Intro
Welcome to the Mental Offload Podcast where we talk about women balancing work and life. It's the podcast that combines leadership, feminism. And coaching tools so you can tackle. It all with more confidence and less stress. Here's your host, Ivy League MBA, certified feminist coach and corporate warrior, Shawna Samuel.

 

Shawna Samuel
Hello, offloaders, and welcome to the Mental Offload podcast. We are in for a really special treat today. I am here with Kara Lowenthal. She is the host of one of the top rated podcasts in the world on fuck your brain. She is a feminist coach. She's also my mentor. I trained with her in advanced certification in feminist coaching. So I am thrilled to welcome Kara here today. Welcome Kara.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

 

Shawna Samuel
Thanks. You know, one of the things I didn't mention in my intro that is super relevant is that Kara, in addition to all these things, is also a New York Times bestselling author of the book Take Back youk Brain. So I want to talk to Kara about some of the amazing teachings that are in this book here today. So we're going to have an awesome conversation about a things feminist coaching. So, Karac, is there anything else that you would like to add in introing yourself that I missed?

 

Kara Loewentheil
I mean, I think you hit the big external things. I guess the internal thing. I'll say is that I always say that my goal is to be an example of what's possible with a half managed mind. So, like, I'm not here to project a like perfectionist, aspirational version of myself that everybody uses to feel bad about themselves. So just take everything I'm saying with a grain of like, I get it, because I've had your brain and I probably still do in some ways love it.

 

Shawna Samuel
And you know, this is quite relevant because before becoming a famous podcaster and coach, you know, back in the day, you were kind of the quintessential overachiever. Degree from Harvard, Yale Law School, living in New York City, you're running a think tank for reproductive justice. On paper, everything looked like it was going really well. And yet you open the book with this anecdote of the time that you found yourself under your desk at work. What happened?

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah, I have to issue one correction. So I don't get like some kind of letter from the Yale cease and desist office, which is that I went to Yale undergrad at Harvard for law school.

 

Shawna Samuel
Pardon me, I got it backwards. Look at that.

 

Kara Loewentheil
So, yes, I. The book opens with a story about me crying under my desk working at a major reproductive Rights organization in what had been my sort of dream job that I had been strategizing for half a decade at least to get. So I had gone to law school and then I had clerked for a federal appeals court judge for two years. And like, all of that had been aimed at getting a job as a fellow, which is like the entry level legal job at, you know, the three big reproductive rights organizations in the country. This was back in the day, at least in the 2008, 2010 era. So I had just spent so much time and energy and money towards this goal. And like many women, I think I had been socialized to believe, meaning like I had. Society taught me to believe that if I just achieved enough, I would finally feel confident and good about myself and that I needed to be perfect in order to feel that way. And so I definitely wholeheartedly believed all of that at the time. And I had a real. Well, for a Jew, it's not really a come to Jesus moment, but I had a real like, you know, collision of my expectations, my socialization beliefs I had been cultivating and the reality of like achieving the thing I had set out to achieve and the like, magical bliss that I had been promised did not descend. And I thought that was really rude. And you know, I, at first, of course, as most of us would, made it mean I'd done something wrong. Like I was an imposter, I must have tricked everybody, like all of those kinds of common thoughts. But in the end I just was really. It's not exactly that I was sort of miserable. Like, part of what I think was the case for me and is the case for a lot of women who work with me is that like, we're pretty high functioning and kind of optimistic in a lot of ways. So we're not like super depressed, but just there's so much like guilt, shame, anxiety driving us all the time, but we're so habituated to that. It's just sort of like a drug we've been on our whole lives. We don't even notice. It's like we have like Munchausen by proxy from society. And so, you know, crying under my desk just kind of seemed like a normal thing that you choose sometimes. But I will say now that I have done a lot of work on my mind, I still cry, but not in that sort of fetal position under the desk, you know, shame spiral away.

 

Shawna Samuel
Yeah, right. Because it's like we, as you mentioned in the book, it's like we think that when we've achieved all the things that we will enter this magical realm where suddenly life is great all the time. It's like, oh, wait, but there's still all these things that society has told me I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to know, date the right person and look the right way and have the right job and have 2.5 kids on the picket fence or whatever it is. I think in the book you refer to it as conditional self esteem.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah. So I think conditional self esteem is the idea that women have been taught that they should only like themselves if. Right. It's conditional if they're able to achieve certain things. And although this concept is not in the book, something I have been teaching and working a lot on recently is this idea of over responsibility that society teaches us to take responsibility for everything and everyone around us. And I think that is really, that's what the self esteem is conditional on. It's like you can feel good about yourself if and only if you have successfully taken responsibility for and solved the problems of everyone and everything you encounter. Like, that's when you'll be able to rest. So our conditional self esteem can be specific of like, I'm only going to like myself if I weigh a certain amount, or once I get married or once I get divorced, or if I have a kid or if my kid gets into Harvard or like whatever is going on. But there's also this sort of global way in which I think it's conditional on. It's almost like impossible conditionality. It's like you can't ever satisfy all the possible responsibilities you could have in the world when you've been taught to make yourself responsible for everything. And so that self esteem is like always out in front of the next thing you're supposed to manage or control or add to your plate.

 

Shawna Samuel
Oh yeah. And you know, I want to maybe dive right in there because that term over responsibility, as you put it, I think this is so crucial when we're thinking, as many of my listeners are, they're in the throes of the demanding job, plus child rearing, plus sometimes a spouse or partner who isn't always being an equal partner at home. And not only are they doing all the things, but they're telling themselves, I am responsible for all the things. So how do we start to break out of that cycle of over responsibility?

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah, so this is something I teach people when they work with me that I call self responsibility. There's a little bit of a paradox because when we're taking responsibility for everything, we actually think that we are being Very responsible. Right. Because we're like, but I'm responsible for it all. I'm responsible for the groceries and our vacation plan and my boss's mood and my parents aging and my body shape and sight. Right. I'm responsible for everything. So what do you mean? I need to be more responsible. But actually when you are trying to be responsible for everything and everyone outside of you, much of which you can't control or isn't even really your business, you are actually not being responsible for yourself. Right. Because a true self responsibility would mean that you take yourself and your own life and your own desires seriously and that you stop over functioning for everyone else. So we're actually not being fully self responsible when we are over responsible for everyone else. But we have to change the way we've been taught to think because we've been socialized to believe that everything is our responsibility. So we have to change that belief pattern in order to take self responsibility instead.

 

Shawna Samuel

I just want to pause right there because I think that's going to be a mind blowing moment for so many of us who almost take pride in over functioning.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah, it's like, I can do it all. That's a badge of honor and I want to be. No, I'm not impressed. Stop. Like this is not. You should not be doing all that. And all that tells me is that you have no boundaries and you're ignoring yourself.

 

Shawna Samuel
Yes. Oh great. Okay, so we're getting into some meaty stuff here and I love it. I also want to talk a little bit about how this shows up for women in the workplace.

 

Kara Loewentheil Right.

Shawna Samuel
So we talked about like over responsibility and the sense that like we're responsible for how people think about us. And I see this a lot when clients are talking about work. It's like, well, my boss sent me like a whole set of corrections for the presentation, but he didn't even give me any positive feedback. Is he mad he keeps doing this? Is my work not good enough? Maybe he's just a jerk. And like before you know it, you spent like half your weekend polling other people about whether your boss is okay, whether you're okay, whether you should be looking for a new job. And you say, well, okay. It's not as simple as just saying, look, we need to stop looking for external validation because the external validation isn't really what we're seeking. Right?

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah. I mean, we're trying to fill a void. So if you tell somebody who has a void to stop filling the void and their only alternative is live with the void, they're not going to do that. Right. Because that's not how your brain works. What you're looking for is really self validation. It's like believing that you are okay and you are enough. And self responsibility absolutely includes emotional and mental responsibility for yourself. Right. And not letting your boss who's not thinking about you at all, he's just. But they're just making edits to your report be responsible for your emotional health. Right. They're not your parent, they're not your spouse, they're not responsible for how you think and feel. Now obviously, you know, there are some circumstances or relationships that are abusive and that's a place that you need your to be in charge of your own mental and emotional self and well being to get out of. But a lot of the time we're talking about just normal level human dysfunction. That is not abusive. It's just maybe that person's not the most amazing boss in the world. But that's not, it's only a problem for you because you think how you are allowed to feel about yourself and your work depends on that person providing the exact right amount and type and kind of feedback to you. And that is just not true. And if I could wave a magic wand and get your boss to say exactly what you want them to say, I promise you that 10 minutes later your brain would be like, well, they didn't really mean it. They were just being nice. It was just because of the magic spell they had to say that. What about this other person, my colleague, who doesn't like me? Like if you don't change the way you think to have a like strong grounding in your own worth, you could change each person one by one in your life and you'd end up, you know, worrying about like what the bodega owner thinks of you. Like your brain will constantly be looking for that problem if you haven't solved it for yourself.

 

Shawna Samuel
Yeah. And I love. You know, one of the things that you talk about in the book is, you know, really that what we think that we're looking for is that external people saying that they like us or filling the void. But it really starts with what do we believe about ourselves? What are we already thinking about ourselves? And that person can sometimes be a mirror for how we're already thinking about ourselves. Right?

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah. I think when we worry about what other people think about us, it's usually the things that we think are bad about us. Like I don't ever worry that somebody thinks I'm too feminist because that's a positive to Me, but somebody who's not sure if they should be a feminist or thinks maybe that's off putting about them would worry about that.
An example I often give is when I was dating and hadn't done any body image work, I never really worried about whether somebody, you know, didn't like brunettes because I didn't have any shame about being a brunette. But I spent a lot of time worrying about whether they didn't like fat women because I had a lot of shame about my body size back then. So anything that you are fixating on whether somebody else thinks it about you and ruminating about it, it's because your brain thinks that that might be true about you or worries that it's true about you, it's really your thought that you are worried someone else has, which partly why sometimes I think we've all had the experience in a long term relationship where you're like obsessed and fixating about one problem and then the person is upset about like something totally different that you never even occurred to you, right? Like you've, we've all had like our romantic partner or something. Be like, well, this thing really upsets me. And you're like, what that thing? Like, I wasn't even thinking about that because I was fixated on this thing because this thing fits my story about what's wrong with me. And I didn't even notice this whole other feeling you were having. So it's just a kind of signal as to like, what is your brain fixated on and worrying about and what does that tell you about your thoughts about yourself? Yourself?

 

Shawna Samuel
I love that. And I think for many people listening, that is a good moment to hit rewind and

go listen to again. Because I think that's a fundamental shift that we make as we start doing thought work to realize, oh wait, a lot of this is just thoughts that I have about myself. So wait, I need to change my thoughts about myself. And we'll talk about that in a second because I know you have some great exercises in the book, but I want, I wanted to just before we get into tactical, how do we attack this, I wanted to talk a little bit about how this shows up in the context of parenting. You know, given the social conditioning that women receive around motherhood and our roles as mothers. And you've pointed out, like we can bring a fair bit of baggage into this space.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah, I mean, I think there's, we could have like a seven hour podcast conversation about this. There's like so many different things. But I mean, I think Women are socialized to believe that, right. Motherhood is the apex of their existence, that it is natural, that it should feel wonderful, that they are naturally suited to it, that they should be able to do it all perfectly, and that they are responsible for everything about their children. Right. I mean, if you just think about, like, the cultural conversation, if something goes wrong with a child, we were like, what's wrong? What happened with their mothering? Like, we don't really think about the father. Nobody's asking, like, what did the father do wrong? It's like, what was wrong with their mom? What did their mother do wrong? Right. And Freud blamed mother. You know, it's like cold mothers for blamed mothers being too cold for children who had autism disorder or who had other, you know, other types of neurodiversity or of mental illness. Obviously two separate categories, but, like, there's just a long history in psychology of kind of blaming mothering for anything that's different about a child. And like, that pendulum has swung. It's like, first it was frigid mothers, then it was over involved mothers. They were like, coddling their children too much, and then it was like, they're not affectionate enough and. Right. It's just mothers are always being blamed. Whatever they're doing, they're doing it wrong. And then I see the, you know, parents, but especially mothers, taking way too much responsibility for their children's, like, mental and emotional health and outcomes. And obviously, like, the way you parent impacts your child. I'm not saying it doesn't, but you are not the only person or thing responsible for whether your child gets a C in algebra, whether they are gonna. On the life path you think they should be on. Like, whether they, whatever, become an astronaut or a punk rock musician. Like, they are their own person, they have their own genetics. They have their own environmental experiences. There's another 50% of genetics from your partner. Like, there's a lot that goes into a person. But women are so socialized to take over responsibility for all the logistical aspects of parenting and parenthood and for all the emotional kind of aspects of it. And then we also think that our job is to make sure that our children are always happy and never sad and never have any negative emotion. And then we become, like, fixated on that. So there's just like, so much over responsibility that happens in the parenting realm.

 

Shawna Samuel
Absolutely. Like, I. I actually had a person hang up on me when I talked about how children need a little bit of frustration in their lives to develop. Like, if our kids never had the

frustration of not knowing how to tie their shoe, they would not work through it. They wouldn't be able to tie their shoes if we were always like kind of stepping in and helping.

 

Kara Loewentheil
If you live in a bubble and you're never exposed to organisms and as soon as you take the bubble away, you will die of the common cold.

 

Shawna Samuel
Yeah. But it sets us up for like just an overwhelming experience of guilt and shame and anxiety as parents. Because as you pointed out, it doesn't seem to matter which way you're doing it. Society has decided you're either doing too much, too little, not right, and your.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Children will blame you anyway. You know, like when I coach weird parents of teenagers, I'm just like, have you ever heard of teenagers before? Were you a teenager? Right. Like your teenager is going to blame you for all their feelings no matter what you do. We could run an experiment where you parent exactly diametrically opposite ways and your teenager will still be mad at you and tell you that you suck and that you caused all their problems. Right. But we, because women are socialized to be over responsible, we take that in exactly like we were just talking about, because it hits a vulnerability we already have. We already think we might be responsible for everything. So when somebody else says you're responsible for like how I feel or for like whatever, you move me to this new school district and I don't have any friends, or like you won't let me go out at night so I can't, blah, blah, blah, like that hits where we're already vulnerable.

 

Shawna Samuel
Absolutely. So I think, like, I know for me that was a big aha in my life is just learning. Oh, wait. All these things that society has conditioned us to believe about the way that we're supposed to do. Name your game, whether it's parenting or work or keeping the house tidy enough. Oh, all those things we really can choose to believe or not. And you include in the book some really great exercises. Like with each chapter it's like, all right, how do we then turn this around? So can you maybe give us a flavor of one of the exercises that you recommend for starting to create your own self worth or as you put it, self serve validation.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah, I think one of the kind of easiest exercises I can recommend in kind of shorter form that's in the book is sort of the flip of what we were just talking about. We were talking about the idea that when you worried about what someone else thinks, it's because you think it. Right. And so the flip of that is when you want someone else to Validate you in a certain way that is a message to you about, like, what you want to believe about yourself. Right. I don't want. I'm never looking for someone to validate me that I'm like, what's the thing I don't care about at all that I'm, like, naturally athletic. I am not naturally athletic. I don't place any value on that for myself. I mean, it's great for other people. Like, I am never,

like, hoping someone will say that about me. Right. So when you want someone else to validate something about you, that's a thing where you want a different thought about yourself than you currently have. Right. Or you want permission to believe a certain thought about yourself. But because you're socialized as a woman, you were socialized to believe that you always need someone else to tell you something before you're allowed to believe it. So what you can do is ask yourself, like, if you're upset in your scenario from before that your boss is not giving you positive feedback, what is it you want your boss to have said? Like, write down what, in your ideal world they would say, like, this is such an amazing report. You are a genius. It's changed my life. Like, whatever it is, it's usually not even that intense. Just write down what you want them to have said. That is right there a script for what it is you want permission to believe about yourself. Right. And so that is a, like, little signal of what thoughts you need to start building towards. And maybe you can practice those thoughts right now. Maybe you need what I call in the book a ladder thought. There's a whole exercise called the Thought Ladder that teaches you how to work your way up in little bits to believable new thoughts. But that is a really quick way to figure out, like, where do I have negative thoughts about myself I'm not aware of? And what is it I want to believe about myself?

 

Shawna Samuel
Love it. And I love that you also mentioned the concept of the latter thought. Because I think so many people, when they think about doing thought work or believing new thoughts, I hear probably at least once a week, you know, I just need to stop thinking that I need to. But, you know, this affirmation business isn't working. And when I talk to someone who's like, I'm like, okay, wait, let's talk about affirmations. And I know that you have some great thoughts on this. So tell us, how is thoughtwork.

 

Kara Loewentheil

Yeah.

 

Shawna Samuel
Different from affirmations?

 

Kara Loewentheil
I think an affirmation is a fantasy. Right. It's like Here's a thought that number one, someone else gave you. You were. Maybe you came up with it yourself. But it's usually just. It's something that you don't believe and it's too far from where you are now. When you don't believe something but you say it to yourself, you have no emotional impact or you feel worse. I cite in the book a study showing that when you try to believe things, you really don't believe you actually can feel worse because it makes you, like, aware of the distance between where you are and what you're telling yourself you should want to believe. So when affirmations work, it's because they had just happened to be thoughts that you can believe right now. So you get an emotional payoff. But for a lot of people, affirmations are just way too positive. So, like, if you're struggling, making money, and the affirmation that a

money coach gives you is like, money is abundant and there's more than enough for everyone. But your current thought is like, there's never enough money and only a few people have it all. That's way too far. You don't believe that. You're not going to get any emotional payoff in your body. If you don't believe a thought, it will not create a feeling, and that will not motivate different actions. So you just don't go anywhere. Right. I can say the thought in my head, my husband is a secret alien, but I don't believe that. So it does not change my feelings or my actions. Right. This is the problem with, like, manifest, you know, affirmations or some forms of manifestation work or whatever is that a human brain can say any string of words to itself, but that's very different from what it actually believes. So if you've tried, like, positive thinking and it hasn't worked, or it seems stupid or naive, or you tried affirmations and those don't work. You got frustrated, you gave up. That's all. Because nobody taught you how to pick a thought that you actually believe and how to build on that. So you actually are creating a change neural circuit. Because, like, you, I hear all the time, I just need to stop thinking blank. And your brain has no mechanism to stop thinking something. There's only a mechanism to think something else instead. And you have to build a different neural network. There is no. Just, like, hit the red button and it stops. You have to, like, redirect the train.

 

Shawna Samuel
Wouldn't that be nice if there were the red button?

 

Kara Loewentheil
Oh, my God, I had a stop button. I would be a billionaire. But I don't have a stop button. Nobody does. And when you tell yourself, I need to just stop thinking this, you can spend years with a thought pattern that way because it's not ever going to stop. If you take nothing else away from this interview, please take away that. There is no such thing as just stopping thinking something. You must start thinking something else. You have to swap the thought and build a new neural connection in your brain.

 

Shawna Samuel
Absolutely. All right. You all are getting it straight from Carl Lowenthal. This is amazing. I love it because there is, you know, every day you're out there on LinkedIn or something, scrolling, and you see someone who's like, just think positive thoughts. And what I love about your work is you have created a structure for people to really start thinking new thoughts, to make those swaps in a way that feels believable. That's not like, I could sometimes refer to it as like self gaslighting. You're like, no, but really, I like, I am a beautiful goddess that I'm like, I'm lovable and my children adore me. If you don't actually believe that, you're just digging that hole of guilt and shame.

 

Kara Loewentheil

Yeah.

 

Shawna Samuel

So, Kara, I want to ask you about a bit of criticism that comes up from time to time even in feminist quarters when we talk about women and social conditioning. Because we're living in a lot of systemic oppression. We've got structural issues. And there are some people who say, well, look, you know, I just got turned down from promotion because of my skin color or because my boss wasn't happy that I took maternity leave last year. Or, you know, even we're still clearly fighting for equal rights and representation in many countries. So we've got these big thorny structural issues. So why should I be working on my brain when I'm not the cause of the big structural problems that are out there? Doesn't that just put more work onto me as a woman?

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah, I think that's a super valid common question and I have two answers to it. The first one is there are a lot of people working hard for social change, but probably the revolution isn't coming right in our lifetime. So, you know, if we were infinite living beings, then maybe we could be like, well, I'll just be miserable for the next 300 or 400 years until Armageddon or revolution and then everything will be fine. But that's not true. If you're middle aged, you have another 40 years maybe. And like, how do you want those? What do you want those years to be like, like you have to take responsibility for how your own life is. Second of all, though, I actually just think it's a misunderstanding to even think that these two things are opposed to each other. Because who creates social change? It's people who think differently from the norm. So the idea that like, you know, it's kind of privileged navel gazing to look at how society taught you to think and try to think differently, I. I just think is like a fundamental misunderstanding of how social change works. Anybody who's ever created a social movement or created change did it by looking inside their brain and being like society tells. Of course, they were looking outside too. They were seeing, here's what's not fair in the world. But society was telling them the whole time, that's fair, that's good, this is how things should be. This is normal, this is correct, this is natural, this is God's will. Like, this is what it should be like. So the revolution that happened was the person. I actually don't think the revolution comes in the recognition of unfairness or of difference or whatever, or of struggle. The revolution is in the recognition of. I don't think it does have to be this way. I don't think that is fair. I don't think that is natural. I don't think I do deserve this. Right. And that is where revolution begins. So the idea that sort of looking at our own socialization will take us away from structural change, I just think is wrong. And if you look at where we have focused most of our movement resources, I mean, I'm somebody who came up in the feminist and specifically the reproductive justice movement. And I worked in that movement for 20 years. I mean, I'm still in that movement, but like, I did it as a day job also for a long time. I was on the board of a national, you know, women's health nonprofit and advocacy group. I was on the board of a national law student, legal scholar, reproductive advocacy group. Like, I have done the institutional social change work and we're spending 99.9% of our resources on that and almost no resources on the mental side. So even diverting 10%, like just adding that right. I think we've tried the other way where we ignore the internalized stuff and we just focus on the external. And like, we're going backwards here in the US we have fewer reproductive rights now than we did when I graduated

college. So something different has to happen. And women, I mean, if you just look at reproductive rights in the United States, like there are so many women who have beliefs that they aren't comfortable expressing, they don't want to rock the boat, they don't want to have a fight with their husband. If they vote differently, they don't whatever. And we can shame them and criticize them and blah, blah, blah, but that does not build solidarity and build networks for change. So I could, like, I have, could be on a soapbox about this all day, but like a lot of the sort of virtue signaling discourse online is from people who have never had to build movement solidarity on the ground. And the way you build movement solidarity on the ground is by helping people understand what's happening and see how their solidarity, not by, like, ostracizing and shaming. And so, like, if we think about how do, like, if all the women in America voted in their own reproductive self interest, this would no longer be a conversation. Yeah, we would have a Democratic Senate, we would have a Democratic House, we would have a Democratic president, we would have nine Democratic justices, like the, you know, there. We would not be having this conversation. And the only way that we are going to help women, like, step into all of that political power is by changing all the internalized socialization that keeps them out of it. That keeps them, like, playing small. Don't make a fuss. Don't rock the boat. Don't debate grandpa at Thanksgiving. Don't, like, contradict that guy on the date. It's okay to marry someone who doesn't think you should have reproductive rights, because what do you know anyway? And your life isn't that important. Like, all of that contributes to how women show up in the political and civic sphere.

 

Shawna Samuel
Oh, I love it. Such powerful rejoinder to the notion, like the work that we do on ourselves is somehow taking away from the movements for justice. And I think you clearly articulated that's not the case. You know, I often think, like, it's really hard to smash the patriarchy if we've got a generation of women who's just too fucking burned out to pick up a sledgehammer.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah. Or you're wearing Spanx and heels and you can't run at the protest anyway because your feet hurt.

 

Shawna Samuel
Yeah, so true. I think one thing that I will share with listeners that Kara has coached me on in the past, I know, is kind of just seeing things as both and problems. Yes, There is structural work to be done in the world, and we can also take the time and invest in ourselves in a way that challenges our own thinking and makes change happen more quickly. So, Kara, I want to close out today by Asking you a question about offloading because you know, obviously you've done a lot of work on managing your mind. But as you said at the top, like sometimes you only have a half managed mind. If you could wave a magic wand, what is one thing that you would most like to offload either in life or in work?

 

Kara Loewentheil
It needs. It can be a thought pattern. It needs to be a.

 

Shawna Samuel
It can be a thought pattern. Absolutely.

 

Kara Loewentheil
I will say in my personal life I do have a partner who's very supportive because I am the breadwinner. So I have already offloaded. Like I don't do the dishes or the laundry. But that has not always been the case. That's just the era of life that I'm in now. And partly because I was able to select for and marry someone like that, because I thought that that was fine and desirable and could and totally still attractive. I mean we could have a whole other conversation about how women pen themselves in by like wanting characteristics in a mate that don't match the characteristics you need for a equal household labor relationship. That's a whole other thing. You may decide you don't like this. I can do another one if so, because it can may go against what you're kind of teaching. But I actually think the thing that I most need to offload is I have a little bit of this like sense of entitlement in my business sometimes where I want to hire someone and I want them to solve a problem for me and that is actually like. And then I spend so much time being annoyed that the problem isn't being solved when if I just spent that time actually figuring out how to solve the problem, then the problem would be solved. I could teach it to someone else and then I could stop doing it. So it's sort of like this way, this over weird. Over responsibility. It sort of is an example of how like lack of self responsibility leads to like over responsibility. Because it's like, because I'm not just taking the self responsibility to be like this is my business, this is a problem in my business. I need to spend some time to figure it out if this is something I care about, which it is, and then I'll be able to delegate it. I'm like not taking that self responsibility and I'm wanting someone else to solve my problem. And then I end up feeling over responsible because then I'm like, well I'm always having to fix this and I'm always having to check this and I always have to review it and it's never what I Want. And like, of course it's not what I want. I didn't figure out how to solve it first. So this other person I'm relying on, somebody else who doesn't even have my brain, has not built a business this size, like to try to solve a problem I don't even think I can solve. I'm like hiring someone who doesn't have the brain I have or the experience I have. And then I'm wanting them to solve a problem because I've told myself it's too hard for me to solve. So that doesn't work. So I, I mean it's sort of, it's less obvious than like I want to stop doing the PTA meetings or whatever. But I actually think, you know, I think I'd cleared a lot of that stuff out previously. So I'm like seeing more embedded complex areas of like not taking self responsibility leading to inefficient over responsibility.

 

Shawna Samuel
Yeah, I think that's such, you know, even though it's specific to your business, I think this is highly relatable to a lot of people who either could.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Be true about like making meals at home and not delegating to your kids or like not having a conversation with your partner about how you really would prefer things be done and then constantly over functioning to like correct it. Yeah, totally.

 

Shawna Samuel
Indeed. And also for people who manage teams at work, this comes up a lot where we hire direct reports and then we hope that they can just like go away and figure stuff out without bothering us. And then we're like, why is this coming back? A royal mess.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah, right. You're like, I didn't, I did not tell you what to do. Why didn't you do what I wanted? Well, yeah.

 

Shawna Samuel
Yep. So I think something we can all relate to in terms of something we love to offload. You know, I am just scratching the surface of everything that is in this phenomenal book. So if you're listening and you don't already have Kara's book, like why not? What is happening? I highly encourage you to go out, buy it, borrow it from your library, wherever you get your books. Because it really is, I don't say this slightly, it is truly life changing work. I've done this work personally, I can speak to it as life changing. So Kara, thank you for being here today. Where can people learn more about your work? Not just the book, but all of what you do?

 

Kara Loewentheil
Yeah, thanks for having me. The easiest thing to do is go to takebackyourbrainbook.com you can get the book there, there's a UK version, there's a US version, there's an audio book. I recorded it myself. So you can find all those links there. And you'll also be able to find how to get to. You know, my Instagram is just my name on Instagram. How to get to the School of New Feminist Thought, which is my coaching business. But really, I recommend starting with the book. Like, the book teaches what you need to know. It's the most accessible way to work with me. You know, it's anywhere from 20 to 30, depending on where you are. So buying the book is a great place to start.

 

Shawna Samuel
Excellent. And we'll put all the links both to the book and to Kara's Socials and School of New Feminist Thought. We'll put all of that into the show notes so that you can click and get right to it. Kara, I want to thank you again for being here. It's always a pleasure. It's funny, it's illuminating and I think people are going to leave with some amazing takeaways for things that can be doing differently, to think differently.

 

Kara Loewentheil
Thanks for having me. It's a blast.

 

Shawna Samuel
Excellent. Talk to you soon.

 

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