Ep. 1 - Starting Strawberry Saturn

Theme music created by: Geovane da Silva

Episode Summary

Welcome to the first episode of Strawberry Saturn!

In this episode I share a bit about the mental obstacles I needed to overcome to get this thing off the ground.

Reference Links

Lost ring story - Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening Your Life's Purpose

Teddy Roosevelt quote - Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

Perfectionism solution - Amber Amhrein, channelwithamber.com

Transcript

(Auto-generated by Whisper AI)

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of Strawberry Saturn.

My name is Mari, and the goal of this podcast is to track the things that I've learned through life for several years so that when I am an old woman, I can look back and see what things I was going through and what things were relevant for me in my 30s, 40s, 50s, and hopefully beyond.

In the process of recording this audio diary, if I can help even one person move quicker through a challenge that they're experiencing, it's so worth it.

With that, I wanted to give a little bit of background that for the past four years, I've felt an inspiration, an inner calling, to create a podcast.

I have not been able to make it happen largely because I had to work through very real mental blocks in order to get this thing off the ground.

If this podcast is about recording those types of learnings of how I get through challenging things, it seems fitting and perfect to make this first episode all about the blocks that I needed to overcome to make this happen.

Okay, so let's get started with the two biggest blocks that I needed to get through.

I've grouped both of them under an umbrella called Creator's Blocks because I'm convinced that any creator has to overcome these blocks at some point, otherwise they never create.

I want to just set the stage of I feel like I've always been very confident in my abilities to perform and create things in general, but nothing quite like this.

There's something so different about creating art, creating something that is a reflection of what you think is cool or something that is totally unique to you.

I've always created things that were assigned and heavily constrained and I felt, "Oh, this will be easy."

Then I got into it and faced so many blocks around ego of like I was identifying with the product.

Yeah, before I stray too far, let me get into that first block.

That first block was, "What if people don't like it?"

It was just that simple question, "Oh no, what if I have this beautiful baby?

What if I put so much time and effort into something that is a part of me and I identify with?"

People say, "Oh, that's an ugly baby," or, "I don't like it," and they just go in the other direction.

A fear of rejection goes hand in hand with the ego because I think evolutionarily speaking, when we are in tribal communities, if you were rejected from the tribe, your chances of survival were very low.

Even though that's not the case anymore, I think the fear is still very convincing.

It still exists in all of us.

Especially when we do what I was doing with identifying with the project, like with the actual product, where instead of just seeing it as an experiment, as something that was outside of who I am, I was taking this podcast and I was saying, "This is my baby.

This is me.

If you're rejecting this product, you're rejecting who I am and somehow you thinking this product is bad," or not you, anyone thinking this product is bad, "is somehow going to make me less than?"

Really, it all connects to Eckhart Tolle, who's this master philosopher on self and he talks about how the more that you identify with something outside of yourself, the more you know it is an ego thing and that the fear doesn't hold weight because it doesn't actually diminish who you are at all.

To illustrate that point, he goes into the story about a woman who loses her diamond wedding ring.

She can't find it and she only has a few more months to live.

She's terminally ill with cancer and she's upset because that wedding ring is a family heirloom that she received from her grandmother and she's convinced that the person ...

She's convinced that the ring has been stolen and that the person who stole it is actually her caretaker.

She's also going through this loss of faith with humanity of like, "How could someone be so cruel?

If I don't have this precious item, I am somehow less me."

Eckhart Tolle asks her this very question of, "Well, you're going to pass away soon and you're going to have to lose that ring anyway.

In losing it now, do you feel like you are any less you as a result?"

When she reflects on it, she feels more at peace because she realizes, "No, she is herself independent of this item."

That the mind was attaching some of her identity to that item and so it felt so personal and it felt so painful when it went missing, but that that wasn't actually true.

That was just a thought.

In really internalizing that truth, I was able to get the courage to work through it, through the fear, but I want to also highlight that the fear is still very much there, that even though I know that my worth isn't affected by this product, it's still scary and that's okay.

That leads me to, if people are aware of Brene Brown, she's an amazing shame researcher.

She has this book called Daring Greatly and this incredible quote that goes with the book by Teddy Roosevelt.

It's all about the fact that it's not the critic who counts.

It is the man in the arena who is doing the thing that matters, so man or woman.

Effectively, what Teddy highlights in that quote is that if the person in the arena succeeds, they get to know the triumph of high achievement.

If the worst happens and they fail, they do so while daring greatly.

In essence, the success really is in daring to go into the arena at all, that there are so many people who can critique the work, but unless they're also doing the work and taking those risks, their opinion doesn't really matter.

I would argue even if they're in the arena with you fighting and saying, "Oh, your fighting is terrible," they're missing the fact that you are daring greatly.

Ultimately, it's our responsibility as creators to identify that that is success.

This success is just showing up and deciding to create, period.

We can't control what anyone says about that work that is created.

There's a peace in accepting that our self-worth is independent, like who we are is independent of anything we do create.

Hopefully, some of that resonated, but all of that context, being in the arena, not identifying with this thought that I am my product, and recognizing that this fear of rejection is purely an ego thing, it really helped me gather that courage to overcome it.

Moving on, let's go to the second creator's block.

It's slightly different from the first, but a lot of the wisdom from the first block can be applied to overcoming the second block.

I wanted to separate it because I realized it was a little different.

It's still a fear of rejection, but it comes from a place of perfectionism.

It's the question, "What if the product I make is objectively bad?"

What if people not only don't like it based on preference, but what if it's also just bad?

What if personally, as the creator of this thing, you don't even like it?

What if I look at it and say, "Oh, gosh, this was the best I can do. This doesn't feel great."

Here, there's that same identifying with the end result, identifying with something externally, otherwise it wouldn't hurt.

Even though I know that's what's happening, it still feels very real in the body.

I think step one is reminding yourself that it is not going to affect who you are in the slightest, but also that it's coming from a place of perfectionism.

Perfectionism really is rooted on having an end result.

This is something that I learned from Amber Amrhein through a session that I had with her.

She's great.

I'll include her information in the show notes.

She is also a perfectionist.

In the session that I had, she said, "What if there's never an end?"

Perfectionism really hinges on creating a product and that product not being perfect.

If the creation never finishes, then there's nothing to critique.

I thought that was brilliant because it's so true that if you're looking just at one episode and say, "Oh, I hate it," you're looking at that as a closed system.

If you look at the result as the entire body of work and you continue to add to that body of work, then there's never really an end.

There's never a final cap to its potential of what it could be.

It doesn't really matter if the early editions of the product are rough because the early sort of output does not dictate the final result.

For me, it was this hope of like, "Yeah, success is engaging with the space and I am hopeful that it will one day be something that is beyond what I could have ever imagined that I could do."

How exciting is that?

Focus on the excitement of growth and creation versus this perception of an initial thing not being great.

That was the second block.

I did want to cover two separate, more podcast-related blocks that I had to overcome.

The first one is more an acknowledgement that to make a podcast there is a certain amount of tech proficiency that I think we run into.

There's a learning curve around editing, getting the right equipment, figuring out things like, I don't know, the entry song and what you want to say and getting the show notes together in a way that makes sense and all of that is challenging.

If you who are listening is someone who's been interested in creating a podcast or is struggling with the kind of semantics of getting it off the ground, you're not alone.

It's a very real learning curve and it's really challenging.

I would say it's also just a matter of persistence that you can learn how to do everything by yourself.

You can get the equipment.

You can do the research.

It's a lot of trial and error.

You can also outsource a product to be edited by a professional company if that's not necessarily something that interests you.

I did want to highlight though that that was a thing and to give kind of credence to the fact that if it's hard then I hear you.

It was hard for me too.

I also need to admit that I had a lot of help in this department.

My husband is really versed.

He's a musician and singer and he kind of already figured out a lot of this stuff before we even met.

So props, even with that help, it was still hard and I hear you and I see you and I wish you luck if you are struggling with the tech side of things as well.

Okay, and this final block that I personally experienced is one that is rooted in a little bit of codependency because I did grow up as a twin and I found courage in doing hard things with someone.

And in this case there was all of this ego fear from the first two mental blocks of creating.

Like, "Oh, what if people don't like it?

They're going to reject me."

And my solution to handle a lot of that fear was to reach out to my sister and say, "Why don't you do this with me?"

Right?

It's less scary if we do it together.

There's strength in numbers and it's no longer just my baby.

It's our baby and you can tell me it's beautiful.

And as someone who is very comfortable in collaborating with a partner to achieve something difficult, it was very challenging to say, "I am going to do this alone," because my sister didn't have the same interest or availability to get this off the ground with me.

She recently had my wonderful nephew, Sage, and that really is her focal point.

So in order to complete the podcast, it's something I had to take responsibility for.

And working through those first mental blocks also helped me get through this final one.

But there was also an exercise that I did where I looked at my life, like I took a step back and I said, "Okay, where else in my life have I done things, big things, scary things without my sister?"

And there's a ton there.

But specifically, bowling is a big one.

It's a huge hobby of mine.

I do it a lot.

And I would say I'm definitely a bowling enthusiast, amateur, semi-pro, whatever you want to call it.

I bowl a lot and I have a coach and I've got big dreams of one day competing with people on tour.

But it's something that I've always taken ownership of.

And in reviewing bowling and seeing my growth in there and how I started, when I started it was so rough.

And yet, a lot of these ego things didn't really have as much of an impact.

It's never easy not being good at something.

But in the closed bubble that is bowling, it all felt like it was okay.

Because I viewed bowling as a game.

I didn't really identify it.

How I performed didn't necessarily...

My mind didn't attach my performance as a reflection of my self-worth.

And for some reason it did to this podcast because I think it's more expressing truth in a verbal form versus engaging with a game and engaging physically with something.

I didn't have any hangups on a physical performance.

I do seem to have hangups on communicating ideas.

And I also realized that in reviewing bowling, one reason that it was easier was because it felt so right.

It was such an authentic form of self-expression that came naturally.

And in order to get to that same place with the podcast, I made changes to the format and how I was going to approach it in a way that made it more fun and made it more natural to what I wanted to do.

So instead of trying to make something that I thought other people wanted, I focused on what really would make me smile and what's something I would really enjoy creating.

Because if you kind of get lost in that personal process, it makes you want to do it more.

It makes it more fun.

And it also, it makes it more you.

And it's something that is sort of a channeling of your energy that feels good.

It feels right.

I mentioned this whole twin thing before, but something I've learned in being a twin is that trying to be someone that you're not, even if it makes you feel safe, it kills a part of you inside.

Because growing up, I was positively rewarded for mimicking and collaborating, like mimicking my sister and collaborating on a collective identity.

Society loves it.

They're like, "Oh, the twins."

I was always referred to in the plural and everyone loves when you do something in tandem.

And it was often scary to be seen as an individual.

Like I felt that it was safer to be seen as a collective unit.

In growing up, I realized that that reliance on a shared identity and the preference of safety over self-expression led to so much misery.

Because inside I always had a voice saying, "No, I don't actually want to say or do this thing, even if it makes me more safe."

And even though that process of expressing authentically will always be scary because the fear of rejection is real, I will say that that whole process of leaning into your inner vibration of self is something that is so helpful.

It helped me immensely.

And applying a similar logic to this podcast of like, "This is me and this is fun and this is what I like to do," it gave me momentum and courage to continue.

So yeah, those four blocks were the things that I've been engaging with and thinking about and trying to overcome for the past four years.

I'm happy to say, "I'm here!"

Thank you for listening and I'll see you next time.