Last week, I joined Jessica Ashley Gill on the Expanded Podcast, a very special show that explores personal healing, authenticity, and changing your life from the inside out – 40 million downloads and counting!
The show and its associated community serves hundreds of thousands of women, and particularly many who are in the earlier phases of adulthood – women who are finding those early relationships, and making foundational career moves and life choices. These women are doing it with a collective conversation about inner work and psychology – and the tech to connect globally around these topics – that simply didn’t exist when many of us (me included!) were at that early stage. It’s really fascinating to see what they are creating.
If you are up for a refresher deep dive into the Playing Big concepts, this conversation is a great one to listen to. We talked about so much – from unhooking from praise to listening to our inner mentors to ending the sneaky hiding strategies we often fall into, like designing at the whiteboard or hiding our own story. This conversation is also one to share with the younger women in your life (pre-midlife) as I geared many of my comments to those in that stage.
Here’s some of what I shared about Inner Mentor on the podcast, adapted and elaborated upon here:
When we discover our Inner Mentors, what happens is often very sacred and mysterious.
The Inner Mentor figure that shows up is this composite of your more authentic self – your more expressed self – but then also this elder self, who you have grown into, or who you are longing to grow into.
Psychologist James Hillman writes about the acorn and the oak tree, that the acorn has all the information it needs within it to become an oak tree. It doesn’t need to go to oak tree school. It doesn’t need an oak tree guide or special healer to tell it what to do.
It’s not that the acorn is entirely independent, sealed off from the world; it needs the right nutrients and conditions and environment to grow and flourish, like all of us. But it doesn’t need anything external to instruct it about what it should grow into. Nor does it need a model to emulate. No, it holds within its blueprint for what it can become.
And of course, the acorn can only grow into an oak tree; it can’t will itself or change itself sufficiently to become a pine or birch instead!
We’re all, in some way, in acorn-ness at any given moment of our human development. The inner mentor gives us a felt sense and an image for our own oak tree self.
Once we’ve found her, we can draw upon her wisdom for guidance and clarity. Everyone has this inner wisdom in them – that I know for sure. It’s a matter of removing blocks to it, and learning to access it regularly.
If you haven’t met your inner mentor yet, I hope you’ll take time to do that and not miss out on this incredible tool, one you can use across all areas of your life. Great ways to start are the Inner Mentor Chapter (chapter 2) of Playing Big, or access the guided audio to Inner Mentor visualization here.
Top Photo Credit: Aaron Burden
