Tara Stiles, CLEAN MIND, CLEAN BODY

Zibby Owens: Tara Stiles is the founder of Strala, the revolutionary approach to being, moving, and healing. Strala teaches yoga, tai chi, and traditional Chinese medicine to help people release stress, let go of bad habits, and move easily through all kinds of challenges. Strala is practiced in more than a hundred countries. Thousands of guides are leading Strala classes daily around the globe. Tara has authored several best-selling books including Yoga Cures, Make Your Own Rules Diet, and Strala Yoga. She's been profiled by The New York Times, The Times of India, The Times in the UK, and featured in most major national and international magazines. She is a sought-after speaker on topics of entrepreneurship, health, and well-being. Harvard even profiled Tara's work in a case study. She has spoken with students at Harvard and NYU about her experience and approaches to creativity and leadership. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and their daughter, Daisy. Her most recent book, by the way, was helping advise on National Geographic's book of animal yoga poses, which is amazing.

Hi.

Tara Stiles: Hey.

Zibby: I'm excited to talk to you again. I know we discussed Yoga Animals on Instagram Live, which I have here. I think I didn't have it front of me last time even though it was upstairs. Anyway, now at least we can chat for a few extra minutes and hear more about all the rest of your stuff and not just this book. For listeners who don't know about Yoga Animals, which is a National Geographic kids' collaboration that you did, you were the yoga expert for them on this book, the subtitle of which is A Wild Introduction to Kid-Friendly Poses. Tell everybody a little more about your role in the yoga community and then how you ended up being a consultant for a place like National Geographic, which is pretty awesome.

Tara: Yeah, that is pretty wild. Pretty simple, I started a tiny little studio in 2008 in my boyfriend at the time's apartment. I ended up marrying him. He was nice about it. The idea was to move in a way that felt good to you. That was really, if you can believe it or not, scandalous at the time within the yoga world. I was playing soft, feel-good music that people could identify with. That was also very scandalous at the time. I wasn't trying to start all these problems. I learned about yoga as a young kid in a dance program. My first thought was, this is incredible. This is amazing. I had a really good teacher. My second thought was, why don't my friends do this? Then I just started walking around and talking to people about yoga. Then I realized all the misconceptions. People felt like they weren’t included or they weren’t flexible or it was against their religion. I get it. There's all these different kinds of communities. I just saw, I wouldn't even say an opportunity, it kept pulling me in. I just started sharing yoga with my friends in the apartment. One thing kept leading to another. It's a global thing now with what we offer.

We have a community of guides. We call our instructors guides. I never liked the word teacher. I was twenty years old teaching yoga to doctors and lawyers and all these smart people. I knew how to lead them through a yoga practice safely, so the word guide really made a lot of sense. My husband, then boyfriend at the time, was a mountain climber. He was saying, "A guide, you walk up the mountain, and it's the person who's done it before, but you're also doing it too." I'm like, oh, let's just say that. [laughs] It was more of a self-deprecating move. There was a lot I had to say and a lot I wanted to express for people to experience yoga in a way that felt like them and a tool that you could use instead of this thing that you needed to live up to in a way. It kept bringing more opportunities into my life. I had no choice but to keep saying yes. Ten years later, it kept going. One thing kept leading to another. Got an email from National Geographic and thought it was a joke, deleted it a few times. [laughs] Happy to help them. If I can offer, especially with the language in the book for the little ones, not to have them read language or be read language that makes them feel like they're not able to do something, so instructing in a way that's about moving your body in a way that feels good for you and nice for you instead of trying to push your body in a certain way or make a certain shape as the goal. That's really been the basis of what I've been sharing for the last couple decades.

Zibby: Amazing. What does yoga do for you? What makes you so passionate about it that you want to share it with everyone that you know and you don't know and everything else?

Tara: Basically, it helps me feel better so I can do better. It's this lock and key for everything that I am. I feel like if I don't do it, if I don't have a period of time where I'm thinking this way, I'm doing these things, then I can become distant from myself. I just know that from my own experience. It's not about the poses. It's not about the length of time. It's just about getting on the floor, connecting with myself, doing that for a few moments every day at any part of the day where I feel disconnected. I automatically, it works every single time, feel better. It's like magic fairy dust in a kind of corny way. If I need to rest, it tells me to rest. If I need to speed up, it tells me to speed up. If I need to read one of the books you suggest, it says, go do that now. The intuition becomes a highway instead of, maybe I should follow that. It's like, nope, you're following that. I feel like I'm put on a train and going in the right direction when I practice. I think that's because I do yoga in a way where it feels good for me and I refuse to do yoga in a way where it's about contorting my body into a certain pose. For me, I know that that works really, really well. When I share that, people seem to have it work well for them too. How can I not give that to people once I've had that experience myself, or at least show them that they can do it themselves and guide them so they can become guides of their family? It's simple. We all can do it. It's just like reading. If I could have forty more years doing this and get to a point where I've convinced enough people that yoga is the same as reading, you just open up a book and do it, you just get on the floor and do it, then I think that's a good thing.

Zibby: How about yoga while reading? Maybe we could combine forces here and put downward dog with a book here. Two birds with one stone. [laughs]

Tara: Absolutely. Especially, I think it's important with yoga to always be comfortable, always be changing your position. If you're sitting and you're reading and you're just sitting and taking in information into your mind, taking that information into your whole self with your breath and allowing your body to move, yeah, let's do that. We could do a class. [laughs]

Zibby: It's one thing for you to teach yoga and then create a whole network of guides to teach other people through your philosophy. Writing about yoga, I would think, is a challenge. I tried at one point to write about all these different fitness moves and I remember thinking, what do I say now? Move your foot to the right. Not that they're always so prescriptive, but you've written a lot about yoga. What are some of the tricks of the trade to make it easy for people to follow and understand and get your overall message as well?

Tara: Honestly, it's funny because you're such a book industry person. For me in the beginning, it was getting the editor out of the way. [laughs] The first yoga book I wrote, it was still before there was a lot of yoga books. There was some instructions in there. There'd be the person who's the fitness expert that wants to make it about the physicality. Yeah, you need to say where to put your foot. That's absolutely important, but it's also important to not say, squeeze your thigh. It's important to talk about the movement. My background is in dance, primarily. Describing yoga as movement I feel is much more open than describing yoga as poses that you should be able to do exactly. It's like, yeah, obviously you're going to bring your foot forward, but before you do that, you should lean to the side and then bring your foot forward so you have some room for that foot to come forward. My descriptions tended to be, especially when I was figuring it out in my first few times writing about yoga, it was a lot longer. Then I would infuse way too much language of "if it feels good" or "when you're ready." Then I realized that if you just describe things like Hemmingway, as clearly, as simply as possible, then there's so much beauty in that, and that will be conveyed. How I came about learning about writing in general was through writing yoga movements or little prescriptive five movements for a headache or whatever and figuring out how to do that in a way that wasn't just about moving your body around.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about your dance career and where the main challenges were and the best parts and how you ended up getting off that path.

Tara: I'm from this tiny little rinky-dink town where there's one little dance studio. You go and do these really terrible competitions where your parents put blue eyeshadow on you and send you off. I didn't love all the blue eyeshadow, but I loved going to these places outside of my small town and learning from the best choreographers in New York and Europe and everything. Then I'd get little prizes. People would say, "You should do this for your living." I'm like, just leave me here. [laughs] I always had to go back, which was fine. My parents were like, "You can't leave when you're sixteen. We're not going to move to New York." Anyway, I ended up going to this dance conservatory after high school for a little bit. It was wonderful. It was a whole world of everything I wanted from age five, but long after that.

My ballet teacher was with American Ballet Theater in New York in the seventies when yoga was having its first moment in New York. He brough in, which was kind of new in ballets programs, but he brought in yoga on Fridays for relaxation. That was the first time I took a yoga class. It was this guy sitting in the front of the room. He was sort of happy for no reason at all. I remember just being so amazed and confused. You can't be getting a lot of money for doing this. Nobody's even paying attention to you, and you're still happy. I was just super curious. I wanted to learn everything about it. I loved the experience of the physical practice. It was super simple. It was before all the yoga explosion of styles and all of that. It was just a normal experience. I felt like I was in my own spaceship where I could connect to myself. I remember my first thought, this is incredible. Then I opened up my eyes and I'm like, why doesn't everybody do this? I was like, what's going on? It was sort of like discovering reading if you're the only one in the world that reads. [laughs] I was pissed, to be honest. I'm like, what am I going to do now? There was no yoga teacher that I knew. I thought this guy was from a spaceship or something sent down from planet Zoltar. There's nobody like him. He's got to have another job. He was a secretary at Sprint or something. Who's knows? This was not a career decision. I was dancing. I thought that would be my job. I moved to New York, was dancing in some small companies.

I wouldn't take a job for a company full time because I had this hesitation of I wanted to be open in some way to do other things. I think that was the early stages of yoga pulling me in a little bit. If you say yes to the company, then you're on tour. You do the whole thing. You're stuck with that until they fire you, basically. Then you work in the costume department there or something, which would've been fine. I kept getting these other gigs and opportunities to dance in a Matthew Barney film or a strange Whitney Houston video or something. It was always these things that would give me a little bit of money to pay my rent and be a fun opportunity. It kept pulling me out of making that decision to join these more well-known troupes and things. Somewhere along the line, yoga kept pulling me in. I'd find my way into some class or some workshop or some talk or some poetry reading or finding all the people imparting wisdom. They'd be on flyers somewhere at that time. It just kept finding me until I couldn't take it anymore. Then I just started sharing it with friends. Anybody that I would meet that would have back pain or stress, I would show them a few things they could do. They always felt better. That made me feel good. I still thought it wasn’t a respectable way to spend my time or anything I could be able to earn a living at or would even want to earn a living at. One thing just kept leading to another. Starting this small studio was still just a hobby. It was fun. It just started to take up more and more of my time.

Zibby: How big is the whole thing? I know you're everywhere. You have all these classes. Tell me what it's grown to. I know it's the pandemic time-ish, but before, pre-pandemic let's say.

Tara: It's cool. It's very decentralized, which I'm happy about because I never wanted to be like, I'm this yoga person, follow me around. We've led trainings over the years and things like that. There's a few thousand guides around the world doing this. It's cool because we all are in this community together. We all know each other and support each other. Everybody's doing their own thing. We also have partner studios and partner online studios now. A lot of them have gone online. It's pretty global. It's in a hundred countries, if we sat down and looked at where everybody is and everything. That's what's cool about it. It's people that have the same idea of yoga should be something that feels good for you, and they want to share that. I think that's spread as it's gotten -- a lot of people just want to feel better. They want something that helps them feel better, something that doesn't make them feel worse, essentially. [laughs] It's a bunch of partner studios, thousands of guides. They're everywhere. They have their own studios. They teach in gyms. They teach in other people's yoga studio. We're very open in that way. It’s not like a SoulCycle where Strala Yoga only happens in this place. We also don't care if people do the training and they don't call it Strala Yoga, they just have a yoga class somewhere. I'm just much more about showing people a way to do this that feels good. A lot of people want to stay within the community. A lot of people want to take it into their life in a different way. I'm just happy that I get to be a part of that.

Zibby: I know a lot of former dancers have all sorts of pain or physical leftovers from the past, or a lot of athletes. Do you have any of that? Do you feel like your integration of yoga into your day-to-day life has sort of mitigated any of the lasting pain that you could've sustained?

Tara: I don't know what's wrong with me, but the only time I ever hurt myself was when I was trying to be a goofball and jumped over a ballet barre and broke my toe. [laughs] I was trying to show off for my friends. It was, of course, right before a performance, so I had to perform with a broken toe. Your broken toe never quite heals. I guess I just got lucky. Mainly, I had really great teachers. They weren’t telling us to force ourselves. They weren’t telling us to be bad to our bodies. They were professional dancers. Our modern teacher was Eileen Cropley. She was in the station wagon with Paul Taylor, one of the first dancers. She’d get mad if we were working in a way where we would injure ourselves. She was like, "How are you going to have a career like that?" I know a lot of people have that experience of injuring themselves so much in dance. I never fell. A lot of my friends, they would have falls from some boy dropping them wrongly or something like that. I was also so tall that I didn't do a lot of -- I did some partner work. I was as tall as the guys, so there wasn't a whole lot of lifting of me happening.

Zibby: How tall are you? It's hard to see. It's hard to tell.

Tara: I'm 5'8" and a half.

Zibby: There are taller girls.

Tara: I'm not six feet or anything.

Zibby: Literally, I thought you were going to say, I'm 6'3". I was going to say, oh, okay, which is fine. You just don't know when you're on the phone or whatever. That's funny. What about collaborating with your husband? How has that been?

Tara: I joke with him, I say, "You're the first straight guy that I met that did yoga, so that's how I said yes." [laughs] I met him at this yoga thing. He was the first straight guy that I ever really talked to that did -- all my friends in dance were gay guys, basically. Those were my friends. Those were my male role models growing up. They'd take care of me. It's funny because he has whole upbringing in tai chi and martial stuff and all this stuff that he doesn't talk about because he can't talk about it. I'm kind of unsure. I'm like, are you in the CIA, or are you just making this up? [laughs] It's very body-oriented things, specifically with tai chi. That's been really cool. I've learned a lot about and had a lot of synergies with my experience with dance and his experience with tai chi, especially that I got him talking about tai chi more and sharing tai chi more in this way. When I met him, he had some startup that he didn't care about at all. I'm just like, "Why are you doing something you don't want to do?" I just don't understand that for my own life. It's not really an option for me to do something I don't want to do. Just qualification-wise, I don't know if I could get a job. Eventually, he just kept coming around. We started working together. It was fun, and then not fun, and now it's fun again. [laughs]

Zibby: That's awesome. If people listening want to do what you said before, they have a terrible headache or they're feeling super stressed today or this is the worst day ever, where can they find those moves of yours to help them through?

Tara: Even without going to our website, doing our videos and all that shenanigans, I think just coming down to the ground and letting yourself crawl around a little bit and slow down and start to breathe a little bit more full, a little bit more deep to the point where you're letting your breath move your body instead of trying to move your body with yourself, with your own muscles. From right there, that's kind of the foundation of everything that we share. That can feel better instantly without logging online and going to our videos and the app and all that stuff. We have all that stuff. A lot of it's free. I think that that's super important and everything, but that's really the basis. If I could just get on the floor, breathe, roll around, your body will start to show you what it wants to do. Then I think that's what's so great about yoga treated like a vocabulary of movement. If you learn a few different movements, then you're going to, just like reading, know how to put a sentence together, know how to write a letter, or whatever it is. I hope to empower people to be able to feel confident enough to do something for five minutes on their own in a way.

Zibby: What's coming next for you? What do you have up your sleeve aside from our new hybrid yoga-reading situation?

Tara: I think that's going to be the main priority right there. [laughter] Oh, my gosh. We finally had time now because of our current situation to do our app which we had on the backburner because we do so much in person. It's just so fun to be in person with people. We love to travel and see everybody and go to all the partner studios. We just hadn’t prioritized doing that. That's coming soon so people can practice with us. I've been doing this silly class on Instagram for almost a hundred days now, every day. It's free. The live element has been really cool to do with people. That's really what the app's going to be about. It'll have all of our decades of videos and collections and things that people already do, but it'll also be more of a live digital home studio. We're excited about that one.

Zibby: That's awesome. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors having collaborated on this children's book, Yoga Animals, and then all the other books that you wrote?

Tara: Oh, gosh. I'm so grateful I get to do it. I feel like I'll keep creating books as long as any publisher will say okay. I think that's the spirit of doing it as progress. A lot of people that I meet that want to write a book are waiting to write a book instead of just doing it. Sure, it's nice to find a publisher that wants to do it, but it's always nice to have something to show the publisher instead of what's in your head. If it's in your head, it doesn't count, I don't think, at all. [laughs] You have to just sit down and do it like a practice every single day. It's not my number-one main job, but I do love it so much. I love the process of writing so much. I love getting better at it. I love reading. I love improving. I love figuring out how to explain things differently and with more maturity as the previous book or whatever it is. I think it's just really important to sit down, put everybody else's books aside that are your familiar people that are kind of like you or that you think are like you, and just sit down. For me, it's making an outline. If I don't have an outline, I can't do anything. It's sort of like I need to know that I'm going to do yoga before I do yoga. [laughs]

I think that's really important, creating an outline and writing an introduction, and then just getting to work, doing it. Then sharing it with people that have more experience than you. In my experience, especially with writing and everything, is people want to help. People are so happy to help people that are already doing the work. I have friends that tell me about their books. I'm like, "Okay, show it to me." They're like, "No, no, it's my idea." I'm like, oh, god. I can't. Just write pages. Do something. Get it together. Then rewrite it a bunch of times. I'm not the gatekeeper to getting your book published. Then start showing people after you have something down. If you're not proud of it, just keep rewriting it. Keep showing up. Keep doing it. Don't wait until you have the perfect hair day. Don't wait until your stomach has the right amount of food in it or whatever it is. There's so much. I fall to that all the time because it's not my only job, writing. I do love it so much that I'm always working on it. I notice that's a bad habit of mine, thinking, I'll do this tomorrow. I'm like, no, I can't. If I want to work on a new project, it has to be, for me, at least some point every day. I have to sit down and do it. Then that's it.

Zibby: That's great advice. I love it. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming back on another piece of my platform here and talking on the podcast about all of your great work. Like last time, I still feel so inspired to now do yoga after I speak to you. Then of course, two minutes later I forget. [laughs] I'll have to put reminders in my calendar to interview you every couple months.

Tara: I would love that. When we first met on your Instagram, I was like, I want to be friends with this woman. She's so cool. We could do yoga together. She'll tell me all the cool books to read.

Zibby: Totally. That would be awesome. I know. I would love that. One day when we're out of here. Thank you so much for coming on. Have a really great day and everything.

Tara: You too. Thanks so much.

Zibby: Bye. Thanks.

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Libby Copeland, THE LOST FAMILY

Zibby Owens: Libby Copeland is an award-winning journalist who writes about culture, science, and human behavior. Her book, The Lost Family, published in March, looks at the impact of home DNA testing on the American family. Although, I would say it's more of a nail-biting mystery, amazing book. Anyway, a staff reporter and editor for The Washington Post for over a decade, she now writes from New York for publications including The Atlantic, Slate, New York Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, The New Republic, Esquire, and many more. She currently lives in Westchester, New York, with her husband and two children.

Welcome, Libby. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Libby Copeland: Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be here. I appreciate it.

Zibby: This is our second take. At the beginning, we had a little chit-chat about Zibby and Libby, so I'll spare redoing that. [laughs] All to say, mine is a nickname and yours is not. It's thrilling to be here with another -ibby. Anyway, can you please tell listeners what The Lost Family is about and what inspired you to write it?

Libby: I've been a feature writer for a long time. I'm particularly interested in culture and human behavior and the intersection with technology. How does technology push and pull us in certain directions? Why do we do the things we do? How do we define ourselves? Why do we define ourselves that way? I got interested in DNA testing a few years ago. A lot of people DNA test out of a sense that it's going to deeper their understanding of their roots. Oftentimes, they're thinking maybe many generations back. That's the typical scenario, but there's a significant minority of people who discover something more immediate and surprising, something that sort of upends their understandings of their own origins of how they came to be. Maybe one of their parents isn't genetically related to them. Maybe they have a sibling they didn't know about. Maybe they're donor conceived. Maybe they're adopted and they weren’t told if they're from an older generation. These are all scenarios that have been happening for the last five to ten years in this space. I thought it was such a broad social phenomenon. I wanted to pull it together. I wanted to shape it around this really compelling genetic detective story of this one woman named Alice who had this astonishing discovery many years back, eight years ago, which is a very long time in the context of this technology, and methodically went through all the theories of what it could be. It wasn't any of the expected explanations. Her story is really meant to be the thing that propels you through the book because it's so compelling and she's so intelligent and dogged in her research.

Zibby: It was. It was a page-turning thriller, almost. Every dead end she would get to, I'm like, no!

Libby: It's kind of an extensional thriller. It's not the whodunit. It's not like, who killed who? It's a true-to-life, nonfiction mystery of how she came to be. How did she get her family history so wrong? How was it that she thought that she was entirely or almost entirely Irish American and she finds she's half Ashkenazi Jewish? How do you explain that? Then what do you make of it? What's interesting is Alice's family is, they're seven Irish Catholic siblings, and they each make something different of it. You see through their different experiences and the different experiences of other people that I follow in the book, we're very selective and thoughtful and intentional. We each take something different from this question, how much does genetics get to tell me about who I am?

Zibby: It's true. All the clues that she would find, even when you were saying some things that are -- you had some analogy like the gorilla walking across the basketball court. Did I just totally ruin that? It was some things that just hit her in the face that were so obvious, but she missed then, and then others that were so tiny and so hard, and the fate and the elements that had to align for her to figure out her story. Then you think about all the people who didn't figure it out. So many more people didn't have the answers and never will. What do we make of that? I don't know. It's all a little woo-woo. [laughs]

Libby: The people who were born and lived and died and never knew that, for instance, maybe the man who raised them that they called dad wasn't genetically related to them. There's all these what-if questions that you hear people talking about in the book. What if they had known? Would they have been better off? Is it better that they didn't know? The struggle with that is that everyone who's telling you their story is telling you from the perspective of already knowing, already being invested in knowing the truth, not be able to un-know it, and so being, in most cases, very glad to know. At the same time, you have to wonder -- for generations, people didn't know. They didn't have the capacity to know if, for instance, they had a half-sibling living fifty miles away and they would have wanted to connect with that person if only they'd known, or it might have totally upset their family dynamic. We don't know.

Zibby: Now I feel like I have to go back into my 23andMe results and just check every single cousin. I know you talked about your results in the book too. At first, to be honest, I was like, she must be writing this because she had some huge surprise show up in your DNA. It turns out not too big a surprise. You're one percent Korean or something that you didn't expect.

Libby: It disappeared, the one percent Korean. I'm not Korean at all.

Zibby: It disappeared, okay. Scratch that. Forget it. Mine were completely predictable as well in a very, very boring way. But I keep thinking, almost hoping, maybe there's some way there'll be somebody else. Then people like Alice who have learned the whole science behind it, I don't know, is better to know or not to know? What do you think? Do you want to know? Would you want to know?

Libby: It's hard to say. One of the things that I found over and over again was that when somebody discovered something key about their genetic origins, they were glad to know even when the truth was very upsetting. For instance, I interviewed a woman who understood her origins to be the result of a rape. This was something she came to after doing the DNA testing, after unraveling the identify of her biological father, after talking to her mom about it. Her mom had gone through this profound trauma and was like, "Listen, here's why I didn't tell you. These were the circumstances." Even for her, she was like, "I'm grateful to know the truth. This explains so much. I grew up in a house where there was a lot of trauma and abuse. There was a lot of not talking about things that were very important. This gives me context. This answers questions. I can go back and look to the age of zero, and I can reinterpret it. Now it makes sense." I was struck by that. I heard that over and over again. I heard that from people who had a sense of agency in the process of looking. You’re autonomous. You spit into the vile. You make meaning. You decide the narrative. You decide the timeline. You decide if you're going to contact your relatives. That's a profound thing. Very interesting, the value that we place on the truth of knowing something key about ourselves.

Then there's people on the other side of the story. Sometimes their narratives are being disrupted in a way that they're not comfortable with. It might be the person who's the secret keeper. I've been keeping a genetic secret. I don't see it as a secret. It was a matter of self-protection. It was a very reasonable decision given the cultural stigmas at the time sixty years ago. We can't judge the past by present standards. Perhaps you're someone who it never was a secret to you. You knew about it, but you weren’t going to tell anyone. Now someone's coming into your life and saying, "I want to talk about this." Maybe you're not ready to talk about it. You're not ready for your family to know. Maybe you're the child of that person. Now there's this half-sibling coming into your life. Maybe this half-sibling was born before you. They're saying something about something your mom or dad did that is very painful to accept. I tell the story in the book of a woman who -- she's a foundling, which wasn't a term I knew before I started writing the book. You probably already knew the term. Certainly, you know it from reading the book. It's somebody who is left and found as a baby. She was left on a pastor's doorstep at four days old. She was conceived before the other children that her mom then went on to have.

When she connects with them and she says, "Hey, listen, I'm your biological half-sister. This is the story of how I came to be. I would love to have you in my life," their response is, "Our mother wouldn't do that." Their mother is dead. It is incredibly difficult for them to reconcile this idea that their mother could do something that maybe causes them to think twice about her, about her character, about the difficult position that she was in. It's one thing for the people on the one side. Then it's the other thing for the people on the other side. There are situations where those things can be reconciled. Those are beautiful reunions. There are situations where, I may be really genetically closely related to you, but our interests are directly divergent at this precise moment when we could be getting to know each other and in a really intimate relationship, but we can't be because my existence threatens your identity. Those are the really interesting and painful stories that I wanted to explore along with the gorgeous reunions and the stories of people expanding their families. It's not all happy endings. It's not all sad endings. It's complicated. It's very complicated.

Zibby: You even talked about how in some families the context of how one person had been looking for so long and she had time to process that, and then the person that she found had to deal with it right away with an influx of all that information. It's a lot. It would be a lot to have that show up in an email.

Libby: Exactly. It's interesting. When Alice tests, it's 2012. The databases are really small, so it takes her two and a half years to unravel the truth. There's a lot of twists and turns. If she tested now, it would be maybe a matter of a few days or weeks. You see the difference. People who tested back in the day, which maybe is only eight years ago but it's a really long time in the context of this technology, those people had time to digest it and maybe in some cases do better than -- nowadays, you test, and you might just look at your results and for the very first time you look at them you're seeing a half-sibling or you're seeing six half-siblings. Maybe you weren’t told you were donor conceived and they're all showing up as half-siblings to you. That is really hard to process in a short amount of time.

Zibby: I saw in the back of your book you referenced Dani Shapiro's Inheritance. Dani has been on this podcast. I've done events with her. I also inhaled that book, similar to your book in just the thrill-seeking of the discovery process when your whole identity is sort of shifting. Hers was an example of a modern-day experience. She figured the whole thing out really quickly. It was still interesting to read. It was fast from the time she got her results. Whereas Alice, as you said, is very slow. Maybe it does make it easier to process the longer it takes. Either way, when you find something out that's a big piece of news like that or you find you have a child, all these weird things, it's a whole new world.

Libby: I think the era of family secrets is basically over.

Zibby: I have a friend who had a baby with a donor. She's like, "No, we're not going to talk about that." I'm like, "You know, your kids are going to figure it out." She's like, "We don't even think of that person as a person." I'm like, "Right, but that person actually is a person. He could be passing you on the street every day. Your kids are going to want to find that out." It's just so hard. You can convince yourself of so many things. Yet is the information really yours?

Libby: Right. That's a profound question. Do the kids they're donor conceived?

Zibby: They must. Yes, they have to.

Libby: This question of what is our obligation to talk about and to admit to is a really interesting one. You see this a lot in the arena of donor-conceived individuals who are like, I was not party to any agreements made about anonymity of my donor or the notion that I should be severed from the person who donated half of my genetic material. You all made that agreement before I was around. Now you want me to be bound by it. It's complicated. On the one hand, donor sperm has made possible many families that would not have been possible otherwise. That's a really amazing thing. It's a really wonderful thing. At the same time, donor anonymity is moot because of DNA testing. It literally doesn't exist anymore. A lot of people feel strongly that they want to know their genetic origins. That matters too. It's not the whole picture. It's not like suddenly you're no longer in love with and in a wonderful place with your family that raised you. People still have this desire to know the rest of the story. I think of it as you're writing your own life narrative. If you don't know the beginning, how do you tell the rest? You see there is this nascent movement to talk about genetic identity and genetic origins. There's an organization that started up. It's becoming kind of a movement. I think it's DNA testing that's basically started it. Before, the technology to create people in this way was there, but the technology to allow those people when they grew up to understand themselves was never there. Now it is.

Zibby: It's crazy. Tell me a little more about you. How did you become a feature writer to begin with? I know you've written for every publication under the sun at this point. How did you get that training? How do you develop all that and get to this point?

Libby: I started as an intern at The Washington Post after college. I was writing for their daily feature section which is called Style. Style is not about fashion. Sometimes people who don't read The Post think that. It's really a daily feature section. We cover everything, politics, art, celebrities, interesting subcultures in Washington. I got to write all those kinds of stories. Then I left The Post after about ten years, eleven years. I was an editor there before I left. I started freelancing because I wanted to start a family back in New York, which is where I'm from. I just got more and more interested in science writing and this idea that we can better understand ourselves through science. That's how I landed in writing about DNA testing. It was after many stints writing about sports. I went to the Winter Olympics in Italy in 2006. I covered the Michael Jackson molestation trial in California, all these various experiences that led me to really wanting to write about people's intimate lives. That's where I've gone over time, is away from famous people and towards ordinary people with extraordinary stories.

Zibby: I thought it was so interesting before how you said you're so drawn to understanding human behavior and even consumer behavior, really, as an offshoot. I find that totally fascinating also. I remember in college being like, I'm really interested in understanding consumer behavior. What should I do? [laughs] What's the next thing?

Libby: I always wanted to be one of those people who sat there and listened to a focus group and wrote things down and asked them questions. I always wanted to do that. I once did a two or three-part series just on jeans and why people buy the jeans that they buy and why certain brands take off and are considered luxurious and others aren't. I totally get that.

Zibby: I interned one summer at an ad agency in the brand planning group. That's what we did. I did. I watched all those focus groups and took notes. I wasn't in the room, but I could watch the videos or whatever and come up with reports. I'm like, so interesting. [laughs] Pepperidge Farm cookies. Who knew? Fisher-Price toys.

Libby: All these brands are controlling us without us even knowing it.

Zibby: Exactly. I just think there's something when you're used to being more of an observer in a way. I feel like you are too. You notice everything. You notice all the ins and outs. That's why you can delve so deep.

Libby: I feel like my favorite thing to do is just, when I find someone that interests me, they have a really interesting story, travel to them and sit with them for days, eat with them and talk to them and watch them while they're working. That kind of fly-on-the-wall stuff, I love that stuff. I just think people are so interesting, and the choices that they make and the different ways that they can be. To circle back to some of the people, I actually first wrote the story of Alice for The Washington Post. It was shorter. It was a newspaper story. It was 2017. Literally, the way that the book came to be was the email that I got in response. There were over four hundred in the first few weeks. They were like, "Let me tell you about my DNA surprise. Let me tell you how DNA changed my life. Let me tell you this story, oh, my gosh." Getting on the phone and talking to people and hearing how they processed and responded to it -- and they're very different. Some people are responding with this openness. Some people are very closed down. Some people are incredibly anxious, understandably. There's this sense when your identity is threatened, you feel completely displaced. You don't even know, does anything make sense? You don't know where you're standing on this earth. To me, having all those conversations was such an enormous privilege. It was as I was talking to those people and hearing all the different ways it can play out that I thought, this is more than one woman's story or a hundred people's story. This is a cultural phenomenon. This deserves to be a book.

Zibby: It was a really great book.

Libby: Thank you.

Zibby: It really was. I know I said it before, but just so page-turning. I feel like I'm so desperate these days for something to take my mind off the real world. This was perfect because it totally kept my attention. That's always what I'm looking for. Are you working on anything new now?

Libby: I'm working on trying to figure out what to do with my kids all day. [laughs]

Zibby: Let me know what you come up with on that front.

Libby: I'm editing a magazine story that I wrote in January before all this happened. I am thinking about next steps in terms of maybe another book, but I haven't gotten far enough that I have anything to report.

Zibby: That's okay. Having gone through this process, do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Libby: That's a really good question. I would say on a practical level, I really liked Scrivener, which is a software that you write in. It's so much better for writing a book than Word. On a slightly less practical and existential level, I really like outlines. Outline is a bit of an existential thing because it's really a roadmap for where you're going to go. It sounds like a small thing, but it's actually an incredibly important thing in terms of understanding the scope of what your reporting and your writing's going to be and the bigger message and the thematics. Then the last thing I'd say is that I think writing a book is a leap of faith. I think it's unlike anything else. I've been running for a while. I wound up training for a half-marathon. It was like training for a marathon and then an ultra-marathon and then maybe more. It just kept going. It never ended. It was years of this hunkering down, not seeing my family and working weekends and all this stuff. Yet in exchange for that devotion and investment, you get something that's unlike anything you can achieve by just writing an essay or a reported magazine piece or anything like that. I'm talking about it from the perspective of being a reporter and writing nonfiction. You go deeper. You achieve more. You know more. It's transformative. I loved it. I loved the process of writing a book. I just thought it was amazing.

Zibby: Wait, tell me what you got back. You said it's bigger than anything else. Give me an example. Tell me what you felt. How great was it?

Libby: I spent most of my career doing things that were more bite-sized. I might spend a couple of days on a story or a few weeks or sometimes a few months, even. Even those pieces that I wrote that were more immersive -- I reported a story on a school shooting. I spent months writing it. I went to this town a few times. I spent a lot of time with the people. Even that, now looking back I see, oh, I was barely scratching the surface. When you spend that much time with a topic, you get to know it in a different way. I really liked getting up each morning and knowing what I was doing and feeling like I was invested in a project that was so much bigger than me. I like that sense of direction. I like the idea that you could take a single topic and you could look at it from all these different perspectives. DNA testing, you have the science of it. You have the business. You have the effect on interpersonal and intimate relationships. You also have the philosophy of it. You have the questions of, how much are we tending towards a kind of genetic essentialism? How much do we have to be careful about that? You have all sorts of questions about, how do we understand biological difference? You have the bioethical angle. You take a single topic, and you can turn it. As you turn it, you see more and more angles that you can consider. It's as if the more you know, the bigger it gets. The bigger the project gets. Just being so involved in something so big and something so meaningful, essential questions about what makes us who we are -- we think about these as human beings, these questions. Who I am? I found that to be immersive and absorbing and just a wonderful process.

Zibby: Was there anything in the payoff of actually having it out in the world and reader response?

Libby: Oh, yes. I get emails all the time from people, LinkedIn and through my website and through Facebook. They're like, "Thank you for writing this book. I need to tell you what happened to me," and sometimes, "What should I do?" I say, "Thank you for sharing. Here's what other people have told me. I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to give you advice, but here's what other people tell me who've been through your similar situation." They're often right at the beginning, so they're emotionally in a really difficult spot. They're often in a really difficult spot because they’ve just tested. They have multiple siblings through the same donor father. Then suddenly, they’ve uncovered their donor father's identity. Now they're trying to figure out, how do I approach this person? It's this weird thing. No one's figured out the right infrastructure to support people. There's no mental health infrastructure. There's no official guidance. How do you write a letter to your genetic father? Can somebody please write a book about that? You could literally write an entire book just about that. That's my next book.

Zibby: There you go. You got your next project.

Libby: There's Facebook groups. There's support groups. There's starting to be psychologists. There's a wonderful genetic counselor who offers advice. There's blogs. But there's not a lot in the way of formal organizations, although they're starting to exist, who are formal guidance. You just see everyone's their own bioethicist trying to navigate this new territory on their own with advice from other people. It's a tricky place to be.

Zibby: Very true. At least we have people like you diving deep into it and helping the rest of us understand it, which is great. Thank you, Libby. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for entertaining me so much with your book and making me think about all the big questions in life. Thanks for sharing your experience.

Libby: Thank you so much for having me. It's just been such a treat to talk to you and such great questions, such thoughtful feel questions. Thank you.

Zibby: Thanks. Hopefully, we'll meet in real life one of these days. Good luck entertaining your kids.

Libby: All right. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Take care. Bye.

Libby: Buh-bye.

Rachel Friedman, AND THEN WE GREW UP

Zibby Owens: I'm including Rachel Friedman on Advice Monday because her advice is about creativity, but her book is also memoir as well. Anyway, that's where I put her. Rachel is the author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure, that was from 2011, and was a Target Breakout Book and selected by Goodreads’ readers as one of the best travel books of 2011. Now she's come out with her second book which is called And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals, The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the creative nonfiction program at Rutgers-Newark with her MFA, she has taught literature, journalism, and writing at Columbia University, New York University, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her son.

How are you?

Rachel Friedman: Hi. Good. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. I'm glad we're finally connecting.

Rachel: Me too. I can't believe I have to follow Marian Keyes, but I'm very glad [distorted audio].

Zibby: Perhaps I should've put her at the end, but whatever. No, I'm kidding. [laughs] Thank you. Your book was so interesting. I didn't have a big idea of what it would be about other than the cover when I started it. I did not realize you had been this virtuoso viola player and that you had to give away -- not give away, that you had to pivot so in early in life. When most people are just getting upwards on the trajectory, you had already reached a peak and had to regroup while everyone was at college bars or whatever. Tell me about this whole experience and how it informed your book.

Rachel: In many ways, I think I had to regroup because I wasn't a virtuoso. [laughs] I was very good from a young age. I played, first, guitar and then piano and then viola. Viola was the instrument that really hooked me. From a young age, I became quite obsessed with becoming a professional musician. I went to a very intense performing acts camp called Interlochen, which is the setting for the book because I reconnect with eight former campmates of mine. I was a small fish in a big pond growing up. I'm sure a lot of people have this experience, maybe not with music, but with debate or with a sport where they're very, very, very good to the point where you can start to think about professionalizing what you love. Then somewhere along the way, you hit a ceiling and you realize, okay, I was pretty good, but I'm actually either not good enough to make it doing what I want to do, or in order to make it doing what I want to do I'm going to have to give up everything else to such exclusion of the rest of my life that maybe I actually don't want the thing I thought I wanted. Both of those things happened to me. I hit a talent ceiling and I hit kind of an ambition ceiling with music.

Zibby: I feel like I saw that a lot in college with the athletes who had been training all their life. Then suddenly, that was not the be-all, end-all anymore and it was time to regroup.

Rachel: I think a lot of us have images of what our grown-up life is going to look like, even if it's not a specific thing we're pursuing. A lot of us, when we grow up, are facing this gap between the fantasy of our adult life and what it actually looks like. That's really what the book is about.

Zibby: Then after this transition, you regroup. Suddenly by age twenty-six, you've published a book and gotten married. You were on cloud nine. This is amazing. Then again, you have to realize that that was another peak and a valley was coming.

Rachel: Yes, that's a really lovely way of putting it. I had this precocious start to writing. Publishing my first book felt a little bit like a fluke in some ways. Although, I'm very proud of that book. I was young when I published it, for better and for worse. I thought, now I've published a book, now I'm writer. Now everything just goes uphill from here. I'm going to be able to make my full living as a writer. I'm going to have famous author friends. I'm going to get awards. It was the whole fantasy of the writers. I realized that with music I had developed this whole ideal of what it meant to be a writer and these very rigid definitions of success that weren’t really based on what I wanted or what was important to me, but what I had absorbed from external voices. With music, I was at this moment where I felt like if I didn't grapple with that artist mythology and what it meant to make an artistic life and what was important to me -- I didn't think I was going to give up writing because writing has already proved to be something that had endured, unlike music.

I thought, I'm going to be really bitter if I don't get a grip on this at some point, if I don't really take stock of what matters to me. What do I really need to feel content as a writer and to endure? I went to track down all these people from this camp. This was a time when everyone I knew at this camp had very specific ideas about who they wanted to be when they grew up. Interlochen, which is a camp in Michigan, is just full of so much incredible talent. It felt to me kind of like the last place when I had really been so sure of what I wanted to be and what that would look like. I was really curious to see if other people had grappled with this gap and what had become of them. This was pre-Facebook, so you didn't have updates on everyone in the same way. When I went to camp, it was pre-Facebook. Even if you do, you don't really have any idea what's going on with someone when you see their social media posts.

Zibby: I love how it all came back to you and you drowning your sorrows about taxes by going to a movie and seeing one of your fellow Interlochen friends having success like that. I think everyone can relate. Although, we don't all say it out loud. There's always something when you're happy for someone else, like, oh, my gosh, how did they do that? What have I done? It's just like, look at that.

Rachel: Yeah, this comparison issue, we all have. We went to camp with Ben Foster who's a very well-known actor. He's not in the book. Although, interestingly, as I was working on this book, at many points people encouraged me to try and interview him. I always felt like that's not the point of the book. I want to hear from people who are not famous, not at either end of the spectrum, haven't completely felt like they’ve failed at what they're doing, or maybe they have, or kind of middle of the road and they're trying to figure out how to endure. Ben Foster, you can read about it any magazine you pick up. That was the impetus behind the book. I was feeling very depressed about my financial situation as a freelance writer. I went to a movie, and there he was larger than life starring in it. That was quite a reckoning.

Zibby: I'm sorry. I've been there. Those are not fun feelings, oh, my gosh. What was your main takeaway? You went and you found all of these people. Then you end up actually dating somebody who's friends with Adam. All these fun things just start happening as you retrace your steps. Everybody has different things to share. What do you think were some of the main findings?

Rachel: It's a very interesting journey tracking down people who knew you when you were young. I do recommend it. It can be a winding journey full of many surprises. Everyone in the book really gave me another framework from which to view the issues that I was dealing with. The book breaks down the mythologies that I had about what it means to succeed, what it means to feel ordinary, what it means to compromise, what ambition looks like, what freedom looks like, all these very amorphous terms. We have this obsession with perseverance in this country, and I'm sure many other countries, where it's like, you only fail when you quit. That's really not true. If you have a quitting problem, that's one thing. Most of us work really hard. Then at some point often, at least some goal at some point we're pursuing, we do hit a ceiling and we have to refocus our energies. That's really good for us. I think the main takeaway of the book is that our lives, we have to design them. There's no expert out there. There's no internet article that is going to teach you what success is or tell you if you do X, Y, and Z, this will happen. We love formulas. We love this idea that you put in the work and then you reap the rewards. I think it's really important to dismantle the clichés and mythologies and really ask yourself the hard questions about what your fulfilling life would look like.

Zibby: That's awesome. By the way, you had probably my favorite expression I've ever heard, the art-nership. That is so perfect. Sometimes I feel like my husband and I, we're both very creative and whatever. That's such a nice way. I was like, oh, we have an art-nership. That's so great. Tell me about that.

Rachel: That's not my phrase.

Zibby: Oh. Well, I'm going to credit you anyway.

Rachel: The idea of the art-nership is your partner, the person that you end up making a life with, is also an artist. It's that romantic ideal of what that looks like. That too is a complicated reality, of course, but that's one of the many things I thought about my life. I need to end up with a person who does X because I do Y. That's the term of art-nership.

Zibby: I loved it. That was so great. Then your Washington Post article recently was great about teaching your son -- well, about evaluating the current theory that people should not allow their kids to quit anything, that we should teach all of them to persevere. You're not good at the piano? Just keep going. You said you also have to teach kids the flipside of that, which is not every extracurricular is for everybody. You have to be ready to cope when things don't work out, which I loved as such great parenting advice and also just life advice. Tell me a little more about that.

Rachel: I think we're really focused on resilience as it relates to perseverance, but there's also resilience in terms of being able to be disappointed that something didn't work out, not to wallow in that disappointment, but to understand that there are real setbacks. The experience of not getting what you want is such a common human experience, but we don't talk a lot about it, this idea of disappointment or longing or quitting, in a way that is not rebranding it as opportunity or turning it into some other narrative, but just, I wanted this thing, I tried really hard, it sucks. Again, it's not about wallowing in that disappointment, but I think giving it a little bit of space to say, I didn't turn out to be an astronaut, or whatever it is.

Zibby: I did notice in your book, and maybe I missed where you explained it or something, but I feel like you talked a lot about your dad. He was a retired film critic. He came up a lot and what he would think and what you would say to him. There wasn't a lot of mention of your mom. I was just wondering about that.

Rachel: My dad was probably just a stronger influence, to be totally honest, in terms of the way I thought about my grown-up life. My mom was very practical. My mom supports my writing and supported my music, but I think for her, she grew up poor and became a lawyer and really felt like her focus, understandably, was on financial security. Financial security is very important. I talk about in the book, kind of reckoning with that. My dad, who is a professor and has a different background, grew up in a more comfortable middle-class background, for me, the message was always, do what you love. You have to be passionate about what you do. There's no such thing as just as job. I think he's wrong about that ultimately, of course. Plenty of people have work-life balance where their job is not the thing that drives them and they derive their fulfilment in other ways. For me, he was just a very powerful influence. I saw his life too, this life of the professor, the life of the mind. He writes books. All of that really was influential for me as a kid.

Zibby: Interesting. I was wondering if you had advice for aspiring authors. Maybe you could weave in the fact that after you sold your first book, your second book didn't sell and you had to regroup and find the way back, which obviously you did because now we have this amazing book and we're sitting here talking.

Rachel: I think it's important to say you have that book nine years after the first one. That's a good amount of time. It took me a long time to write the second book. I did get pregnant in the middle of the writing process, which will slow things down a little bit. I couldn't figure out the right framing for that second book. It didn't get a contract. I was really disappointed, obviously. I think too, after a first book, you feel a lot of pressure to have this momentum. It's a very common experience for the second book not to work out. That's just one of the kinds of examples of enduring through disappointment that I think is useful and that we should talk about more. Marian Keyes had great advice for writers, which is essentially, you write. You sit down and you do it. Try to get out of your own way. I think a lot of times people who want to write, who aspire to write, they need permission. I'm not sure who we're looking for permission from, but we are the ones who need to give it to ourselves. You are entitled to write. You are entitled to self-expression. You are entitled to that space. To try to quiet those inner voices -- she was saying, we're all writing, as Anne Lamott would put it in Bird by Bird, which is a brilliant book if people are looking for inspiration on the writing life.

We all write shitty first drafts. Maybe some people don't, but we'll just consider them outliers. Most of us, the way you endure as a writer is through rewriting. You have to have a tolerance for repetition and for revision because what comes out first is messy and often incoherent and not very good. You can't edit, I think, out that part of it. You have to go through that part of it. There's a different part of your brain -- this the like the write drunk, edit sober expression which doesn't actually mean drunk-drunk, but I think means writing -- for some people, it does; not me -- writing without that inner critic telling you that something is no good. You just have to get it out. You have to take time to do it. Writing is a job like anything else. You put your hours in. I think sometimes people think, and Marian Keyes was saying this too, that it's sort of magical. Of course, there are magic moments, but I don't think that you have the space for those magic moments unless you're doing the disciplined work of carving out time regularly. I'm not even saying every day, but consistently to words on a page.

Zibby: Thank you, Rachel. Thanks for coming on. It was so nice to connect with you and hear your thoughts. I felt such pride for you when you were detailing your journey. Then knowing that because I was reading the book that you eventually got to success again, it was this wonderful thing that you could be holding the answer to what happens to the main character in your hands sort of like a meta -- anyway.

Rachel: Thank you so much. This was lovely [indiscernible].

Zibby: You too. Take care, Rachel.

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George Brescia, CHANGE YOUR CLOTHES, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Zibby Owens: George Brescia is the author of Change Your Clothes, Change Your Life. He is a style expert and has appeared NBC's Today Show. His other television includes regular red-carpet commentary and fashion and trend reporting for CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX. As Playbill.com’s “Best Dressed” columnist, he covered the Tony Awards and several seasons of Broadway openings and galas. His award-winning web series, Dress Up!, featured George working with Broadway’s top stars preparing them for their opening nights and premieres. He travels the country doing guest lecturing, special events, and regional television shows about current fashion trends and personal styling, and has also been featured on NPR’s Marketplace. George is currently the brand ambassador for LOGO by Lori Goldstein on the QVC Network. His background includes twenty-five years working closely with top fashion leaders Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Tommy Hilfiger, and with the fashion directors at Bloomingdales, Bergdorfs, and Lord & Taylor. He's also a top-tier New York City-based stylist and image consultant with tons of clients. Listen to all of his advice here. As he says, your clothing has the potential to enhance your personal brilliance.

Welcome, George. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

George Brescia: Oh, my god, Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

Zibby: I was really nervous, to be honest. I know this is an audio recording, but you and I are over Skype right now. I was like, I wonder what I should wear to this Skype interview because you are the master. I just put on a coverup, so sorry. [laughs]

George: You look great. Listen, you know what, it's not even about that. It's never about feeling bad. That's the last thing we want. We want you feeling good. That's what my book is all about. It's all about you feeling good and feeling confident and just having the clothes in your closet that do that for you so that you don't really have to think about it. You look terrific.

Zibby: Well, thank you. Give listeners the broader picture of your book, which by the way has probably the best cover I've seen in my entire life. I want to frame your cover and put it on my wall. I'm obsessed with color. It is so awesome.

George: Thank you. I appreciate that. The book has a very colorful cover. That is no mistake because I'm all about color and what colors people wear and to have them in colors that make them look really good. Listen, this is the deal, you have to get dressed every day. No matter what your life is, no matter what's going on in the world, we cover our body with clothes no matter what. My goal is to have you put clothes on your body that, A, make you feel amazing; B, give you the response that you want from people in terms of the way that you want to be seen. It's not so much about a compliment. It's more about, how do you want the world to see you? They do see you whether you like it or not no matter what, whether it's on a Skype call, a Zoom call, in person. No matter what's happening in the world and what your life is, you are seen at some point. You want to make sure that you're being thought of in the way that you want to. Clothes do that. I really got that from dressing celebrities. I'm a stylist.

I have a whole background. I was at Ralph Lauren for ten-plus years. I was a vice president in Tommy Hilfiger. I've worked at Donna Karan. I've worked with Jay Z at Rocawear, and Beyoncé. I've dressed all kinds of Broadway actresses to all kinds of Oscar-winning actresses in Los Angeles, movie actresses. What I realized was dressing them for auditions -- they would say to me, "I'm going in for this role. What do you think I should wear that speaks to the role?" We realized that when the door opened and they walked in, immediately they were sort of cast or not cast in a role based on what they brought in the door with their presentation of themselves. I was like, you know, this happens in real life. I do it. You do it. Everyone does it. People don't talk about it, but they do it. You walk by someone on the street. You see someone maybe on one of your Zoom calls and you're like, huh, she's this, he's that, based on what you see them wearing. It's an instinctive human response. I just want you to win at that response and become more present to it. When you become more present to it, what ends up happening is you connect to yourself. It's a connection to yourself because you have to take the time to think about yourself, think about what you want to present to the world, think about the fact that you're putting something on that's going to make you feel good.

It's self-care, is what it really is. I think we're in a time right now in this country and the world where it really is about self-care. If we don't take care of ourselves, then we're not better for others in any way. When we take care of ourselves, we're a better mother. We're a better sister. We're a better wife. We're a better friend. We're a better husband. We're a better boyfriend. It's just self-care. It really is. This book really talks about how to do that and how to -- all the clothes that you have in your closet, I call it the window to your soul because it is. What are you holding onto? What won't you let go of? Why won't you bring new in? You want new in your life. Maybe you want the new love of your life. Maybe you want the new job. Maybe you want the new home. If you don't get rid of things that aren't serving you, how do you become an open vessel for all good? It's funny. I'm watching the expression on your face as I speak. I think people are surprised when I speak this way about this book because this isn't about, if you wear this skirt, it makes you have a smaller waist, or if you wear this color, you will look younger. It's not that kind of a book. There is that information in there, but it all comes from a very spiritual place because that's really what it is. It's how you connect to yourself and how to present yourself in the world. Your clothing is a tool that you have that can help you to do that.

Zibby: I didn't mean to suggest anything by my expression other than I was just listening intently. I read your book, so I know what's in there. I think it's great. It's almost like a clothing empowerment movement in a way, right? It's more like that.

George: Yes, exactly. I loved your expression. I love it because it makes me know that what is in the book can be powerful. That's what I'm seeing in your face. That's what I love. People will say to me, "George, what's one of your favorite things about what you do? What do you love?" I always answer with, I love the moment when I put something on someone and she looks in the mirror and she's like, oh, yeah, there I am. There's that person I want to be or I hope I am, or that's what I want to say. That moment of self-discovery, that is my favorite part of what I do. It always happens. When people hire me to dress them for, whether it's an opening of a Broadway show or a movie premiere -- sometimes I have women who just want to hire me because they want their closets filled with clothes that really can reflect who they are and who they want to be, but they don't know how to do it. We do that kind of work together. That's my favorite moment because that’s when they discover, I can do this. I can be this. I can have this.

I think that especially for women, it's so hard. I really feel for women. I do. All they do is take care of, take care of their kids, take care of their husband. They're just constantly give, give, give, giving. Then do they have any time for themselves? Do they have any moment where it can be just about them? When I usually come to someone, that is one of their moments that they get to have. I get to experience that with them. I love it. Then they’ll call me in a month or two weeks and they’ll say, "Oh, my god, I just feel so much better. Every time I walk out the door I don't have to think, do I look okay? Am I okay? Am I enough?" It's funny. With my book, when it first came out it was Change Your Clothes, Change Your Life: Because You Can't Go Naked. That was the subtitle because you really can't. That's why I did it. I wanted to be funny and fun. You are required to wear clothing by law. People always say, what about a nude beach? I'm like, okay, I'll give you that, but do you live your life on a nude beach? No, you don't. What we did was -- it's been some years since the book has come out. As you know, we're relaunching in paperback on August 25th. We rewrote the forward. It's all the things that I've learned since the book has come out.

I have been on the road traveling all over the country doing style events in all kinds of places: Fargo; Minnesota; Ponte Vedra, Florida; Minneapolis; Wisconsin; the heartland of the country; Springfield, Missouri. I've been everywhere. I have been dressing these women, doing style events and book signings and also doing some local television. I've learned so much from all of these women. It's been such an education for me, one that I have loved and treasured. It's been a wealth of knowledge of what women go through and also how it's a little different in different parts of the country, different kinds of challenges. Yes, we are America, but we do have different regions that have different little cultural things. The Midwest is different from the East Coast, from the West Coast, from the South, from New England. It's fascinating. I've tried to impart some of these things that I've learned in the forward. Then we have changed the subtitle. The reason that we changed the subtitle, I wanted to say Change Your Clothes, Change Your Life: Because You're Worth It because you are worth it. You're worth that moment every day of self-care and a little bit of self-reflection to say, what do I want to say today to the world? How do I want to feel? To take that moment to connect to yourself is very powerful.

Zibby: It's almost like you're doing your own branding exercise. I don't think that everybody necessarily pauses the way you're suggesting to think deeply about what they're wearing, their style versus who they are. It's a whole nother level. There's one thing, what looks good on my body? I feel like most women have kind of figured out through trial and error the kinds of things they can pull off and the kinds of things they can't. I'm not going to wear a skintight -- [laughs]. I know A-line is my thing. I'm just going to stick to that. However, to think more deeply about it the way you suggest, what does it say about me? Who do I want to be? What do I want to show when I go out the door like when I do this? It's a really interesting concept that I feel like people are not really talking about. That's why I think it's so interesting.

George: Thank you so much. They're not talking about it. That's what is so bizarre to me. When the stakes are high, we know how to do it. When you have to go to the PTA meeting and you know you're going to see all those other moms, you'll take time to give yourself a blowout, put on a little mascara, put on a little lip, make sure you're wearing the A-line dress that you feel really good in because you know you're going to see those other women. But why don't you do that all the time? Here's the thing. People will say to me, because I'm running around. Yeah, but here's the deal. This is what really defines it. How about when you don't do it, you throw on anything, you don't even know what you have on, you go to the grocery store because you're going to get groceries for dinner that night, and you bump into your husband's boss for some weird reason? He happens to be there, or his wife. You're like, oh, god, don't look at me, don't look at me. I just ran to the store because I needed to get some fennel for this delicious thing I'm making for the dinner tonight. Don't look at me. What do you mean don't look at me? We see you. You're not invisible. How the hell do you want us not to look at you? Of course we're looking at you. You don't have to have those experiences. How many times have you bumped into someone where you've been so mortified because you just feel so disheveled, you hate what you have on, and you feel horrible?

My thing is if you have clothes in your closet that always are the great colors for you -- in other words, if you have to buy a T-shirt because you like T-shirts in the summer, nice cotton lightweight T-shirts, and you're going to Target to get the three-dollar T-shirt, just get it in the color you look good in. What's the difference? You're buying one anyway. Then when you are at the grocery store and you have on a little T-shirt and you've got those pretty blue eyes and you're wearing it with a pair of just khaki shorts and just a flip-flop, but at least it's the blue T-shirt that highlights your eyes and your hair's in a ponytail. You still look great. You're not all dolled up. You're running around casual, and you look great. That's the other thing. I think that women have a very -- they all know how to get dressed up. They all know what to wear to clean the house or to do some yardwork or do some gardening or whatever, but they don't know how to run around and be causal, running around, errands, dropping the kids off the school, going to the grocery store, meeting a girlfriend for lunch, going to maybe some club that you're in, a meeting, or whatever it is. They don't know how to do that. Even the girls that work, which is so many, what if you're in a casual job? What do I wear to work? How do I look professional but still feel casual, but still feel relevant, but still feel modern?

It's overwhelming. When you know what colors you look good in, when you know what silhouettes look good on your body, what's flattering, what's camouflaging your challenges, accentuating your assets, and you know all of these things, it all becomes a very different experience because you have a much stronger point of view. You also know what you want to say. My look is, fill in the blank. My look is classic but casual. My look is modern and cool. My look is edgy and sophisticated, whatever it is. If you start to pay attention to it, it becomes a different thing. The other thing I love to tell is that I'll clean out someone's closet, we'll go through things, and she'll say to me, "I just wear that to walk the dog." I'm like, "Are you single?" "Yeah." "Did you want to say single? Did you want a Friday night date?" Girl, who's coming up to you in that? Put on the cute jeans that fit you great. If you're wearing a little sweatshirt, maybe it's the sweatshirt that makes your eyes look great or lights up your skin. When you start talking to someone on the street and you meet this guy or whatever, you're feeling good. You're presenting a different part of yourself. You're not apologizing for yourself. I have found that in spades across the country.

Women apologize for themselves so much subconsciously because they just threw on clothes. They feel horrible inside. They don't feel like they look good. They don't feel confident. Not just running around in their lives, but how about when they go to the cocktail party in the neighborhood and they see the girl walk in and they're like, why does she always look cute? She always looks cute. She always has the cute dress on. She always has a cute top on. I'm sitting over here like a big shlunk. I hate the way I look. That is horrible. That's not good to yourself. That's not being good to who you are. That's what I love about empowering women. People use that word so much. I hate to even use it myself because it's gotten so overused. When you hear it in this context, that's what it really means. Give yourself that moment of confidence and self-care and self-love. That's what empowerment is, so that you don't feel less than in a situation. The school pickup line, oh, my god, that is just the worst. They're feeling horrible. They’ve got the baseball hat on to cover their hair. They don't even know what they're wearing. I like to set people up for success. That's so much of what this book does.

Zibby: That's awesome. It's so true. I think you're talking about two different things, how you seem to other people and the shame when you're not as put together as you could be, but also how you feel when you present a certain way. Actually, I feel like I've been thinking about clothing more than usual because of the quarantine. When I left home, I brought two weeks of clothes. I was like, that's all. I'm going to be gone for two weeks. Let me just grab a few things. I don't usually sit around in my sweatpants or my pajamas all day, but like most people during quarantine, there has been a lot more of that than usual when I'm busy running around like everybody else. It's amazing to me how much even what you wear affects your mood. If you don't get dressed or you don't brush your hair, you don't get out of the jammies or whatever, I think over time it really wears away at your energy level, even.

George: That's so true. Yes, thank you for bringing it up. With the quarantine and the fact that this is happening, that's absolutely true. What happens there is the reason that you feel bad, and I've talked to so many women, is that you start to disconnect from yourself. The way that you know this is that when you do have that Zoom call, whether it's for work or it's a virtual birthday, which I've been to so many -- I've seen more people in the last three months on camera communicating than I have seen in the last three years. What happens, you hear women say, "I had a Zoom call. I did my hair. I did my makeup. I put on the cute top. I feel so much better." Why? Why is that? Ask yourself. You know why that is? Because you took the time to connect to yourself. It's not because you look prettier. There's no pretension in what I'm saying. That's where people get sometimes, when they first hear me talk, "I don't care what other people think." No, darling, it's not for the other people. It's for you. It's for you. There's no pretension. As a matter of fact, it's the dead opposite. It's the dead opposite of the fact that is for other people. It's for yourself. What do you want in your life? How do you want to be seen? How good do you want to feel? That's what this is about. This isn't about anyone else. Once they understand that, they're like, oh, yes, that makes so much sense.

With this quarantine, listen, wear the sweats, but wear the ones that make you feel good. If the ones that you have don't make you feel good, go online and find an inexpensive pair. There's tons of them. Now that we're into summer, it's all about the tank tops and the T-shirts and the shorts. There's so many places to go to shop for clothing that's inexpensive. Clothing does not have to be expensive at all. I am not a proponent of that. That's the other thing where I love talking because there's nothing pretentious about this. This is not about glamour. This is not a Pretty Woman situation, the movie. This is about you and self-care. You can get clothing at any price point. You can get it very inexpensively that makes you feel good and look good. It's up to you. When people work with me, I always say you're your own banker. I don't know what your situation is. You decide. I can take you anywhere and shop. As a matter of fact, when I referenced being all over the country doing these style events, I did them in these boutiques that were very inexpensive. Most of the items in the boutique were under a hundred dollars. A lot of them were under fifty. It wasn't like I was at these glamourous, very expensive boutiques all over the country dealing with women. No, no, no. I was dealing with women at every price point, and I do. Here's the other thing. I'm on QVC. I work for a brand called LOGO by Lori Goldstein. Her clothes are so inexpensive, but they're fantastic and wonderful fabrics and amazing comfort. She knows a woman's body. It's fabulous. I love working with these clothes because it's another tool that I can give people for their closet. I call it a closet full of tens. If it's not a ten, get rid of it.

Zibby: I loved that. That was actually one of the best lines in the book, I thought. I was like, yeah, why do I keep all these clothes around that they're like, eh? I don't know. Then I feel bad because I bought them.

George: Right. That's a whole thing. That's where I want to help. When you go shopping, when you kind of know what you look good in -- by the way, all of this comes from -- people are probably like, where does he get his information from? How does he know what looks good? It all comes from film and television, meaning that when you see someone in a movie or on any television show -- by the way, even the political debates, do you know the hours of conversation that go into the color of the tie, the color of the jacket, the dress color, what these people are wearing and what it says and what it's going to invoke? It's huge. This is what I realized. If you look at your favorite sitcom, really start to look at what people with your coloring are wearing. How are they going to pop the eyes on camera? How are they going to illuminate the skin? How are they going to bring out the hair color for everyone? That’s where I get all, we call them tricks of the trade or hacks, if you will. It comes from a structured place. I just think that it's so important for you to take the time to give yourself self-care. You are worth it. You really are worth it.

Zibby: Love it. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors now that you've survived the process of writing this book?

George: I think that you have to be passionate about what you say. I'm sure that that's the obvious. I don't think that you can be overwhelmed. I think if you concentrate on the fact of the how -- how am I going to get this book published? How am I going to write a book? How is it going to happen? -- you're focusing on the wrong thing. You have to focus on what you want to say, and say it. I know this might sound a little woo-woo, if you will, but the universe does take over. You don't have to worry about the how. You just have to be really clear about what you want to say and how you want to say it, and do that. Then you'll start to align yourself with the right people. You'll get to it. You'll get to a publisher. You'll get to an agent. You'll get to all of those things that you're supposed to go there. This is a time where we want to hear from you. One of my favorite books is, Brené Brown, Daring Greatly. I'm obsessed with her. The reason that I'm obsessed with her, she talks about how to be vulnerable and how that affects you in your life and how great it is. She talks to us in a way where it's like a best friend that sat down and had coffee with us. She's like, okay, here's the deal. I love that. I love people. I love making people feel good in any way that I can, whether it's dressing them and help them to discover who they are or what they want to be and how they want to be seen, or being on television and inspiring them, doing a wonderful podcast like this and being able to just let people know that they do matter. By the way, here's the other thing, you have to look in the mirror every day and just look at yourself and say, I'm enough. I am enough, because you are.

Zibby: I love it. You're like a wardrobe therapist. It's great.

George: It's funny. You said no one's really talking about this. I don't think people are. I really don't. One of my goals is -- I love Oprah Winfrey. I loved Super Soul Sunday. I love what she talks about. She's talked about every aspect of life and this kind of work. She talks about it with food. She talks about it with money. She talks about it with love. But she has never talked about this part of it with the clothing. I just want to get to her and say, I want to talk to you about this. I know from watching her with all of the interviews that she does and all of the work that she does, she subscribes to this. I know she does because I see it. I think it's easier for people when you do subscribe to it. It's something I'm so excited to have out there and to really help women and let them know you are enough, this is self-care, and then give them all the fun tricks of the trade. I will tell you one other story because I know we probably have to stop. You know me, I'll go on forever.

Zibby: After this. [laughs] I'm putting the hook or whatever that expression is, giving you the hook.

George: This is really funny. I got this woman. She came to me through a friend of a friend of a friend. She called me. I never met her. I went up to her house. We started doing her closet. She was in relationship. They were not engaged. She had been married. He had been married. She was in a job where she was having her own business, but it wasn't going the way she wanted and all of these things. We were going through her closet. We started pulling out things. It was Eddie Bauer, Eddie Bauer skirts, Eddie Bauer dresses, Eddie Bauer jackets. I was like, what is all this stuff? We were laughing. She said, "I know. It's Eddie Bauer." I said, "I didn't even know they made all this stuff. Why do you have all this in your closet?" She goes, "Because when I get off the subway at night from work, there's an Eddie Bauer store." I said, "Walk the other way. Don't go to that store." In our working together, she got married. I did her wedding dress. Her business totally became amazing, all of these changes because she just became such a different person once she had clothes that made her feel incredible and let her say what she wanted to say to the world. She was an entrepreneur. It was wonderful to watch.

Zibby: That's awesome. It's so great what you do. Your way of making people feel good about themselves, it's just super honorable, really. It's a service that you do. It's really amazing, what you do for making people feel good about themselves. That's one of the keys to happiness, really, that inner sense of confidence. Anyway, so it's really great what you do. I'm glad you shoved it all into the book so that we can all have a little piece of it to take along with us.

George: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby: It was my pleasure. Thanks, George. Bye.

George: Bye-bye.

Claire Nicogossian, MAMA, YOU ARE ENOUGH

Zibby Owens: Hi. Happy Monday. Actually, I don't like when people say happy Monday. I don't know why I said that. Anyway, welcome back. I hope you guys had a great weekend. This is the second week of my July Book Blast. Get excited. The first day is Advice Monday. It's assorted advice all day for this Monday. I hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned. All week we're going to have kid's books and beach reads, self-help and more. We're kicking it off with Advice Monday. Stay tuned.

Dr. Claire Nicogossian is the author of Mama, You Are Enough: How to Create Calm, Joy, and Confidence Within the Chaos of Motherhood. As soon as I heard the title, I knew I had to pick up this book as soon as possible. Originally from Washington, DC, Dr. Claire Nicogossian completed her undergrad degree in psychology and early education, and her master’s degree in counseling from Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. She then became a psychologist and got her doctorate in clinical psychology at the American School of Professional Psychology, also in Virginia. She completed an internship at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, and then had fraternal twin girls and moved to Rhode Island. Now she's there, returned to clinical work, and completing her post-doctoral fellowship at RICBT in North Kingstown. She has worked in a variety of clinical settings including the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, County Mental Health Center, and the Catholic University Counseling Center. She also works in private practice. Dr. Claire is passionate about well-being and self-care for individuals with a focus on parental well-being and writes about these topics at MomsWellBeing.com, Mothering.com, The Today Show Community Parenting Team, and at her self-help column, Ask Dr. Claire. You can also listen to her podcast, "In-Session with Dr. Claire."

Hi, Claire. I'm sorry I'm late. How are you?

Claire Nicogossian: I'm good. No apologies needed. Two minutes still feels like on time.

Zibby: I was actually taking the quiz on your website.

Claire: That's awesome.

Zibby: I was like, how much longer could this be? [laughs]

Claire: It is long. You know what? I appreciate that because I created that a couple years ago. Now I realize, who has time for all those questions?

Zibby: No, no, no. It was good. I had time. I just didn't have time right now. I should've done it an hour ago before I was in the middle of doing a podcast. I was like, oh, how fun is this? I'll never pass up a quiz.

Claire: I love it. It's fun. I love to do that because it's almost a baseline of what I would do when I'm working with clients. I feel like that information's so important and powerful for people if they can start with their physical health and they can go to a primary care physician or they can go to their counselor and have a nice foundation to start from.

Zibby: That awesome. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Can you tell me more about your book? which of course I left over behind me. I have it. [laughs] Tell listeners about your book and what it's about and what inspired you to write it.

Claire: Thank you so much for having me on. So generous what you're doing for authors, so thank you so much, and what you have done. I'm a mother of four daughters. I am also a clinical psychologist. When I became a mother with all this education, these advanced degrees, a master's and a doctorate, those first couple months, that first year of motherhood, I said, oh, my goodness, there's so many things I'm feeling. There's so many things I'm going through. I've done as much education you can in mental health. How come we're not talking about these things? I would go to moms' groups. At the time, I was in this twins group. I just wanted to talk about real emotions. I love my daughters, I love being a mom, but is anybody else bored? Is anybody else frustrated? Does anybody else feel so angry from your sleep deprivation or frustrated with your partner or husband because you can't get them on the same page? It was like this wall would go up. It was taboo to talk about. That became a lot of the inspiration for the book, is to talk about things that us moms are going through that I hear about in my profession. Moms would come in. I work with a lot of news mom, postpartum, second-time moms, or people who are going through parenting issues and just need some support.

Whenever they want to talk about motherhood or fatherhood, they always start with a little disclaimer. I love my children so much, but I need to tell you they're driving me crazy. I'm overwhelmed. I feel ineffective parenting them. How come it seemed so easy with child number one, but now child number two, I don't want to be around? I started hearing these narratives and experiences from moms and just giving them space to talk about it. When we do that, they can change. They can look at themselves and not go to this place of judgement. In a nutshell, that's what the book is about. It's about the emotions that all of us mothers experience. I call them the shadow emotions. I do so intentionally, inspired by Carl Yung who talks about going to those places within ourselves so we know where our pain is so we can have a greater understanding and awareness. That was the framework of what I wanted to do. I don't want to call emotions negative. When they're negative, we start judging ourselves. I shouldn't feel that. Well, we are feeling it. Either you're pushing it down, you're ignoring it, you're denying it, or it's coming out in another way. If I can give space to those emotions, anger, sadness, disgust, embarrassment, shame, fear, and worry, and let's call them shadow emotions, then we become curious about it.

Zibby: This is like in Inside Out, the movie. Have your kids seen that? We have the books. Each one of the books is shame, disgust, joy. Just throwing that out. [laughs]

Claire: It's true. I remember that movie coming out when this book was in process. I thought, we have to spell it out for ourselves too. It doesn't have to be so complicated.

Zibby: What tips can you give to moms who are feeling this way who can't maybe have a session with you? Although, I feel like I want to sign up for how you scaled your services. What are some encouraging things or tips that you can share?

Claire: The first thing that I think is important for moms is don't be afraid to allow yourself to feel. Feel without judging. Just be curious. I live in Rhode Island. The analogy I always use in therapy is when you're at the beach, you look at waves come in and out. You're not really judging them. You're just observing them. Oh, that's a heavy surf. That's a light wave. Wow, look, it's a rough surf today, or super calm. If we start looking at our inner world like that, then we get out of that shame and judgment. That's number one. Then number two, it's so important to physically take care of yourself. It was interesting. When I was writing the book, I went to a conference. I was talking to another parenting author. I said, "How did you make a break into having your book published?" The advice I was given was, "Wait until your kids are older to publish this book." I remember responding to myself -- I was tired. I was exhausted. I feel like I work all the time, but it brings me so much joy to write. You lose the essence if you're away from the moment of parenting to look back on it. I feel like that's the voice that I really bring, is that I'm in it right now. I'm doing the distant learning. I call it a COVID meltdown every afternoon. I had one right before I turned this on to meet with you.

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Claire: Oh, no, it's just life. Someone's always overwhelmed. The step is just to allow yourself to feel, to take care of your physical health, to get the sleep. As exhausted as you may be, try to know your amount of sleep you need. When you sleep and are rested, then you can access your coping skills. Your thoughts feel a little clearer. The third thing I think is so important, with everyone at home right now, and I'm sure listeners can relate and we're starting to reopen the world a little bit, but there's not a lot of alone time for parents. How do you get that self-care when you're with your kids now constantly in all these different roles? What I say to parents, and moms especially, is watch the voices in your head. How are you talking to yourself? Be kind just like you'd talk to a friend. Those are some of the quick tips that I always like to remind moms to do. Also, don't get into this mindset that you have to be productive all the time. I think that's the piece that can be really overwhelming. The way I've been framing this time in the world is that if you lost a loved one, you'd allow yourself to grieve. You would scale back and have to just see it day by day. I'm doing a lot of that in sessions with clients and reminding myself that we're all grieving in our own way in different intensities. Let go of that need to be productive. Maybe the most accomplished thing you can do is feed your family and get outside for a nice walk.

Zibby: It's actually easier for me to do six podcasts in a day than it is to go on a walk. [laughs] I know I should be going on walks. Everybody's going on walks. Why am I not going on walks?

Claire: It's hard. Yesterday, I was in between a bunch of sessions. Then I had to teach in the afternoon. It just felt so suffocating being in the house. I took my oldest girls, teenagers, they're fraternal twins, I said, "Let's just go for a quick walk." I came back, and I felt better. Sometimes I think it's fun to be in that mode of just recording or being productive, and then other times...

Zibby: How old are all your girls?

Claire: My oldest are fraternal twins. They're seventeen and a half. They're finishing their junior year. I have a soon-to-be seventh grader, she twelve, and then a soon-to-be fifth grader. She's ten.

Zibby: We have a similar spread. Actually, it's very similar because I have fraternal twins also who are about to be thirteen next week. Then I have an almost-seven-year-old and a five-and-a-half-year-old.

Claire: Very similar.

Zibby: I'll be where you are in a couple years.

Claire: It's amazing. It's a lot to juggle all those different developmental stages, but I think it's such a joy.

Zibby: When you were saying about the surf coming in and watching the weather, this is a big wave and now it's a storm, I'm like, yeah, but I feel like I'm watching -- and I'll include my husband. As adorable as he is, everybody has moods. I'll include my own moods. I have tons of moods. So that's all six of us with different tides. We're all crashing on the beach in different ways on different days. It's a lot harder to manage all of our emotions. If someone's having a bad day and they're having a big storm and you don't even know why and it makes no sense because the Hatchimal didn't open or whatever it is and the other person's upset because of something bigger like some friends such-and-such, then you have to manage all of it as the mom, or some dads too, I'm sure. How do you deal with all of it at once?

Claire: It's so true. That's the human part of it. We can have these ideals. Then what does that look like? as you just described. What we do in our family, and I think I've coached the girls pretty well, sometimes it's not effective, but I always say you have a right to every feeling, but you don't have a right to take it out on someone. That's a message I say. Oh, you seem pretty angry. You're not being kind with your words. Do you need a break? I'll model that. Girls, I am so tired. I am feeling really sad. I'm just a little quieter tonight. It's about labeling, identifying, and then making that conscious effort. How are we going to treat each other right now? And giving them permission to go take a break. I'm not being disrespectful. For example, one of the girls, you're yelling and you're not being nice to your sister. I'm wondering what we can do about that. What do you need? And giving her permission to go to her room and just take care of herself instead of, why are you feeling that way? Why are you being so mean to your sister? You're the older one. Okay, we need to pause and take a break. It's not kind right now. That's this message that I repeat. Some days it's more effective than others. Like I said, I had a meltdown right before we started, but that's life.

Zibby: I feel like with so much time with the kids now especially, as I know all of us are home with the kids, I keep trying different things emotionally and just seeing, okay, I'm going to try this. Today I'm in the mindset where I can try this tool that I've read about. Also, just not being able to hide my own emotions, as I'm sure with you, here we are. I can't say I'll be back in twenty minutes, not that I used to do that so often, but there's just no hiding it. If I'm crying, they're seeing me crying. I might as well say, you know, moms get sad too.

Claire: Exactly. I think that's a beautiful thing you do, is to normalize that feelings happen. When feelings are pushed away, repressed, ignored, judged, then you feel shame for feeling them. It's okay for parents, and especially moms right now -- moms are carrying the mental load of this pandemic. That's what we're seeing. Moms are so overwhelmed. That's not because they're ineffective. That's not because they're doing something wrong. It's because what we're living through. It's constant. It's okay to have those feelings. It's just, what are you going to do about that? The book, it was interesting, the way I organized it is looking over those five big emotions that we talked about earlier and then breaking them down kind of on a continuum. A mom can pick up the book and say, today I'm feeling irritable and I'm feeling frustrated. She can go to this section in the book and read about it. What does that look like in motherhood? What are some of those thoughts she may be saying to herself?

Then I give tools and instructions on -- number one, in this book you'll see that my writing is all about compassion, all about taking care of what's going on inside and healing, whatever that may be. The message is received going up from a partner, from society. She can see, okay, I can manage my thoughts. If I'm saying this, here's a healthy way to say that. Here's moving from the shadow into thriving. There's the cognitive piece. Then there's steps that she can do, whether it be reaching for support, journaling, talking to a counselor. I have a little meditation at the end called The Thriving Mama Reflection, just an encouraging way to be compassionate about yourself when you feel it. It's not a book that I intended for moms to read front to cover. It's almost like a resource. If I'm in a moment and I want to just get in the car and go but there's nowhere to go, can I just label the emotion I'm feeling and read about it? That was my goal.

Zibby: That's awesome. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors now that you have a book out in the world?

Claire: I appreciate that question so much. If you are an aspiring writer and writing, one, write as often as you can. Two, don't wait for someone to give you permission to write. Just write. Then take risks. Continue to have that grit. My book, it was interesting. What you'll see is this lovely cover and lovely message inside. What readers and listeners may not know is that it was rejected I think twenty-four times over the course of four years. I have a wonderful literary agent, Regina Brooks, at Serendipity Literary Agency. She believed in me. That really helped. I had her in my corner. The messages we always received was, the world's not ready for a book this honest. She held fast that hope for me, as did my husband and friends and children and parents. That gave me the courage because it felt worse to give up on writing than not to write. For me, I just kept on believing and regrouping. Those rejections were hard. There was one moment at the dinner table in 2018. We had come back from a trip to California visiting family. I'd gotten my last rejection. I sat at that table with my husband and the girls. I said, "I think it's time to give up writing." Then I sat with it. Then of course, how authors/writers write, then they get an idea. They're like, oh, my goodness, I want to ignore that idea and not write. I looked at my husband, I said, "You got to take the kids for four hours. I literally have to write something. I can't not write it." That was an excerpt that I submitted to Motherly that Diana Spalding said, "Claire, I love this so much. Can I put it in our Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama?" That felt like the universe was like, okay Claire, I know you wanted to give up, but you kept going. For me, it was just getting quiet and listening as a writer in spite of the rejections, if that makes sense.

Zibby: Of course it does. That's awesome. That's such an inspiring story. You hear it. It takes a lot to get it published. Hearing your story, rejection hurts. There's so many times when, for every book, think of all the authors who did give up and they're not out there, the books that weren’t.

Claire: The books that weren’t, that's the piece too, what I would say to any aspiring author is your voice is what makes you the writer. Don't try to be like anybody else's voice. Some of the feedback we received is, "Oh, my gosh. We'll buy Claire's book, but we think it's too heavy. We'd rather it be funnier." I remember having these conversations with my literary agent, Regina. She's like, "Claire, you got to be true to who you are. You can't be funnier. You can't be indignant. You are you, and this is your voice." That's the other piece. Be open to feedback, but don't give up who you are as a writer and your voice.

Zibby: That's great advice. Thank you so much. I'm glad we connected. I'm going to go back now and read all of the results of my quiz from your website, Dr. Claire Nicogossian. Thank you. Thank you for all your tips. Thanks for helping so many moms out there.

Claire: Thank you, Zibby. I appreciate talking to you today. This was a lot of fun.

Zibby: Thanks. I hope the COVID meltdown pre-our call has been resolved by the time you walk out of the room. [laughs]

Claire: Thank you. I'm optimistic. Have a great one.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Claire: Bye.

Zibby: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Advice Monday on the July Book Blast. I know that some of these were from the quarantine and some might seem old even though they’ve just come out. I had to get them out in one big sweep. I hope that you've gotten some useful life tips as you've listened today.