Tami Simon: You are listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Tara Mohr. Tara is an expert on women’s leadership and well-being. Her work helps women play bigger in their work and in their lives. With an MBA from Stanford University and her undergraduate degree in English literature from Yale, Tara takes a unique approach that blends inner work with practical skills training and weaves together both intellectual rigor, and intuitive wisdom. She is the creator of the global Playing Big leadership program for women and she’s also the author or a new book, Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tara and I spoke about the fear that can stop us from realizing our most cherished dreams, and how to move ahead even when that fear is present. We talked about leaping and creating what Tara calls “a success architecture for actualizing what we most want to bring forward in the world.” And finally, we talked about the relationship between individual change and collective change in Tara’s vision of leadership that is diverse and equally includes the voice of brilliant women. Here’s my conversation with Tara Mohr:
Tara, you’ve written this beautiful and helpful new book, Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message, and you’ve addressed the book primarily to women—to women who are in a place in their life where they want to play bigger, and I’m curious what you think the differences are when women look to play big versus when men are looking at that same question in their own lives?
Tara Mohr: Hmm. I think the challenges, of course, are really different, because unfortunately today still, girls are socialized—if not by their families then often by the culture—to pay a lot of attention to how they’re perceived, to maybe pay more attention to how they’re perceived than to their felt experience from the inside out. They’re often also socialized be good girls, to follow the rules, to prioritize relationships and harmony in relationships over their relationship with themselves.
So there’s a lot of those things that come up, then, as barriers—internal barriers—for an adult woman when she wants to freely share her voice, to make change in the world, to make choices that other people might not applaud or understand. So, those barriers, I think, are quite different. And men have their own set that can be equally limiting, but are just not where my focus in my work has been.
Because the other thing that’s different is that of course, we have a dearth of women’s leadership—in our political life, corporate life, public life—still, and I personally felt in my own life like I was surrounded by brilliant women who couldn’t see their own brilliance: who were playing small, and I wanted to see them leading and I wanted to live in the better world that I knew their leadership would create and that’s why I have it the focus of my work. So this sort of call in our time for women to step forward in leadership is quite different than what the call is for men, which is probably more about redefining power, redefining success and leadership.
TS: Mhm. Now, in order to write and publish a book like Playing Big, you have to be ready to play big yourself and I’m curious what were . . .
TM: No, no one told me that! [That came out] belatedly! That’s the problem!
TS: No one told you that? Aha! [Well,] I’m curious to know what were the biggest obstacles for you or the biggest challenges you had to work through in order to be able to write a book like Playing Big?
TM: Yes. Well, the first was to embrace my creative self and my writer self, and that started way before the book—that started six, seven years ago. I’m someone who grew up loving writing, loving creating anything, loving dance, loving theater, loving art. And then I had the privilege of a really great education—Ivy League education, Yale and Stanford— where, I must say my analytical mind, my left brain, we could call it—rational thought, critical thought, reactive thought, was very well-developed and honed in those educational experiences. But for me, the true essence of creativity was absolutely squashed in those places.
So that led me into a kind of playing small where I was really afraid to create, afraid of failure, afraid of at not being liked, afraid of criticism. And so the first step in my own playing big was reclaiming my writing life. For me, that required first listening in word to a little voice that was saying, “Just write. Just start writing again.” And that voice was also saying, “And honey, we don’t mean grant proposals and write papers,” which is what I was writing at the time for my job.
It also required really letting go of my own inner critic’s voice judging my work and letting go of worrying about what other people were going to think about my writing, and writing just for me. So that was a huge—a huge kind of surrender and transition in my own life.
And then that’s just continued; as my writing and my work have gotten more visible, it’s a constant [struggle of], am I willing to challenge my inner critic on this one? Am I willing to not believe the voice that’s saying, “I’m not ready yet to write for that publication; I’m not ready to go on that TV show; I’m not enough of an expert on the topic.” I’ve got all of those voices inside of me; I think that’s why I’m so interested in talking to women about them and helping us all move past them. I really believe that we teach what we need to learn. And so that still goes on for me.
TS: Not worrying about what other people are going to think about your creative output— I imagine that’s a challenge for lots of people who are listening. So how can you help people with that?
TM: Yes. Well, there were a few pieces of that for me that made it possible. The first was really getting—and for me it was one day sitting at my computer trying to write, and just by grace having the thought pop into my head that said, “You know, Tara, if you’re going to write consistently you’ve got to write for you, you’ve got to write because you’re a woman who loves to write.” And so that day, I just tried to write one blog post from that space, for that reason—because I love to write—and I found I could do that that day and it helped make the words come out. And the next day, I sat down and tried to write again from that place, because I find so much joy in writing. And so that was a kind of, “It’s ok to write for that reason and I’m going to take this back for myself.”
And then the second concept that I find so helpful—and it applies not just to what people think about our creative output, but any kind of feedback, and I write about this a lot in the book—is that I came to understand that feedback only ever tells us about the person giving the feedback; it never tells us anything about ourselves. And I really believe that. It’s funny, when I was writing that section of the book, my editor kept like trying to change that line and she said, “Aren’t you really saying feedback doesn’t just tell you about yourself, it also tells you about the person giving the feedback?” and I said, “No, I really believe that.” I believe that if a million people said, “I don’t like your book, Tara,” that wouldn’t make me a bad writer and that wouldn’t make the book a bad book, but it would tell me a whole lot about what works for a reading audience, what works for contemporary readers.
And when we start to see feedback that way, it all becomes emotionally neutral information that does not take our egos on a huge roller coaster, but just gives us insight and then if we realize, “Hey, that insight is about people that I want to reach or influence or engage, I better pay attention to it.” And if it’s not, then I don’t necessarily need to pay so much attention to it. So it just becomes sort of strategic information that can help you achieve your aims, which I believe is the role of feedback; not ego boosts or ego wounds, and certainly not evaluations of your merit.
TS: Now, let’s say though, someone finds themselves really in a twist: really twisted up in a fear state of some kind. And, you know, they’re hearing what you’re saying, but they’re activated in some way when they think about really investing in their creative life and becoming more visible and other people seeing their work. You know, they may intellectually understand what you’re saying about [how] feedback relates to other people, but, you know, they’re in an activated state. How can you help that person? Is there anything you could say, or [could you share some] techniques?
TM: Well, I have a particular way of looking at fear, and I think it’s really helpful in the kind of situation that you’re talking about. It has to with the idea that there’s two kinds of fear—and this comes from a teaching from Rabbi Alan Lew, who is a brilliant spiritual teacher; I bet some of your listeners are familiar with his work. He talks about how in the Old Testament there are two different words for fear: one of the words used for fear is pachad and one of the words is yirah.
Pachad he defines as the fear of imagined things or projective things, so that’s our worse case scenario fear: ego-based, overreactive, lizard brain; the disaster’s coming, people are going to laugh at my blog post or my painting show or my presentation or whatever it is—I’m going to be, you know, booed out of the room; that kind of thing, that’s pachad. And when we learn to recognize it as that, we know, “OK, that is, by definition, overreactive fear, fight-or-flight; that’s going to mislead me. When I notice I’m feeling that, I’m going to look for ways to remember what it is and not take direction from it.” And there’s all kinds of practices, whether breath work, movement, visualization, that can just help us make the small shift to get out of that state of fear.
But then there’s this other kind of fear that also comes up when we are doing our creative work, and that Rabbi Lew defines—and this is the definition of that other term, yirah—in three ways. It’s one, the feeling that overcomes us when we’re inhabiting a larger space, literally or metaphorically than we are used to inhabiting; it’s the fear we feel when we possess more energy than we normally have; and it’s the feeling we feel when we’re in the presence of the divine or the sacred. So when we’re contemplating putting our creative work out there, we are in all three of those places: we’re touching the sacred in ourselves though that creative expression, we’re inhabiting a larger space in the sense of that visibility, and we’re often in possession of more energy than we’re used to, because we’re doing something that we’re passionate about, something that connects us to our core energy.
And so we feel this fear-like feeling—which is there, remarkably, in the Old Testament as yirah—that is very different from pachad in that it’s not overreactive, it’s not misleading, but it does bring us that adrenalin and that feeling of trembling and that feeling that feels a lot like fear, but it has this sacred element to it. And the power in knowing about that kind of fear and holding that concept of fear is then when we feel it, we can actually savor that feeling and welcome it. And that I believe really is part of the creative process and the process of sharing our work, is learning to sit with, breathe through, welcome that feeling of yirah.
TS: Do you have a method in your own experience for sorting which type of fear it is?
TM: Well, some people find, a lot of women I work with find that the physical experience of both is very different, so pachad— they both have a quality of adrenalin excitement to them, but pachad will also often come with a sense of constriction and tightness, whereas yirah can feel a little bit more like kind of the going downhill on the roller coaster or soaring through space— it has more of a sense of awe to it and more of kind of a positive thrill quality to it. So the body is a really good way to feel out the difference.
TS: And still I just want to be clear: when that constricted lizard brain is happening, what in your own life do you do when you find that?
TM: I do a lot of things, and it depends on the situation, but I find certainly like slowing down my breath—sometimes that’s enough. Just really slow down, take deep breaths, change up what’s happening somatically will do it. Often music will do it for me, and not just listening to music, but really listening to music that I find comforting, connecting me to my sense of spirit, and then consciously asking myself to look at the situation I fear, from the energy of the songs. So it’s like the song gives me a different lens or a different space, a different state of being to look back at the situation from. That really helps me. And sometimes—and this is kind of where I think in a way this is almost, I’d say this is a practice that you can use when you’ve been working with pachad for a long time so it becomes familiar, where I kind of just say, “Oh, yeah, that’s pachad” and it’s still going, it’s still active, but I’m familiar enough with what it is and how the situation normally plays out that I can proceed even when that’s happening. Tt’s like the pachad is in full force, but it’s happening in lane next to me and there’s another part of me that can keep driving in my lane even with that in my awareness and my peripheral vision.
TS: Mhm. In Playing Big, one of the things you talk about in this, let’s say parallel lane, the lane you’re in and you’re moving forward, is how important it is to learn something you call ‘leaping,’ and I wonder if you can talk about how one leaps.
TM: Yes. Well, one of the things I find about brilliant women—and of course when I say brilliant women I don’t mean those of us who have the highest IQ on our IQ test or got the highest score on the math test, but I mean all of us who each have a unique brilliance and a unique set of gifts—one of the things I find about brilliant women is we’re really good at delaying on taking immediate action towards our playing big. And since we’re so darn smart, we come up with lots of sophisticated reasons why: “First I need to get another PhD and I’m going to take another special training program,” “I’m listening to my intuition and I just don’t feel ready for this,” or some of them are like sophisticated personal growth-y saboteur voices.
So, I had to find a way in my work, a framework to help women get into action now—now, now, now, now, now—because I really believe that whatever that playing big dream is, that’s calling you, it doesn’t have to wait. One of the things I believe most strongly, even if you think your playing-big dream is to become a neurosurgeon, I believe there is a way you can start living the core of that dream—not just preparing for it but living the essence of it what it is that day, that hour, right now. And I’m really interested in helping women do that.
So, leaping is a special kind of action that helps us swiftly liberate ourselves into our playing big right away. And a leap action has a few different criteria; it’s got to be something that’s intimately tied to your playing bigger; it has to be something that can be started and finished at most within two weeks; [and] it has to put you in contact with the people that you want to reach or influence or engage through your playing big. So for example, if your dream is to start a nonprofit organization, writing your mission statement is not a leap, because that doesn’t put you in contact with the people you want to reach. But maybe writing your mission statement and having a little gathering where you show it to some of your desired clients or desired board members for your nonprofit organization—that would make it a leap.
The other thing about leaps is they have to have a learning question at their heart. So for example, writing that mission statement, maybe the question is, “What kind of succinct way of explaining what we’re doing is going to resonate with the people I want to engage?” So there’s some curious, productive question that you want to answer by doing the leap. And then last but not least, it has to get your adrenaline flowing. If you’re not feeling scared, if you’re not having a little, “Oh, my gosh, am I really going to do this?” kind of thing, it’s not a leap.
TS: And you really believe that no matter what someone’s playing big vision is, no matter what they’re called to, that this leaping approach can work—you can find something to do within the next one to two weeks with the criteria you described, no matter what it is?
TM: I do. And sometimes what makes that hard to see is that people are focused on a specific manifestation of their underlying calling and there’s not a way to do that manifestation right away. So, for example, let’s say we have a woman in her 40s who got talked out of going into neurosurgery when she was, you know, going into college because her family thought that was an inappropriate career and now she just is—her soul is longing to go back and she feels so strongly that’s what she’s meant to do. So of course, she can’t start doing neurosurgery today, but if we were working together, I would want to understand from her, “Ok, what is it about neurosurgery? Is it something about the way that you’re helping people in that situation? Is it about getting to be a witness to the amazing creation that is our brains? Is it about the personal challenge and its significance for you in doing that kind of work?” We get to the kernel of it.
And then we would brainstorm from there, “Ok, what are the ways you can live that kernel today? Are there some other ways you can experience that kind of challenge or witness that kind of divine creation, or help people in the way that you feel you would be in that role?” And there really always is—you know, I believe when we’re talking about playing big, part of what we’re talking about is playing big with our callings, and I believe our callings come from a very soulful part of us that is not tied to this time and place. So whatever the essence of your calling is, it’s something that could have existed a thousand years ago; it’s not graphic design or web design, it’s something more elemental than that that may take those forms in our contemporary era. So when we get to the essence of the calling, the kernel that is not tied to this time and place, we can always brainstorm and find some ways that it can have expression in a person’s life right away.
TS: Now, I’m imagining someone who’s listening, Tara, and they’re thinking, you know, “Playing big, finding my big calling, you know, why does everything have to be so grandiose and so super-sized, if you will, can’t I just stay close to the ground and express my care and concern for the people in my life, why do I have to play big in the first place?”
TM: Yes. Well, it’s funny that you used the word “grandiose,” because I like to say our callings are grand, our inner critics will call them grandiose, and the work on them is all about the granular.
But a lot of people do say that when they first hear the phrase “playing big” They often have a kind of conflicted reaction to it, like part of them says, “Yeah, oh, that sounds good,” and that same part is like, “I kind of do feel like I’ve been playing small and copping out on some aspects of my potential.” And then another part says, “I’m exhausted and playing big sounds more exhausting,” or that other part sometimes says, “Isn’t this what’s wrong with our culture, that everyone’s trying to play big? Can we just play right sized? Like we have a small, overloaded planet already, right?” and I think all of those are wise concerns.
My definition of playing big is playing big from the inside out, meaning playing big according to what that really means to you, not the world’s definition of playing big. So it’s not necessarily bigger title, more prestigious job, bigger audience if you’re creative— it’s not necessarily anything that will look like playing big to the world, although it may, it may fit many of those conventional definitions. But it may for you look like turning down a promotion, or stepping off the corporate ladder, or doing something quite invisible but powerful in work in your community.
The essence of it for me is, “Are you being more loyal to your dreams for your life and your contribution, or to your fears?” and playing small happens when we’re being more loyal to our fears; playing big happens when our aspirations take the lead. The kind of playing big I’m talking about happens when our heart’s aspirations to contribute to the good and show up as our highest self take the lead. And that kind of playing big is a lot less exhausting than playing small, because when you’re playing small you’re working against your own nature—you’re stopping up your voice, you are fighting against what wants to emerge in your life, and nothing is more exhausting and taxing than that.
TS: Now, you mentioned this idea of callings, that we have callings. We might have had a calling that feels quite ancient in us and, you know, interestingly I have a friend who at one point said to me, “You know, I’m sick of you having conversations with me, Tami, about my calling, I don’t know if I even have one, instead I’m just going to follow what I’m curious about and relieve the pressure of needing to have a calling, I feel very pressured by that idea.” And so I’m curious what your response is to that?
TM: Yes. So, you know, I think it’s unfortunate that the idea came out, it became so popular in our culture that, you know, finding your calling—singular, the word “calling” in the singular, is important. People really got stuck asking themselves, “What’s my calling?” and then waiting for the answer. Like if there’s no answer, then you start to feel like you’re missing something important, and then your ego gets into the whole story about that, and can be really unhelpful.
I believe we all get a lot of callings, and that they begin and end—that they’re quite fluid, and that they can be very small or very large. So the defining quality of a calling for me— it’s the inner longing we have to address a particular need in the world, or to bring light or love into the world in a particular way.
I often think of a friend of mine who felt that sense of longing and that sense of having an assignment to do something about the—to help the panhandlers and homeless people in her suburban town. And she doesn’t have much money at all, but something she could do was create these—she created these little baggies of toiletry items after talking to a homeless person in her town and just trying to figure out what she could do that would be marginally helpful. And so she always carries some in her purse, and when she sees someone in that kind of need, she’ll offer that to them.
The specific vision that she got to do that in the sense of rightness and inspiration and home that she feels when she’s doing it—it has all the hallmark signs of a calling. That’s one kind of calling. Another kind of calling might be a calling to a 30-year career in a particular domain of work. Another kind of calling might be to help a particular population through your activist work or volunteer work.
So I think the question we need to ask ourselves is not, “What is my calling?” which is a very pressury question as your friend was saying, but rather, “What’s calling me right now?” And there are some clues that can help us discern what that is.
TS: Say more about that. The clues.
TM: Yes. So there’s some patterns that I see in how callings tend to show up for people. One is that we have a particularly vivid pain or frustration with some aspect of the status quo. We all read too many heartbreaking news lines, more than we can count—news headlines, more than we can count every single day. We’re all aware of the numerous desperate problems and situations in the world, and yet they don’t all stir our heart equally; there are some that call out to us more, that give us that vivid sense of frustration and pain, and that can often point us towards areas of our callings.
And then on the other side of the coin, sometimes we get a more positive—it’s a gentler way that our callings can kind of knock at the door of our lives, which is not through pain and frustration but through a vision of how things could be different. So that could be a vision of the community garden that you can just picture at your kid’s school and oh, you so want to bring it into being. Or it could be a vision of how our healthcare system could work differently, right? [Call them] “big visions,” [or] “smaller visions,”—but how a vision of how things could be different—that’s another way our callings could show up.
And then surprisingly, many people don’t realize that another telltale sign of our callings is resistance. So even though it usually feels really wonderful to actually be immersed in the work of a calling, before we get to that immersion point, when the calling arises, when we’re becoming aware of it, we don’t run towards it with open arms. We usually resist it because it asks us to be vulnerable or visible in some way; it may ask us to sort of leave the herd, do something that our friends and family may not totally get or may not be conventional or what’s expected of us. And it brings us alive in a way that brings up that feeling of yirah and the part of us that likes the comfort zone of the status quo and gets cozy when we’re a little bit numbed out and things are routine—it does not want to go there. So we usually feel great resistance to our callings, and we often resist them for many years.
Some of the qualities of a calling that I find people often really recognize themselves in but aren’t previously aware of, is that one, we will always feel at the outside of a calling like we don’t have what we need to do the calling and we will also always feel like we aren’t who we need to be to do the calling. “I don’t have enough courage. I’m not educated in that topic enough. I don’t have the right skill set. I’m not comfortable enough with the darkness in the world.” Whatever the narrative may be—and that’s not just our inner critics talking, that is actually true. We don’t have what we need, we aren’t who we need to be at the outside of a calling, but callings have a magical way of growing us as we do them and I believe that’s part of their purpose.
TS: Now, it’s interesting that you said that resistance and appearance, potentially, of intense resistance can actually be a sign that we’re quite close on the trail of our calling. How do we know if our resistance is not just a sign that, you know, there’s something wrong with us, so to speak? I mean, we’re deficient at some, you know—I’m resisting, I can’t do this.
TM: [Laughs] Not everything we resist is a calling, of course, right? We resist all kinds of other things. But if there’s something in your life that meets some of those other criteria and you notice also that you have resisted it or you are resisting it, it kind of makes you want to run the other direction, you’re likely looking at a calling. And, you know, I love, in the mapping of the hero’s journey—step one is hearing the call and step two is resisting the call, so it’s absolutely a normal part of the process. We just don’t want to get stuck at step two forever.
TS: OK. In Playing Big, there was a sentence towards the end of the book that really got my attention that I want to be sure that we talk about, and here’s the sentence: “There is no such thing as an innate quality of self-discipline or willpower.” I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s a really important thing for me to u>nderstand,” because, you know, I’ve asked a lot, “Maybe I’m not doing this thing that I’d like to do because I’m not disciplined enough, I just don’t have enough self discipline. But here’s Tara saying, ‘There’s no such thing as an innate quality of self discipline or willpower.’” So if you could contextualize that for us in the playing big process and how you came to that conclusion?
TM: Yes. Well, I’ll begin with my own story and how I began thinking about that topic, which is, I come from a long line of emotional overeaters, and I grew up as an emotional overeater, I grew up on and off as an overweight kid, and very early in my life, you know, 10 years old, or so, I started to feel the pressure to diet and was dieting and trying to control my eating and my weight.
And like a good child of the 80s, you know, I thought that was about self-discipline, as most of us think—especially things related to our fitness or nutrition, [are] about self-discipline. And so for a long time I tried to make change by willing it—by having enough passion or motivation or determination, self-discipline, to stop eating the foods that were problematic for me and would cause me to overeat in an out-of-control way and that was always very short-lived. I could get a little stretch of time together and then I would fall right back into my old habits.
And then in my mid-20s, I took a very different approach. I got that I wasn’t going to be able to change my food habits from a place of self-criticism and hating my body or feeling ashamed, but that I had to do it out of a profound compassion for all the suffering that I had been through around that, and a real like, “I’m going to be your friend, Tara, and you’re not going to go through these ups and downs emotionally and these bouts of pressures, shame, self-hatred around your body and weight.” So there was kind of a shift in my whole orientation.
But then more importantly, I made change in a very different way. Instead of expecting myself to be motivated or self disciplined enough, I set up all these support structures in my life to make change easy. So I started sleeping more so that I wouldn’t be turning to food when I was really just tired. I started finding other ways of processing my emotions so I wouldn’t be turning to food when I was stressed or feeling alone. I wrote down what I ate every day for a while, and I sent it off over email to a supportive person so I was accountable and in partnership with someone around changing my behavior—and the list could go on, you know, many things I did to create a scaffolding for myself where change would be relatively easy.
And through using those tools, I stopped eating all the foods that were really triggers for me, were problematic for me and I stayed away from them for, now we’re coming up to a decade. And people would often say to me, “What, you haven’t had sugar in eight years? What, you haven’t had wheat, you know, since… [laughs] since like this old song was popular? How do you do that? You have so much more self-discipline than I do.” And I would always say, “Self-discipline has nothing to do with it,” because in my experience it didn’t.
So I started thinking about that framework for making change in our lives in general, that there’s actually a way that habit change can feel more like water flowing downhill, like ease, than like a hard push uphill, and that comes from building that support structure. I sometimes call it a “success architecture,” because it really feels to me like building an architecture to support your success.
And then one day I got really interested in, where did this idea of self discipline even come from? And so I looked up the history of the term and the roots of the term and I found that, of course, discipline comes from the word “disciple” and from the student-teacher relationship where there’s a clear hierarchy of authority—teacher instructs the student what to do—discipline comes from that kind of a model. And then, that idea started to be applied within the self as if there was an authority figure and subordinate within the self, so that some aspect of the self could discipline the rest, but nobody really checked to see if that was true.
And of course now, we also have a lot of neuroscience that supports the idea and of course, we have ancient spiritual traditions that support the idea that there isn’t one executive self directing the rest, [but] that there are many different impulses firing in our brains concurrently and with no one clear authority figure, and that there really isn’t one static self that controls the other parts of the self. So I think it’s a myth, and I think it’s a myth that can be very harmful because as you’re saying, it leaves most of us feeling like we’re lacking the critical ingredient for consistently doing what we want to do.
TS: Tell me more about this success architecture. So I’m imagining someone listening and they have some habit-change goal in mind that they’ve unsuccessfully been trying to self-discipline themselves to achieve. How can they instead implement this success architecture?
TM: Yes. So the first piece, and I think of it as really the foundation, is, “Do you have the right goal in the first place?” So when you think about that habit that you want to change, is it what I would call a “gift” goal or a “should” goal? A “gift” goal is a goal that truly feels like a gift to yourself, versus a goal that comes more from your inner critic, from a spirit of self-hate or self-critique or a sense of “should”—or even what other people think you should be doing in your life. Sometimes very similar goals can go either way; it’s a matter of nuance.
So for example, “I’m going to go to the gym five times a week and get back into the old jeans,”—that could really be coming from a very critical part of us. Versus, “I am going to go to my Taekwondo class five days a week because I love the way that it makes me feel and how it connects me to everything in myself and in others that I want to be connected to.” It’s a different source for actions that may look similar on the surface.
So that’s [the first part] of a success architecture—do you have a goal that feels like a real gift to you? Is this aligned with a spirit of self-care? Because if the goal is a “should” goal, then you’re literally building that architecture on sand; there’s no way to healthfully sustain motivation for a “should” goal. So that’s number one.
And then there’s these other elements of the architecture you build in. There are a lot of them, and we don’t need to have all of them for every goal, but you can sort of pick and choose what you think you need.
So one is sources of accountability: who knows what you’re trying to do, who’s checking in on you, who are you reporting in to? And designing a relationship with them where they know, “Ok, here’s what Tami wants me to do if she kind of falls off the wagon, here’s what she wants me to do when she’s really celebrating her accomplishments,” so that they can support you in a way that’s helpful to you.
Another kind of relationship that can be really valuable, it’s a little different from source of accountability, is just a champion. My definition of a champion is a person who sees the future that hasn’t arrived yet. So they can hold for you, “Yeah, I totally, totally see you working on your novel every morning, that’s no big deal, you’re going to be doing it really soon,” like they see the future that hasn’t quite arrived for you yet and that you may not see as so possible for yourself, they’re champions for you.
So there’s those kinds of relationship pieces and then there’s sort of planning pieces, like how can you make the action that you want to take the default? Now, I love Kelly McGonigal’s words, “We want to plan to work on our goals with the most exhausted version of ourselves in mind as we make those plans, not our best version of ourselves.” So how do you make it easy through how you schedule, through doing things with others, so that’s the default, whatever you want to do?
I also believe, and this is sort of a spiritual part of a success architecture, that it can really helpful to see yourself as working in partnership with a larger force than you, so that you don’t feel you’re doing this all on your own. So if your goal that you’re working on is, let’s say, designing a line of beautiful fabrics, maybe you’re going to see yourself as working in partnership with the larger force of creativity or working in partnership with the larger force that is art. Or if your work is helping adults who can’t read learn to read, maybe you’re going to see yourself as in partnership with the greatest force of learning and growth—and when I say those words, you know, I always picture them, [as] Learning with the capital “L” and Growth with a capital “G”; I see these things as energetic entities that you can walk hand in hand with and in doing so, source power from them.
TS: I thought it was interesting, Tara, that this final section of the book where you’re talking about how to move forward with the success architecture to play big, you actually call this final section, “Let it be easy,” and I think that is so interesting, I don’t think most people think that playing big is going to be easy, in fact I think we think it’s going to be really, really hard.
TM: Yes. It’s going to be filled with stretch moments that bring up a lot of yirah and bring up pachad as well. There’s going to be fear, and that part can be hard. Doing things that take us so far out of our comfort zone that they bring up the inner critic and we have to hear what it has to say and find a way to move forward anyway—that can be hard. So that’s the, what I would say, the sort of trials on the heroine’s journey. But because I believe playing big is our birthright and that fundamentally what playing big really is, is letting who you really are flow forth into the world unhindered, it’s actually much easier than trying to stop up that flow.
TS: Now, Tara, I actually have met you in person and I know that you’re a relatively young woman and I remember from our very first meeting having the experience, “Wow, this is such a wise person for being so young.” And actually just in this conversation with you, I’m putting something together, which is one of the sections of the Playing Big book is you talk about how we can access a part of ourself that’s much older, that’s in the future and I’m thinking, “Huh, maybe part of the reason Tara became so wise was because she accessed her future self, the crone Tara, and that’s who is educating her in this process.” And I thought to end our conversation, it would be great if you could share with our listeners this process that you write about in the book, about being mentored by an older version of yourself.
TM: Yes, I will. But I first have to say to give credit where credit is due, I think that if there is some reason for why I love thinking and talking about these things and have helpful things to offer, a lot of it has to do with how I was raised. I was raised in a home where I was diagramming the Jungian archetypes of my dreams with my mom at the breakfast table every single morning on a yellow pad from the time I was about five years old. I was raised in a house where, when I came home and said, you know, “So and so teased me at recess,” my mom is like, “What do you think is going on for him at home that would cause him to tease other children?”
TS: Now I know, Tara, I’m supposed to be feeling sympathetic joy in this moment when you’re telling me this, but basically what I just think is all the people who are listening here are like, “God, I wish I had something that was even 10% like that!”
TM: [Laughs] Well, the reason I share that is because I do feel so blessed by it and, you know, there’s some interesting challenges that also come along with not telling your five-year-old what they should do about the person teasing her other than thinking about, you know, what the psychology of the situation, but the reason I share that is because I really believe that everything that you talk about—and the books and audios and products of Sounds True talk about—all of that I believe we bring to children in a much younger age than we do.
And so that why I share that, because I feel so fortunate that my mother believed that and I could grow up with those concepts, and I feel that they were incredible tools for getting through childhood and adolescence with. And I think we don’t always, even those of us who are immersed in those tools, we don’t always bring it full into our parenting and into our conversations with our children.
TS: I appreciate that and you’re living proof. OK.
TM: OK. So, the inner mentor. So I first encountered this idea of imagining—imagining is not the word—discovering what I call the inner mentor when I was being trained as a coach at CTI, The Coaches Training Institute, which has fabulous training programs for coaches all over the world. And one of the core tools that they taught was taking individuals through a guided visualization that’s in the book and also you can access an audio of it from the book, where we meet ourselves 20 or 30 years out into the future.
But something really odd happens when people do this visualization: because we close our eyes, because we slow down, because we move the body into a relaxed state, because we access a different part of our brains than language based normative thinking, the self we encounter in a visualization is not our ego’s desire for who we’ll become in 20 years, but something very different. It’s like meeting the “crone” you—as you mentioned, Tami— it’s like meeting an actualized manifestation of your real individual essence, maybe a visual representation of your soul.
So [there are] a lot of different ways we could put language on it, but it’s the voice of inner wisdom, it’s the voice of perfect clarity. And I can’t tell you how often I will simply say to women after they have this tool when they are grappling with a difficult situation, when they’re in fear, when they’re in confusion, when they’re in self-doubt: “Check in with your inner mentor. What does she say? How does she see this situation?” And what comes out is always totally unexpected, something so wise and profound none of us could have predicted what it would be. It’s beautiful, it often moves the woman to tears, and it’s the right answer for her. And in many ways I think the journey to playing bigger is the journey of pulling our present selves more towards the inner mentor self, making our current lives look more like that fully realized expression of ourselves.
And, you know, when I teach this concept, particularly for women right now, it’s so important because often when I bring it up I’m thinking of a time when I was sharing about it in a corporate setting, doing a training for women and just talking about it many women in the room started to well up with tears and one of them said to me, “You know, no one ever talks to us about this voice. There is so much emphasis on finding the right mentor and taking that more senior woman in the company to lunch and going to networking meetings, but no one ever says I might have the right answer inside.”
And that to me is a tragedy, and it is also particularly problematic in our time because right now we need women to be change agents. I don’t want every woman to go find someone three rungs above her on the ladder and get instructions on how to do that, how to get there; I want her to look inside to get clarity about how she is going to completely revolutionize the status quo and uplift us from where we are, and that answer is going to come from inside.
TS: Well said. I just have one final question for you, Tara, which is I’m curious to know how you see the interplay between an individual going through a change process and the collective changing—how we make changes in the collective, how that affects individuals and then how individuals change and how that affects the collective. Because clearly there’s a strong motivation behind your work in teaching playing big to women in such an enthusiastic way to be a change agent in the culture as you just described. So how do you see this interplay?
TM: Yes. I think it is—I think this self/other dance is a dance where one feeds the other and then the circle comes around again. But I think it’s very important for women to know that they’re not alone in either the inner transformation work they’re doing or the change agent work they’re doing.
One of the critiques of the kind of work that I do and that so many are doing right now to look at women’s—our inner challenges, our inner barriers—one of the critiques is that it’s so individualistic, right? And what about collective action and all of that? And there’s a way, I think, where we can see that inner work as something we’re doing as a collective to undo the legacy of what the past has been for women. I love to think about it as everybody being together on one big transition team—to playfully use that term from the business world and the organizational change world, where you appoint a transition team when you’ve got a major change.
And we’re in a huge transition, because the past is a world that was led and very much designed and even defined by men and only certain men. And the future, we hope, will be a world that is designed and defined and led by a much broader diversity, of women and men. I think every woman alive today by virtue of her birth into this moment has been placed on the transition team. And when we see ourselves as on that global transition team, I think we can feel the sacredness and awesomeness of that, and see our frustrations in a new light, as just part and parcel of being alive in a transitional time, and see our work in a new way that is really energizing—and just how sacred [it is], to get to be stewards of that transition.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Tara Mohr, someone whom I really respect and admire, and she has just written a new book called Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message, Transition Team Universe! Tara, thank you so much, thanks for being with us on Insights at the Edge.
TM: Oh, Tami, thank you. You know, this is my very favorite podcast, I’m a loyal listener and sometimes when I think my work is—hmmm, when I feel I’m getting a little off track one of my touchstone questions to myself is, “Tara, this is worthy of conversation with Tami Simon on Insights at the Edge.” So that’s how important you and it are to me, and it’s been a pleasure to talk with you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com—many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
