If Elizabeth Gilbert can say "I don't care!" then you can too!
[Originally posted on October 15, 2019]
Last week, I covered the 5 main themes from the PA women’s conference and then discussed three tips on embracing imperfection. You can read more about that here.
This week, I dive into the next hot topic, which is setting boundaries and saying “no” to things that pull your attention and energy from what you value most. At the conference, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls, Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love gave a moving keynote speech about this exact topic.
In her keynote, Elizabeth told the story about when she was a “starving artist” in NYC, splitting her time between working three jobs, her boyfriend and living in a small apartment with two roommates. She spoke about how she had no time to write because of these exact things. There was a woman that lived near her that was a successful artist, and someone that Elizabeth secretly decided would become her mentor. After months of positioning herself close to this artist, they were at a party, and Elizabeth was lamenting, as usual, about how all she wanted to do was become a writer, but how she had no time to write.
It was at this party, where the artist finally looked at Gilbert, and asked: “What are you willing to give up to live the life you keep pretending that you want to live?” When Elizabeth tried to respond with the fact that she couldn’t give anything up, she needed the jobs to pay the rent, she couldn’t write at home because of her roommates, etc, the artist started to ask Elizabeth about how she spends her free time. Again, Elizabeth tried to respond that she didn’t have any free time, and the artist asked these powerful questions to reframe the question a different way:
What is your favorite TV show?
What are your favorite magazines?
Where do you and your friends like going out to dinner?
After Elizabeth was able to respond to all of these, the artist simply stated: “How nice that you have the luxury of free time to watch TV, read magazines, and go out to dinner with your friends.” She then went on to ask Elizabeth about an upcoming vacation she had planned at the beach with her roommates. When Elizabeth started to spill the details, the artist stopped her mid-sentence and said “you’re not going.” The artist had just dropped the bomb and continued to tell Elizabeth that instead of going on that vacation with her friends, she will take advantage of the free time and silence in her apartment, and she will write. The artist finished by telling Elizabeth that if chose to go on the vacation instead of staying home to write, the artist would never speak with Elizabeth again.
Elizabeth didn’t go on that vacation. She stayed home, and she wrote the first draft of her first novel Pilgrims.
Why am I retelling you this story? Well, for one, it is to highlight the fact that we do have free time. We just mask it by doing other things. For another, it is to highlight that sometimes, we need to say “no” to things that we WANT to do in order to accomplish the things that are truly important. Lastly, I find the first question the artist asked to be incredibly powerful: “What are you willing to give up to live the life you keep pretending that you want to live?”
We’re human, there are 24 hours in the day, and our list of priorities often requires that we need 30... 38 if you want to get a good night’s sleep. This way of living isn’t possible, and it causes burnout. The only way to remedy this, is to start trimming down our priority lists to focus truly on our non-negotiable values, the people and things that matter most in our lives.
In Elizabeth’s speech, she recapped the difficult time in her life when her partner Rayya Elias was diagnosed with cancer and given 6 months to live. Elizabeth dropped everything and flew home. While she was waiting at the airport, she went into her inbox and deleted all those unread emails that had been sitting [for weeks or months] waiting for a response. She realized, in that moment, that she didn’t care about responding to those emails – if she had cared, she would have responded immediately, like she does to her emails to her loved ones and her publishers.
How empowering to not be weighed down by those "I should probably respond to that" emails. Those emails that don't require an immediate response, or those emails that you don't have the energy to respond to, or those emails where frankly you just don’t care enough to respond. Those emails, that if you're like me, you leave unread, or move it to an “address later” folder. But, again, if you're like me, over time, more and more emails move into that category, and we just never get around to responding, and we feel bad about it.
By why? Why should we feel bad about not responding? Why should we feel bad about not caring about something that isn’t important to us?
In her speech, Elizabeth challenged us to change the dialogue, from lying to telling the truth. Rather than saying “I didn’t respond to you because I didn’t have time,” try saying “I didn’t respond to you because I just don’t care.” {maybe not to someone’s face – that would be mean and inconsiderate, but you get my point here! it would be liberating!}
When you start to think about life in this way, separating things out from what you care about and what you don't, you start to realize what your values are.
Think about your life. What five things do you value most? Is it your family? Your dog? Your spouse? Your reading? Your writing? Your business? Your time in nature? Whatever it is, write it down and draw a circle around it. Make the border thick, because that represents your boundary. Everything inside your circle is sacred.
Think about that. You have the power to determine what is sacred. You have the power to decide what is non-negotiable. You have the power to determine who can and cannot see what is inside your circle. And, you have the power to tell people that if they want to be let into the circle, to be a part of what you wrote down, then they better take their shoes off and treat those items with respect, because those items are sacred.
Interested in understanding your values? Here is a values assessment tool that I have my clients complete. It helps you understand what you truly value, and how much respect you’re paying to those values. It helps you start to identify your non-negotiable values, and the things that you may want, but also may need to say “no” to sometimes if it means that you can prioritize your non-negotiable values.
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