We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - 193. MICHELLE OBAMA!

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

MICHELLE OBAMA! 1. How to develop the one tool that has sustained Mrs. Obama throughout her entire life. 2. How to identify whether you’re deeply satisfied or deeply stuck – and how to reach for the goal of living “comfortably afraid.” 3. What we never knew about Mrs. Obama’s incredible father, Fraser C. Robinson III, and how he shaped her life.  4. How to avoid what Mrs. Obama calls, “Getting lost in the battle of explaining yourself.” 5. How to finally live in your own Enoughness.  Read Mrs. Obama’s glorious new book THE LIGHT WE CARRY.   TW: @MichelleObama IG: @MichelleObama

People. It's happening. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Look at you guys. Look at you. We are so unbelievably grateful that you trusted us with this. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God.

More than you can imagine. And my husband is like, oh, and I told him I was going to do this. He was like, oh, they're pretty good. He probably didn't sound exactly like that. Yeah, yeah. We will take it. We'll take it. Okay, I'm all yours. Welcome to the most thrilling day we've ever had. Long ago, when sister and Abby and I heard that Mrs. Obama had a new book coming out, I remember saying to sister on the phone, just please God let it be like, here's everything I know about how to humor. That's what I said to my sister. And it is, Mrs. Obama's newest, glorious book. The Light We Carry is about how she humans, woven through her deeply intimate stories are her personal humaning tools, her concrete strategies for navigating life, marriage, motherhood,

and career with grace and grit, with toughness and tenderness. Mrs. Obama believes that everyone has a light. And her book and accompanying new show The Light Podcast is about ways to protect and rekindle our light, see and amplify the light in others, and light up the world together. We are outrageously honored that Mrs. Obama is joining the pod squad today to shine her warm, life-giving light on all of us. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things, Mrs. Michelle, Levan, Robinson, Obama. Yeah. Thank you to the pod squad. I am huge. fans of all of you and what you're trying to do with this conversation that you have. So this was the perfect place to come and talk about the light we carry. So thank you for having me.

I'm thrilled and remember, call me Michelle. Okay, okay. Because we cannot have a real conversation with his Mrs. Obama stuff. So you now have permission. Thank you. Okay. You are so known and beloved. Your husband, so known and beloved. Your mama, Marion Lewis Robinson, so known and beloved. And since reading The Light We Carry, I cannot stop thinking about your father. I fell absolutely in love with him. And suddenly what was previously your inexplicable well of grace and tenacity and steadiness became explicable to me. And I mourned for you that you lost him so early. And I mourned for our nation that we didn't have the chance to know him and love him. And I just wondered if you could tell

us about Frazier Robinson III and how the way he lived every day shaped your understanding of life. Well, that's a beautiful way to start. Because, you know, I introduced my dad in becoming, but this book allowed me to really dive into the lessons that both he and my mom have taught me that keep me upright. If they were alive, they would have their podcast. If I could convince them that their wisdom was actually valuable, which my mother still doesn't believe. So this is my way of sharing some of those little tidbits. But my dad, you know, as you could hear in the story that I tell about it, I mean, it's really a special, special man.

And the older I get, the more that I realize how fortunate Craig and I were to be parented by these two amazing people. But when I think about my dad, especially in these times when there is so much anxiety, so much fomo, so many people who seem to be dissatisfied with their lives, My dad lived the opposite way. For many reasons, you know, in this day and age, he had every reason to feel dissatisfied, disappointed, shaken, anxious about his life. You know, he was a black man that grew up in some of the most segregated times of this country, although he was incredibly talented and gifted. He was an artist, a sculptor. He got a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, but he could. He could. to 10 because that's not what men did, especially if you were working class. He needed to get a job and support his family. He didn't come from the kind of background where he had parents who would understand investing in art. So he had this thing in him, but he couldn't go to college. He had

get a job. And my father had a disability. It was MS. It affected his ability to walk, but he didn't have it his whole life. He grew up with the ability to walk. He was an athlete. He was a boxer. He was a swimmer. He was a very active, engaged man. And then he couldn't walk without the assistance of a cane crutches.

So if you were to lay out someone in these times who should bemoan their life and their fate, it would be somebody like my father. But he lived just the opposite. He was the kind of person who lived by the motto is like, you count your blessings. I talk about in the book how the one thing he used to say to us as kind of an admonition to me and my brother is when we ever did something where it seemed like we were looking at the other person's plate, he'd say never satisfied. I mean, that still rings through my head every day. Never satisfied. You wanted an extra scoop of ice cream. Never satisfied. You know, he taught us to value what was on our plate. And when I talk to my kids, Malia and Sasha these days,

one of the things that I remind them is that one of the gifts my parents have is that they have learned to be content, self-content, to be satisfied with where they are now at the moment and not looking over at the grass is always greener. My father lived that way. And as a result, he was one of the happiest people that I knew. because he valued what he had. He didn't look at what the other guy had and worry, well, he didn't measure himself against

somebody else's values. I think that's a gift, and it's a gift that I try to mirror, you know, because the truth is, I know some of the most powerful, wealthy, famous people. You name them. I probably have met them. Many of them are my friends. They're not the happiest people I know, because when you're always wanting someone, something else. When there's a hole that you can't fill in yourself, you're never satisfied,

you know. But my father, Frasier Robinson, he was a uniquely satisfied man. And I think that's probably the best way to introduce him in this conversation. You're transparent that a public political life was maybe not your first choice or second or third life choice and that you decided to take your foot off the gas on your own career because of how you wanted your family to operate. You call your husband your greatest disruptor. And you say that marriage is an ever-evolving compromise. So we need to know what compromises has he made to make your relationship work and how are you a disruptor of his life? Yeah. Well, first, can I get just an amen on that? compromise because I share that because I meet so many young people who haven't grasped that

about the challenge of marriage. I see so many people lunging towards the ceremony, especially in this day and age. There's so much emphasis placed on the proposal and the balloon thing. Everybody's getting engaged 12 different places and they've got 12 dresses and they've got these, you know, idea pages and flowers. And all I do is shake my head and go, ooh, you're going to be so surprised. When the real of marriage hits, all the hard work because it seems like a party, a show. And in this day and age, that's what we show people about marriage. You know, folks like me and Barack, a joke that we're hashtag couples' goals. People see us in our best state, you know, the fifth bumps. the high fives, the family going to church, and we show our best selves all the time, sadly.

And so I think it confuses people when we're not completely honest. And so I find that young people give up on marriage too early because they think that it's all about the great moments and it's really about pushing through the tough moments. So if we don't share those, if couples like me and Barack don't share those times, then we're not really giving the best advice that we can. And so compromise is right in the middle of it all. And, you know, people look at what I've done because I've been so vocal about the fact that I wasn't interested in politics. It looks like I'm the one that's the primary person who's compromised.

And because I'm the woman in this relationship, generally that is the case. But the truth is that, you know, Barack has compromised in big and small ways throughout our relationship. I mean, just on the temperament side, right? We are totally different people. I love being around people all the time. I can talk to people all day. I'm never exhausted from company. So that's just my natural personality.

Barack loves people, but he also is more of a loner. He likes that time to himself. So he's had to compromise and come to the middle on, you know, come out of your hole for a minute. Let's talk. One of the things I shared when we were first dating, because we were long distance after he went back to law school because he was going into a second year and I was still practicing. But he told me he's like, man, I'm not much of a phone guy. And I'm like, oh, you're about to be.

You're about to be a phone guy because if this is going to work, you know, you're going to be talking to me every night for hours, you know. So, lo and behold, he became a phone guy. Maybe I was talking more than he was. Maybe he was doing more listening. So those are temperamentally, you know, you come to these relationships as completely different people. I talk about him being a swerver, and I was a person that liked my feet to the ground and dinner every night at a certain time. And he had to compromise on how our family was shaped. I think I was right in many of those decisions, as I always think I am.

But I think he's had a step back on decisions that I've made for our children because a lot of times he wasn't there. He has backed me on some crazy decisions. Malia's first major punishment for something that she did, I grounded her for like a semester, you know? Whoa. Yeah, and that's what, that was his first reaction. It was like, oh, a semester, you know? And I was like, yeah, semester, that seems like, right? And I can see in his eyes, that nice round number, you know.

And he was sort of like, might be a little harsh, but if you said it, we're going to go with it. And he went with it, you know, and I was wrong. It was way too long. It had no effect. But that's another story. So, you know, even in the way we raise kids and the decisions that we make, he knows that he's got to have my back, especially we've got to be that unites. at front. So he doesn't always agree, but he won't disagree with me in front of the kids. And his compromises really allowed me to step back in those times that I wanted to step back.

I talk in becoming about the decision I made to walk away from a very lucrative corporate law career to work in the city and then nonprofits and all of those decisions of mine, you guys, were financially problematic. Because we had the same. amount of debt, but each job I took I made less money. And so the only way I could do that and he and I together could still pay down our school debt was that he took on more of the financial responsibility. At one point when he was a state senator, he was literally holding down three full separate careers.

He was a state senator. He was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, taught two courses, one in con law. He taught con law while he was state senator. Oh my God. And he was still doing appellate work at a law firm so that I could make less money, so that I could make the choice to work part-time when I had the girls. There are so many ways that that's like what your dad did with your mom. Yeah. Yeah. And that, let me tell you, that's one of the reasons why I fell in love with my husband. at his core, he reminded me of my father. You know, this honorable, decent, he is who he says he is kind of person, doesn't care about the external stuff, doesn't sweat the small stuff.

And I was just so happy that my father got a chance to meet Barack before he passed. My father couldn't walk me down the aisle, but Barack got his blessing. And that meant the world to me. So, so yeah, my husband compromises, even though I don't always talk about it. Oh, you don't need to. Yeah, why should I talk about too much? Talk about it too much, you know. It's a new year, and instead of trying to reinvent myself, I've been asking a simpler question.

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openly and courageously about your struggles, it really shifts something fundamentally in someone like me who may hypothetically have been thinking, I was doing it all wrong. And I am now like, maybe I wasn't doing it all wrong. Maybe this is just how it is. And so I deeply, deeply thank you for that because I agree with you that people aren't doing that in the world. And it's so important. And I wondered if you could share with us more about what the challenges of having young kids are on a marriage. Oh, my goodness. And what are the gifts of a long partnership on the other side of, say, a decade of not being able to stand each other? Well, this is what we don't talk about.

I joke about it all the time. I mean, if I were to track the hardest years of our marriage. the times when I was most resentful was the time when the kids were little because they suck the oxygen out of all living things. Thank you. Can that be your next book? They suck the oxygen out of all living things. Yes, that's a good working title.

But nobody tells you that. And I had to work hard to have my children. I wanted them desperately. I wrote in Becoming. We went through IVF. We had unexplained infidelity. As more and more people are doing, it wasn't unexplained. We were in our 30s trying to get pregnant. But nobody talked about that. You just felt bad in the moment. You felt like you were broken in some way. So just that emotional trauma alone, how that impacts a marriage. Because nobody talked about it. I don't think that we had the tools to know how. how much of a challenge that was for us. I was feeling bad about myself. I was depressed. I had a miscarriage.

I didn't understand why we couldn't get pregnant. It was one of these things when you're a hard driving person, you decide what you want. And then you go after it and you get it. And then the one thing you want that you really, really want, it's out of your control. That was one of the first experiences that I had. So I was going through stuff.

We don't talk about postpartum. I don't think I had it, but who knows? We never talked about what having kids does to your hormones. And we didn't have the language. We didn't have the knowledge. So let's just start there, right? That's before they even arrive. That's before they even get here. And breastfeeding, you know, doesn't work out right. So who you mad at? Him. It's like, you can't help me. What are you doing? There's so. many ways that kids are hard on life. But we can't say that out loud because we love them. And as Barack and I say, that's why God makes them cute. But there's just this thing about them, right? You know, they're just so you can't be mad at them because of them. All right? So who are you going to take it out on? You take it out on each other. The sleepless night, the worries. I mean, the endless Worries. My kids will be 22 and 25 this year. Let's just stop there. That's kind of shocking, right? Those two little people. They're grown women in the world. They are away from us. And you would think that that would create less stress. But no, more stress because guess what? They're out there on their own,

taking planes, living in apartments, driving cars, having relationships. It never ends. And no one tells you about this. They just say, have a baby. It's going to be great. It's going to bring you together. No, it's very hard because you love them. And so I think that we got to talk about that. So that when young couples do run into those struggles, they don't think that they're broken. It's like, no, this is the hardest thing you're doing. Marrying another individual, melding two lives, do different ways of being, and then adding more life into that mix. And then you don't even know what kind of kids you're going to get because that's another thing they don't tell you. Have one. Maybe you think you're a great parent, right? You're like, ooh, I got this down. And then the second one shows up.

And they are not having any of your first child decisions. They don't even abide by that, right? Let me not talk because I want to hear, I want to hear that I'm not crazy. No, I just feel that so much. I mean, I really thought I was a really good parent when I had my first kid. I did. People would complain and I'd be like, oh my God. Oh, what? And then I had the second. And I was like, oh, this has nothing to do with me. That's right.

It's the good news and the bad news. And Barack goes through that because our first, Malia, they're both brilliant, of course. Malia was more of the, she's more of an appeaser. She's a people pleaser. She was in many ways. So I think Barack thought that he was really. interesting to young people. You know, the difference in like when they were teenagers, where Malia would say, all right,

I'm going out this weekend. I think I need to go in and give dad like 15 minutes, right? And she would go into a treaty room in the White House and she'd ask him, so tell me about Syria. And, well, I saw that you gave a speech on blah, blah, blah. You know, she'd just go in and he'd come out with his chest pumped up. up, you know, and I'd be like, do you know where she's going this week? And he was like, oh, no, I didn't even ask. It's like, ooh, ooh, that's some jujitsu on you because you were so thrilled with the fact that she took interest in your presidency that you don't even know what

she's doing, right? Then Sasha shows up, and Sasha's totally like, don't touch me, don't look my way, I don't need to please you. You're annoying. He got a lot of that. He was stunned, And I tell them, it's like she's going to come around, you know. And now at 21, they just got off the phone last night. She called him looking for advice. And it just took her longer. But he was devastated. We used to joke, he's like, Borak is so scared of Sasha.

You know, he's so desperately trying to win her approval. And she was having none of it. So it's like that they're different kids. And so that can take you for a loop, right? Yes. We don't know how they think the way they do. And if you care too much about them liking you, you're already losing. That's right.

That's good. Okay. Yes. So what I hear you saying then is the inverse of that is if they don't like us, we're nailing it. Right. Or you want some balance of it. Yes. One of my sayings, which I hear myself saying it, it's like, don't talk to me that

way, I'm not one of your little friends. It's like, we're not friends. I love you. I love you desperately, but we're not on the same plane. And they don't even want you to be on the same plane. They want boundaries and authority. So I urge young people who are thinking about having kids. It's like, think about why you're having kids. Because in my view, we're not supposed to have kids to fulfill something in us that we're missing. As my mom, Marion Robinson said, we are here as parents to raise individuals. And we have to be thinking along those lines.

And if you have a baby because you need a friend, well, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Because with your friends, you make accommodations for your friends, right? And with kids, you can't make accommodations. They're three, four, they're unreasonable. They don't know anything. You know, I mean, they have no facts, no logic. So we can't treat them like they have sense all the time.

I mean, we want to treat them like they're capable. In my view, kids aren't supposed to be your friends because the job is too big to worry about whether they like you or not. And no matter what you do, they will find a reason not to like you. That's their job to push against us. And if we get pushed a little bit and we cave, well, then we're giving them no way. foundation. We're giving them no base. And a lot of times, that's what they're testing. They're trying to test, can I push you like I can push my friends? And the answer has to be no, absolutely not. You know, there's some consistency, there's some predictability and how I'm going to react to you. And we don't

do that with our friends. That's right. So you mentioned your mom. So on this podcast, we're always asking this question of, are we supposed to change our kid for the world? Or are we supposed to change the world for our kit. Okay? This is like a repetitive theme. You, through your mother's wisdom, give us a third way, which rocked all of our worlds and is one of the many things about the book we haven't stopped talking about. So you write that whenever you or your brother complained about how people in the world were responding to you, who liked you and who didn't, your mother would say, come home. We will always like you here. Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. It's simple and so not simple.

It's such a brilliant way of refusing to either change other people to like your kid or change your kid to be more likable. And instead, it's just offering your very self as a safe accepting celebratory sanctuary from this unpredictable, uncontrollable world. How did knowing come home we will always like you here, help shape who you are? Oh, wow, profoundly. Profoundly, because when you have a base of love, you know, and not everyone has it, right? You know, you have a place to come where people are glad to see you.

They're happy to hear your voice. They're happy that you're alive. I grew up with that. So it didn't take away the pains, the fears, the hurts of the world, but it gave me a safe. place to land, to lick my wounds, to build up my courage to go back out into the inevitable chaos. And that is more powerful than book knowledge, what I find myself falling back on and have fallen back on throughout my life. It's that general enoughness that my parents gave me at home that helped me settle myself and learn how to heal myself from the inevitable, you know, flux of the world. I fall back on it to this day. I try to emulate it with my own kids. I try to replicate it for kids that I come in contact with. Just this notion of we cannot control the world, nor should we. So all we can do is control

our own selves to protect our own light, but if no one has shown us the value of our light, it's hard to do it, you know, if we didn't, you know, and it doesn't have to be a parent. I say that because I know that there are people who don't have it in their homes. But that light, that feeling of enoughness, that feeling of gladness can come at school from a teacher. I just want young people to search it out and to run after it. they see it and they recognize it, because that's all we can control. I wish I could fix the world for my kids. I'm no different than any other mother. I am a mama bear. To this day, my kids

come to me with a problem, and the first thing I was like, well, give me a name. Yes. Thank you for that. Thank you. Yeah. Who's she? What's her last name? You know, And they're like, mom, mom, don't start Googling people, you know. I have that in me. I will fight to the death for my kids, but they have to live in the world, you know, and they have to fight their own battles and they have to know that they can. My mother was good at that. I knew she always would have my back, my parents.

I could come home. I could tell them anything. I could complain. And a lot of times when you're a kid, you don't even want them to do anything. That's right. You know, you just want to be heard. My mom spent so much time doing this that I didn't realize. It was more like, mm-hmm, oh, really?

What did you? You know, that was most of my conversation. I was like, yet another thing. And then she let me spin like the Tasmanian devil, and I just run out of energy. And she would end with, well, do you need me to do anything? And the answer was usually, well, no. I actually felt better after letting it all out, right? That's what my poor little working class home life was like.

And we had no money. My parents didn't go to college. They didn't have networks. They didn't have any of that. But they had that enoughness, that enoughness in themselves to be confident that what was going on at 74-36 South Euclid was just as powerful. is what might have been going on in the White House or somebody else's nicer house,

that our world was secure because we had love and respect for each other. That's like so much more powerful than trying to fix the world so that your kid never experiences pain, never experiences failure. There's nothing wrong with those feelings, with those experiences if they have a safe place to land.

And they learn how to build that for themselves as they become adults. Yes. That's where the kitchen table comes in, too. If you have it at home, now you know how to replicate it and build it for yourself when you go out in the world because it's not just coming from your mom, your dad, your home life. You've got to know how to build relationships with people who sustain you, right?

And that's part of that kitchen table. My parents taught me that. So my relationships are just as valuable to me with my friends as they are with my parents because I need them desperately. I need the enoughness that I get from my girlfriends, right? So I was able to go out into the world with that tool. And that tool has sustained me through being the first black, first lady, having people call me fat and names and, you know,

meeting the bully down the street or the professor at undergrad who didn't think I was smart enough or the council. who told me I couldn't go to Princeton. My attitude towards all that wasn't that it wasn't supposed to happen. I didn't feel like I was entitled never to experience that. But what I had was, I'll show you. I will show you because I know what failure feels like. I know how to go home and get the reassurance that I need,

and I will come back and I will prove all of you wrong. to me that's a better tool than being hurt or being afraid or shying away from the negative things of the world inevitably has waiting for our kids out there in the world. Yes. This show is brought to you by Alma. When I first tried to find a therapist, it felt like a scavenger hunt with no map, pages of names, long wait lists, voicemails that never got returned. I remember thinking if this is what it takes just to talk to someone, no wonder people give up. So when I found Alma, it felt like someone finally turned the lights on. Alma, ALMA, is this beautifully simple way to find licensed, in-network therapists without all the

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How does it feel to have your girls creating that with each other right now, that they're living together? We cannot stop talking about it. Is that the ultimate? The ultimate is the dream, right? You guys, it is the best feeling in the world. You know, and my kids have, they're already accomplishing some pretty amazing things out there. They're great students. They remain sane in a pretty unusual childhood. They've managed the negative and positive attention, great grades, gone to great colleges.

But the truth is, is that when I see them. building community with each other and taking that out and staying connected to their friends and creating their own rituals, I don't doubt that they can do the work that comes. I want to know that they can sustain themselves as human beings when I'm not here. Because let's stop there. My mother, of all people, and we roll our eyes, she's been preparing us for her death. And she's one of those morbid only. He's like, well, I'm not going to be here.

So you all better be able to. And I was like, oh, would you stop talking about the day you're gone, you know? But she's getting us ready because she's like, I don't want my kids falling apart because I'm not here. You know, what's the point of that? And so I find myself feeling the same sense of gratitude for my girls because I feel like they're getting to the point where they don't need me. And that feels good. They like me. They like us.

They like being around us, but they don't need us. And I think that was our job, right? As parents. That's our job. That's it. You know, not to be wanted, need it. I don't want to be grading your papers or reading your assignments. I don't want to go to school with you again because I don't want to do that again.

I want you to be able to handle your business. I want you to be able to handle your disputes when somebody is racist. I want you to be able to look them in the eye and know that you're ready. I see that in them. And that gives me a great sense of relief. And that's what I would urge all parents to think about. We can hold on and try to fix the world for our kids. But, Dag, if we do that, we're going to be doing that for the rest of our lives.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's like a lot. So we're already so tired from having these kids. We're already exhausted, right? And you get older, you get more exhausted. I don't have the energy for that. I don't want to go through a.

first job again. I want to watch you do it. Tell me about it. I did it already. So I find that I enjoy my life more, my kids more because I taught them to be competent and independent and we practiced it for a long time. And that's why I want parents to know it's like the helicoptering is something you can never let go of. And that seems exhausting. It doesn't seem like a great way to live. Let's start getting our kids ready earlier. We can't. can't wait until they're 23 and out of the house to teach them that they can get themselves up in the morning, that they can handle their homework, that they can deal with disputes at school and with their friends. Let them practice. Let them fail. Let them get hurt because that's waiting for them. Yes, it is. You know? And if the first time they experience a losses in their 30s, they're going to fall apart. We have to help our kids understand. stand their way through because this next thing is scary. So much of your book is so helpful in teaching us about how to look our fears in the eye. And you said that fear comes from within,

which means that denying your fear almost always involves denying a part of yourself. Yeah. That rings so true inside of me. And it feels like since that is true, then when you're facing a fear, whether you are succumbing to it or overcoming it, you're always denying a part of yourself. So my question is, how do you know that it's the right part of yourself to deny? How do you know if it's the anxiety or it's the intuition? If it's the oppressor or the liberator? How do you identify that voice, which part of yourself is the right part of yourself to deny?

Cool, deep, good question. For me, it's practice. It's like, it's self-knowledge. And self-knowledge takes time. And I think that that's the frustrating thing about your 20s and your 30s. You don't know because you haven't had enough practice with yourself. Unless you have dealt with a whole lot of trauma and have been pushed in ways. And there are a lot of people out there who have had to learn a lot about themselves.

And they sadly have done it without much guidance and ability or time to be self-reflective about it. But I find that that's one of the things like, you know, you learn yourself over time. I have learned by taking risks and doing hard things that over the course of what will be these coming on my 60th year of life. I'm getting better. I'm still now just getting better at making those kind of distinctions, right? I know when my fear is real and I have to pay attention to it and I know when my fear, as I write in the book, is trying to keep me stuck, is trying to keep me from growing. I've learned it more and more because I've done harder and harder things. That roller coaster ride that you go on when you're doing something that's hard but not dangerous. It's just scary.

And you know that feeling when, ooh, I'm about to fall off this mountain. Yes. And I just don't want young people to think you know it right away because I find that young people, if they can't distinguish it right away, they think they don't know themselves. And it's like, well, you've got to try on a few things. Everybody's going to have their first, their first time, you know, getting on a bus by themselves, you're learning something there. That's, that competence. That's giving your kids the practice in independence. Just riding a public bus tells you some things about, is it the bus ride or is it that scary dude that just got on at the third stop? And what do I do under those circumstances? Do I can just put my headphones down and not listen or watch or keep my

eyes open? Or do I get off and run? It takes practice, you know, going away from home, for the first time, right? That's a first that really test that whole is, should I stay home and not go away to school? Because I don't want to be away from the things that are familiar to me. And we all know if you've gotten a chance to go away to school, it could be that those first six weeks, even three months, can be horrible. Oh, you don't know anybody.

They are horrible, you know. and you don't have a friend, you don't know how to be alone yet, you don't even know how to get to the library, but you don't realize that that's going to pass. You don't not go to college because the first six weeks or even the first three months, they're going to be hard because guess what, in three months you'll make a friend or at least you'll know your roommate or you'll get used to the pace of college.

So that fear isn't a fear that should stop you. Starting your first job, move into a job, move into a new city. I mean, all of that. But the more that we do, the more that I've done I know in my life, the more I can make the distinction. But if you're holding on to your child, to yourself, if you're never taking that first leap, you never get to practice it. And there's so many people who live in their comfort zones forever. And they make their world small. I wrote about some of those people in my life, my grandparents were those people. Sometimes my mom can be. My mom is well, I tease her, she's like, she's well practiced in the art of no. Because guess what? When you're a black woman raised on the

south side of Chicago, Chicago was a very segregated city, you know, going out into the wrong neighborhood could mean you were going to get beat up, killed. There are some real fears there. So people were more reticent about stepping outside of their family, their neighborhood, right? So my mom's got that naturally. But as she's grown up with us, she pushed us. And now I find that I'm pushing her. It's like, yes, mom, you do want to go to China with us. You do want to move into the White House.

We need you. It's going to be an interesting experience. You do want to meet the Pope for a second time. You do want to go to Venice. I mean, look, I have. If I've said that so many times to my mom, I'm like, mom, come on. We're going to meet the Pope. But her first response to everything is, no, why would I want to do that?

Yeah. Is that the flip side of being deeply satisfied? When you're talking about a deeply satisfied person, is. Yes, it's stuckness sometimes. And so now the test is, are you satisfied or are you afraid? which is it. And these are all questions that we all have to ask ourselves. Are we satisfied or are we scared of the new?

And I talk about that being a part of bigotry, racism, unbeknownst to some of us, that we just get caught in our comfort. We block out all the new. And so now we don't know any new. We just do the same thing all the time. And we don't realize that that newness is keeping us blocked off. from other, because other gets scary, right? Yeah.

And so, as I said, when I went to places like Princeton for the first time of my life, and I realized, wow, there are whole places in this country that are wealthy, white, and don't even know I exist. Oh, my God. And these are people who have money, right? They live in worlds where they don't see, you know, smart, young black women from Chicago. They don't even know I exist. So me realizing that gives me more empathy because I'm like, well, it's going to take you a minute to know that I even exist.

But we need to challenge each other on those fronts because that gets dangerous when we're only living in our safe zones. Yes. Because then we don't know our neighbors. And then that means somebody can tell us something crazy about our neighbor. That's not even true. We're susceptible to lies and misconstrued notions. People who were afraid that Barack Obama was a terrorist, that he was a Muslim, that he was, that we were other, that our family was so different that we posed a threat to the nation, right? I don't want to dwell on that part of ourselves, but that was a part of the challenge of being the first black family in the White House.

People didn't know black people, you know? They didn't know what we would do. How do we think it's so different? You know, that fist bump that I gave them, that was a terrorist fist bump, right? It wasn't just a, yo, dude, we just won. You know, that could be misconstrued as something dangerous. And so we all know people who were stuck in their sameness in that regard. And not because they're inherently bad people.

they're just afraid, right? That's why we have to talk about what we have to dissect our fear. And I want young people to dissect their fear early so that we don't get stuck in just what we know. But that takes practice. It takes constantly pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones. And how do I know? Because I've been doing it for 60 years now.

And I still don't have it right. I still don't always know myself because, as I said, in becoming, we are always evolving. The journey, that evolutionary process never ends. You just get a little better in it. You become comfortably afraid, is what I write about in the light. And I think that's where I am. A little more self-aware, a little more comfortably afraid. So good.

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our inventory, and you can automate all those manual processes no one wants to do. Right now, get our free business guide, demystifying AI at netsuite.com slash hard things. The guide is free to you at net suite.com slash hard things. NetSuite.com slash hard things. You share really powerfully in the new book about the loneliness of onliness, of being the only black family or black woman in a space. And you also talk about the opportunity cost of onliness, which isn't talked about enough. So our son's friend recently texted me for advice from a days-long protest at Wellesley for

trans rights. And when I told Abby about the text, I said to her that when Emma texted from that days-long protest, I thought, what do you think the other kids in their English class are doing right now? They're studying. Yeah. Because they don't have the extra job of demonstrating for their own existence. So who's going to do better on Tuesday's test? Yeah. So what do you tell your daughters about how to protect their pressure?

time and energy in this world that will try to give them so many extra jobs. Yeah, yeah. I try to explain that very principle of getting lost in the battle of explaining yourself. Your example is perfect. That's what happens to onlys to women, people of color, you know, in sea suites and in boardrooms and in classrooms all over the world. There's a self-consciousness, there's an extra weight. There's a, as I say, this tray of expectations.

It's not even just within yourself, but it's the history that you represent. Everybody else's hopes and dreams that you're carrying on this tray across this tightrope. It can be exhausting. So what do I say to my daughters, other young people is like, first of all, let's acknowledge that that's happening. Because so many times is an only, right? you feel crazy. You feel like, you know, nobody else sees this. There's this ghost in the room that only you are experiencing.

And sometimes it's just important to remind young people, you're not crazy. This is actually happening. It is a burden. It is not right. But it is real. And acknowledging the realness of the problem for a lot of people is important. That's why there's so many young people who are trying to be seen. See me.

Right. See my struggle. See my thing. And it's important to say, yeah. But to go back to what my mom says, what I tell my girls is that this is the way the world is. We need to continue to work to change it. But you also cannot focus yourself solely on the onliness. And nobody can help you out of that but yourself. You have to constantly remind yourself what your job is, what your point is, what your purpose is. that's still work that you have to do in your 20s and 30s and focus as much on that as you do on fighting the battles or the past or the things that are in front of you because as you said, you have to bide your energy. You cannot take on every battle and you can't do it all at once. So there is a pacing that has to happen

and a lot of these young people have to be told that it's okay to pace yourself. And the other thing that I, you know, remind, young people is that your first, first and foremost, you have to do the job at hand. Right. And I tell young people that all the time, your job as a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, is not to fix the economy or to fix racism. Your job is to graduate. You know, you got to start with what's right before you, the thing you can control, you know. At 15, you can't fix your whole neighborhood that is being bombarded by drugs and crime, you 15-year-old can't do that, but you can do

your homework. You know, you can go to school every day. You can focus on your own mental health so that you can get up and go to school. Because if you don't get your education, don't get your high school diploma, you'll never have what you need to fight the battles when you actually have the power to do it. So I constantly urge people to do the job at hand. But that doesn't mean you're complacent. Let me say that because the young people will go back to the respectability, politics, and balance and patience. My own kids, they hate feeling like we're telling them to just be patient, right?

And it's not about being patient. It's about being strategic with your time, with your energy. It's about being smart. even as in the White House, as First Lady, one of the most power positions I've ever had, there were only a handful of things I could do. And if I tried to do too much, I would do nothing. That's why I had to be strategic about picking a handful of initiatives. And let me tell you, we got letters and people were disappointed.

Why didn't you do more on this? And you never talked about that. And you're like, you're right. You're right. I had to say no more than I said yes. I did as much as I could to go deep and not just broad. But I was also 40-something years old. I had been used to being in a strategic place.

I understood how to get things done, that you have to narrow and focus. I was practiced in that in a way that a lot of young people are still learning when they're the onlys in these other situations. It reminds me of what, sister, you said, the deep instead of just broad. It reminds me of what you were saying. So I was thinking about how the whole world knows you as when they go low, we go high. And this new transformational tool that you have in this book, we have started calling, when the stress goes big, we go small. Because the world is screaming at us, go big or go home.

Go big or go home. But you talk about the importance and the dignity of tending. to the small, what you call what is good, simple, and accomplishable. What makes the good, simple, and accomplishable so important and so dignified for us to do? Because in my view, that's how change happens. The real lasting change, you know, when we look over the course of human history, yes, there's the big wars, there's the depression, there's big stuff, the invention of the telephil, the invention of, the telephone and, you know, all of that stuff. That's all big and we write about it. But the way the world works is that we live, you know, we love, we bring life in, we teach from that life. It goes on and it does

better than us. Small things. I was First Lady of the United States of America, but the biggest job I've ever had, will ever have, is raising two human beings that I'm putting out into the world more empathetic, more compassionate. Is it glamorous? It should be more glamorous than what we make of it in this society because it's really pretty profound what we do to raise another human being, right? How we interact with other human beings in the world right now, people are losing their minds because we're all just being rude. Everybody is mad and impatient because we had a leader that led that way.

We pretended like it didn't matter, but it does. It matters how you lead. It matters how you show up in the world as a human being. Seems really small, not as big as being president in the United States. But look, a good teacher, a person who is a good teacher can have as great, if not a greater,

on the world than the president of the United States. To me, that's how change happens. It's not glamorous. And oftentimes, sadly, it's unsatisfactory, right? Because you are not going to live to see the fruits of your labor sometimes. And I think that that's our challenge with so much immediacy. You know, we want gratification now. We want wins now.

I think about all the older black folks and people who fought for civil rights and for change, who didn't live to see Barack Obama become president, but it didn't change the nature of their fight, the nature of their work, you know. And I hope we don't fall into that feeling. If it's not big and I can't see it, then what's the point? Because changes that day-by-day slow grind. It's the knitting that we do, you know, the analogy wise to open up the book with the power small and talk about my knitting is that that was something that became real clear to me over the course of the pandemic when the whole world shut down. And there was no big that could happen. And all we could do was to tend to our knitting, you know, to get up every day, to try to stay safe, to feed our families, to hug our loved ones. And for many, they didn't even have the luxury of being able to do that. And for us to feel like that at that moment, one of the most

profound moments in our lifetime, that the biggest thing we could do was to be small and to do what we could do, manage ourselves, our health, the people we were responsible for, our neighbors, our friends, that's life. That's the profound thing of it all to me, right? That it still all starts with what's in here, that light inside of us. The thing we can control, we can't control how people feel about us, how they see us, whether they're mean to us. We can control the thoughts in our head, how our soul operates. We can control the families that we raise, the neighborhoods that we live in, the smaller, the better. That's what we can control. And then that impacts the big. because if we're all doing that small job,

just imagine all the stuff we wouldn't have to be bothered with. If we all just tended to our knitting, there'd be so much we wouldn't have to worry about, right? If we all just tended to our knitting. Michelle Obama. I just called you Michelle Obama. You did it. I did it.

During even the really dark times over the last day. decade, you have been a consistent light. Yeah. Even when we can't see you, even when you're not in our your existence, who you are in the world, the way you walk through the world, the way that you wife, the way that you friend, the way that you lead, the way that you parent has been a consistent light to the point that when I got to the end of your book and you were talking about, are we still going to go high? Yeah. it was a part of me that thought maybe you were going to say we weren't. I don't know.

I just truly didn't know. The last page. Oh, there it is. And when you stayed steady, when you stayed the light that you are, I just cried. I just started crying. And I don't know what that is. It might be just that you have been one of the only constant, consistent things in the world for the last decade. So thank you.

We will be in your corner forever and ever. Amen. We love you. Thank you for this hour. Thank you for this platform. Thank you for the light. All of you are putting out there. This is that small power.

It's a conversation one at a time. We never know who's listening. You never know who's going to touch. But the fact that all three of you are putting your souls out there every day, taking that risk, I applaud you. That's why I wanted to be here with you. Thank you for not disappointing in the depth and breadth of the conversation. Thank you guys so much. If you knew that was our only goal, please don't

disappoint Michelle Obama. So thank you. We have done it. We can go now. Thank you so much. Love you guys. Love you. Love you so much. Thanks from coming on. Thank you. Wow. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, you all are smooth. Oh my God. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do each or all of these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do

Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right hand corner or click on Follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios. I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle. I walk through fire. I came out the other side. I chased desire I made sure I got was mine and I continued to believe that as I'm were adventurers and a final destination they stopped asking directions

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