Okay, I am one of those people who has a whole stack of books next to her bed and shames herself about all that she’s not reading. Yes, that’s me. I think I’m like many people out there. I love books and I love to look at the titles, but it does make me feel bad. I feel bad that I’m not reading. I have self-disparaging thoughts, and one of the things I’ve done more recently is I’ve removed them from my nightstand and I leave just the one book that feels important to me to read.

One of the other things I’ve done is I’ve started doing what my friend Eric does, which is to listen to more interviews. Instead of always feeling like I need to buy and read the book, I first listen to an interview or two and decide whether it’s something that I want to invest my time in. So recently I’m focused more on listening to interviews with the authors of books that I’m interested in. Or, the authors of books that I never read that are kind of old now but I’ve always been intrigued by. One of them is a book by Jen Sincero called ‘You Are a Badass.’  The book title never resonated with me, but it is everywhere, and it has been on the bestseller list for years and years.

Anyway, Jen was interviewed by my good buddy Susie Moore on her podcast ‘Let it Be Easy.’  I realize that I reference Susie a lot. It’s because she is like the Godmother of Dear Constance and one of my wisdom buddies. We trade messages about books and interviews and life hacks.  Anyway, I decided to listen in because I had never read any of Jen’s books and it was indeed a fabulous interview.

There were two things that she talked about that I wanted to mention. One was retreating.  When I say retreating, it’s something that a lot of us did during Covid. This is not a commentary on Covid, but one of the great things about Covid and that whole period was that a lot of us got more comfortable with being alone. And some of us took that too far and got isolated.  I was really isolated.  I had come off a long-term relationship, then Covid happened, and then I was with him again to retreat out in Montauk on the east end of Long Island. Then when I came back to New York City and back into my real life, I was spending a tremendous amount of time at home alone, and Jen Sincero talks about this a lot in this interview.

What I find interesting is that we lose our confidence. It’s so easy to forget the stimulation and insights, and the joy and love we get from being around people. Speaking for myself, I’m not a hugely social person, but I love that intimate connection and I’ve been making much more of an effort to put myself out there and I’ve gained confidence. I’ve sort of found my voice and I’ve come back into myself. I just loved how she spoke to that in the interview. She’s a very public personality – hugely successful – and she was talking about how she retreated and had taken that retreat and that quiet too far.   I do think that some people are still stuck in that mode. I don’t want to say stuck. I shouldn’t say stuck. They’re simply still sort of in that mode.

The other thing that she talked about were these questions that she asks herself as she reengages more actively in the world. They were so good. I had to go back and listen to the interview again to find them.

Here are her three questions. Will it be fun? Will it give me energy or deplete my energy? And does it have meaning? Now, of course, these questions were in the context of her life as a public figure. It’s interesting because one of the questions she used to ask herself, and one of the filters through which she evaluated how she spent her time, was will I make money?  Now that this is no longer her key driver, these are her questions.

So, I guess this kind of brings it back to the filter question. I use the term filters for these types of questions. What are your filters? And she asks herself these questions, but we’re both saying the same thing.  It really does come down to clarity and realizing that you have a choice to make. Do you want to stay isolated and in your own little insular world, or do you want to reengage? As I’ve said before, and speaking for myself, my filters are am I going to be putting myself in the way of interesting people, and am I going to be around people that are focused on the same things that I am, which right now are my writing and creating this show for you. That’s what’s important to me now and those are my filters and the questions I’m asking myself.  Sorry if I’m belaboring a point, but it’s what’s on my mind right now.

That’s all for now, from my heart to yours.