said, which I found so great is kind of what's coming through in your messaging as well, is that this, the imagination is that something ticked off your list. Yeah. Yeah. And then you think about how many boring horrible lists we make every day. Like we don't down the crappy things we have to do, right? Like, that's because we know if we write them down, they will come true. We'll do our crappy, boring, errand things, right? So we'll write down on beautiful things too.

It's not like, it's not a woo-woo I did. It just makes logical sense, right? Absolutely. I think something that it would be really great to get your thoughts on is once you kind of have worked out what you want to do or you've got in touch and you've kind of found this ambition and you've got this drive to get going. How the hell in a world where, as you say, we're pretty much conditioned to want to please and put pretty much everything else and all our boring stuff and our chores and our responsibilities in front of what we want, how the hell do you prioritize

yourself? And I'm particularly interested in you answering this from the perspective of a mother because I find it hard enough and I don't really have any real responsibilities. Yeah, I love it. I love it. That's why I only ask my friends who don't have kids for parenting advice because they're the only ones who are saying enough. I'm serious. The only friend for parenting advice is my friend Liz Gilbert because she has no kids. She gives you the best advice because she's so, you know, still sane.

Okay. I mean, I guess first of all, it depends. It's different seasons. I mean, having young children at home, you can just feel completely consumed. And sometimes the last thing you want to do is add a layer of, oh, my God, and now I have to be living my best life right now, too. No, I mean, go in seasons. And sometimes the best life is just surviving. Okay?

So there's that. Then your kids get a little older and you get out of survival mode. And you have time to really think about what parenting is. Okay. And you have time to start rejecting cultural ideas. of what parenting is and start deciding for yourself. And what I think about is to the woman who's deciding whether she should continue to what they call put everyone else's needs above her own, I would ask her to think about what she dreams for

her daughter as an adult. Does she dream that her daughter will spend her entire life, not knowing herself, not bringing her dreams to life, not living fully alive. And if she would not want that life for her daughter, then I would suggest that she not model that life for her daughter. I would suggest that, yes, all parents want desperately to give their children what they need. And I would suggest thinking hard about what it is children need. Because I think what children need is parents who are fully.

alive, right? I think that children will only allow themselves to live as fully as their parents allow themselves to live. And so I think that in the long run, we should not settle for any relationship, any life, any nation, any world that is less true and beautiful than the one we would want for our children, right? And I would suggest that they consider what Carl Jung said, which is that the greatest burden any child can bear is the unlived life of a parent. So I would ask parents not to buy in to the false dichotomy of do I put my children's needs above mine? And I would suggest that you have the same needs. There's no, what you need is to live fully and what your children need is to see you live fully.

You have the exact same needs. So stop making it this false thing that culture wants us to do, which is choose one or the other. choose what you need because it is exactly the same as what your children need. That's so powerful. Joan, I could keep on talking to you for hours, but you have other interviews to do. So before there's some really good tips in there, before you go, could you let me know if there's one piece of advice, the more practical the better that you have for any women listening on how they can get in touch, with what they authentically want and to the best of their ability, go for it and make it happen.

What would it be? Well, I mean, I would say that, you know, anybody who's starting to kind of try to put that phone line back together between themselves and themselves is to just block out all the voices at some point and try to turn inward, practice that. Like in every moment of uncertainty, we are people. I'm in our communal, and there's beauty in that, right? You know, I still, I don't, if I don't know what throw pillow to pick, I'm calling my sister, which, I mean, there are things that I don't know, okay, and I want other people to tell me,

if I'm getting dressed, I'm calling my sister. Like, I don't know how to dress myself. These are, but like the big things, like our purpose, our careers, our relationships, big things have to come from us, right, from our deepest selves. So what I would say is I think that we are a gender, a culture who has been taught not to trust ourselves. And everything in my life became more true and beautiful when I decided to start trusting myself deeply. So that's what I would tell people, just consider it, just try it, just try to listen for that inside voice and then dare to trust it on the outside. And what happens is over time when you do that again and again, your lifestyle.

starts to make sense to you. Right? Your outside world starts to reflect your inside world and that's what we're going for. That's what peace is. I think that's what integrity is. It's just living with, it's living integrated. The outsides match the insides. Yeah. Fabulous. And if it feels a little bit awkward at the start, then I guess that's probably normal and right, because if you've not been listening to yourself for quite a long time, it's going to feel weird doing something different. Yeah, and it's going to lock the boat and it's going to be. hard on the outside and you're going to cause a lot of outer conflict. And what we always need to remember is that we have decided for a long time not to rock the boat, not to make things awkward,

not to cause outer conflict because we thought there was no price to that. But it turns out there's a huge price to that and that is constant inner conflict. Right. So there's a price to pay either way. Right? We either rock the boat on the outside. We either cause outer conflict or we choose inner conflict and we slowly die inside. Right? And that's just too high a price to pay. Absolutely. Well, Glennon, thank you so much for coming on going for goal. Oh, thank you for having me. I just hope to get over there someday and give you all a hug in person when this is all over. Thanks so much for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd urge you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. Before I go, I've got two

little things to tell you. The first is some big news. Women's Health Live Virtual is back. That's right, we are hosting a full day of virtual workouts on our YouTube channel this coming Saturday, the 23rd of May. If you want to work out with the likes of Kato At Sinez, Kelsey Wells and Simone Delirou, all you have to do is subscribe to our YouTube channel and show up on Saturday morning. I'll see you there. And one more piece of exciting fitness news. At Women's Health, we have created a 10-week sweat and reset workout that's available on

the Fit app. That's Fit with two eyes, like Hit, get it. Whatever your fitness level, this 10-week full-body program will help you cultivate a weekly fitness routine at home. Right now, we're offering you a 14-day free trial plus 25% off the plan you choose with Fit. Sweat and Reset is included with any Fit premium membership and all you need to do is sign up online. There's a link and all the instructions for how to do so in the show notes. That's all from me for today. I'll catch you guys next week. Bye.