The One You Feed - Tara Mohr

Episode Date: March 15, 2016

This week we talk to Tara Mohr about playing bigTara Mohr is an expert on women’s leadership and well-being. She helps women play bigger in sharing their voices and bringing forward their ideas in work and in life. Tara is the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, named a best book of the year by Apple’s iBooks and now in paperback. In the book, she shares her pioneering model for making the journey from playing small–being held back by fear and self-doubt–to playing big, taking bold action to pursue what you see as your callings.Tara is the creator of the Playing Big leadership program for women, which now has more than 1,000 graduates from around the world, and creator of the global Playing Big Facilitators Training for coaches, therapists, leadership development professionals and other practitioners supporting women in their personal and professional growth. A Coaches Training Institute-certified coach with an MBA from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree in English literature from Yale,Tara takes a unique approach that blends inner work and practical skills training. Her work has been featured on national media from theNew York Times to Today Show to Harvard Business Review, and has captivated women from all walks of life including Maria Shriver, Jillian Michaels and Elizabeth Gilbert. Our Sponsor this Week is FractureVisit Fracture and use the promo code “wolf” to get 10% off!!In This Interview, Tara Mohr and I Discuss:The One You Feed parableThe immense flexibility we have in who we becomeFeeding the good wolf in othersThe Inner Mentor and the Inner CriticThe qualities of the Inner CriticWhy you shouldn't argue with the Inner CriticHow the Inner Critic also sounds like the voice of reasonFinding our Inner MentorDon't ask what you are ready for but instead ask what is life asking of me right now?Imposter SyndromeThe Objection RolodexMaking "The Leap"The 6 criteria of the "The Leap"How to keep change goingGiving up sugar For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just stop even asking yourself the question, are you ready? It's kind of the wrong question. The question is, what do I feel called to do? And what information is life giving me about what I'm ready for? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of

us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition

signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Tara Moore, an expert on women's leadership and well-being. She helps women play bigger in sharing their voices and bringing forward their ideas in work and in life. Tara is the author of Playing Big, Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead. Her book was named Best Book of the Year by Apple's iBooks and is now available in paperback.me. And here's the interview with Tara Marr. Hi, Tara. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to have

you on. You have a book called Plain Big, which is just released in paperback recently and has been very successful. And it's really about being willing to live in a larger space than we have before. And the book is primarily directed towards women. Most of your coaching is done with women. But as I was reading it, I saw parallels with all sorts of things we talked to on the show. And so I'm excited to get into it a little bit more. I'm so excited to be here. And yes, we hear from a lot of men who have read the book. I think the ideas are applicable to everyone. I've focused a lot of my work on helping women, but the concepts are certainly universal. Absolutely. We'll get into the book

a little bit more in a minute, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandmother who is talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. And she looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and she looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love the parable. And it reminded me of a blog post I wrote years ago called, What Are You Pouring In? What are you pouring into your day? What are you pouring into your day? What are you pouring into your life? And, uh, the post was really about me remembering that in order to feel good in my life and in order to show up in my relationships the way I want to, in order to feel like I'm doing my best in my work. I can't just kind of live blank slate hoping that that will happen. I have to pour a lot of inputs into my life that let me do that. And for me, that's writing, it's prayer, it's doing lots of creative things. It's certain kind of reflective practices where I'm checking in with myself against my goals and what feels in integrity to me. And I think, you know,

I think to me, this is what the whole personal growth world is about. It's about saying, hey, there's so much flexibility in who we become and how life can shape us. And we have a tremendous amount of power in terms of what we do each day and where we focus our attention that affects who we become and therefore how we impact our world and the people around us. I really like that idea of what you pour in.

I mean, for me, the parable, a lot of it was really very much that idea that it's so easy to go on autopilot and just sort of coast through our days. I mean, coast isn't even the right word, right? A lot of us are scrambling. But we're not, at least for myself, I'm not stopping and making sure I'm putting good inputs into my life, that I'm doing the things that matter, that I'm consistent, and just that I'm really being thoughtful and conscious about what I do. Yeah. And then the other piece is I think it's such a relevant parable in our social realm and

our communal realm too, because it's not only what wolf do you feed in yourself that matters, but what are you feeding in others? And recognizing that when we encounter people who seem like they're acting like a bad wolf, probably it's because what has been fed in their environment is the bad wolf and having some wisdom and compassion around that. Yeah, I had such a classic example of that the other day. So I was at work, and there was somebody there who started working there a few months ago. And, and I just was up till up till yesterday, I've been like, well, they're just they seem kind of aloof and, you know, kind of stuck up. They're just, you know, they're just not, they just don't seem very

friendly. And then I saw the person. And the thought occurred to me, I'm glad the thought occurred to me before what's about to happen next because i at least am not completely ashamed but i saw the person and i thought maybe they're just sad and and then so that was very strange because i hadn't had that thought about this person before and then about an hour and a half later i was sitting there and this person came up and sat down not too far from me next to somebody else and started telling this person i mean i couldn't help but overhear about problems in their relationship and how heavy it's been weighing on them. And it was just another reminder to me of like, I'm judging somebody without knowing anything about it. And you know, if you go in with the intention of they're probably a good person

who's either shy like you are or uncomfortable or something's wrong. I'm always pleasantly surprised by people. Yes. Yeah. And then you notice things because you're asking that question and looking at it in that way. You see something that you wouldn't pick up on if you were caught up in your own story and your own projections. Exactly. So a lot of what you focus on, particularly early in the book, is the voices that happen inside of us. I often think that another great way to think of the parable for me is that the positive voices in my head are the good wolf and all those negative voices are my bad wolf. Now, you refer to them as our inner critic and our inner mentor. Can you tell me a little bit more about the inner critic? I think we all probably know this person pretty

well in our heads, but it'd be helpful if you could elaborate. Right. And what's interesting, because of course, we all know that we have an inner critic, and we know we have these certain self-doubts, but we actually don't typically in our culture really pull the camera lens back and take some time to look at what is that voice. And we don't have a very good collective understanding of what I call inner critic 101, which I think every human being needs. So the basic idea is inner critic is the voice in your head that's saying things to you about yourself, talking to you about yourself in a way that you wouldn't intend to talk to someone that you really love. And there's a lot of common qualities of the inner critic voice that can help us start to recognize it. It tends to be a very black and white thinker, so thinks about things

in very binary terms. The inner critic doesn't usually see the gray in us or the complexity of any situation. You're going to be horrible at that. You're going to make a fool of yourself. You're not qualified for that. It tends to be very repetitive and have kind of a broken record quality. It's the voice, for many of us, it's the voice of you're not ready yet, which can sound like a very rational, even an evolved inner personal growth savvy person's version of the inner critic. And then it shows up in interesting gendered ways, too. For women, it will speak up more around the things that are associated with masculinity in our culture. So you're not good at math, you're not good at negotiating, you're not good at

technical stuff or scientific stuff. For men, interestingly, the research suggests it shows up more like, well, you're not good at that emotional stuff. You're not good at things that are about communication, if you look at the population as a whole. And my philosophy is not that we need to overcome having an inner critic or move beyond having self-doubt. There's so much encouraging us to become more confident. And I don't think that that's actionable advice. You say don't argue with the inner critic, right? Don't argue with the inner critic because that will actually, the inner critic voice is like

one of those people in your life that loves to get you caught up in the argument. And if you get into an argument with them, you know, you start to get kind of, you lose track of what you're arguing about and you waste a ton of time and you just feel horrible after. That's how it is to argue with your inner critic because your inner critic is an expression of a manifestation of your safety instinct. So the part of you that never wants to fail, never wants to risk criticism, doesn't want to stand out from the crowd, that part of you has to figure out its best strategy to keep you in your comfort zone and keep you in the status quo. And raising its hand and saying, hi, please stay in the status quo, you would just say no to that. And so it uses a more

sophisticated argument, like you're about to make a fool of yourself. You're not qualified for that. That's the kind of argument that's likely to scare us into staying stuck. So since that's the cause of it, if we argue with it, it just keeps coming up with a new line, a new line, a new line. It doesn't care what's true, what's not true. It'll just try and keep us distracted in the argument. So I believe we have to learn to witness the voice and get comfortable with it, but not take direction from it. So is that basically the heart of how to deal with it? Because you also say it's not about learning to be more confident, but coming into a new

relationship with our self-doubt. So is that new relationship with our self-doubt sort of a, I recognize it's there, thanks for the input, but this is what we're going to do? Yes. And knowing that it's going to speak up most loudly and most vocally when you are on your right track in your life, because that's when you feel the most vulnerable, when you're sharing your gifts, when you're speaking up about something you're passionate about, when you're following a calling. So it's a practice of one, getting familiar enough with your inner critic so you know when it's talking, which is really hard because it sounds really like the voice of reason

when it's talking to each of us. And then naming it and noticing it. And there's some other fun tools you can use, like creating a character that personifies it or envisioning it leaving the room. like creating a character that personifies it or envisioning it leaving the room. Those can be nice add-ons, but the basis is I'm able to recognize it in shorter and shorter time frames, name it for what it is, and then have a process where I can take direction from another part of myself, which gets us to the good wolf, not from this part. So before we go into your inner mentor, another question about the inner critic. So the inner critic that we're talking about in this, at least as we're describing, it tends to be very rational. You know, you're just not really good at that. You're not. But is this the same voice

that can also be very harsh? Can be, you know, people have body image issues. Is that all the same source or, or do those things diverge at a certain point? Cause you've said that the inner critic is not pathological. I don't believe it's pathological in the sense that we don't need to find a bad experience we had in childhood to explain why we have self-doubt. Having worked now with like people all around the world, all different levels of success, ages, gender, it's universal. And it shows up when we're at the edge of our comfort zone or some possible form of vulnerability, the kind that the good wolf would like us to risk so that we can get some fulfillment.

But yeah, I would say that the inner critic can take on a lot of different forms. But for me, it's the same voice that's saying, no, Tara, you cannot go on that television show until you lose 10 pounds or it's going three more months before submitting an article to that publication? It would probably be better if you could add this and this credential when you write the email. Same thing. It's just like, please don't let me ever be criticized or fail. That's really what that voice is saying underneath. me and here's the rest of the interview with Tara Marr. So let's talk about the inner mentor then. So this is sort of back to the analogy, this is the good wolf. Yes. So the inner mentor, it's one of my favorite things to talk about because I can honestly say that I have watched it be life changing as a as a tool as a presence in people's lives for thousands of people and I don't Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of therapy for black girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and

real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional

because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past.

And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out

if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really, no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. No, anything that as easily and efficiently connects people to their highest best selves. So that's my pitch for it. And what it is, is a vision of yourself 20 or 30 years out into the future.

But if I were to say to you right now, like, hey, so, you know, who do you think you'll be 30 years in the future? That wouldn't be your inner mentor. That would be some combination of your egos, hopes, and your fears. And so we get to the inner mentor through a long, longish, you know, 20 minutes or so visualization and meditation. So people really get out of their everyday conscious mind and you don't make up what your inner mentor is. You really discover it. And for everyone, something shows up that is from a deeper place about not only who they're becoming, but that figure that shows up isn't just an older version of them. It's also like a more authentic version of them and their sort of inner wise woman or their inner wise man.

And then once they get a sense of that person and that, that it's really like an archetype almost that is their highest self, their most essential self, they can consult with that figure like a mentor. And so let's say, oh, my boss just dumped this project on my plate that is so overwhelming. But if I respond, I'm going to be seen as not committed. If I say I don't want to do it, we'll say, OK, what would your inner mentor do in this situation? And we might even have that person close their eyes and reconnect to that person and really check in.

How would they handle it? and close their eyes and reconnect to that person and really check in. How would they handle it? And unfailingly, every time there's an answer that kind of surprises the person, they wouldn't have thought of it on their own. It immediately feels resonant and they have a way forward. It's a really, really amazing tool. And so once you've gone, as you mentioned, you go through the visualization and you make first contact with the inner mentor, then is it sort of, you're able to reach that person in a, in a faster, more consistent way after that? Or is it, you kind of go through the whole process every time? You don't have to go through the whole process every time. So then people often,

that first visit, we do sort of an extended conversation with your inner mentor. We do sort of an extended conversation with your inner mentor. And then a lot of people will have a vivid enough sense that they can then sort of just check in, even just sort of thinking of it for a second. Oh, yeah, what would he do? What would she do? And sometimes, you know, if they're feeling off balance or whatever, the situation is particularly tough, it might take like, okay, let's just really close our eyes for 10 seconds and imagine we're going back to their house and sitting down, but it is much

quicker and more accessible. Excellent. You have a question that you use, which is a great question that is one that we explore often about the idea of the fact that we're telling ourselves stories in our head. But your question that you think is worth asking is what am I making this mean? Yeah. Yeah. And I don't, I'm certainly not the creator of that question. I'm sure it crossed my path in the coaching world, but I think it is a super helpful question. Um, that could be, you know, I, uh, I started a blog and no one's reading it. What am I making that mean? Have I made that mean that I'm a bad writer? Have I made that mean that no one's reading it. What am I making that mean? Have I made that mean that I'm a bad writer? Have I made that mean that no one's interested in my story? It might mean those things. It might also mean like your blog hasn't gotten enough exposure yet,

or you've been targeting the wrong audience. And a lot of times what the truth of the matter is, is a lot less personal and a lot less, you know, what our inner critic would think it is than what we're assuming. Yep. Yep. We're obviously taking a fact and then putting quite a bit of interpretation into it. The fact is your blog has been read by 18 people today. The interpretation of that is kind of wide open. Yeah. And I always think back to that idea that often when children's parents go through a divorce, the child will feel responsible, like they somehow caused the divorce. And they can even make up a particular story like, oh, because I didn't clean my room enough, I caused my parents to break up. And what amazes me so much about that phenomenon is that

it's actually as painful as it would be for a child to feel that they caused the breakup of the family. That's less painful to them than the story that they had no control over what happened. And we do this as adults all the time. It's more comfortable for us to say, if only I had done this or that, and to take blame on ourselves and have the inner critic story, then to sometimes recognize what we can't control and how many factors are really at play and so on. Yeah. I'm always interested when people choose the self-blame route and when people choose the other blame route, whereas there's sort of a middle ground between those two things, which a lot of is exactly what you said, which is a lot of life is in a very frightening

way, sometimes out of our control. Right. Right. Yeah. And what is in our control? You know, I always, I like to think of that as what's on our side of the street. Right. And you can there's a lot to do on your side of the street usually to clean up your side. But there is another side of the street too. There sure is. And thankfully, the way we choose to react and process and interpret all those things is on our side of the street. Right. So you discuss the fact that a lot of women are hiding, you call them

hiding strategies. What are hiding strategies? And maybe you could highlight a couple of the top ones that come to mind. Yeah, yeah. And I would be curious to hear how prevalent you think these are among men as well. So hiding strategies. So this was, I started to see this pattern in my coaching practice of, I was coaching, you know, brilliant women, educated, successful in their careers. And, and a lot of them were hiding their gifts or stalling on their dreams and their goals. Even though from my perspective, you know, it seemed obvious to me and many people around them, oh, you could totally pull this off. Like they, they were capable, but they didn't feel that way. And because again, the way our fear operates and our inner critic operates is kind of sneaky sometimes and

sophisticated. They didn't feel consciously afraid or even self-doubting sometimes. They came up with these hiding strategies that allowed them to hide and to stall on playing bigger, but to convince themselves they were moving forward as diligently as they could. So a couple examples. So one of them is what I call this before that. And this before that are the beliefs that we have about the order that things need to happen in. So we come up with a story like, well, I really want to leave my job and launch my business. But to launch my business, I need a website for my business. But to have a website, I need a great web designer. And that costs $5,000. So first, I need to get the rate, like, and we come up with a long, long story. That's right. Right.

Right. That's this before that hiding strategy. Another one that I think is probably particularly common for women, because the data suggests, you know, women are getting much more education now than men, as adults, that women are often feel they need another degree or another certification to do what they want to do. And I can't tell you the level of ridiculousness of examples of this I've seen, like a woman saying, well, I want to teach teens yoga, but I'm certified as an adult yoga instructor. And I've taught teens as a high school teacher for 20 years, but I'm not certified as a teen yoga instructor. Right. And that's, I think, the gender piece there.

It's not at all to blame women for that, but there's a real overlap between how girls are socialized and then the mode that we expect students to be in, which is like listen to the authority figure and take in all their information and then give it back. So there's a connection there. Another hiding strategy is curating other people's voices instead of sharing your own voice. And of course, there's nothing wrong with curating other people's voices. There are lots of important projects that do that. But sometimes someone will really have something to say on a topic. And that's why they're drawn to it. But it feels too scary to share their point of view and experience. So then they go create a big project curating, you know, 50 great thinkers on this topic.

And they somehow managed to forget the whole time to say their own point of view. But those are a few of them. Yeah. I recognize a lot of those. I've been in entrepreneurial cultures, startups since I was very early in my career, and I never went to college. So I've kind of learned to get over most of those because in an entrepreneurial situation, you're never really ready. I mean, that's the lesson that I think most people could get is if you wait until you think you're ready or you really feel ready, you're probably never going to start. Yes. I'm a huge advocate of you should just stop even asking yourself the question,

are you ready? It's kind of the wrong question. The question is, what do I feel called to do? And what information is life giving me about what I'm ready for? You know, when I first started doing media associated with my writing, a publicist had approached me because she had read some work I liked and she was like, we've got to get this out there. And so she said, Tara, like, here's how it's going to be. We're going to do some local media and then we're going to do regional. And then when you have all that, then we'll do national. So I'm like, okay, great. Well, I don't know what happened, but something happened. And like, literally two weeks later, she emailed me like, great, you're booked on the Today Show. And I literally, thank goodness, I happened to be in a store at the moment that had chairs in

front of the dressing room. Like I could not stand. I was so panicked and nervous and was sure I wasn't ready. Like I haven't honed my message enough and I'm not media trained and this show isn't the right fit. And then I kind of had to say like, let's actually let the Today Show producers decide if you're ready. And that might sound passive, but to me, that's been such a helpful principle. Like, if life opened the door and the opportunity comes, let's trust life to know what you're ready for and not have to separately assess that in your head. Yeah. Well, I think it's that that gets a little bit to that idea of imposter syndrome. And I had a conversation with a guy today that I do some work with and he lives in India and he's got some great opportunities that are that are happening to him right now. And he's he's in these meetings and he's doing these different things. And he's saying, but I didn't go to Yale and I didn't go to. And I said, but you're in the room like you didn't get to, and I said, but you're in the room. Like you didn't get in that room by accident. Like you earned being in that room and, and don't, don't judge

yourself out of it. You know, you, there's a reason that they're inviting you to these things. There's a reason you're getting these internships. And the person who went to Yale is sitting there going, well, they just went for this thing on my resume and I imposter syndrome my way into Yale. Right. Exactly. You know, I mean, that's the funny thing about getting to, it's like, I get to see that the old one, old people think they're too old to do it.

The young people think they're too young to do it. It's like, because again, the inner critic, I call it the objection Rolodex because it, the inner critic was just like, well, we didn't go for that card. Let me pull the next one up. It's just, you know, trying everything I can think of. now you have a great approach for dealing with hiding that i really like and you call it the leap yeah so because how how do we get out of this hiding? You know, I think you do need that foundational inner work of inner critic or inner mentor. You can't go straight to leaping because you just won't leap. So you need some kind of inner tools of how do I even quiet a little bit that voice of self-doubt and so on.

Then when it's, you know, when you have that, you can really start to get into action and move out of hiding. And a leap is, I have six, there's six criteria for a leap. It's not just anything that makes you feel wild and crazy and fully alive, which I'm constantly misunderstood as that. Nope. There's six criteria. Chris is on his way to leap right now, I think, maybe based on that.

You hear the six criteria leap. Okay. that okay so it's something that uh relates to your playing bigger whatever that means to you it's an action that or a project that you can finish in under two weeks it gets your adrenaline flowing so it's gotta kind of take you out of your comfort zone? And it's something that has a learning question at its heart. And this is one of the kind of hardest ones for people to understand what that means. It means that there's something you want to learn through doing the leap. You might want to learn, do I really like memoir writing as much as I think I'm going to?

You might want to learn, do I really like memoir writing as much as I think I'm going to? Or if you're going out on a fundraising meeting, maybe the learning question is, are the investors for this company who I think they're going to be? But there's a specific question you've highlighted that you can gather data on by doing the leap. And then another key part is it's not something that's done in isolation. It's something that brings your work into contact with the people that you want to influence or reach. So writing your mission statement is not a leap. But writing your mission statement and sharing it with a few potential board members to get their feedback is a leap. Drafting the next five blog posts, not a leap. But get their feedback is a leap. Drafting, you know, the next five blog posts, not a leap, but drafting and publishing is a leap, so on. So the idea is you're moving into action really quickly. You're doing a messy version of something that will probably feel

quite out of control and icky to you, but you're getting yourself into action. And the, you know, it has great practical benefits because you learn and you get into action and it has great emotional benefits because it really forces you to really confront whatever fears have been keeping you hiding. I love all the things you've wrapped around that because there's really no substitute for actually doing something versus. Hey, y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations.

We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were,

how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Analyzing, thinking about contemplating versus an action that you can take that moves things forward and you gather some real data on what's happening. Yeah, and it's very paradoxical in a way because we all avoid doing this. Like, you know, instead of just sending off that one book chapter to, you know, someone to

read, we like spend years reorganizing our table of content, you know, like we do that because it feels safer. But I always find as much as people avoid those leaps, once they take them, they always write to me and they're like, that was so much fun, you know, and now I'm talking to the people that I wanted to be talking about and I'm so energized. So it actually feels really good once we get over the initial fear. So one of the things I wanted to talk about in the book, you talk about a thing that I think we all have a lot of challenges with, and that is how to make a change, which a lot of us know how to do, but how do we stay with that change? So we've made a change. How do we keep it going? Well, this is so important, right? Because it is where most of our efforts fall short. And my

approach with this, it actually comes out of my own experience with food and eating and sugar, which I come from a family of sugar addicts. I grew up an overweight kid. You know, no one I am related to can, has any control over what happens when they come into contact with sugar. And, and at a certain point in my life, I, you know, really felt I had suffered too much with this and, uh, gave up sugar successfully and a lot of refined carbohydrates that I also, my body couldn't really handle and didn't eat them, um, for over a decade. It's now with a brief hiatus of pregnancy when I was extremely ill and really needed to eat crackers, it's probably about 12 or 13 years now. Yeah, 13 years. And so people would always, you know,

if I was at a party and they'd like, oh, I don't eat sugar. And then they'd say, well, what do you mean? Did you like give it up for New Year's? And I'd say, no, I haven't had it, you know, in seven years. And they'd be like, what? I don't have the willpower for that. And I always felt it was so important to look them straight in the eye and say the truth, which is this has nothing to do with willpower. And it was such a powerful learning for me because so many times in my life, I had tried to change my eating or my weight through willpower and always failed miserably. And in the end, what allowed me to make that change sustainably really was almost the opposite of willpower. It was setting up my life and my routines and

the supports in my life in such a way that that change became truly doable. And that meant different things at different points. So in the beginning, it was more dramatic. Like I have to nap a lot more because I used to use sugar for energy. And so now I'm finding I'm actually exhausted by 4 p.m. if I don't have sugar at my disposal or I'm going to take these things out of my house. And then it became much more kind of mellow supports as I got more used to that new way of living. But what that evolved into for me is anytime we want to make a sustainable change, anytime I want to make a sustainable change, I now don't think about, well, how am I going to rally myself up? And am I going to get my shit together? Nope. It's more like, how do I design what I call

a success architecture that is going to support me? And that would include who are my champions going to be? People cheering me on. What is my source of accountability? What are the small pieces that I've broken this down into the small milestones and thinking of my steps in that way? What kind of spiritual energy can I draw on here? Like what do I feel I'm in partnership with in doing this that's larger than me? How do I make what I want to do the default? There's seven or eight things that are to me like the possible elements and then you can make your own recipe from those elements of what you need for that success architecture. Yeah, the data is really overwhelming in that idea of setting up external support for things.

The main thing I work with people on coaching on is behavior change. And it's amazing how much we do think it's a willpower or a discipline thing. I like the term that you use there, making things structural in your life. There's some study that shows that the more factors of influence that you bring in, and there's five or six different kinds, your chances of being successful just like double every time. Yeah. And this goes back to, right, I mean, it's the ultimate, what are you feeding in your life? What are you supporting and getting away from? I'm not sure if it's just our human fantasy that

we have control or if it's our American individualism thing that makes us think, you know, we should be able to say, I will it. I wrote it down in my New Year's goal list, therefore it will happen. But, you know, that's just not how we're, my sense is not how we're wired. And in the book I share, there's a stat from the American Psychological Association that people, Americans reported, they feel their number one reason that they're not meeting their goals is lack of willpower. And so we need to look at that. If everyone thinks that they individually lack the willpower they're supposed to have, that means there's probably something illusory about our expectation of what willpower is supposed to be able to do for us.

Yeah. You referenced Kelly McGonigal in your book. She's got great writing on it. We had Carrie Patterson on the show who wrote a book called Influencers, which has a lot of this information. Switch by the Heath Brothers. I mean, there's a lot of stuff out here we had bj fogg on the show and there's a lot of studies and a lot of things out there about how

building habits and behavior change is it's an art and a science but there's a lot of clear things that we can do because willpower is ultimately kind of like a mood and moods just by their very nature fluctuate a great deal i love that willpower is like a mood. That's great. So one of the last things I want to talk about, and it's related to this idea of willpower and discipline. And you talk about it in a similar section of the book, but I just think it's so, so important. And I love the idea, which you said the self-criticism is associated with less motivation and worse self-control. But we tend to think that the way we get things done is to be really hard on ourselves.

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because every time I go and teach a workshop or give a lecture about the inner critic, one of the first questions I get is from someone who says, but what if your inner critic is like your best ally? And then they'll talk about how through their life, they've done better work because of that voice that says, you know, that wasn't good enough, or that's going to, you need to double check it again and, and all of that. And I can relate to that and, you know, going through parts of my career and school being very fueled with the fear of messing up. And that was my motivator. The problem with that, there's a few problems with it. One is if you have stress hormones flooding through your body as a source of motivation for your great work, that over time is going to have a really bad impact on your health.

This is not what our friend Kelly McGonigal would deem the good stress. This is like, right, the fear of like and the belief that I am screwing it up or I'm about to screw it up and I have to do a bunch of things to not screw it up. to screw it up and I have to do a bunch of things to not, not screw it up. Um, but the bigger issue to me is that that kind of inner critic being tough on yourself, that doesn't actually motivate you to do your most important, glorious work. Like what the inner critic motivates you to do, what being hard on yourself motivates you to do is work a few hours later, you know, read that document again and make a bunch of changes you just decided in that moment are needed, even though you've done it 10 times already. You know, think that you need to go fix this and that about yourself before you do A, B, or C. So it's never going to motivate you to do the most important moves in your career, which would be the

I'm speaking up even though I don't feel ready. I'm doing this thing that I was asked to do even though I can't believe I'm qualified. I'm taking a risk and sharing creative work in the world. I'm saying something on this topic even though no one else in the room is talking about it the way I'm thinking about it. That's where we get to share our individual gifts. That's where we get to move our world beyond the status quo and help it move forward. And that is not a kind of expression into the world that being hard on yourself will ever help you move toward it will move you away from it. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And even with things that we think it will help us with, like motivation and basic self control. A lot of the studies seem to show that that being extremely self critical and hard on ourselves actually is less effective than being encouraging and supportive to ourselves. For sure. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I really

enjoyed the book. We'll have links in our show notes to your book and a lot of your writing online. So thank you. Thanks so much for having me and thanks everyone who is listening today. Okay, take care. Thanks. Okay, bye. Okay. Take care. Okay. Bye. Bye. Y'all can learn more about this podcast and Tara more at one, one, youfeed.net slash Tara. And don't forget to visit me at Chris's Barbecue Tofu. This is Chris, sole proprietor.