Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following. We break those rules, and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier, and more self expressed. I'm your host, Erin Keating.
Today I want to talk about change. This past few years has been an intense period of change for me. I mean, I'm looking at my life in 2021, where all these changes started to happen compared to now. And it's pretty unrecognizable. Or more accurately, how I feel inside is so different than how I felt in August of 2021 when I got Covid and I went to the hospital and it felt like a vacation.
That is almost three years ago, and it's hard to believe that it's been that long. Some parts of the outside of my life really still do look the same. And the inside territory has changed so much. I am in the same house that I was in in 2021. I have the same kids that I had in 2021, although they are teenagers now. I don't have a husband. I don't have a job in quotes. I still work hard.
I'm still driven. I'm still focused. But I don't have a boss. I don't go to someone else's office. I don't get a paycheck. That's the one I feel the most. But I am building something on my own. I have a voice that I didn't have back then.
When I try to get into the feelings in my body that are so different, I walked around with my chest feeling so compressed. And I walked around in my head and not fully integrated into my own full nervous system. I was living in a series of boxes. Work box, marriage box, mom box. Maybe they were wrapped up and they looked good on the outside, but on the inside, they were heavy. They were heavy, and I was carrying such an uncomfortable load. I feel better than I ever have felt before. I have better energy.
I'm more in my body. I'm fit. I've never been fit. I mean, I'm still. I'm still soft, but I have muscles. I feel strong. I take great care of myself. I don't do more than I can do.
I was pushing myself and pushing myself and grinding myself down into dust because I was trying to maintain a life that was no longer tenable or had become untenable. Holy shit. I'm really in awe of the amount of change that I have experienced. And people who see me, who've known me, who knew me during that period, can see it. It's all over me. I walk with more confidence. I'm more blonde. I'm, like, eternally more blonde.
Every time I go to the hairdresser, she makes me more blonde. So I feel like this is just my destiny. I'm just gonna be a platinum blonde. Oh, my God, look, I look better. I feel better. I have more sex than I've ever had. I flirt more. I have more dates.
I'm more connected to my desire. I have more orgasms. I'm more open and fun. When it comes to all that stuff, dating and relationships were always so heavy for me my whole life. This is the first time in my life where I really feel like I can say what I need to say inside of the kinds of relationships that I have. I can say my needs and let the chips fall where they may. I am no longer hung up on, oh, what if I say the wrong thing and then I lose him because I don't have all my eggs in one monogamous basket? I'm just hanging out with a bunch of people that I like who are fun and sexy and interesting to me. It's not right for everybody.
But for me, for where I'm at, at 52 years old, almost 53 years old, it feels pretty fucking good. You know, I have more love in my life, deeper friendships, more connectedness, and more of a sense of purpose than I've ever had. But I have the same brain, and it keeps expecting things to move in a linear progression. It keeps expecting things to operate on a timeline. It keeps expecting me to make a decision, and then all things flow from that decision. But what I have found is that change is like an onion. I keep changing, and then when I think, okay, I'm set, this is my new normal, this is fixed, and this is who I am going forward, and I'm going to operate from here. What becomes clear to me is that I have more changing to do.
I keep changing and changing and uncovering and unfurling. And the more I go towards what has scared me in the past, the more I realize how deeply my programming runs. My programming tells me to be a good girl, to play it safe, to be conservative, to not say certain things, to do things right in quotes, to care for others feelings before my own. To not be selfish, to throw myself under the bus for the sake of other people's comfort. To not upset the apple cart.
There's an apple cart. There's a bus. There's a whole transportation and mercantile metaphor going on here. Apple cart. How come? All my illusions are very old timey? I must be 80. Every day, it seems, is an opportunity to go deeper, to challenge my assumptions, to give myself permission to feel free, to let new people into my life, to let my partnerships, creative, business, romantic, be as deep as they want to be, as complex and rich as they want to be. I was my mom's only child. I grew up entertaining myself alone in my house, classic Gen X latchkey kid, finding ways to entertain myself and being fucking lonely as a child. And what I have found in the recent past is that some aspects of making this podcast feel lonely to me.
I sit alone in my office and I talk to you, and I know you're there, and I know you're listening. But I'm all by myself. And so I'm setting about to shift that a little bit and to do projects that are a little bit more collaborative and to pull other people into my orbit in a deeper way and to say yes to what they bring to me and what I can bring to them. You know, every day is an opportunity to let go of people in situations and dynamics that are not serving me, even if it's just like a conversation I'm having with someone on a dating app, and it's just like not going anywhere. I can let that go. Dating is just such an eternal metaphor for me. I can let that go.
I can practice taking care of myself and protecting my time. Every day is an opportunity to ask for what I really want and make sure I'm not lying to myself about what I really want. You know, I've gone down a bit of a path of thinking. Okay, well, when you have a podcast and you have certain things to say to a certain demographic, then be a thought leader, which is a phrase that makes me want to throw up. I've said this on the podcast before: you don't need me to lead your thoughts. Maybe I can provoke some insights, soul searching, but you do not need me to lead your thoughts.
And if that idea of thought leadership leads me to a conference full of women in pantsuits, and we're all doing very buttoned up, good girl speeches, preaching to the choir about how we need to change and how things need to change, ugh. I don't want to do that. It feels too much like corporate life. I want to have fucking adventures. I want to have fun. I want to go do things and tell you about them. But there are all these things and ways of being that I have convinced myself that I am supposed to do and be. And even three years in, I am still unwinding I am like a kid who keeps asking, are we there yet when we're halfway through a journey? A journey that doesn't actually have a set destination.
Your life does not have a set destination except for the inevitable one. It's a series of endless off ramps and ideas and projects and partnerships and lovers and friends. It is a journey without a destination. And the only way to give it a path is to know what you want and move towards that. And for me, knowing what I want has been a moving target. Or maybe the not what it is that I want, but the how to get there. There's a lot of good, appropriate, culturally sanctioned ways to get there. You know, you do this and you write your business plan, and then you raise funding and go fuck yourself.
That's how I feel about everything. I feel like there has got to be a more fun way to do this. There has got to be a way that feels like I can take the reins of my life a little bit more and not be trying to wear a suit that doesn't fit and then acknowledging to myself, gosh, maybe that suit doesn't fit. And then I have to take a different path. But what I feel these days is free to change and less locked into any particular path or idea of what or who I think I'm supposed to be. Because so many of us are trapped inside these self definitions that we have decided are the acceptable way to define ourselves. And less and less do I care about being acceptable. Yes, I care a lot about being acceptable.
Yes, I care about identity and status and being perceived a certain way, but not at the cost of my own truth and my own freedom to say what it is that I need to say in the world and to say it in the way that I need to say it. There was a thing at Snapchat, I think it's common in the tech industry, where, like, part of my performance review was always about whether or not I could thrive in ambiguity. I feel like I must have talked about this. This was a big thing, thriving in ambiguity, because when you're working for a company or an organization that operates like a startup, that needs to be agile, that is responding to trends and changing its direction, kind of as the tide turns in the market and in user behavior and all these variables that we took very seriously and needed to for our business, we needed to thrive in ambiguity so still be able to set a goal, have your eyes on the prize, but kind of go with the currents as everything changed.
That is a thing to get really good at in life and to my surprise, I was always rated very highly at doing that at Snapchat. And maybe it's my stubbornness and determination and all kinds of good things, but the older I get, the more I realize that the job of life is to get good at change, because it never stops. It never, ever stops. Everything is always changing.
I learned that as a parent. Every time I would think, I can't take this phase anymore, I can't take this behavior anymore, or, God, you know, how am I going to handle this? My kids would grow and they would evolve and they would change. I've learned to get good at change in my career because my career in media has been so affected by technology and the changes in distribution and content consumption, corporate, blah, blah, blah.
Sounding that sounds like I'm a robot, but that is the truth of what I'm up to and what I've been up to professionally. And I bet that you have had to pivot and change and evolve and adapt constantly. How do you handle that? Is that something you accept or something that you fight against? How can you be in more acceptance about change? How can you acknowledge to yourself that there are more and more layers to the onion, even when you think you're at the very center of the onion and you're gonna peel back those layers and it might fucking make you cry because there's more to do and there's more to be revealed. Where is your life evolving? Where are you trying to stop it from evolving, and how is that working for you? Where are you allowing things to change? Where are you encouraging change in your life? How do you handle moving toward a target when the target is always moving? What techniques do you use? What tools? How do you adapt? Are there places where you can hold on more loosely? I think it's an eagle song. Hold on loosely, I think it's an eagle song.
You know what? Sometimes the baby boomers are right, but it's mostly only in song lyrics. You know, you can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you get what you need. Those are good lyrics. Those are words to live by. Thank you to the boomers for that. And mostly nothing else. I have a thing against boomers. What can I say? Where was I?
Thriving in ambiguity How's that going for you? So much of life is ambiguous, and I look back to three years ago when my life felt concrete. You know what's also made of concrete? A fucking prison. A prison is concrete. That's dramatic. But I do feel like so much of the choices that I made in my professional life, in my marriage, in how I was really forcing myself to walk with shackles on. I am really laboring this metaphor. I really think I did it to myself, you know? And yes, the patriarchy. And yes, you know, you live in the consequences of the decisions that you make when you're younger.
But I was really scared about change. And today I embrace it. Today I know that the next great thing is around the corner. And that's because everything always changes. The next big opportunity, the next hot guy, the next adventure, the next deep conversation, the next revelation. Everything is good because everything changes. How do you feel about that? Where are you fighting it? Where do you embrace it? How are you making change work for you in your life? Thanks for listening to hotter than ever. I know I got deep there.
Please reach out to us with questions that I will personally answer on the air in our now periodic advice episodes. Did this meditation on change spark some questions you have about your own ever changing life? Do you want help with a specific situation or have questions about how you can get your groove back? How you can be more fluid and easy? How you can get yourself out of prison? Metaphorically, not literally. I will not be an accomplice. I have probably been there, and I am here to give you my very biased and totally unqualified feedback.
So just dm us on Instagram @hoterthaneverpod or call and leave a voicemail. Or text your question to the hotter than ever Hottie Hotline at 323-844-2303 I would love to answer your question in a future episode.
Hotter than ever is produced by Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez.
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