Episode 127 - Radical Discernment: Balancing Self-Care and Collective Care with Katherine Golub
I’m so excited to welcome Katherine Golub to the podcast today. Katherine and I have so much in common–not only our journeys of breaking free from good girl rules, but also our commitment to community organizing and social change. She is a coach for leaders and activists who want to continue showing up for their communities without burning out. In this conversation, we explore the polarity between personal and collective needs, and how radical discernment can help you step into the life you want. Here’s what we cover:
Why we have to choose to take care of our needs before we can do so
The definition of radical discernment and how it helps balance personal and collective care
What resonance actually looks like and how it can help when you're overwhelmed
The importance of only focusing on the next right thing
How curiosity can help when it’s difficult to imagine what you want
Find Katherine here:
https://callingsandcourage.com/
https://callingsandcourage.com/podcasts/
https://www.instagram.com/katherinegolub/
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Transcript
Sara Bybee Fisk 00:59
Katherine Golub and I are here to talk. We have stuff to say. We've been exchanging emails for a little while and we have so much in common, including not just our own kind of journey out of that good girl cage, but some of the work we've chosen to do in the world, community organizing and being a part of charitable and NGO organizations. I'm glad you're here, Katherine. I feel like we need to have a conversation today.
Katherine Golub 01:28
Like I said, a couple of minutes ago when we started talking, I woke up with all the real feelings today and so, and I was like, oh, do I do this? And absolutely, I mean, it's important to be having real honest conversations right now. So I'm grateful for this opportunity to connect with you.
Sara Bybee Fisk 01:49
Me too. What do you want people to know about you as we begin?
Katherine Golub 01:52
Sure. So first of all, I'm a mother of a 17 year old.And in that transition for myself and with him and with all that, that means I'm a small town city councilor in what is now known as Western Massachusetts. I have been engaged in community organizing since I was 18 years old, so 25 years now. And for the past 13 years, I've coached community organizers, leaders, activists, folks who are engaged in social change work who often come to me burned out and grappling with the question of what do they do next? And how do they continue to show up for their communities and the ways that really align with their values while also feeling good while they do that? And those questions are as relevant now as they've always been, but much more poignant in this moment.
Sara Bybee Fisk 02:44
Part of your question I think is the question that we all have to ask ourselves because every single one of us exists in this place between me and them. How do I balance me and them? How do I know what my voice is when I hear their voices? How do I know what my job is and what their job is? And whether you are a mom, whether you are working in a place outside of your home, no matter where you fall in any type of the work type scenarios that we can be involved in at the heart of everything or these human relationships. And I think it's the question that I think about a lot. How do I balance me and them? How do I hear me and hear them? How do I honor me and honor them? How do I listen to and really make use of the wisdom and the value and the experience of me and them? How do I balance my wants and their wants, my needs and their needs? I feel like it's just a really human situation to be in constantly. And it's one that I hear the women that I work with asking themselves a lot. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about that.
Katherine Golub 04:03
Sure. So my first thought is to map what you just said. So dominant culture often perceives things in either or. And so I find a lot of people get stuck in this question of how do I, do I, do I prioritize myself now? Do I prioritize the people I love or my work or my community now? Which do I do? And although we're trained to think in either or binaries, the reality is, is that life exists along polarities, you know, hot, cold night, day, acting, resting, et cetera. And so a polarity consists of apparent opposites that need each other to be whole. And so there's this polarity that you're talking about of collective care and self care. And we cannot do one without the other. Oftentimes clients have come to me because along that spectrum, they've been, they've had a habit of prioritizing collective care. And so they've been hanging out on that side of the polarity so much that things have gotten out of whack. And often there's this next stage of development in which people say, I need to prioritize myself next, right? But that is, that is a, that is a next phase of development. And often in order to find balance, we do need to go through some period of letting a lot go and learning to focus on ourselves. And that is not the end of the story, that in order to be whole, then in order to be well, both in ourselves and in our communities, we have to, we have to learn to dance along that polarity. And I'm holding up my hands that I'm kind of demonstrating a figure eight. So there's a dance between those two of collective care and self care. You know, simply many of the reasons, the root causes of why we are not individually well are collective. And if we do not address collective challenges, we will continue to be unwell, or we could check out, we could dissociate, but that is not in my experience, the fully embodied alive, to be fully embodied in life, we need to be in relationship and we need to be addressing root causes of why we haven't felt well.To do that, we need to dance along that polarity. And to do that, we need to choose. So I have found that, of course, we know a lot of better care of themselves and knowing that they want very much to continue to keep showing up for their families and their communities. And they have often developed a habit of, like we all do, of letting habits take the reins of the bus. If we can imagine that inside of ourselves, each of us is like a bus, right? That we have lots of different characters, a lot of different parts of ourselves. And where we get stuck is where we let one part of ourselves, like habitually hold the reins, hold the steering wheel of the bus. So for example, the collective caretaker, the one who cares for others may habitually hold that steering wheel. And so in order to allow other parts to take the steering wheel, in order to take charge, and also to develop the ability to let each part take the wheel as is appropriate in the situation, I have found over the years that before we take care of our needs, we need to choose to take care of our needs.
Katherine Golub 07:27
And I have, over the years of supporting my clients, I've kind of discovered or come to call the way that I have learned to help my clients radical discernment, which I define as the ability and practice of making choices that honor our personal and collective needs.
Sara Bybee Fisk 07:47
It's so interesting. I love that metaphor.I use it a lot as well. And what I find interesting is that oftentimes the part that is driving the bus, you mentioned like a caretaking part, that caretaking part has been, you know, nurtured and rewarded for lots of decades over, let's say, the life of a typical human who is socialized as a woman in, you know, patriarchal Western capitalist society, right? That's what she's rewarded for. That's what she is. That's where her value comes from. And oftentimes, there's a lot of fear, what's going to happen? If I stop doing this, will I not be needed? Will I not be loved? Will I not be recognized? Where will my value come from? And there's often an internal struggle that goes unseen, where this part is using an outdated, either coping mechanism or mechanism for getting recognition and connection in a way that actually is depleting to the person as a whole. But I've seen this over and over in my own life, and in the lives of, you know, other women and people that I work with, where they say, I just can't stop, I just can't not do it. It feels like this compulsive thing.
Katherine Golub 09:11
Yeah, and I've found that in order to make the choice to release the steering wheel and allow another part to take the steering wheel, to take charge, there are steps that we need to take before that. And there's so many powerful methodologies out there, so many different methodologies that I've studied and I integrate into my work, and I've found that there are steps that we need to take before we can make the choice.And so, of course, it's hard to just release, to just let go of the steering wheel. So what I've come to name the key skills, so radical discernment is kind of a body of skills and body of practices. And very simply, there are six core skills that I've come to distilling it down into six core skills that help us to choose, to help us to release the steering wheel. And before we come to choice, we have pausing. We have resonance, which is attuning to and acknowledging the part that is holding the steering wheel in the first place, not just demanding that it release it. So pausing, resonance, which means attuning and acknowledging those parts, imagining what we do long for, learning what are the possibilities, then choosing and celebrating. Of course, each of those steps too requires a choice, right? And of course, it's not linear, so you can dance between the different steps. But we can't choose until we pause, and really the pause is the moment of choice.
Sara Bybee Fisk 10:55
is the first step that I teach as well, which is so interesting because you have to stop. You have to stop the habit or just the moment from taking over.And that is a real skill to be able to do that. So when you're teaching a pause, what is happening in that pause?
Katherine Golub 11:15
So there's so many different ways to answer that. I love that question. And there's three things that come up for me. The first is when do we pause? Like what happens even before the pause? So what I teach and do my best to practice are two things. One is just pausing throughout the day regularly, like having micro pauses. We're not talking about going on retreat or vacation, which can be great and important, but we don't always have access to. We're talking about tiny pauses, a few seconds to a few minutes to under an hour. But you can do this in 30 seconds. You can do it in five minutes when it becomes integrated into your day. So first is just having pauses regularly.And you can have ways to prompt yourself to do that, like wearing a bracelet or having the word pause on a sticky note or having it next to your bed or on your steering wheel, actual steering wheel in your car or places that help you remember or scheduled into your days. And then the other time that we pause is when we notice that we're feeling a feeling that is calling for attention. In the recovery movement, they talk about halt. There's an acronym halt. So that stands for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. So when we feel that way, it's a sign for us to pause. So we actually often need to notice that we're not feeling well, even before the pause. And then when we pause, what we're doing there is we're noticing what is going on within us and then what is going on around us. So the first step is noticing the sensations and emotions in our bodies and acknowledging those, which is actually that second step of radical discernment and then asking them, what do they wanna tell us? So instead of telling, demanding that the collective caretaker release the wheel of the bus, we notice, oh, I feel, and asking, do you feel sadness? Do you feel panic? Do you feel anxiety? Do you feel disgust? Do you feel rage? Do you feel finding, trying to find words that feel like they match the feeling that we feel in that moment? And then asking, what do you want me to know? What happens then when we pause is that we shift from reacting unconsciously to responding or at least having more opportunity, more possibility for responding consciously. So whereas before, when we're just going through our days, most of what we're doing is habitual and there's actually, like that's how we're designed as humans is for most of our activity to be habitual. That's okay. I don't need to think about how I brush my teeth or how I tie my shoes or any of that. That's good or how I write, right? And I've learned how to read and write. That's a gift that I, that I am privileged that I have. I can, I don't have to think about those things, but where we get stuck is when we're reacting with a part that doesn't serve the moment, that doesn't honor our personal or collective needs. And so when we pause, we create an opportunity to choose. So it's like, what happens in the pause is that we stop, we pause, we interrupt the habitual reaction loop and we create an opportunity to enter a new loop of responding, which can begin with noticing what's happening within us and what's happening around us.
Sara Bybee Fisk 14:51
I think that's so beautiful the way you've explained it and so important, because we do have these incredible brains that learn how to autopilot, you know, so many different processes and and I mean, I'm teaching I have a 15 year old, I'm teaching him how to drive right now, send thoughts and prayers because
Katherine Golub 15:10
How do I do? I'm teaching my 17-year-old.
Sara Bybee Fisk 15:13
And to watch like the amount of concentration that he has to put into every little thing. And then I just get in the car and sometimes I don't even notice what's, you know, I'm like, wait, how did I end up at Safeway? I was trying to go to this other place. So I love that part of our brain.And it also has, you know, the other polarity that you're talking about here that it needs to be whole in that we do have to take off of autopilot. A lot of the habitual ways that we respond and react because they don't serve us. And I think that's such an important under talked about and under hyped up skill, right? Because we are praised for fast, productive, you know, really efficient processes that get things done in a way that makes everybody marvel at how amazingly we produce. And there is a lot less praise for the pause, for the slowing down, for the self connecting that is really necessary to see kind of the peak behind the curtain of like, Oh, I actually don't want this habit to continue to take center stage. I want to be able to choose something else. And that means I've got to slow down. So I love that. Any comments there or I'd really love to hear also about what happens after the resonance.
Katherine Golub 16:39
Yeah, I do have a response to that. One of my favorite quotes is, love is 90% pacing. And I don't exactly know what the 90% means, but it just feels right in my body. And love for self and love for others. And I still don't always get it right.But it's like always going for the pacing. What is the right size pacing here? Because there is polarity between fast and slow. I mean, Tima Okun named urgency as a symptom of white supremacy culture, which I believe is absolutely true. And we can get too much into urgency. At the same time, sometimes urgency is needed. And so sometimes we need to go fast and sometimes we need to go slow. So I am not recommending only pause and stay in the pause forever. But if we are always in action, then we also get stuck. And so it's like finding that that dance. My commitment to myself this year with your permission to swear. Absolutely. Let it rip. My commitment statement for myself this year is Katherine fucking dances in 2025. I've been dancing a lot. And it's an embodied practice of I like a lot of fast, swig and salsa dancing. And also I've been practicing a little bit of going to a couple of Tango classes, which is very slow. And there's just learning to follow the movement of the lead. And it's a real somatic practice in learning to be in that polarity of fast and slow.
Sara Bybee Fisk 18:15
That's such a beautiful practice. I also love dancing. I feel like I don't get to dance nearly enough and to just feel the inside polarity of your body, how it wants to move, how it actually has information for you. Like I want to do this. I want to swing my arms this way. I want my legs to do this. And I think that's amazing. That's amazing.
Katherine Golub 18:35
It's been fun. It's been good medicine for this year, definitely.
Sara Bybee Fisk 18:41
So after pause and resonance, you talked about imagining what we long for. Let's talk about that.
Katherine Golub 18:48
Before we get to imagination, I also want to name a little bit more about the resonance piece. Right. So resonance is that moment. It's like empathy or compassion plus a yes. So resonance requires two people. So that may be the witnessing part of yourself and the struggling part of yourself, the habitual part that's grabbing the wheel, or it can be between two people. But it is when one person or part turns toward another with warmth and kindness and genuine curiosity and responds to the other person or part in a way that that person knows they are heard. And so it often sounds like a question like for, for listeners, really, like, do you need acknowledgement of grief right now? And do you need acknowledgement of fear? Do you need acknowledgement of disgust? Do you need acknowledgement of rage? Those are four questions that I've learned from, and I've learned a lot of this work from a woman named Sarah Payton, who teaches around resonant healing. But those are questions that can be particularly helpful for potentially traumatizing moments like the ones that we're living through. So if you respond with a yes, that's, and you might feel a sense of settling. I asked those questions very quickly. So listeners may or may not feel anything, but when there's that yes from the other part or person, yes, that's where resonance happens.And that is the opposite of trauma. Trauma is what happens when we are too alone. Resonance is when we are connected and together. So I'll add that in addition to attuning to and acknowledging ourselves, we also need to acknowledge often before we get to imagination, what is happening in our relationship. So a lot of my work is around helping people resolve and transform conflict in their workplaces, in their movement spaces, because that is often what leads to burnout. In addition to just doing too much, it's often the relationship challenges that lead to burnout. So we often need to acknowledge what's going on for someone else. In addition to what's going on for ourselves, often when there's a conflict is because there's things that we are not seeing and they could be interrelationally, they can be systemically. And a lot of my work is around helping people see the hidden dynamics that are keeping them stuck in their workplace conflicts. So there's often needs to be an acknowledgement of what is before we can move to imagination. And then we get to move to imagination. So in a five minute pause, like this morning when I woke up sad because my kid is at a pre-college two week thing and I'm like, oh, my baby's gone. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to pause and I'm going to be like, oh, I am really fucking sad right now. Oh, that hurts. Like my heart hurt when I woke up. So I offer myself some acknowledgement and then I'm like, okay, what am I longing for? What might make me feel better today? It can be that simple. Like what do I want right now? What do I want these next two weeks that he's away to look like? It can be really simple. Once you're in the habit of doing it, oftentimes we get into the habit of really focusing on what's not working.
Katherine Golub 22:09
And so that can be, there can be a habit shift, a real practice that needs to happen in order to develop the habit of imagination. I'll pause there. I could say more about imagination, but yeah.
Sara Bybee Fisk 22:21
I'm kind of listening to you through the ears of somebody who I might work with or who might be listening to this podcast. And the question that I think they would have is, okay, what if I pause and I experience, you know, some resonance, and then I try to imagine what I want. And there's nothing there. Because I don't know what I want. I've, I've done such a good job of listening to everybody's voices for so long. And such a total job of like, not letting my voice come into the conversation because I was told I was too much. I was told I was too loud. I was told that I was too demanding or too selfish or too needy. What do I do with that?
Katherine Golub 23:01
I love this question because for many years when I started coaching, clients would say that and I would believe them. I've learned not to.Okay, let's hear it. So often where people get stuck is they think they need some brilliant vision or some brilliant imagination or some like they need to have all of the puzzle pieces together of the picture of the life that they want or they need to know how to assemble all the ingredients into a delicious recipe. Their steaks are very high for what they're expecting themselves to be able to imagine and that is not always possible, especially when we're burned out. And I'll say that often when we're burned out, what we just want is to stop. We want to be done. We want to sleep and that is actually what we know we want and we know we want that. And the next question is, okay, you know you want that. How do you do that in safe enough ways?You might not be able to quit your job immediately, but how do you do the doneness or the rest in safe enough ways? So I'll go back to what I the reframe that I give my clients now because I know now that they do actually know a lot about what they want. And so what I ask them to do and I do this in the very first session with clients before they've started resting more, before they've started recuperating their energy and they're always able to do it, is I ask, okay, envision the next horizon of your life, which can be sometimes we're bushwhacking and we can only see a foot or less in front of us and that is I need to go to bed early tonight, right? Sometimes if we're bushwhacking, we don't know much. Other times we're like in the high mountain desert and we can see for miles and miles and the vision, the next horizon is far away, but I say it doesn't matter. We're not putting a timeline to it unless that's relevant for their specific circumstances. And I asked them to tell me, you don't need to know the whole how all the puzzle pieces fit together. You need to just tell me what are some of the puzzle pieces that you were aware of wanting? What are some of the ingredients that you're aware of wanting? And once they have permission and an expectation to share some ingredients or puzzle pieces, they do. And so that's what I would ask your listeners to do. And partially, part of I think what makes it possible for them to do that in the very first session is that they have resonance support from another human.Yeah, they have me listening, taking notes, asking more questions, encouraging them to keep going because the squashing of imagination is a symptom of trauma. And so when we've experienced trauma, which we've all experienced, whether acute moments like being fired from a job or bullied by a coworker or something like that, or having our parents get divorced or, you know, being told that we were too much when we were little or etc.
Katherine Golub 26:09
Or it's more the systemic situations that systemically, we're not in a situation that honors, you know, our political, economic, social systems are not set up to help us honor our needs. So of course, it becomes challenging to imagine, which makes imagination radical, I just interviewed for my podcast at Desiree Attaway on imagination being a radical act, right?But because imagination is squashed often by trauma, we often need resonance support to be able to feel safe enough to imagine what we want. And when we have that support, I now it's, I don't know, maybe been a decade or so. I never have clients say I can't because they know that I know that they can.
Sara Bybee Fisk 26:58
Yeah. I like to also think about it in terms of, I mean, want sometimes has such a, there's a pressure to it, especially for a lot of women who are told that they're supposed to know what they want. And it feels like a deficit that they don't. And so another way that I like to think about that is what are you curious about? Like curiosity feels like a much more playful, expansive word. Want feels like what if I pick it, and then I discover I don't want it? Or what if it's the wrong choice? What if I go after this thing, and it wasn't the thing that I should have been wanting? And I figure that out. And so sometimes curiosity opens that up for a little bit.
Katherine Golub 27:41
Absolutely. That there is so much pressure in dominant culture to find your one true purpose or your one true passion.And I have found that doesn't really exist, that purpose exists in relationship and in context where we are and with the people that we're with. Right.
Sara Bybee Fisk 27:59
And I used to think that my one true purpose was to be a good Mormon and to, you know, to just really obey the tenets of that religious group for the rest of my life. And it's not anymore.So yeah, it exists in context and relationship. That's such a good thing to note.
Katherine Golub 28:16
Right. And that curiosity is often what lets us know what we want. Our longings are personal and they're collective. We can't.And what is possible for us has a lot to do with who we're in relationship with. And so part of it is getting curious about what we want. And also part of it is getting curious about what other people want and what is in the good of the whole. And we can't know that without asking questions, which brings us to the investigation part. Also that, oh my God, what if I say what I want and I'm wrong? No, it's clarity is emergent. So oftentimes, the word that clients use to describe what they want on an intake form when they first come to work with me is the word clarity. And that used to really intimidate me because I was like, oh my God, as the high, the higher achiever in me was like, I got to help them figure out what the thing is. But after a while of supporting clients and really studying what helps people get clear, what I came to is clarity is an emergent phenomenon. Clarity emerges.So emergence is the process by which something that is greater than the sum of its parts that could not quite be predicted emerges from many different little interactions, often between people. And clarity is emergent. We don't get clear by knowing what we want, having a huge crystal clear vision and then making it happen. Clarity arises and emerges much more through action than it does through, even imagine, in nation. There's a polarity between vision and emergence that we need to dance in in order to become clear.So it's not that I'm asking clients to name what they want and then go do it. It's like, let's be in this dance between the polarity of the inside view and the outside view, right? Of what do I want? What do my people want? What does my community want? And dancing in between those. And so instead of saying a lot of clients get stuck saying, what if I don't have the right choice or the perfect choice or the best decision? It's like, no, do the next right thing now. Do the next right thing now and the next right thing now that get now, like literally right now. Don't try to figure that out for the future and engage every action as an experiment.
Sara Bybee Fisk 30:49
I think it's important at this point to bring up some words that caught my attention that you were saying, because I think they have an important relevance to doing the next right step. You talked about safe enough. It just has to be safe enough to do the next right thing. You have to have enough safety, just enough to just do the next thing, and another friend and coach, mentor that I'll talk about. It's safe to feel a little unsafe. I love bringing that idea into conversations, because I think for a lot of women who are kind of paralyzed by fear of messing up, not getting it right, and doing it either in a public way or doing it in a way that affects a community that they love and are so protective of and trying to help, that type of fear can be paralyzing. Of course, all those parts on the bus, there are a lot of them that hold a lot of fear about what will happen if we get it wrong or do it wrong. It just has to feel safe enough to do the next right thing.
Katherine Golub 32:01
Yes, the idea of safe enough is so important, I think especially right now because we are in a moment in which those of us who are engaged in social justice work are at more risk and will need to take more risk. And so we do need to be asking the question of what do we love enough to be able to take some risks for it? And what is the right size risk for me to take at this moment? There will be letting go anytime we choose something and we say yes to one thing, we have to say no to something else.And so that actually takes us to the fifth step or the fifth skill that we need is that choosing. And I really have come to rely on a metaphor from one of the oldest stories that we have written record of, which is a story of Queen Inanna, who is the ancient Sumerian queen of heaven and earth. And it's a story in which she journeys to the underworld to visit her long forgotten sister, the queen of the underworld, and in order to make the journey, she has to go through seven gates. And at each gate, something is taken from her in order for her to cross, in order for her to say yes to this calling. And she's also asked, who are you now? And so in order for us to say yes to who we are called to be, we will need to go through gates and we will need to let things go. Oftentimes though, where people get stuck is that they focus on the big gate. So for example, the big question of do I stay at my job or do I leave my job? Do I stay in my relationship or do I leave my relationship? Often these are questions and gates that are too big to answer until we cross through many little gates first, like having a conversation with our boss about making some changes or with a colleague or having a conversation or many with our partner, for example. And so we have to cross through these little gates and often it becomes safe enough to honor our longings and our needs when we focus on, okay, what's this next gate? What am I called to do right now? What honors my needs? What is my best guess? My best guess at honoring my personal and collective needs right now. And that's where when we focus on the little gates, which is actually where we live most of our life, that it can become safe enough to keep taking the next step.
Sara Bybee Fisk 34:36
I love that explanation. So then when it's safe enough and we're able to just go through the next step and make the next decision, have the next small conversation, make the next kind of small move, I think that's what I hear you saying is that we kind of tend to focus on, am I going to stay in this marriage or not?When real, the question is, can I have a conversation about something that's been bothering me for the last decade in a way that feels like it honors both of us? And let's do that first before we make the big decision.So then how does that kind of lead you to the next step after that?
Katherine Golub 35:21
Right. So it doesn't really, it's not, this is not, we can make sense of these skills in a linear sequence, because that just helps us think as humans, as to put things in a linear order, but it's not really a linear set of sequences of steps. So actually the last skill, which is celebration, which is rejoicing, which is noticing what is good, which is taking in the good, it's not necessarily, oh, we choose, and then we celebrate, which we can, which I absolutely like, every time you take it, you make a choice, like pat yourself on the back and do that. But it's not like, oh, we get from choice directly then to celebration.Because sometimes we need to grieve before we celebrate. And I've come to call the first, like the first steps as a practice in a micro pause, come to call it the discernment pause. So we pause, we turn toward ourselves with warmth and kindness. We acknowledge and get curious about what we feel and what we need and what our situation needs. And then we choose the next, the next thing we do. And of course, in there, it's often imagination and investigation, but sometimes those steps take a lot of time. So it's not like you just do one after the other. But celebration is all about developing the skill of enjoying what we have when we have it. And taking, rejoicing in what is good now, because the plant in front of me is good. Our conversation right now is good. The water that I've been drinking is good. There's so much that we have and that we often take for granted. So it's noticing what we have now. And also when we notice when our needs are met and we learn to track when our needs are met, it gives us lots of information with which to honor our needs in future decisions. It offers us the ability to see otherwise hidden opportunities and possibilities. It does so much for us. It nurtures our energy as we continue to move through the gates and take the risks and do the hard things. So I would say, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Let the choice, let the celebration follow the choice and do it throughout your days as much as possible as well. And again, this is micro. This is Rick Hansen's work. He identified that he's a neuropsychologist that coined the phrase taking in the good, which is just spending 15 seconds a day noticing when you're feeling good and kind of amplifying and enhancing and then absorbing those good feelings in your body. When we do that, we are literally rewiring our brains to have more of those experiences in the future.
Sara Bybee Fisk 38:14
I've always said women overwork and under-celebrate, but it's just this kind of programming that we have to produce, produce, produce, produce, and celebration has been such an important part of my own journey to really appreciate who I am as a person, and so I really appreciate that it's part of your process as well. When you think about what becomes possible for someone who is willing to kind of work through these core skills in micro and sometimes macro ways, what do you hope is accomplished for women?
Katherine Golub 39:00
That is such a good question. I love that. I love that question because like there's so many different ways to answer that. And I think I would put the question to listeners, right?And ask like, okay, what if you had a practice of pausing and really offering yourself warmth and kindness and curiosity and noticing what you need. And what others need and then just choosing the tiny steps. Like what would you choose today? Like what is actually possible today? I'm just like, I'm asking myself that, right? Right. It's like, okay. And I asked myself that this morning. So I reached out to a friend to get dinner tomorrow night. Cause my kids are not here and I want to have dinner with him. And I saw, and then I was like, okay, I'm going to go on LinkedIn. Cause that's a part of my business. And I saw drag bingo night on Friday that like, part of me is going to be like, Oh, do I really want to like, you know, I'm known in this community. Like, do I really want to go see people, but like I'm longing for community and connection. So I might go to drag bingo night. That might be what's possible, right?Like what, you know, I've been focusing on my sleep a lot. I really had a lot of insomnia last, you know, pyramidal puzzle insomnia in the last year that, you know, and so for me, it's like sleeping so much better because I'm taking all these little steps. I know for me in these times, it's felt like the land, the, the world has been wobbly beneath my feet. Right. And so I know that for me and some of the, like the recent Supreme Court decisions is just a felt like, uh, like the, the Supreme Court like took the world and like turned it upside down or like flipped it so that everything just slid toward the presidency. Really. Right. Like, yeah. So for me, this practice has really been helping me find my feet and my, my steadiness and being able to show up in my community and all the, like the trauma drama of city politics, right. Accentered, right. And to be able to maintain good relationships with people on the other side of the political aisle in my, in my community, even during these times, right, that's what's made, that's what's become possible for me.So the land still, I mean, the actual land, when I pause and like taken the land, right, taken my connection to the actual land and the actual floor between my feet, then I feel steadiness. That's taking in the good that like feeling that that connection becomes possible and I'll say like, I still feel unsteady sometimes. This is a, and I will, I know I'll continue to feel unsteady sometimes. And the steadiness is so much more because I've really, like, I've really ramped up my practice in the last six months. Practicing what I preach in that, or at least doing my best to, and that, that has become possible for me. It's like, okay, this is still hard. I still wake up many mornings feeling sad or feeling scared about what's going on in the world and honoring that, pausing and honoring that instead of trying to make those feelings go away.
Katherine Golub 42:08
The grief is a part of this process too. So, and yet I feel so much more steadiness and connection to myself than I know I otherwise would.So those are some things I'm curious for you. Like what becomes possible for you at EDL these things.
Sara Bybee Fisk 42:24
I feel like the connection to myself becomes it's the thing that I value the most because I spent so many years in this kind of performative stance toward the world and toward the people. Like I had a role to perform. I had rules to follow. I had things that were expected of me. And I did all of those things and I did them very, very well. And I didn't feel like there was much of me actually there. There wasn't any room, right? It was all kind of taken up.And so what feels possible for me is really a deep connection to who I am, to what I want, to what is what I'm capable of today, which might be different tomorrow and was, you know, maybe different yesterday. And an appreciation. It goes beyond appreciation. It's like I get to be in love with myself and I get to be in love with all of the parts on that bus. And I get to see that the sum of those parts is good and is something that can do good, not just in the world, because that's still very important to me, but can do good just for me, just for existing and being. And the way that I feel that connection, sometimes it's really strong and sometimes it doesn't feel as strong, but I can always come back to it in much the same way that you've kind of taught these core skills. And so I'm just, I'm really grateful that we've had, you know, the conversation we've had today. And as we wrap up here, was there anything that you didn't get to say that you really want to make sure you have the chance to say?
Katherine Golub 44:16
The one thing that comes to my mind is a response to what you just shared. And I, and I love that, that being able to be in love with yourself. And I had this visual as you were saying that of like reclaiming the parts of yourself and like becoming like, you know, filling in the puzzle pieces of yourself, right? Like embodying your whole, your whole shape, your whole self.And I want to name that in an honest story, when she goes through all these gates, she does have to let things go. But in every great story, at least from a Jungian perspective, every part of the story is a part of ourselves. And so her call is to go meet her long forgotten sister, the queen of the underworld. And the story is largely about reclaiming what has been lost in the shadows, what has been, what we've negated, what we've discarded, what we've denigrated and reclaiming that, right? We're reclaiming or at least shifting a relationship with it. We can still say no to a lot of things, but it doesn't have to be in the lost in the shadows. And so when we go through the gates, we're not only letting go of things, but we are also reclaiming parts of ourselves that we have been cut off from or things that have been taken from our communities that we are reclaiming and reintegrating. And so that's also, yes, it can be scary to cross through the gates and to let things go. And also every time we do that, we are also reintegrating, falling back in love with, reclaiming our ability to be in love with ourselves.
Sara Bybee Fisk 45:51
that's such a beautiful way to kind of wrap up our conversation because it is a process and again back to polarities of giving things up right letting things go and taking on new not even just habits but perspectives and and opportunities and I'm just really grateful to you for the conversation we've had if people want to find out more about you about who you help and possibly want to work with you and find out how they could do that where should they go
Katherine Golub 46:18
Thank you for asking that. So there's a couple of freeways for people to connect with me first. The first is that I have a regular, once a week, sometimes once every two weeks, free love letters to change makers that I send out that includes resources to other teachers, that includes podcast episodes that I've written, that includes short pieces that I write to folks to help them nourish themselves in these times. So to subscribe to that, people can go to my website, which is callingsandcourage.com. And I also have a podcast, Conflict Decoded, in which we talk about really the dynamics that lead to the conflicts that we experience in our workplaces and movement spaces and how to get clear and confident to move through them. And so yeah, people can learn more also about the courses and coaching that I offer at my website, callingsandcourage.com.
Sara Bybee Fisk 47:18
Thank you so much for being here.
Katherine Golub 47:20
Thank you.
