Let Life Be A Rough Draft, Feed Your Curiosity with Megan Hellerer
In this episode of Good Enough for Now, we hear from Megan Hellerer, founder of Coaching for Underfulfilled Overachievers and the author of the forthcoming book, Directional Living: The Underfulfilled Overachievers Guide to Work and Life. She talks about her journey through shifting her life path from being “achievement ambitious” to “process oriented.”
Tune in to hear Megan explain that your curiosity can create more impact in your life, tips to figure out where to place your focus, and how to get out of your head and into your body.
LISTEN NOW
three reasons why you should listen to this episode:
The value of paying attention to what feels right for you in the moment as a way to make decisions
How embracing curiosity is more impactful than figuring out your life purpose
Learn to become “directional” rather than “destinational”
Highlights
We catch up with Megan in upstate New York, where she lives with her partner and has been focused on writing her first book. Through her proprietary Directional Living Method which emphasizes “aligned ambition” rather than “blind ambition,” Megan helps people transform their lives by transforming their careers.
She finds herself in a period of transition, energetically and physically after having spent the last two years on an inward solo journey, writing her first book, and is finally transitioning from working behind the scenes to a more public persona.
It's been also very juicy, inspired, creative, interesting, engaging time, but it's all been happening internally. I don't have anything to show for it, there's nothing that I've put out into the world. So from an external perspective, it kind of looks like I've been doing nothing. I know that's not true.
Making decisions can be a challenge and Megan describes her process for knowing where her focus needs to be at any given time.
I really need to remind myself that my only job is to show up and allow whatever is going to happen to happen. So create the conditions for success and then show up.
…but it really is thinking through and experimenting, through some trial and error. Like, what is working for me? What is the most conducive way for me to find, to be in the right mind space, the right energy space? And how do I really protect this? So this can be my primary focus.
It’s imperative to be clear on how you need to utilize your time and when. Discipline is about boundaries with yourself, but boundaries are meant to be structured, and structure is meant to support you, not inhibit you.
If it feels suffocating,... then I would know it was time for change. So it's really meant to be something that gives you the freedom to know that you have the space to prioritize these things.
The idea of “achievement ambition”, as in knowing exactly where you're going, reverse engineering your life, and then blind ambition following that track at whatever the cost is till you get to that destination, is a hindrance to our success.
It's great to have a big direction that you're heading towards, but we can't manufacture or reverse engineer our lives, at least with any measure of authenticity or fulfillment.
It's being process oriented, not outcome oriented, because we don't control the outcomes.
The goal is to have a hypothesis that gives you just enough structure in order to begin taking steps and begin experimenting. And then your goal is to find the truth, the real thing, not the perceived right thing that you should do.
Megan learned, through a low period in her life, where simple decision making caused her unimaginable stress, that she had no idea how to determine what she wanted. Along with a new appreciation for curiosity, she recognized that having a clear life purpose alone would not get you to a place of fulfillment and happiness.
I always say joy and curiosity are the building blocks of fulfillment. You will not have fulfillment if you don't start with joy and curiosity in the process.
Where achievement is the thing that we think is going to protect us, the thing that's gonna get us happiness too. Transferring to curiosity, which feels scary because you don't know where it's gonna lead.
After a client told her how she was physically ill and “powering through” her symptoms until finally an ER doctor, incredulous that she was walking around so debilitated, queried “How Are You Walking Around Like That?”, Megan coined the term Hay Walt. Hay Walt is a way to explain how we are living too much in our heads and not our bodies, and that it’s important to know that our intuition and alignment feeling is somatic.
We do that with so many things and our lives we're just like…I don't like this… I'll just get used to it. And then we get used to it and we just become, we start tolerating things. And so some of this is calibrating your tolerance for things that aren't working for you or Hay Walt, right?
What Good Enough For Now means to Megan:
It's something I've said to myself daily for the past two years working on writing because perfectionism is the opposite of creativity. It's the number one enemy. Frequently, when I would find myself knowing this is not the right word, or this is not the right sentence structure and just wanting to perseverate and stay, I'm gonna keep thinking about it until I get the perfect word and realizing this is good enough for now, this is a draft, I'm going to be going back over all of these things. I need to keep it moving on this. And repeating “this is good enough for now”.
…So good enough for now is failure versus allowing everything to be a work in progress, which it already is. So whether we wanna look at it that way or not is a choice. And it's certainly not what we've been sort of indoctrinated with, but I think it's so liberating and it allows you to do the work, which I think is all of our real purpose in life of becoming ourselves. …It is a becoming, it's always gonna be in progress until it's literally not. And there's a gentleness to it that I think is really like a self-compassion that's really beautiful.
ABOUT
Megan Hellerer is the founder of Coaching for Underfulfilled Overachievers and the author of the forthcoming book, Directional Living: The Underfulfilled Overachievers Guide to Work and Life, expected in 2024. Through her proprietary Directional Living Method which emphasizes “aligned ambition” rather than “blind ambition”, Megan leads Underfulfilled Overachievers, including AOC, to transform their lives by transforming their careers. After checking all of the traditional boxes of success—graduating at the top of her class from Stanford and spending 8 years as a Google executive—and still finding herself deeply unhappy, she quit her “great-on-paper” job with no plan. Through her effort to simply "unstuck" herself, Megan developed The Directional Living Method and built what is now a multi-six figure business, with the mission to provide others with the support and guidance that she needed and couldn't find when she herself was struggling.
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Stephanie (00:04):
Hi and welcome to Good Enough For Now, we are Your hosts. I'm Stephanie Kruse.
Harper (00:10):
I'm Harper Spero. And our show is for people who wanna make meaning from life's detours so they can find the creative resilience to move forward.
Stephanie (00:18):
We'll explore stories of transition, false starts, unexpected U-turns, and other moments of reinvention that happen as we move through life. Each week we'll bring you a fresh perspective from our own lives and share insights from guests we bring on the show.
Harper (00:33):
Join us when you need a moment to get out of your head. Feel us alone and maybe a little bit more
Stephanie (00:39):
Together. Together.
Harper (00:49):
So when I think about both of our stories, we've both been through so many transitions, especially in our careers. I had eight jobs in 10 years before starting my business and it used to be something that I felt like I had shame around. And now it's like the first sentence of my bio and the conversation that we had with Megan is so much about being intentional about the path that you choose and being open to the pivots and what sparks excitement and curiosity in your life.
Stephanie (01:18):
Yeah, and I think one of the things that she talks about is you know that spark doesn't always come from some place of joy or happiness for her. She's very authentic in telling how she got to a very deep and dark place to make a really important pivot in her life. And I think that that's equally important, knowing when to listen to your inner compass and how to find what's no longer tolerable for you and use that to make another pivot or a change in your life that can allow you to move forward. So it was a great conversation. Let's get into it.
Harper (01:59):
Megan Hellerer is the founder of Coaching for Underfilled overachiever and the author of the forthcoming book, directional Living, the Underfilled Overachievers Guide to Work and Life Expected in 2020 through her proprietary directional living method, which emphasizes a lined ambition. Rather than blind ambition, Megan leads Underfilled overachievers to transform their lives by transforming their careers. Welcome Megan. We're so happy to have you here today.
Megan Hellerer (02:31):
I've been so looking forward to this conversation.
Harper (02:34):
Us too. So why don't we get started. Tell us where you are in your life right now.
Megan Hellerer (02:41):
I would say I'm in a time of transition, both energetically and geographically. <laugh>, I've been for the past two years in I would say a very behind the scenes internal introverted solo process. Mostly due to writing a book and you know, also in tandem Covid was going on and I sold my book and 2020 right after Covid started. So it's very different than a lot of the other phases of my life and work where there's been a lot of things launching or a lot of things public or talking about my work a lot, being out in the world, running workshops, promoting things, being on social media and all of those things. I took a step back from, I took what I call a social sabbatical. So I haven't been on social media in a couple of years. I took a step back from my private practice with clients.
(03:45):
I kept some, but I stopped taking new clients so that I could create space to really focus on writing the book. And that was really important to me too. I've said no to mostly everything that doesn't support my creativity and book writing, including podcasts. So this is a transition podcast. This is the first Thank you <laugh>. I'm so honored. And it was an easy like whole full body. Yes for me, the alignment of what you guys are talking about and what you guys are doing and how much I love your work. But also the timing for me of being in this transition period. This is one of the first times that I'm really speaking about my work and out in the world again it feels like. So it's been also very like juicy, inspired, creative, interesting, engaging time. But it's all been happening internally. You know, I don't have anything to show for it and I'm doing air quotes, you know, there's nothing that I've put out into the world.
(04:40):
So from an external perspective it kind of looks like I've been doing nothing. I know that's not true, it doesn't feel that way, but it's a very different energy than what my previous life or what my underfilled overachiever self as I call us likes to be doing. And it's been a very sweet time from that perspective. But I'm also feeling really ready to start to be more in the collaborative phase, which is editing the manuscript is currently with my editor, so that'll be going back and forth, having more communication, having feedback around that and started taking more clients on again, which has been over the past few months, which is just my complete happy place. It's been so thrilling, inspiring, energizing, renewing, and really just having such fun with that and eventually, you know, moving into book promotion. So I'm in this sort of transition phase of moving from this like very behind the scenes back into exploring some of my more extroverted parts as next year unfolds. And then geographically has sort of mimicked that we just made the unexpected move to the woods, uh, talk about introverting in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley. And that is something that six months ago would've surprised me deeply if you had told me that I was going to be doing that. And yet it feels so aligned and so right. So I'm sort of reemerging. I would say that's where I am in my life.
Stephanie (06:24):
So when you were talking about the transition and emerging from this sort of more inner place, a lot of what came into my mind was energy. So energy you're putting out in the world, energy, you're getting back from others, your internal motor, right? Creating the energy to actually do the work, but around that had to be some real intentional decision making on your part. This isn't the first time in your life you've had to decide what not to do, walk away from some of the activities you've been doing and go into something else. Can you talk through how you have done that in your life before and how that's helped you now make some of these decisions?
Megan Hellerer (07:09):
Hmm. Yeah. You know, I think in this process for me, me it was a matter of deciding what is my work right now. That's sort of always my question. What am I working on right now personally, professionally, in relationships? Where are my couple of priorities? And whether that's quarterly, annually, I always like to know, there's a couple of things that I'm really focused on and there can be other things that are sort of going on in the background. Most of the time my private coaching is sort of ongoing, but usually there's one or two projects that are just creating something new, something brand new from scratch. And I like to have that balance. And for me it was really about narrowing it down. So it really started around selling my book. What was the timing that I wanted to sell my book? There were other questions about other projects, tv, podcast, among other things.
(08:10):
Mm-hmm <affirmative>, there were a bunch of things on the menu and I think an older version of me would've said yes to all of them because <laugh>, all of them are interesting to me, right? I think that's the hardest part is that it's one thing at this point where something isn't appealing, but when multiple things are, the question for me becomes what's first, what right now? And I think I knew that the book had to come first and so I said no to all of the other projects. And then I began to really ask myself as I do with everything that I commit to, what do I need to set myself up for success here? And especially with creative projects, I really need to let go of the perfectionism. I really need to remind myself that my only job is to show up and allow whatever is going to happen to happen.
(09:12):
So create the conditions for success and then show up. And for me that looked like a daily writing practice. Morning is the time when I'm most productive. So I knew immediately that this was gonna have to be a situation of my mornings were for writing. And that involved doing things like talking to my partner and saying We can't talk to each other literally until 10:00 AM because as soon as my mind starts going to some other place, you know, what do we need to do today? What are the chores we have to do? Whatever the logistics are, I'm in a different world. I'm in like the material plane, which is a completely different part of my mind. And so for me it really is get up and go right to the desk for writing. And that isn't true for everyone. You know, mornings aren't inherently morally better for some reason.
(10:06):
That's just really what works for me. And knowing that no matter what for those first three hours of the day I was sitting at the desk and I could write zero words, I could write 10,000 words. It was not my job to figure that part out. My job was just to show up and to create those conditions and do all of the things so that I didn't have other things on my mind in the morning, you know, that I <affirmative> could really keep that space. And another piece of that was environment for doing that writing. So thinking through that and living in a one bedroom with a partner during the pandemic who is also working from home was not the most conducive to that. I realized pretty quickly <laugh>, it's such a cliche, but I realized I needed a room of my own. And again, because of the pandemic and I was fortunate enough to get an advance for selling the book, we decided to go live in a few different houses in different places around the country for a few months at a time.
(11:13):
And I also discovered through that process that writing outside when weather allows is amazing. Uh, this house that we've just moved to, which I finished the manuscript this summer, has a screened in porch, which I discovered is like the magic spot for me. And that literally was my like outdoor indoor office for the summer. And so again, it depends on what the project is, but it really is thinking through and experimenting, you know, through some trial and error. Like what is working for me? What is the most conducive way for me to be in the right mind space, the right energy space? And how do I really protect this? So this can be my primary focus. Cause for me doing a creative project, it isn't just hours of the day. So much of that happens in the in between times when you're taking a shower, when you're taking a walk, when you're driving, when you're running errands. Like and for me the question is like what is that thing that my mind is going to in those in between times? Cause so many of the best ideas happen in those times. So for me it really was, yeah, sitting down for those three hours. But I couldn't have multiple things that were like running behind the scenes. I really needed to know this is the only thing that I'm conjuring up, dreaming up, imagining
Harper (12:34):
What stands out to me is when I think about you and knowing you for several years, the words that always come back to me about you are intentional and boundaried. You're so clear on how you need to utilize your time and when and how. And there's something so powerful of being aware of that. Cause I think there's so many people that walk around being like, I'll do this and fine. I'll say yes. And you know your concept of saying no to so much in these recent years and I appreciate you saying yes to us. <laugh> is really powerful because I think it's so easy to get caught up in the yeses, even if they're not things that you wanna be doing cause you just feel responsible for other people. So the concept of your book is so much around this practice that you have been preaching and you've been coaching around. Can you tell us a little bit about what the concept is and where you're at in the process?
Megan Hellerer (13:31):
Yeah. Whenever I hear someone say boundaries, uh, it took a while to get here. That was not something that was organic for me or that I was born with. And you know, for me, discipline is about boundaries with yourself. But boundaries are meant to be structure, right? And structure is meant to support you, not inhibit you. If it feels suffocating, you know, if at any point it had been like my writing every day feels like I'm trapped in that I would know it was time for change. So it's really meant to be something that gives you the freedom to know that you have the space to prioritize these things. Then getting clear and priorities for me became so important to not be wishy-washy, which is something I leave the door open like maybe if I feel like it, but then even that is sort of almost like a tab open in my mind that's still weighing on me.
(14:27):
So it really feels like very important to just make a decision. I can revisit it at a later point, but for now, so writing the book and you know, the method that I work with with clients and have come to because I needed it. It was what I needed and couldn't find. I knew I was doing something very wrong in my life to wind up in a situation where my life looked amazing on paper, like up into the right check all the boxes, did all the right things, and felt horrific inside and was really killing me. My mental health was, you know, I was under a hundred pounds. I had anxiety attacks almost every day. I was so depressed to get myself out of bed into work every day was excruciating. And yet I just kept doing it cuz I thought that's just what you do.
(15:23):
And I'm sure people had some sense that I wasn't doing well, but I certainly wasn't, you know, I got promoted during that time, right? I was still showing up and performing and playing the role and doing the thing. And what I realized when I finally left with no plan and committed to giving myself at least six months with no job, no job applications, no resume updates because I knew I would get scared and I would just take the first job that was offered to me and it would probably be some other thing in tech and maybe I could be excited about it for a little while cuz there'd be a learning curve and then I would end up in the exact same spot. But I realized how much I was focusing on the destination, how much all of us were focusing on the destination. And we've been sold this idea that achievement ambition means knowing exactly where you're going, having a 10 year plan, reverse engineering your life and then mm-hmm <affirmative> and then mm-hmm <affirmative> blind ambition, following that track at whatever the cost is till you get to that destination.
(16:38):
I call this destinational living. And it's usually also externally driven, meaning it's kind of arbitrary the destination we pick. The thing I started to understand was life is really directional and not destinational. Meaning it's great to have a big direction that you're heading towards, but we can't manufacture or reverse engineer our lives, at least with any measure of authenticity or fulfillment. So for me it was really making this transition and understanding, oh my job isn't to figure out where I'm going or what the fuck I'm doing with my life, which <laugh> ended up being the name of my course. My job is simply to start asking is this directionally right from today from where I am? And asking that question of my inner navigation system, of my inner knowing instead of what I should do or what other people think I should do. And this is simple and not easy, but it really is just a game of warmer, colder and when you know what it feels like to be aligned with yourself.
(18:00):
For me, something like the book and knowing how to prioritize was literally looking at the things on my plate and saying what is warmer and what is colder? And this book felt like something I couldn't not do. There was even a point where I was really struggling, I was really stuck and I reminded myself, I don't have to do this. There's no reason for success or financial gain or any reason that I have to do this. There are many ways that I can achieve what I want to achieve that I can impact people. So the question is, is this aligned for me? Is this really what I want to do? I can give back the advance. And for me giving myself that option, am I making this choice? Not because I'm stuck in this position but because I really want to do this. And what I kept coming to was no matter what happens if the book sells one copy, or even if for some reason I write the manuscript and they decide not to publish it or I don't know some other crazy thing happens, this would still have been worth it.
(19:04):
This is still directionally right, this is still a line, this is still a process that I need to go through regardless of the outcome. And that's really the nature of directional living for me. It's being process oriented, not outcome oriented because we don't control the outcomes. I was listening to something recently in September about the people who publish their books on nine 11, it was a Tuesday. Oh man, nobody was thinking about what is the latest book? No media outlets were covering that, right? That could happen. They could have the most brilliant book in the world and maybe it becomes popular later date or all of these things, but there's so much out of your control. And so the only way for me to feel good about it and to know that I'm doing the right, and when I say right, I mean right for me, not objectively or universally right thing is to know that it is directionally right for me no matter where it goes next.
(20:06):
So when I looked at these different options, it was like what is the warmest thing for me? And you know, I really asked myself and I do pretty regularly and the thing for me with the book was I know deeply I cannot die with this book inside of me no matter what happens if zero people read it, I have to do this in order to move on to whatever the next creative thing is going to be for me. Mm-hmm <affirmative> knowing that and doing this, like yes I am absolutely doing this because I don't want people to suffer the way that I suffered when I was, was trying to figure out what to do with my life and what was wrong with my job and what was wrong with my work and what I thought was wrong with me. Like nobody needs to suffer in their career.
(20:57):
I want that so much. I want this book to be in the hands of people and I can't do it for that reason because that is putting fulfillment externally outside of me. And so this process of writing the book again has been such a good reminder for me of all the things that I've been teaching, like practicing what I preach, which is writing the book. As hard as it's been, as many times as I was like, I have no idea what I'm writing about. This makes no sense. I literally started an entire manuscript over from scratch. It has felt fulfilling inherently. I wanted to even when I didn't want to show up to the page every single day and I knew that was what I needed to be doing and the work I wanted to be doing in my life. No matter what happens from here,
Stephanie (21:49):
Obviously going through creating what you didn't have got you to a place where you can really be in the process of it, instead of the destination as you so aptly named it at the same time, it's not as if you're stopping, you're taking on work, you're creating new things, right? And I think that that's where you see sometimes people get really stuck in the overwhelm of options, of choices. And so they just revert to doing. And you know, you going through that process in your, I imagine it was in your twenties at some point. Yeah. It's not uncommon. So many people I did, I think Harvard, I were talking about this, she did. We all went through that like postcollege first job era and maybe it was all working out just fine. And we wake up and go, wait a minute, is this it? I'm miserable. I know what I don't want. I don't know exactly what I do want. Now that you've been obviously in this practice of simplifying, figuring out a process by which to move through these types of phases, what do you feel like was so unique about your experience or unique in the way that you have seen your clients or friends or people that you have helped come through their own experiences to be different?
Megan Hellerer (23:15):
We tend to think that we need to figure it out. That we need to go sit in a room and think about it really hard about what our next thing is going to be. Again, what that destination is and then reverse engineer it and like make the spreadsheet that tells me exactly how to do it and that feels the safest. That feels like we have the most control. But the reality is we don't have control <laugh> over what the outcomes are and where you're going. I mean, if anything, that's one of the things Covid showed us, right? You could think, oh I have this career that's so stable that's never gonna go away. And then you know, you have a brick and mortar store and suddenly that is not a thing that exists anymore for a while. And so we really have to have the agility to be able to respond to what is actually happening externally to us, what is going on in the world, and respond to what is happening internally for us.
(24:14):
Mm. Like we're allowed to grow, we're allowed to change, the world is allowed to grow and allowed to change mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so to not be so fixed about it. Mm-hmm hmm <affirmative>. So I think what is unique is to start where you are, I call it the lily pad approach. If you imagine like a video game and you're on one side of this river that you discover you have to go over and the only thing that there is is one lily pad. So you're like video game figure running around trying to figure out how the hell do I get to the other side? Like do I build a bridge? Like is there boat? How do I get to the other side? And you discover eventually that the solution is you have to step on that first lily pad and when you step on that first lily pad, the next lily pad will appear.
(24:56):
But that takes trust and it takes practice. And then when you step on that next lily pad, the next one will appear. And so it's an iterative approach. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, this exists in a lot of different ways, but it's really just to get into motion. You know in tech there's the minimum viable product, right? The mvp and you launch and iterate. It's the thing like what is the good enough for now version <laugh> of this thing that we can put out into the world so that I can start to get feedback on what I like, what I don't like, what I'm good at. I need to give my internal navigation system some data points to work with. And once you realize that if you step on the next lilypad, the next one will appear. It's so much more freedom, so much more liberation, so much more permission to play to experiment, right?
(25:49):
You can have a hypothesis of where you think you're going, but it's the scientific method for life, right? If you think about running an experiment, the goal of the scientific method isn't to have a theory, have a hypothesis, and then manufacture the experiment to prove that you're right. Like it's great if you're right, but that actually isn't the goal. The goal is to have hypothesis that gives you just enough structure in order to begin taking steps and begin experimenting. And then your goal is to find the truth, the real thing, not the perceived right thing that you should do. And so I think what is unique is again, we start to play this game of warmer, colder and I say forget your passion. You know, there's so much like figure out your passion <laugh>, right? It becomes so limiting. They tend to go sit in an isolation in a closet hating their whole lives and being like, what is my passion?
(26:43):
What is my passion? And just we don't know the answer. We have no idea. And so instead, if we just follow our curiosity, so forget your passion, forget your purpose, your life purpose, and follow your curiosity. That's the first lily pad. So what are you curious about? What is interesting? What feels fun? I always say joy and curiosity are the building blocks of fulfillment. You will not have fulfillment if you don't start with joy and curiosity in the process. It's easier said than done in the beginning when I left Google, I had no idea what I was curious about. I did not know how to spend a single day without being accountable to someone else and having someone else tell me what to do and provide structure for my life. There was a moment, I had a complete breakdown in a drugstore because I couldn't figure out what the decoration design pattern of tissue paper of Kleenex that I wanted.
(27:42):
Because I knew how to ask what design of Kleenex paper would someone who has really good taste and da da da da da and is aesthetically pleasing, what would they buy? But I realized I had no idea how to actually determine where my curiosity broadly speaking was in terms of the design of a Kleenex box. And that existed everywhere in all of the ways. Like I had never genuinely asked where is my curiosity leading me? And so it is a question of starting small and it's also a question of noticing your curiosity. Most of us have been trained, the curiosity is a distraction. You know, when you're in school and it's like, oh you're curious about music, like that's after your homework is done or you're curious about art, like that's a hobby, not a main event. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So we learn that it's a distraction and I certainly learn that like anything I want to do, I'm interested in doing the fields fun.
(28:45):
That's an afterthought. That is not what a responsible, good, successful achieving person does. I will not be distracted by my curiosity. And in reality, curiosity is like hunger. It's meant to show us where the nourishment is. It's the best proxy that we have for purpose. So when people come to me and say, what is my purpose? I say, first of all, forget about defining it. But second of all, your curiosity is the thing that's telling you where your purpose is. And that's not easy at first because it often leads us to places that we don't think are ambitious enough. For me, eventually my curiosity led me to a coaching training class and I thought it was a ton of BS and I thought it was a waste of time and money because I didn't have a job and I didn't, didn't have income. And I was like, who goes to Stanford and becomes a coach?
(29:45):
Like so much judgment and ego and fear really. And I gave myself permission to do it. Most people signed up for like five series, the whole thing. I signed up for like the first little bit and I decided I was gonna go and it felt so align, it reminded me of who I was. It was the first time in so long that I was like, oh this, this is my language, this resonates. Like there's something here. And then I didn't go back, I didn't continue the training for like three or four more months and I kept thinking about it, but I kept saying, this is a waste of time. This is not relevant to my career because I was so used to anything that feels that fun cannot be work, can't be a job, it can't be something that I actually make money doing. And so, you know, it's a hard thing to learn to reprogram ourselves from this underfilled overachiever nest from this achievement wound, right? Where achievement is the thing that we think is going to protect us, the thing that's gonna get us happiness, to transferring to curiosity, which feels scary because you don't know where it's gonna lead.
Stephanie (30:57):
Yeah. You know, I think about when I became curious about creative writing wasn't something I had done since I was younger, you know, literally maybe middle school, high school age. I had been focused on the should dos and what was gonna make money and kept down that line and felt completely uncreative and unfulfilled in that way. And I remember going to the first couple of sessions with other writers like me who were learning how to write nonfiction, were writing memoirs so we're telling each other these really, really intimate stories to strangers. And as hard as that was, and as difficult as it was to have people take apart the words I put on the page, how I, you know, structured my paragraphs well or terribly, there was something about it that felt so connected to who I was that I didn't care so much about the external reward or discouragement of it. And I think that it's a privileged place to be, to be able to give yourself space to do that. And if I think about people younger than me or younger than you in that situation, what advice would you give to your former self? You know, Megan at 18 going to launch her life the way that she saw it then to help her get maybe to this place a little bit sooner or relieve some of that suffering if you think it was possible. <laugh>.
Megan Hellerer (32:29):
Yeah, no, and it, it definitely is a privileged place to be, especially to do it on the kind of scale that we're talking about here, which is like just focus on writing a book or making space to go to creative writing projects. But mm-hmm <affirmative>, I think again, I encourage people to do it in the smallest of ways. Even if you can't rearrange your whole life, if you can start asking what feels warmer for dinner and what feels colder for dinner. So instead of I should have a chicken breast with whatever, asking yourself what would really feel exciting and interesting to have for dinner or instead of, I should finish this book because I never don't finish books or whatever it is. Or I should read this book cuz everyone's talking about it. Like what book really makes me excited to read it? So whatever it is that's going on in your life, having this small switch from what feels warmer and what feels colder and distinguishing the shoulds from the wants and discovering what that feels like in your body I think is a huge thing.
(33:31):
Because the shoulds and anxiety and fear live in our brain, their verbal, verbal, they speak to us in words. You're knowing your intuition, your alignment is a feeling, it's somatic. And again, I think so many of us have been taught to live from the shoulders up and not be in our body. You know, this is one of the things I wish I had been taught younger is how to distinguish intuition and fear in my body and how to be able to discern what feels aligned for me. And I often go through a calibration process with clients where we think of, you know, what is a time in your life you know that you were exactly where you were meant to be doing exactly what you were meant to be doing. So fully alive, firing on all cylinders, like forget to look at your phone, forget to go to the bathroom just one time.
(34:32):
It could have been 30 seconds, it could have been a whole period of your life. What was that time? And when you think of that, what do you feel in your body, right? Most people it's like, oh you know, the short way that I say it is light and right your shoulders drop, you feel a sense of ease, peace and it's a little bit different for everyone. And then toggle over to a time that you know that you were miserable, that you were insecure or confused and lost. It could be the lowest point in your life, but you also don't have to go somewhere that dark. Just something where you were like, this does not feel right for me. And what does that feel like in your body? So for me, if I think about coaching versus Google, right? Google, I have a visceral reaction.
(35:19):
Like I feel myself breathing more quickly, I feel a tightness in my chest, I'm speaking more quickly, I feel hot, I just feel anxious and on edge. And so I know that when I start to again even approximate that feeling that that is something that is colder for me. And sometimes, you know, going back to the boundary question and I'm saying yes and no to things, sometimes something will feel in the hypothetical to be warmer, to feel more like coaching for me this light and right feeling in my body. But when I try to put it in my schedule and day to day life right now, I start feeling anxious and that's when I know it's gonna be too much. It's gonna be overwhelming. I'm gonna be pulling it in different directions. So you know, if you ask me about starting another book, like today in the hypothetical, I'm like, yeah, I would love to write another book at some point if I needed to start doing that today I feel so stressed out and anxious and I know that even if somebody was like, here's 2 million to start writing this book in the next three months, that that would be a no for me.
(36:28):
And I would have to just trust that this was not the right timing for the book for me and maybe it would be less money or whatever it is. But if my body says that this is stressful, it's not that I can't handle it, it's that it's not the right timing. And so I think that is the beginning of it, just at the most basic level. Like what are you gonna wear today? That's a big one. For years I was dressing and like what I thought a young professional would wear and thinking about like, okay, this is what I should wear, but what do I really want to wear? Like what feels exciting? Where's my curiosity? Leading on that, on jewelry, on food, on furniture, on like things you're already doing. And if you get into that habit of moving towards the things that really light you up, that really feel this light and right this excited, this full aliveness feeling and you start taking out things that I call hay Walts, which are how are you walking around like that <laugh> before there is uh, a friend and client of mine, you know, she told me, oh I'm having these terrible headaches and you know, I was like, oh you should go to the doctor, what's going on?
(37:40):
She was like, yeah, maybe I will, I don't know. Next time I see her I'm like, how are you doing? How are your headaches? And she's like, oh, I kinda just forgot about them. Like they're there. I have a headache every day. I take Advil multiple times a day, but like I'm just busy and I'm a mom and I am managing a team and I don't know, I just kind of got used to it. And then the next time I saw her she was like, well I ended up in the ER and the doctor said to me I had the worst sinus infection he'd ever seen. And he said, how are you walking around like that? And I was like, we do that with so many things in our lives we're just like, ugh. Absolutely. Like ugh, I don't like this. And then you're like ugh, I'll just get used to it.
(38:15):
And then we get used to it and we just start tolerating things. And so some of this is a calibrating your tolerance for things that aren't working for you or hay wat So doing some deha watting, right? So what are the things in your closet that give you that icky feeling? No. Like what are the things in your room, the furniture, the way, like all of those ways, you know, and experimenting with starting to figure out for you what are those warmer, colder things? It does not take something drastic like quitting your job with no plan, right? My hope is that I did that and so other people might not need to do that, right? They might not need to get to that breaking point. But also it's not the most practical thing in the world. And so if you start doing this sort of calibration and moving in this warmer, colder way and moving towards the things that you're curious about and cutting out the things sooner that you are not excited about, like, I don't know, everyone says do yoga, but you realize like, actually I hate yoga <laugh> and I'm no longer doing yoga.
(39:18):
Like I'm gonna find another thing I'm gonna do or I can cut it out and go back to it later. Or you know, friend groups that you keep hanging out with them and every time you just feel drained, like revisit those things and really start noticing for yourself, when am I getting energy and when am I feeling drained and calibrating and tweaking and iterating based on that? And it doesn't have to be a life overhaul in order mm-hmm <affirmative> to start practicing that. It doesn't take a ton of money, it doesn't take a ton of time. It is a practice, but that's really the, I guess what I would call the recovery, right? Recovering from being an underfilled overachiever. That's where we begin is to start to calibrate and learn how to look inwards and know what is directionally right for us and what is directionally wrong for us.
Harper (40:13):
So much of what you bring up is about listening to your intuition and your body and what you feel. And I love that sort of analogy of us being so stuck above our shoulders of just being in our heads. You bring up so many amazing points and I have a million more questions, but I'm looking at the time and going, we gotta wrap up here. So Steph, unless you have something, I'm gonna go to our final question.
Stephanie (40:38):
Yeah, I feel like I should like pay you for this coaching session. Thank you Megan
Harper (40:42):
<laugh>.
Megan Hellerer (40:43):
I'll leave my Venmo. Lemme <laugh>
Harper (40:47):
When you hear enough, what is that aoke for?
Megan Hellerer (40:54):
It's the Aper perfect motto. Motto or it's something I've said to myself probably daily for the past two years working on writing because perfectionism is the opposite of creativity. It's the number one enemy. So frequently, you know, when I would find myself knowing this is not the right word or this is not the right sentence structure and just wanting to like perseverate and stay thinking about it until I get the perfect word and realizing this is good enough for now this is a draft, I'm going to be going back over all of these things, I need to keep it moving on this. And so repeating this is, is good enough for now. This is good enough for now. You know in tech when you're launching an app, you launch an iterate, you don't launch a final product. So I think it evokes this iterative piece of it, this lily pad approach, this drafting, right?
(41:47):
Giving yourself permission to draft, whether that's like a literal creative project, like writing a book or a blog or a piece of art or an Instagram post. But drafting our lives, drafting our careers, letting all of it be drafts that we can learn from, get feedback from, and having it be this iterative approach and seeing that as more efficient, more effective, more authentic, more direct than a finished product focused thinking. And I know what would come up for me in a past life if you told me this is good enough for now. I would've been like, this is not good enough for now. <laugh>, <laugh>, <laugh>, um, never good enough, relatable. But I think what would've come up for me is it feels like the opposite of perfectionism is failure. So good enough for now is failure versus allowing everything to be a work in progress, which it already is.
(42:49):
So whether we wanna look at it that way or not is a choice. And it's certainly not what we've been sort of indoctrinated with, but I think it's so liberating and it allows you to do the work, which I think is all of our real purpose in life of becoming ourselves. And it is an ing, you know, it is a becoming. It's always gonna be in progress until it's literally not. And I think coming back to that is sort of a touchstone. I love that phrase. There's a gentleness to it and like a self-compassion that's really beautiful.
Stephanie (43:29):
It's all a rough draft, right? <laugh>, all of it. This was such a fantastic conversation. Me, we cannot thank you enough. And where can people find you if you're
Megan Hellerer (43:41):
Back in the world <laugh> at this point? Yes, well much more to come hopefully in early 2024 with a book launch. But for now my website is my name Megan Heller, m e g a n h e l l e r e r.com. And my Instagram handle is at Megan Heller. Those are the two main places that you'll find me and it's been such a joy and such a fun conversation. So thank you for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to talk about some of my favorite topics and ideas and I too could talk about them all day. But <laugh>, this has been such fun. <laugh>,
Stephanie (44:22):
We'll have you back on when the book launches. We'll have a lot more to talk about then how
Megan Hellerer (44:26):
That <laugh>. Love I'll Amazing. Thank you
Stephanie (44:30):
Megan. Thank you so much. If you'd like the show, please follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And give us a five star rating and review
Harper (44:45):
For show notes and more information, head to good enough for now. pod.com
Stephanie (44:50):
And follow us on Instagram at good enough for now pod. See you next week.
