Who Are You Without Distractions: The Value of Original Thinking for Female Entrepreneurs

Oh, hello. Welcome to Leadership is Feminine. I'm Kris Plachy and I am your host. I'm thrilled that you're here.

Thank you to those of you who have been recommending the podcast to other people that you know. I'm so grateful for you doing that. I know it can be really easy- I find myself doing it all the time. I listened to a really great podcast or I read a really great book and I internalized that I loved it. And then I forget to tell other people until like, the topic comes up and it becomes relevant.

And then I'm like, "Oh, you should listen to this podcast". So thank you. In the moment, if you think of it to just pass it on and share it, it means a lot. And my goal really to impact 20 million women is continuing and I'm marching forward and there's more to come on that.

Today, I want to talk to you about something that's, I think, a little weird. And I say that because I've shared it with other people, and honestly, they've not told me that it's weird. So that's the good news. But I still feel like it's this really interesting thing that has been in my brain.

And a couple of weeks ago. I was talking to my husband and I said, "Do you ever just wonder what it is that you would actually think if you weren't reacting to everything around you all the time? And then you have thoughts because of what you're reacting to," right?

So it doesn't matter what it is. You're listening to this podcast. You're having thoughts. You get in your car and you drive somewhere. You have thoughts. You have a conversation with a friend and you have thoughts. You pet your dog and you have thoughts. You read your email and you have thoughts. You pick up your phone and you look at your Instagram or your TikTok or your LinkedIn or your Facebook and you have thoughts, right? You watch the news. You have thoughts. You watch, like me, all my favorite Britbox, Acorn, PBS, TV shows that are all detective stories and you have thoughts, right? All the things.

And I said to him, I'm like, I wonder, I sometimes I wonder what I would actually think if I wasn't responding in my mind to all of the circumstances of my life. If I genuinely just removed myself enough to not have any stimulus. What would my brain think about by itself? Is that weird?

Do you guys think I'm weird when I say that? And why do I care? Right? Well, I guess I care because this is my chosen profession, and I'm super intrigued by self awareness, self discovery, self knowing, and the importance I think that plays in the, the experience we have in this lifetime.

I think our lives are better if we're willing to invest in them and investigate them and seek out ideas and insight and explore like all that we already have within us to know. I am intrigued when I meet people who have no interest in self knowing and in my personal life. I will tell you, I have zero tolerance for it.

Like I just can't hang out with people who don't want to understand themselves. And maybe that's judgy. I don't mean it to be, I just find it so difficult to be, to relate because I do find that meaningful conversations are the only ones I want to have. And I like to talk to people who like, are interested in stuff.

It's, you know, so much of why I created my Sage CEO program, because I work with these really smart women who, yes, initially find me because they need help, you know, running their business and leading their teams and not working as hard and getting out of the weeds of their business. And we do all of that.

And also we open up the boxes of unexplored insights about ourselves because- I wrote an article this week and posted it on my Moxie Sage sub stack about, you know, I bought a self watering, uh, this is very random podcast. Stay with me. I bought a self watering planter. And I've never had one of these before.

It was, and so basically it explains in the box that you, you know, you put all the, there's this box thing and there's this tube and anyway, so those of you that probably had one, you're like, "yeah, duh Kris."

But my point is that I did this whole thing and made this planter. And the whole point is that you have to put the plants in and you water the plants. for like three weeks, not, you know, the self watering mechanism won't work right away because the roots of the plants have to get to the well. They have to make their way down to the well in order to touch the water that's part of the reserve water. But the only way that you can help those roots grow so they can get down to the water is when you pull the plant out of the pot.

You know, when you pull a plant, I'm sure you've done that in your life, you pull the plant out of the pot, right? What do the roots look like? Well, they're all wrapped around the plant. They're all like tightly bound tangled, they're a mess and they're not built to grow with depth because they're so bunched up, right?

So one of the first things you have to do is you have to break that up. You have to let the roots start to untangle. And in the course of that, you often will break some of the roots. Like, they'll be gone. They'll just fall off in the soil that comes off the plants. It's part of the process. But you have to break up the root ball in order to create, to let the plant expand, because as deep as the roots will go, that's how the plant will live.

The plant will thrive more if the roots can get down deeper and anchor the plant, get more nutrients, and get more nourishment, and get more water. So the self watering planter, that's part of the process, is you have to take these plants out of the pot, and you have to break up their root ball, and you have to let those roots have space, and so they can grow, and then they grow down into where the water well is.

And it got me thinking about just humans, that that really is the process that we have to go through. And if we're not careful, we become that pot in the plant, right? And if we're just spinning on all the same thoughts all day and same circumstances all day and same stimulus all day and same people, same TV shows, same news channels, same Facebook pages, same Instagram algorithms, same music.

We're a root ball that is just bunching up on itself. And then do you even really know what you think if you were to just think. Like, if you had time to not be influenced by anything, what would come to you? Do you ever wonder that? Am I the only one? This has been coming to me in that I talked to my husband about this a while ago.

And then I saw Salman Rushdie on, uh, be interviewed on a show and he wrote a book years ago. It's a very interesting story. He wrote a book years ago called the Satanic Verses and it was incredibly provocative. There was a death threat on his head for years and he had to live in exile and he was afraid for his life for years.

He finally came out of hiding and then he, not hiding, but he finally started to sort of be, live more publicly and lo and behold, just two years ago, someone finally got him and stabbed him - I don't even know many times - and he survived the attack. So he's just written a new book. And so he's an incredibly interesting man, whether you agree with his philosophy or not, it's not what I'm here- I don't have an opinion on his philosophy. I just find him fascinating in his life.

He said to the person that he was being interviewed by, he said, "Well, you know, I'm just not a part of the algorithm". Because I think the question was like, how do you have these thoughts, these original thoughts? How do you write? How do you find your voice? How do you do this? And he said, "I'm not a part of the algorithm. I don't, I don't spend my time in the same pot that everybody else is in."

And I just think at a time where we are so challenged to find the truth in anything that as leaders, If you're not asking yourself reflective questions, and you're not having conversations that elevate what you think and challenge what you think, even the stuff you think is like, the truth about how the world should be and how people should be in it.

If you aren't willing to explore your own root ball, if you aren't willing to loosen that sucker up and see like where could you possibly go If you weren't bound up by all of the pieces and parts of the life that you've designed, what else might you figure out? What else might you discover? What might be hiding that you don't even know you are so good at knowing because it's buried in the algorithm of a life.

I think that if we want to wear a name tag that says I'm Kris Plachy and I'm the founder, I'm the owner, I'm the CEO, I'm the principal, I'm the chief of something, I'm the head of this, I'm the business owner, person. If I have raised my hand and I am willing to accept the responsibility that people will follow me, I believe, and this is my belief, it does not have to be your belief, but you're listening to my podcast. So my hunch is you might share a little bit of this. But I do believe that we have a responsibility to find more neutrality in our thinking and to be willing to silence the influences enough to access our true thinking.

And I journal every morning. And I journal a lot of the same stuff. I know I do. So I'm sure I could argue that that is what I think because I'm so consistent. But I do think that Now that I think this has a little bit to do with age, right? And also this time in my life with my, my kids are grown and they were coming up on the end of their freshman year.

My older son has been out of the house now a couple of years and her dog died and we live in a new house. And it's just been a lot of things that have sort of changed that I built out of thoughts that I had at one point that I believed were important and true and necessary and mine. Like that's what I wanted and I don't argue with that at all.

But now as I look at the territory of my future. It's kind of like being 22 again. It's like, what do I want to think? And do I even know what I really think about what I want, what I want to believe, who I want to be, who I want to surround my time, who spend my time with, who I want to, what jokes I think are funny, what, you know, what is it?

I was joking. I've talked to a couple people about this. I'm like, is this like why people go on silent retreats? They go sit in the woods or somewhere for a week just to like totally connect? Maybe. I don't know if I could handle it. It's such an interesting thing to think about. It's for sure why I do my Sage program and we have our Gatherings because I want to create space for women to at least chew on other ideas other than what comes in in their own brain and in their own world.

You put really successful, really smart, really funny, really interesting women in a room together, throw something on the table to talk about. It's so powerful to watch what happens and how they create, assimilate that, or don't, or resist it, or argue, or cry, or are deeply moved, or doesn't make any sense.

Like it's just so interesting, but that's what's so cool about my SAGE clients is they're like interested in that. Because they, they like transformation, they enjoy that next level of, like, poking the bear a little, like, "Oof, this is kind of intriguing, what could I figure out? I didn't know that was in there."

I just think that this lifetime is such a gift for all of us, and I don't want to spend it sitting on the couch. I don't want to spend it, In this tiny little circle of people that I might have known for my whole life. I really want to allow my mind to be disrupted. And maybe that's because I know now I'm very capable of whatever comes up in it.

Like I know there's nothing I'm afraid that will happen, that I will learn, that I will discover that I won't be able to handle. I think that's why a lot of people stay in their pot with their roots that just grow in circles. It's very scary to come out of that pot and see what happens if you let those roots grow.

They might go somewhere you don't know about, you don't want, you're afraid of. You're afraid of what other people will think if you let them grow. So I think there's lots of things keep us small and we leave a lot of territory of our life unexplored. I don't want that.

So what thoughts might you think if you had nothing to influence what you're thinking? I don't know the answer because I don't, I haven't tried that and not in a way that is really pure. I don't really even know what that is for me yet. But I think I might find out because I've asked the question and one of you might actually tell me which will be super fun. So if you have an idea, you can send it my way.

But um, so yeah, kind of a deep one for this day, this, this bright new week that we're moving into. Give it a think, right? But at least, you know, get out of the pot. Like, break those roots up a little bit. Let's, let's shake things up a little bit, mama.

Life's big. There's so much. And I bet that most of you listening to this would already say, "I've already done so live." I really have. I get it. But you know what's true? There's more. That's so fun. Don't you think that's fun? I think it's fun. Sometimes it's exhausting, but mostly super, super cool.

Thanks for tuning in today. Talk to you next time.

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