Episode Description:
In this episode of "What If? For Authors," Claire Taylor tackles the anxiety-inducing atmosphere of election season and how it affects authors. Drawing from her experience as an Enneagram Certified Coach and her own journey as a writer, Claire explores strategies to remain creative and hopeful during such a stressful time. This episode offers a compassionate and realistic approach to managing your nervous system, staying grounded, and continuing your writing journey amidst political chaos.
Key Takeaways:
Managing Election Anxiety: Understand the impact of the election season on your mental health and how to stay grounded.
Nervous System Regulation: Learn practical techniques for regulating your nervous system and maintaining focus on your writing.
Enneagram Insights: Use the Enneagram to identify and manage your emotional patterns and fears during stressful times.
Impact of Stories: Recognize the power of storytelling in shaping minds and promoting compassion and understanding.
Actionable Steps: Tips for creating a calming practice, staying informed without being overwhelmed, and staying connected to your writing purpose.
Why Listen? If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the current political climate and its potential impact on your creativity, this episode provides valuable insights and techniques to help you stay focused and resilient. Claire's empathetic guidance will help you navigate the turbulence of election season while continuing to write meaningful stories.
Join the Conversation: Have a question or fear you'd like me to explore? Reach out to me at contact@ffs.media.
!Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of what if for authors, I'm so glad you're here. My name is Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors as well as a humor and mystery writer. You can check out my latest book, sustain your author career by going to ffs. media forward slash sustain. As I'm recording this episode, 2024.
Technically, I don't believe this is considered to be part of the election season in the U S. But it sure feels like it already. Election season runs for way too long now and it sort of wears us down. So that come election day, we just want it to be over. Well, too bad folks. It won't be over after election day this year.
Have you seen who's running? Remember the last presidential election? Right. So this election shows all signs of being as big of a stressor on our bodies, minds, and hearts as the last one. That's why this episode is going to be all about asking the [00:01:00] question, what if it's election season? We ask it so that we can answer the question, figure out how to continue to be creative and hopeful authors and make it through to the other side, regardless of the outcome.
I'll be honest, I'm already finding myself dysregulated on a regular basis, thinking about the election and what's at stake in it. I'm going to do my best. not actually get political in this episode, but there's a part of me that wants to get very, very political because that part of me doesn't see this as a matter of slight policy disagreements, but rather will we have democracy when 2025 rolls around or not?
I don't think anyone's going to have a hard time guessing which candidate I will definitely not be voting for. So. I won't spill it out, but suffice to say I have a very bad feeling about this. It's causing me a lot of anxiety because I worry about the health and safety of not just myself, but of a lot of people I care about and how that'll be [00:02:00] negatively impacted by one or multiple of the possible outcomes.
If you're listening to this from outside the US, maybe that helps you understand some of the stakes Americans feel about this and the complete sense of impending doom. Some people seem to think this is a fun game called Tear It Down, and they seem to have lost sight of how many actual lives, both inside the U.
S. and outside of it, would be lost as a result of that impulse, frankly. So, the impulse seems very reactive to me and not accompanied by much discernment to speak of.
I say all this to let you know that This what if has been one I'm actively having to manage while balancing my own authorly responsibilities. There's a real strangeness to writing a scene where my sweet little sleuth is enjoying a harvest feast with friends. And then I close the document and catch a new snippet where one of the presidential candidates is saying something brashly dehumanizing about [00:03:00] an entire group of people.
And then I remember that a lot of people are down with that. They may vote for him. It's, it's hard for my heart to stay connected to the relevance and impact of my fiction when the real world seems to be using my heart as a punching bag. And for me, as an Enneagram type one, when I pop my head into the world of politics, which is the world of humanity, since politics is simply the rules we set for ourselves.
And, you know, rules that affect all of us, though not always equally. When I pop my head into that world, all I see is a mess. It's a horrifying mess. I see people foaming at the mouth for violence, people begging to be seen as humans while being completely ignored. And some of the pettiest bickering among grown ass adults who are supposed to be taking care of those things.
So my attention as a one naturally flows towards what I perceive to be wrong or broken, and I am perceiving the fuck out of American [00:04:00] politics is brokenness right now.
Does that mean that I think the wisest solution is to tear it all to the ground? No, because I'm not a three year old and politics isn't a block tower. I get the impulse, but it comes from desperation, not discernment. And I really, really hope more people start to see that. Anyway, I've been considering what I'm going to do in the heat of election season for a while.
I wouldn't be surprised if the industry is already starting to see a dip in sales overall in the U S market as a result of the anxiety that I'm describing here, books can be a great world to slip into to take a break, but books Past a certain threshold of nervous system arousal, people struggle to focus on anything that isn't addressing what our bodies are telling us is a threat.
We start to enter a state of collective hypo or hyper arousal, and that's going to impact people's reading habits, y'all. I've been hearing people talk about how it'll start in September and [00:05:00] October and run through the election. But I think that's a vast underestimation. I suspect it's already starting.
So if you see your sales going down right now, but Nothing about your business marketing has changed. I would say that's probably what's going on. And I don't believe it's going to carry on until the election and then slowly go back to normal. That's mostly because, like I said, I don't think the election will be anything close to resolved by the morning of November 6th.
And then assuming the person who wins decides to play dictator, uh, which one of the candidates has literally said he would, And I'm inclined to believe him. Uh, I don't really know when the collective hypo and hyper arousal will end. And I'm saying that knowing that it's going to freak you out. Yes, I know it will, but I don't think covering our eyes to this possibility will allow us to make better business decisions here.
And I see a lot of authors covering their eyes lately.
So the idea that the one who wants to be a dictator will win is just one outcome, right? [00:06:00] Another possibility is that the guy who doesn't show interest in being a full fledged dictator, maybe he wins. In which case we have some pretty solid past data that indicates that will probably not be the end of the election discussion, probably that will be contested and dragged out until at least January again.
I don't think we'll have a repeat of what happened in the last election. Instead, I think we'll be picking up where we left off and building from there and the intensity of the election results denial.
I won't even speculate on what that would look like because frankly, I'm still traumatized from the images of the first time. So there are a couple of options laid out, and I'm sure there are others I haven't thought much about because there always are, but those two seem to me to be the most likely ones.
I don't know. Maybe you disagree with me on that. Fine. If your brain is able to concoct a rosy outcome, please let me know what your secret is. I'm sure your heart rate right now is higher than when you started listening to this [00:07:00] episode. And sometimes looking at reality will do that. But you do still have a lot of control over how you feel throughout this process.
Unfortunately, this discussion is going to be one of those where we talk about systems that are broken and how it falls to individuals, uh, who are suffering as a result. It's not fair that each of us have to carry this anxiety individually and address it individually, just because we live in all these broken systems of politics, ideology, and so on.
It shouldn't fall to the individual, but at this point it kind of does. It's like how you see those news articles constantly talking about how Gen Z's mental health issues are because of their phone addictions, blaming the individual for their mental health struggle, rather than talking about the world Gen Z is inheriting.
Where the climate is rapidly changing, the adults in charge handled a pandemic about as poorly as humanly possible. Many groups of people are getting their [00:08:00] human rights rolled back and so forth. But sure, it's the screen time, not, you know, any of the things happening in the world that they're learning about through that screen.
So that's what I mean by saying, I hate to put the responsibility on the individual here when the problems are created by the systems we live in. But that seems to be the reality right now. And I think it can actually be an empowering thought if we let it, you don't have to wait until other people start acting right before you can care for your heart, mind, and body the way it deserves to be cared for.
There are going to be some authors whose careers do not last through this election season, but there will be plenty of authors whose careers do last. There are a lot of factors here, like whether the person is good at compartmentalizing the politics when it's time to write. There How much money you have socked away for your business when the biggest dip in sales happens.
And, you know, whether you're in the U. S. or not. I don't get the sense that folks outside of the U. S. have all that much less [00:09:00] dread about our election than we do, considering how the U. S. has its hands in every corner of global politics. But it will certainly feel less immediate and less personal for folks who are living outside of the U.
S.
So that may impact a person's ability to focus on their writing. Um, we don't have control over a lot of the factors that will determine whether our author career still stands come 2025. So there's no point in focusing on those things that we can't control. Instead, I think there's going to be one factor that really determines this above all else.
And that's the individual's ability to regulate their nervous system. I feel. Like, I've been shouting this from the rooftop since the start of the year, and only a few authors are actually understanding how crucial this is. Nervous system regulation is something that must be cultivated through lots of intentional practice.
It won't show up for you in October out of [00:10:00] nowhere. You know how the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the second best time is now? Practicing mindfulness for regulation is like that. It grows slowly, like a tree. Start today, if you didn't start 20 years ago. We can become dysregulated many times a day, especially when we don't have control over which people we encounter, or if we check the news a lot.
The 24 Hour News Station's goal is to get you dysregulated and in a state of fear, and then keep you there, because it'll keep you locked into their channel and forget about everything else. Essentially what's happening is they're triggering your core fear so that they can hijack your perceptual filter.
The concept of a perceptual filter is that it determines what information is relevant to you and what information is not. It filters out all the irrelevant information so your conscious mind doesn't have to juggle it along with everything else. What is deemed most relevant is whatever relates back to the fear that's been triggered, which is usually our core fear that defines our Enneagram type.[00:11:00]
So once a news station activates that fear and you enter into a state of dysregulation, your brain is going to really home in on the TV or phone or wherever you're watching it to keep watching, because that's where the perceived threat seems to be coming from. And you're hoping to get information that will prepare you against it.
So you are hooked in., My recommendation is don't watch 24 hour news stations, any of them. This will not help you maintain your nervous system regulation through the election season. For the sake of transparency, I should point out that I've done the exact same thing in this episode. I've hijacked your attention with fear, but I promise I'm going to release you by the end with some helpful hints that will hopefully bring you back into a regulated state and with at least one new tool to get you back there.
Anytime you notice that you're not there and are ready to return. The tricky thing is that it's not always easy to notice when we're dysregulated. That's because when we are, our self awareness [00:12:00] tends to be very low. We're unable to observe our patterns because we're totally engrossed in them. Add into that the fact that what many of us consider healthy patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior Are not actually healthy.
A lot of people value self righteous behavior, for instance, because they've seen it modeled in authority figures from a young age, but self righteousness shows a lack of self awareness. Righteousness is healthy though. There's a thin line between those two things. And on one side is our ego. That's the self righteousness side.
And on the other side is selfless love, which is righteousness side. So the Enneagram is a map that helps us sort out when we're in a fear response and how far into it we are. That's why it's such a useful tool. The concept of levels of development for each type breaks down how deep we are into fear and how out of touch with our essence or the truth of our type we've become.
So if you want to learn to stay more connected to yourself, less [00:13:00] at the mercy of whoever hijacks your attention with fear tactics, and you want to recognize more quickly when you're in hypo or hyper arousal, I haven't found a better map and troubleshooting guide for that than the Enneagram. And then what do you do?
You've realized that you're in a state you don't want to be in, and what's the next step? There are a couple of things. First, you might look toward what's called the vice or passion of your Enneagram type. Same thing, two different words, vice passion. These are emotional patterns that are the biggest stumbling block we face.
And so anytime we're struggling, we're afraid we can pretty reliably look to our vice acting up as the culprit there. Focusing your attention and curiosity on that vice, asking it why it's there and what you can do to lessen its grip on you is a great start. So let's look very quickly at the vices of each type, according to the integrative Enneagram.
And I'm not going to go super in depth on these, but this can be a starting point if you want to do [00:14:00] some research and learn more. So type one's vice is anger. You can look for everywhere. Anger is appearing as disdain, contempt, resentment, rage, any of other of its many forms and ask yourself how you got there.
Type twos vice is pride. Look for where you're denying your own needs and projecting them onto others to feel like you don't need help, but everyone else does type threes. Vice is deceit. So look for where you're projecting a false image of yourself to the world and how it might be reinforcing your own self deceit about who you are.
Type fours vice is envy. So look for where you're comparing yourself to others to confirm that they have something you don't and notice any sense of entitlement to what they have that you're sitting with. Type fives vice is avarice. So look for all the ways you're trying to hold on tight to your resources so that you don't have to be dependent on anyone else ever.[00:15:00]
And notice where your sense of scarcity is starting to run the show. Type six is vice is doubt. So look for all the places you're acquiring a guarantee where you could never have one and how that's causing you to doubt yourself and those around you so that you can never feel settled or safe. Type seven spice is gluttony.
So look for where your fear of deprivation is causing you to take an overly hedonistic approach of more, more, more. Eight's vice is lust. So this is not necessarily a sexual thing, but look for where your feelings of powerlessness are causing you to adopt a conquering approach to life and sending you to all or nothing extremes.
Type nine's vice is self forgetting. So look for where your fear of conflict is causing you to forfeit your agency and allow others to make decisions for you and determine the path your life takes. If all you did was take a hard look at your vice, you'd be in a pretty good place for deconstructing the emotional patterns that are [00:16:00] sending you into a dysregulated state.
Most frequently.
But that doesn't necessarily help you regulate in the moment. So for that, I would guide you toward a few practices that can ground you back in your body. Now, these practices need to actually be practiced prior to game time. So when you're feeling calm and self aware, that's when you lay the groundwork.
The repetition of these is what strengthens your neural pathways around wellbeing so that you can travel them more easily when you need to later on.
The number of practices that fall under this category are pretty much endless. So here's what I like to do. Doesn't necessarily mean that it will be the one that you really like, but you can try it on for size. I closed my eyes. I imagine myself floating in the spaciousness of my body. I place one hand on my chest and one on my belly, and then I breathe deeply through my nose into my belly to the count of four.
I hold the in breath for four seconds and [00:17:00] then I exhale through my nose to the count of eight. I do that a few times and then I move on to the next step, which is to feel my palms pressing against the sturdiness of my body. And I tell myself, I am here, I am whole, I am home. You can say it aloud, or you can repeat it in your head.
I usually say it quietly to myself as I continue to breathe into my belly. I am here, not floating in that war zone or reliving a traumatic event from earlier in my life. I am here right now, right here. I am whole. There's nothing missing from me and nothing about me that needs to hide. I am complete and solid.
I have autonomy over my being. I am whole. I am home. The world around me can change, but until the day I die, my body is my home. And therefore I can always return home. All I need to do is to [00:18:00] recognize my desire to return home. And then I go there. My body becomes my shelter from all storms and it's there for me always.
I am home. Now the here whole home combo is one I put together specifically for my needs. And after reading a shit ton of books about this and learning from some great teachers, your combo may not be here whole home, but it's not a bad starting point. Over time, you'll figure out what you need more and then you can change it up.
It works like absolute magic for me. Did a bunch of men in Texas who couldn't point to a uterus on a diagram, if it were labeled, pass yet another law that limits my ability to get healthcare. I might someday need to survive. Okay. Take a few deep breaths. I am here. I am whole. I am home now. Does that fix the external issue?
No, but now at least I can function within the show a little bit better. At least enough to be in the mindset to write some satire about [00:19:00] these bozos that may later help someone laugh so they don't cry. Laughter is great for the nervous system and its regulation, by the way. So laughter. Also crying.
Definitely start addressing any blocks you have right now about crying because it's a wonderful tool to have at your disposal when you're under constant stress. Deconstruct whatever voices taught you early in life that crying was somehow bad or weak or whatever. It's just fine. And there sure is a lot that we could cry about.
So if you want to cry, but you don't, that's bad for you. Don't do it. Just cry. It's great. Anyway, I practice my regulation tools when I'm on walks out in nature. The environment and activity allow me to feel calm. And that's when I practice grounding myself in my body. A lot of the practices I've developed myself are, to be fair, results of reading the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. His life's work was to revolutionize Buddhist teachings of mindfulness so that they could [00:20:00] spread far and wide beyond the monasteries and create real change in the lives of everyday people.
He was a proponent of the idea that other religions and cultural practices should just be layered on top of these mindfulness teachings and that there wasn't really a contradiction there. In that way, his mindfulness teachings are sort of like the Enneagram, which can be layered on any religious beliefs because it's passed through all of them and it's development.
It's almost like a secular wisdom tool and you see the wisdom of Christian teachings, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism in there, along with the knowledge of a lot of different indigenous cultures. Some people take issue with the idea that there are any sort of central threads of wisdom between these major religions.
And those people are usually not willing to listen to anything I have to say anyway, so that's fine. But I think the commonalities are beautiful and it gives me hope that there is some underlying map of the path forward for the human race [00:21:00] and for our planet as a whole. Just because my little ant brain can't see the path forward doesn't mean there isn't one.
But it takes each of us learning to keep ourselves in a mindful place when shit goes south for any sort of collective awakening to happen. So that's something that you and I can work on. That we have control over. We may not be able to fix the systems, but we don't have to do that on our own. One person alone.
Can't it takes the collective deciding it needs to change and agreeing on how to change it. So our role is to make the change inside of us and help others do the same if they choose to. And it's a scary idea for me that that's all I can realistically do. I have to accept that I'm just a small piece of this puzzle.
But I'm still an important piece and so are you. And as writers, the work we do for ourselves, it shows through in our books and it can transform the hearts and minds of so many people. [00:22:00] I don't know a single person whose view has been radically changed by something other than a story. Stories have the ability to change the world.
And so I think we have a huge responsibility as writers. To be conscious of the stories we're telling and how they are shaping the world around us.
I don't know what will happen this election season, but I do know that no matter what, we're going to need a lot of stories that spread compassion and understanding for our fellow humans. Now, maybe that takes the form of romance or thriller or horror, but when we transform ourselves, we transform our stories and those stories transform our readers.
The impact of our own mindfulness and compassion practices as authors has an exponential impact on the world in that way. So if you start to wonder why you even bother writing when the world seems like it's going mad. There you go. There's the reason. [00:23:00] Because stories are the only thing that has ever changed someone's mind.
You are a storyteller. What effect do you want to have on the world? Start by connecting to that in yourself.
So the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. I cannot encourage you enough to start grounding practices that help regulate your nervous system's fear response as soon as possible today, if you're not already doing it, and if you were doing it and fell off, this is your reminder to pick it back up.
It's like a muscle. It can atrophy if we don't keep using it. Election season happens every four years. So this is a skill that you will use for the rest of your life. So to answer the question of this episode, what if it's election season? I'll say that your job is to stay grounded in yourself, create a calming practice, stay away from the news sources that profit from you being in a heightened fear state, [00:24:00] and make sure you carve out moments of calm for yourself regularly.
Multiple times a day, multiple times an hour. And if you're struggling to connect to the point of writing amidst the chaos and uncertainty, don't forget that stories are the only thing that has ever changed anyone's mind. You may feel powerless in other ways, but you have this power.
So I suggest we don't squander it.
Oh, and vote, vote. Oh my God. Vote, uh, use discernment, ask yourself which candidate will move this country and the world closer to the kind of place you want you and the people you love to live in, make sure you're nice and regulated and then go vote. So those are the things you have control over. Don't let yourself get caught in a pattern of being so upset about what you can't control that you neglect the things you can control.
Take a deep breath. You are here. You are whole. You are home. That's it for this episode of What If [00:25:00] for Authors. I'm Claire Taylor, and I hope you'll join me next time as we explore another What If question together.