Five Things I’m Thinking About: The Creative Process, Pricing Your Work, Inspiration vs. Discernment, Insanity, and the Etymology of Should

Written By Alexandra Brockman

Hi, it's Elise Loehnen, host of Pulling the Thread. Today, it's just me on the podcast. I'm sharing five things I've been thinking about a lot from understanding how to quantify and charge for one's time, what to consider before starting a new creative project, and the art of a gentle no. I'm also answering some of your questions about judgment, sanity, and the etymology of should.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Okay, here we go. So some of you might have heard me say this sentence before, or you might have heard it from Carissa Schumacher, who told it to me-- it's the statement: "your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot. Manage it" and I'll repeat it for you again in a minute with context, But for those of you who are new to the show, I'm an author Yes, I wrote the book On Our Best Behavior and before that I had ghost written 12 other books And I continue to ghost write today and I host this podcast and I have a sub stack newsletter And I do some consulting and I sit on some boards and prior to that I was a longtime media executive. And every once in a while, when I get particularly into a scarcity tunnel and scarcity tunnels are very real, I start kicking up more work for myself and until I'm completely overwhelmed and then I consider starting my own bigger project or raising money or whatever it may be. So this sentence, your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it, is very alive for me. And it's the first piece of advice that I offer to people who come to me looking for creative direction, who feel compelled to start something. Maybe they don't know what it is, or they have a little bit of air under their wings around something, and they feel pressure, sometimes internal pressure, sometimes external pressure to grow it or to make it into a thing. And I think that this sentence, which sounds sort of new agey, but let's break it down to make it less so, has so much resonance for all of us. Again, your vibration must be higher than what you create. Otherwise you cannot manage it. And this is what I've seen in my 20 year career of watching a lot of people in the wellness space, healers, all variety of people build businesses. There are some who manage to stay completely nested in their integrity. It might curtail or curb their growth, but they recognize that what they offer Can only be scaled to a certain degree that they can't clone themselves, or it's not an easily teachable or scalable method or approach, and they seem to be quite content and being what it is.

And again, I would say that their vibration is high enough to match what they're creating or bringing into the world. They can manage it. And then I have friends who are so invested in growth, or who feel so compelled to grow by, again, it might be external factors, it might be internal pressure. In our culture, there's so much movement, so many people extolling us to go up and to the right, up and to the right, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. This is just in the air that we breathe, that they push it, and then they find themselves potentially out of integrity, they might not recognize that they are, but suddenly they're behind the vehicle, they're chasing the vehicle. They're not on top of it, it's running them. And they have a lot of mouths to feed, they have growth numbers to hit, and what they've created has outrun them. It's no longer under their vibrational control. And that to me would feel like death. And so I keep coming back to that statement from Carissa: your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it. Not as an admonishment to stay small, but as a mechanism for checking in with myself when my imagination starts to run wild, or someone has an idea, or they want me to get involved with a project. It's a really good internal mechanism for me to say, do I have the energy for this? Does this feel like something that I can get my arms around, or will this be something that ultimately enslaves me and is driving me?

So, here's another thought for the creatives amongst you, or people who are expected to monetize and put a price or quantify our time. And I owe this insight to Ann Emerson, who is an energy worker. I don't know quite how to define her. She's highly intuitive coach, and she works with you on your limiting self conscious beliefs. She is one of the wise women in my life who manages to always set me straight, and she laughs the whole time. And early on in this phase of my life where I've been working for myself. And I would try to understand how to price my proposals, and I found, you know, again, I'm sure many of you can relate to trying to put a price on your output. And when I try and figure it out according to an hourly rate or a day rate, to me it just has never added up. And I'm not a lawyer, you know, so much of the way that we think about time is on this assembly line, punch in, punch out, show up for eight hours. But for creatives, it's a very different equation and creative work I think can often come out really fast. Sometimes it's more labored, but often I work quite quickly, I write very quickly, but it's only after sitting and cogitating for hours, days, weeks, months, as many of you know, I'm a huge reader. So I think about all the input I have to process before I'm ready to sit down and synthesize and write. And that's not reflected in an hourly rate or a daily rate. And so, Anne Emerson, early on was like you and pretty much every other creative, you are not allowed to create rates for yourself that are hourly or daily. That's not how you need to think about your time. That's not how your process works and needs to be priced solely on output, on projects, on a deliverable, and never on what would seem to another person to be the visible work because it takes so much energy. One, it takes so much experience, but two, it also takes so much energy to spill yourself out on the page or the canvas or in whatever medium any of you are working. And I'm sure that many of you can relate to my work style, which is very, I sprint. I work, I have a huge amount of output for Days, and then I need to be fallow for a long time.

So, for example, the first draft, which was a shitty first draft, I'll admit, of On Our Best Behavior. I, in some ways, have been thinking about that book my whole life. But I read, read, read, thought, thought, thought, compiled notes, organized, organized my thinking, organized my thinking, and then I would sit down and I would write, I would draft a chapter a weekend. I didn't do it every weekend, but that was the process, like sitting and writing for me is a fluid process. Then the going back in and editing, editing, editing, that was the most intensive part of the experience. But think about how you're quantifying your time and make sure you're not selling yourself short. And here's another insight: what is easiest for you is your gift. This was shared with me by my friend, Jen Walsh, who had observed it in other people in her midst. She's a long time literary agent giant. But that when she would be talking to or mentoring younger people, she'd say like, what's this in your proposal? And they'd say, oh, that's really easy for me. So it's like hard for me to charge for that. It's really easy. That, my friends, is your gift. What is easiest for you is your gift, and in some ways it's the most valuable thing. It's the thing that you charge the most for, even if again, can't best be encapsulated by the time it takes.

Okay, third, I write about this in On Our Best Behavior, but so many of us are also trained to believe that our output is tied to our direct productivity, to our doing. Women in particular really struggle with this, in part because needs are endless. There's endless needs from people at work, from our families, and so few of us really feel entitled to rest and to nothing. And, you know, I can speak from my own experience of admonishing myself for being lazy when I dare to say, watch TV or watch Netflix with my husband, which I honestly don't even know how to work my TV because one, I don't say that to be virtuous, I say that because my kids and my husband really haven't on lock, but you know, my husband Rob rewired it. I can't figure it out. But I went to Charlottesville a couple of weeks ago and I watched a USA Law and Order SVU marathon, which was so fun because I love Benson. Mariska Hargitay is my hero. She's kept me company for, you know, decades, like the rest of you. And I felt so bad about it. It's so alive in me. I mean, I wrote a whole book about this, and yet that internal lash, that whipping, is still something I'm perfectly capable of using against myself when I feel like I'm not doing enough. But letting the unconscious, letting the brain work when it's not quote unquote working is so much more powerful than trying to process everything in the conscious part of our brain. The difference, it's like using a supercomputer versus using a calculator to try to write. And I'm talking about when you used to write and then flip it, flip your calculator upside down to pass notes to each other in class.

There's an amazing book on this, which I'm definitely going to be sharing more with on my newsletter, on the Substack. I'm trying to get him to join me on the podcast. But it's Ian McGilchrist, who's a neuroscientist. And his first book is called The Master and the Emissary. And then maybe it's not his first book, but his most successful book. And then he followed it with this two volume series called The Matter with Things, which the look at the two hemispheres of the brain. It's so obsessively researched, and reported. And it's full of pretty much everything that Ian McGilchrist has ever thought about anything. It's fascinating, but it's full of digressions, which is why it is 1500 pages long, with so many appendices and codas and hundreds of pages of notes. But it is full of fascinating insights. And essentially the theory is that the left hemisphere, which has long been equated with our intelligence, is responsible for the parts. It's like the logical, rational part, but it lies. This is all fascinating. And then the right hemisphere is responsible for holding the whole.

So when he talks about the master and the emissary, ideally, the right hemisphere holds the vision. It's the master of the entire picture. And then the left hemisphere does all the work of piecing all the parts together. And then it fact checks what it finds with the right hemisphere. But his point is that our culture, our world, is becoming increasingly left hemisphere dominant, and he has concerns, which he outlines brilliantly in his book. It's such a cool book, including looking at what happens to artists when they suffer from left hemisphere or right hemisphere strokes, and what happens to their art in the way that they conceive of the world. And for people who suffer from right hemisphere strokes, their art becomes flat. They lose the wider context, and I don't know, this is one of those books I'll be talking about for years because it's just stuck in my brain like a piton, like those rock climbing clips, like it's so fascinating to think about how to use the whole brain. He doesn't offer a lot of insight, but I've been reading online, other people talking about his work. And one way is doing things like drawing on the right side of the brain or Julia Cameron's morning pages, finding ways to enliven or let go and Make the left hemisphere stand down.

Okay, we're on to number four. Now, this is something that I have not really figured out, but it's more of a prompt to you all to think about and it's something that I'm going to be working on all year because this is so hard for me and that is practicing the gentle No. And I get a lot of requests for blurbs, for people to write about their work or have them on the podcast. And I can't even respond to most of the incoming, but I lack a gentle no. I need scripts, I need ways to resolve this for myself because when people ask something of me, my immediate instinct is to try to give it to them and I feel so bad. It haunts me when I can't deliver and yet I can't. I'm already so incredibly tapped out. I mean, my to be read shelves probably have 150 books on them. I am perpetually behind, which is anxiety producing for me. But I don't know if any of you who are listening have mastered the art of the gentle no. A friend suggested that I write some scripts.

But the the bigger prompt, I guess, is sure, I can write some scripts, I can come up with language, but how do I resolve it in myself? What is it in me that feels so. bad saying no. I don't know. I think it's because I feel bad maybe when people say no to me, although I don't really mind. I much prefer a no to being ghosted, but whatever that is, is alive in me and I'm gonna guess it's alive in a lot of you. I think too, as women, it's really easy to hit that button of you should help people. You should help everyone and anyone who asks. And it's just not possible. It's funny, I did an event with a group of women a few months ago, and there were a couple of men there. And at the end, they were like, what, wait, we ended up in a, this conversation about mentorship and the chapter on envy and these guys who are both businessmen were like, wait, so you guys are saying you don't have any mentors? Because I had someone in my life, I always had men who were interested in my career who would take me out for drinks and dinner and always pick up the phone when I called. And this sea of women, we all looked at each other and we turned to him and we were like, no. No, not really. Because you know why that guy, I mean, here I guess, let's just call them hetero partnerships, but why that guy could take you out for dinner or drinks or answer your phone call? Because most likely his partner was holding down the rest of it. So, women, We don't really have time because there's so much caretaking that's required of us at work Yes, and also at home and yet there's still this feeling that we should be doing more. So, I don't know if you all have tips, but I'd love to hear them, I'll be writing about this in the newsletter.

And then finally, I hosted Zoom sort of office hours, which was really fun. I'm going to do it every month through the newsletter and please come. It was so heartening and there was so much crowdsource wisdom in our hour together. And one of the questions which really got me thinking, and I've written about this before, was this idea of intuition and discretion. So I had made this video a while ago, again, this is a Carissa teaching, but it was about intuition and this idea that intuition has two components. It has inspiration and discernment, and this is so important. You can think of inspiration as the gas pedal and discernment as the brake, but we get these hits, right? We get these feelings. You can call it your gut feeling. You can call it what could be a sign, a knock, a nod from the universe. And how do you take that information and run it through your body and understand if you're being moved forward or you're being cautioned to slow down or stop or go in another direction? And I think that was primarily the first response, which is you have to run it through your body, and you have to understand if that discernment feels like a yes for us, or like a no, and often that requires time. I used to be a reflexive yes person, like, yes, of course, I'll do that. And then, in that process, override everything in my body that was saying no, this is a no. And then not only would I end up with resentment. But often I would end up in situations where it was like, God, why didn't I listen to myself? I knew this was a no fly zone for me, or I knew this was a bad fit, or I knew that this wasn't the right person. So you really want to start to tune yourself to understand resonance.

Like, is this a resonant yes? Or is this a resonant no? And then pay attention. Try and map it back to that first, intuitive hit to understand to refine and hone that as a map finding tool. And I was relieved because on the call, my friend Satya was there, who is a young yin. And she wrote this book called quarter life, which is wonderful for 30 something she's been on the podcast. And so we got into a conversation, too, and I've certainly found this amongst my friends who tend to be both highly intuitive but also obsessed with intuitives. This will surprise exactly no one, but they are people sometimes who will want to gut check their moves with intuitives. I try to not do that because I think it's important for all of us to develop our own guidance, our own GPS, and our own muscles for moving throughout the world. But hey, I get it. I understand. That said, you know, Jung talked a lot about synchronicity and his work with the I Ching and so on and so forth was about synchronicity and messages from spirit or the other side, however you want to imagine it, that are undeniable. So what I see happening sometimes, and this was why the person brought this up, is that an opportunity had landed in her lap, just unbeckoned, uncalled for more status, more money, and she had jumped at it, not because she felt compelled to move, she was actually happy where she was, but because the synchronicity of it felt like a call from the universe to which she was supposed to respond.

And I think that's such a key distinction because sometimes these are tests, I have a lot of friends who can fall into this trap of, Oh, this felt so synchronous, or this guy just happened to be sitting next to me on the plane, therefore, I'm supposed to leave my marriage and have an affair with him because we got into this really intense, long conversation, or this job offer fell into my lap, therefore I'm supposed to take it, or this person also wants to start a business, and I want to start a business, and this feels so easy and synchronous that here's our five year plan, ten year plan. We've raised twenty million dollars. Here we go. I swear to God I've heard all of these situations because and then have them heard them attributed to an intuitive hit or synchronicity. And so Satya and I were talking about on this call that sometimes synchronicity is not a yes. It's just information. And for this woman on the call who had Left her job and now was in an unhappy situation and lamenting and Mad at herself. It's like well, actually maybe that what felt like synchronicity was really a prompt from the universe to say What do you want? Because there was some part of her even as she's Mad at herself now that wanted more, maybe wanted a new adventure wanted something different. And so perhaps the, the prompt was just to examine that, not to necessarily act on it or take that opportunity. Or maybe if you end up sitting next to someone on a plane before jumping into an affair, it's like, Oh, actually, is this information about how reignite with my partner or something that might be missing anyway, to each their own. But, intuition has two components, inspiration and discernment. And intuition is a muscle that must be developed, and it must be interrogated, honestly. It must be interrogated. It doesn't mean that you can't move forward with it, but it must be interrogated.

All right, now, just a couple of questions. So Tori asked if I would consider an episode on judgment. Why we do it, and why it feels so deeply ingrained in our Western culture. She writes, My immediate go to thoughts are always around this inner yardstick of better, and I find myself forever caught in the vortex of that thinking. Same Tori, same. So yes, it's funny, synchronistically have been looking around trying to find Jung's writings on judgment because it's really hard, I think, when I'm in judgment of other people or other places to know how clean it is or how clear it is versus whether I'm in projection and I'm trying to get bad feelings away from me by placing them on someone else. And so by casting judgment on someone and putting them on the other side, I get to claim the right side and feel morally superior and virtuous and all of that. So judgment to me is very slippery and I watch myself very carefully because I think it's one of those instincts that is loaded with meaning if you care to look at it for yourself, more meaning for you than for the person that you're judging, because honestly, people who you don't judge, you don't feel judgment, it's because there's no information there for you. You just you're not attached. You're not engaged You don't care, you know, like I don't I don't care about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey in the Kansas City Chiefs. I cannot bring myself to pay attention to it. I just don't care There's no information for me there. There's nothing. But there are other situations that I watch acutely and I recognize how much feeling is there. I was talking to my friend Courtney Smith about this, and she was saying that she believes in her work as a coach that we prefer judgment to sadness and grief, specifically. That judgment becomes a way of distracting ourselves through blaming and it allows us, it keeps us, it distracts us from needing to then sit in our own sadness. And I think that's so true too. Or fear, I think you could put a lot of emotions in that bucket. But watch your judgment. I think it's really interesting. And yes, we've been conditioned through religion and whatnot to think of judgment as sort of righteous, from God, up high, and that, you know. It's our job to judge, but I don't think so. I don't really think it is.

Okay, this is from Christine. She wrote, Sanity? Where is the sanity? When all you hear are extremes being reported and you are afraid to even think of an opinion, let alone voice it. Where does this leave us if we are all afraid to talk and communicate when we feel the world has gone crazy? It leaves us alone. I know, Christine, I'm devastated about this, I know so many of you listening are devastated about this, and about the state of the world and everything that's unfolding around us, it's really hard. And most of us live thousands of miles away from These conflicts and hellscapes and it's not enough that we're all watching trauma porn all the time or feeling like our rights are being stripped away or that we're losing our planet, just to name a few of the things that are going on, but we have lost the ability to have reasonable discourse about so many of these things. And the shaming, again, the judgment, the finger pointing, the inability to hold five truths simultaneously, we've lost it. This is a big focus of my next book and something that I'm thinking about deeply and on a personal level and a cultural level.

And I'm eternally optimistic. I think we're in an inflection point. This episode is coming out after the episode about Spiral Dynamics, but I think that, which ran last week, but I think that we're hitting a shock point, and it's at these moments where it feels like all is lost, we're breaking apart, we're so polarized, we'll never be able to come together again. Who are we? I think we're all, we're stepping up to the next level of consciousness, and it's gonna be really painful. It has been really painful, where we can, to quote Ken Wilber, transcend and include, or to quote Richard Rohr on Ken Wilber, include and transcend, he reverses them, which I like, but get to a higher vantage point where we can hold All of these complex truths, where we can sit in the nuance, where we can tolerate diversity of thought, where we can tolerate and include voices that are different than our own, where we don't insist on groupthink, where we don't preach tolerance, but behave with so much intolerance toward each other. And I have so many thoughts about this. I have so many half formed newsletters about this. And it's something I'm continuing to work on deeply. But Christine, I hear you. And I think if it's any consolation, I think that we've been collectively sort of hijacked by extremes. And on either side of the political spectrum, and that's most people are somewhere in the center, just wanting discourse debate, yes. And a way forward. That might mean that we all don't get everything that we want, or think that we all deserve, but that we start functioning as A collective, again, ish. Maybe we've never functioned as a collective, but I'm optimistic.

Okay, finally, at this event in Charlottesville, someone asked me about the etymology of should, and it's funny, it never had occurred to me to do that etymology. So should comes from shall, which is from the German soul, from a base meaning owe, like owing someone money, which makes so much sense because should has the worst energy. It's such a drag, this feeling of obligation that we're dragging around. There's no joy in it. There's no joy in I should do this, or I should do that. And there's so much obligation. And I don't know that should is a gendered word. I don't know that it applies more to women than to men, but it's a brilliant etymology, something that we should pay so much more attention to because there should be a choice there. I want to, or I don't want to. No more shoulding. It's full of regret. It's full of the energy of failure, of not measuring up, of honestly, as the etymology suggests, indebtedness. It's a drag. Anyway, that was a great prompt. Thank you for that.

And then this final question made me laugh. Are you in perimenopause? It's coming, I would assume, soon. I have an episode coming up soon with Lisa Moscone, who is a neuroscientist who currently has 11 grants to study menopause, including four from the NIH, and it's a great conversation because as a pre menopausal woman, while I'm relieved that we're having more conversations about menopause, I am disheartened by the trajectory of those conversations for the most part, which tend to pathologize menopause, pathologize older women. And focus on the capitalistic or consumer components. I think people recognize the huge buying power of women, obviously, but women of this age who have been ignored for a long time. And now the marketing has really turned up and there's a lot of startup money and hopefully it comes with corresponding research into women's health. But I'm not holding my breath that that will happen, and I know that there are some great products out there, but I would like the medicalization of the conversation and the fact that it's so much of it is about the body to shift, to include the spiritual components, the social components, the cultural components, and the fact that This is actually a bright time for women, many who maybe they've never had kids or their kids have grown, who have a remodeled brain, as painful as that process is, that's the conversation with Lisa Mosconi, but menopausal women are powerhouses, literally, mentally, and I would love to see the reveneration of older women in our culture. I think it might save us all. On that note, thank you for listening, and I will see you next week.

Alexandra Brockman
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