The Problem With Self-Help
Episode 440 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Sharon Podobnik
When self-help does more harm than good.
Balancing fault and responsibility in pursuit of a better life.
Chances are, you’ve read a self-help book or two. These days, whether you’re seeking better work-life balance, your first million in the bank, or exemplary mental health, there’s a self-help guru and their associated step-by-step guide eager to explain how they did it and how you can too.
I am so excited to share my conversation with self-help-peddler-turned-myth-dispeller Sharon Podobnik. Sharon was a speaker at the Bossed Up Bootcamp I ran a decade ago, and we sat down to discuss her new book, It’s Not (All) Your Fault: Self-Help and the Individualization of Oppression, which challenged me in all the best ways.
From seeking self-help to exposing its toxic traits
Sharon chose to approach her investigation of our problematic systems from the lens of an industry she knows inside and out. Before founding The Center for Conscious Leadership—which provides executive leadership coaching for “change agents and game changers who are challenging the status quo to create a better world”—Sharon ran a subscription box/book club hybrid that shipped a monthly self-help book to thousands of women around the world.
At the book club gatherings month after month, Sharon began to notice a trend, and it wasn’t going in the direction she envisioned. Whether the chosen book taught a method for weight loss, money gain, or another out-of-reach goal, and no matter how adamantly members followed the guidelines, meaningful change was always just out of reach.
Sharon started hunting for books that didn’t just shame their readers and bypass the real, systemic problems at play, books that considered social justice at the same time they preached personal change, but that particular subgenre was sorely lacking. In the end, she closed her subscription box business—there were just too few books that fulfilled her new criteria.
The patriarchal slant of self-help
The problem with self-help, Sharon began to realize, is that most of the available literature is written by the people who benefit from the systems that cause the very problems women are trying to fix in the first place: wealthy white men. And even the self-help books that are written by women tend to disproportionately feature the voices of wealthy white women.
Even when a text isn’t deliberately predatory, it’s delivered through the lens of someone who beat a system set up precisely for their own advancement. As a result, the primary option for women seeking self-help is a narrative all about how they can change themselves to better fit into a society that didn’t account for them in the first place. Is it any wonder that Sharon’s readers weren’t seeing unmitigated success?
Oppressive vs. liberatory self-help
In It’s Not (All) Your Fault, Sharon compares two niches of self-help: the one she tends to see in the wild, and the one she wrote her book to fill.
Oppressive self-help gives you “the tools to navigate your own exploitation.” This is what I mentioned above; rather than encouraging anyone seeking change or improvement to first question from where their problem stems, it skips all that, launching right into how they might twist and tweak themself to better fit the deeply problematic capitalist mold.
Liberatory self-help, on the other hand, asks you to dig into “the systemic portion that is contributing to the problem you’re facing.” Once the systems at fault are identified, you can begin to explore how to take responsibility for navigating the problem in a way that cares for you, first, and begin to take action against those systemic forces. The potential result: we begin building for ourselves (and those who come after us) a system designed to help everyone within it reach their goals.
Sharon’s book is heavy; it raises a lot of questions that at times left me feeling defensive and really made me think—and that’s exactly what she set out to do. She doesn’t pretend to know how to fix all of society’s problems, so the book doesn’t have a tidy, happily-ever-after ending. But it encourages readers to join Sharon in acknowledging their complicity in these systems and thinking about the steps we can all take to shift the self-help sphere toward inclusive and non-judgmental support.
What are your thoughts on this industry? Are you a die-hard self-helper or a deep-seated skeptic? Visit the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn to share your thoughts. If you’ve read or are reading Sharon’s book, I’d love to hear what parts have challenged or inspired you!
Related Links from today’s episode:
The Center for Conscious Leadership
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I am delighted to take a stroll down memory lane with Sharon Podobnik,
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a leadership coach, author, and speaker known for her work at the intersection of individual development and collective transformation. I feel like we've had a bit of collective transformation together because a decade ago, Sharon and I were running in the same circles as budding entrepreneurs in Washington, DC. She was a featured trainer and speaker at Bossed Up Boot Camp, my original offering through Bossed Up, which started it all back in 2013, that was our flagship weekend long training program for women navigating career transition. Shannon and I got to know each other over the years. We had her speak on all kinds of topics around emotional intelligence, to love in relationships. And during it all, we were swapping titles of books that were really expanding our worldviews at the time. And now it's my absolute pleasure to have her on today's episode talking through her book, her new release, that really blew my mind and really challenged me. I found myself kind of feeling a variety of emotions like anger, despair, combativeness, defensiveness, and then awe, while reading this really interesting book. It's certainly the most interesting read I've had in a really long time. It's called It’s Not (All) Your Fault: Self-Help and the Individualization of Oppression.
I'm so excited to have Sharon here drawing from her background in education, her personal experiences in the self help industry, and her vast array of insights from the worlds of psychological and sociological research that has shaped all of our lives and futures. She synthesizes a bunch of complex topics, blending research with storytelling to present ideas in compelling and accessible ways. And her work has been featured in Forbes, the Washington Post, Good Morning America, and Oprah magazine. Now, that's not all. Sharon is also the founder of the center for conscious leadership, which really relates directly to this book. And through her work at the Center for Conscious Leadership, she seeks to co create a more peaceful, just, and equitable world. When she's not exploring the world with her husband, Mark, she's writing at a local coffee shop or reading with her spunky kitty, Annie in Seattle, Washington. Sharon, welcome to the Bossed up podcast. It's so good to see you.
SHARON: Thanks for having me. It's good to be in conversation with you again.
EMILIE: Last time we saw each other, let's just set the scene for a minute. We were baby business owners is what I can kindly call us, right?
SHARON: I think that's it, absolutely.
EMILIE: We were both living in the DC metro area. I hadn't really figured out how to make a proper living with Bossed Up. And you generously offered up your services as one of our amazing trainers at the beloved, but now no longer really in existence. Bossed Up Boot Camp, weekend long training. Does that ring a bell?
SHARON: That was right, and it was so good to be there. I met so many amazing humans at that. And I'm sad that it doesn't exist. It was a million years ago.
EMILIE: I know it's sad. And many of them, I'm sure, are listening right now of the 500 or so alums, like, a lot of those OG’s are podcast pals now, but you were running a subscription box company at the time, which is so, it just, like, brings me back to 2014 in such a visceral way. Tell us just briefly about Go Love Yourself to set that scene, because it ties directly into this book.
SHARON: It does. So, if when you read this book, you're going to learn that I had a massive breakdown on my honeymoon and that led to me quitting business as usual to start the subscription box. Basically, there were two main motivations for starting this. One is I was absolutely throwing myself into self help. I believed that if we just took a little bit more personal responsibility for ourselves, anything would be possible for us. And secondly, I was coming from the world of education where, you know, I was a teacher. I was making no money. And, you know, all the self help books will tell you that to make money, you're going to have to start your own business.
EMILIE: It was like side hustle season.
SHARON: Side hustle completely. So I started my own business and I decided what I wanted to do was to invite everybody into reading self help with me. And so it essentially started off as a glorified book club, wherein I actually just sent books to the doorsteps of all of the women who were going to read these books. And together we would become the bada** boss b**** we were meant to be and learn how to conquer the world on our own.
EMILIE: I love it. It was called Go Love Yourself. I distinctly remember it evolved into, like, a box with a book and a candle or a face mask or what have you, right? Self care delivered to your door. I just distinctly remember us, uh, sitting in the lobby of one of our sponsors who was letting us generously use the space for free for boss up boot camp because that was our budget at the time. Sitting there talking about the respective men we were dating. That's a generous use of the term. But like boys that we were seeing at the time now, our lovely, beloved husbands. And we were talking about love and relationships, and I just distinctly remember you saying, “have you read why men love ****?”
SHARON: Yes.
EMILIE: And I was like, I don't know what that is that you are peddling, Miss Sharon Podobnik over here, but fast forward ten years. We've come a long way, baby. We've had our social justice existential crises, respectively. And now you're here because you just released a book called It’s Not (All) Your Fault: Self-Help and the Individualization of Oppression, in which you spend a good 400 pages tearing down big self help. How did we get here, Sharon? Why did you write this book?
SHARON: So, first of all, thank you for reading it. And it's so good to like, see the full circle as it comes to a close, right? And continues on. But by the time self help hit it’s I'm sorry, the subscription box hit its apex, we were servicing thousands of women across 20 plus countries. I was sending self help to thousands of women every single month and facilitating book club conversations monthly, where we came together to discuss all of these issues, right? And month, after month, after month, we were coming back together to talk about these issues and seeing no great, meaningful change. For all intents and purposes, our wallets, our waistlines, our self esteem, the problems that we were dealing with at work and at home were pretty much staying the same. And I was like, how the hell could this possibly be? Like, how could it be that all of these women who are working so diligently to make changes in our own lives are seeing no great, meaningful change? How could that possibly be? And so I started to pull back some of the layers of the onion to see what's going on. Is it us? Could it really be all my faults, all of these things that I'm facing? Or is it possible that there are systemic, structural problems that we are all facing together, that no amount of self optimization will really help us to make a difference in? Right? And so I'm reading some books, and as I'm trying to choose what book is going to go into the next subscription box, I'm like, I cannot, in good conscious put this book in here. It is so shaming. It is so like, bypassing of our problems and everything that we're going through. There is no way I can, in good conscience, put this in the book and put this in front of my community. No chance. And, the more I looked for it, the more I saw, the harder it was to find a book where it wasn't outright blaming you for everything that's going wrong with you and saying that you're the problem. You need to fix everything. And so I started looking for self help that was sort of more in the social justice sphere, but there was so few at the time that could successfully make the bridge between self help and social justice. What's going on with me is probably what's going on with a lot of other people. And there was just such a void of that kind of content that I decided I had to actually just stop the box. I could not continue this business and feel good about the content that I was peddling in this world. I can't put that on people's doorsteps and feel good about it. Then I'm not going to do it.
EMILIE: Right. And this is an interesting evolution, one that I think a lot of people have gone through without writing an expose type book about it, right. So, you've been very courageous and vulnerable in articulating that in this book. And it's also, frankly, Sharon, it's, like, pretty dystopian. It's dark. It's darker than I thought it would be. It's sort of like it left me, at times, feeling hopeless. Because I, like you, am totally complicit in the hero narrative of, you know, obviously, we live in a world of systemic oppression and injustice sh** is not fair, but here's how you can hack into it. And it was really for me just to provide a little community in your experience. Like, in the past year or so, as we hit the ten year mark at Bossed Up, I'm looking at the wage gap, I'm looking at the leadership gap, I'm looking at gender equity across the globe, and sh** is bad. Like, things have not made progress, and it does make you want to pull your hair out and maybe just call it a day. And I put out a podcast last year all about what actually leads to gender equity. And you're right. It's not what we're doing as individuals. It's what collective change we can force to come about.
So the irony here, Sharon, is that you wrote a book, right? That's pseudo self help, about the ironic, faulty nature of self help. And in it, you mentioned a whole bunch of different kinds of books. You already talked about diet culture. You talk about personal finance, all kinds of professional help books. I felt a little triggered at times. I'm like, oh, my god, this is me. I fall into this category, which is probably a good call in, call out moment as I read this book. But help us set the stage here by defining what you consider self help, and particularly how you differentiate between the things you couldn't put on people's doorstep and that which you feel better about now.
SHARON: Yes. So when we think about self help in its current iteration, we like to think that it's all of us helpless people not being able to figure it out in the world. But the reality is, self help goes back hundreds and hundreds of years and has origins in religious texts and beyond, right? Like far earlier than some of our religious texts even. Because for as long as humans have existed, we have desired guidance. Fundamentally, self help exists to give us strategies and resources for, quite literally helping ourselves. The term self help, in its current usage, started as a legal means and was a way for folks to take into their own hands legal matters, to write wrongs done to them by other folks. But think about even just that. Who gets to write wrongs against other people? Originally, it's going to be white men, right? Like, who else gets to write the wrongs that have been done to them societally over the last 200 years?
EMILIE: I mean, it takes a lot of privilege to have the time, energy, effort, resources to go conquest your own, be your own justice squad there in any context.
SHARON: Exactly. And so we see these two origin points, and today we see a proliferation of self help texts which mean to give us guidance in the place where our preparations have not met our aspirations, when we desire more for ourselves. But what we have is not good enough to get us there. So I think about education all the time. I come from the world of education. My career started as a middle school math teacher, I think, and I'm super invested in education as a systemic good and force for change. And, but also, it leaves us wanting, right? Talk about all the things you were just talking about. Education does not prepare us for health and wellness. It does not prepare us in finances. It does not prepare us to be women in the world successfully. It does not prepare us to navigate the structures of corporations. There's a lot that it doesn't prepare us for, and self help steps in to fill that void and give us what we think we need to get there. But again, who is self help written by? It is majority written by middle class white men.
So most of the feedback that we're getting about how to be successful in this world has been written by men, for women. Most writers are men. Most readers are women. So when we get advice on how to exist in this world, it is perpetually through the lens of men who created these systems, who benefit from these systems, and who benefit from telling us to change, to fit ourselves into their systems.
EMILIE: Right, And even when it's written by women, we saw this with lean in, right. That the month bossed up started, like when we were back in the day in DC, we see the limitations of wealthy white women giving advice that is supposed to be inclusive for all people. And we're seeing that change, right? To sort of speak up in defense. I feel so defensive when reading your book. I'm like, but my editor is not trying to perpetuate this evil complicit, there's no cabal of big self help, of authors and publishers who are plotting against inclusion, and quite the opposite is probably happening. But you are sort of saying, and you're not blaming the individuals like us who are seeking out self help, right? But there's a lot of systemic assumptions, individualization, right. The individuality that's so prominent in the western world and in the United States, the pull yourself up by your bootstrap sort of mythology of the american dream. I mean, you dismantle so much, you break so much down. You're a historian in addition to a math teacher. I mean, you must be one of the most well read people I've ever met. Truly, Sharon. So it's just kind of interesting that you come for self help because you're really coming for capitalism. You're coming for classism, you're coming for racism. You're coming for systemic oppression. Why self help? Like, like, like, why that element of what you're hoping to dismantle here?
SHARON: I think a couple of reasons. One is because self help is what I know inside and out. And if we're going to dismantle capitalism and all of the other isms that are giving us all of the problems, we need to do it where we know it well. Right? And so I'm going to start by being a traitor to my own industry.
EMILIE: Oh, I love that.
SHARON: And I'm going to reveal what's happening in my industry because I'm not, you know, in the next couple of weeks, going to be able to dismantle capitalism, but I sure as sh** can pull back the curtains on what's happening in self help.
EMILIE: Yeah. Okay, so on that front, you describe a difference in terms of liberatory self help versus oppressive self help. What does that difference break down to?
SHARON: Yeah. So to come back to what you were just saying about capitalism, right. If I think about oppressive self help, it is going to give me the tools to navigate capitalism and navigate, for instance, my own exploitation. So if I'm going to be exploited, I might as well do it in a way that gets my boss to like me? How do I get promoted so that I can exploit other people? How do I navigate these systems that exist? I am not questioning these systems at all. I am finding ways to operate within them. Whereas oppressive self help goes, hey, what's the problem? Are you the problem or do you have a problem? I have a problem. Okay, what's the problem? What's the systemic portion that is contributing to this and helps you to figure out how to navigate in a way that leads you to take care of yourself while taking action against the systems that are oppressive?
EMILIE: So wait, is that second one liberatory self help?
SHARON: Yes.
EMILIE: Okay, I think I got them backwards. Or maybe we said them backwards. I'm not sure. So you're saying oppressive self help doesn't say burn the system to the ground. Here's how you can operate within this messed up system. So you can then oppress others.
SHARON: Correct.
EMILIE: And then, you know, liberatory self help says, there's broader systems at play here. It's not all your fault. Let's think more expansively. And this truly is what I struggle with the most in your book, because maybe I'm not a grand visionary enough, right? Like, you present wildly audacious, dismantling every system that our whole globe operates on. And I go, I don't know if we're going to get there right now, Sharon. I'm not sure we're ready. And maybe that makes me complicit, right? Because I'm like, when your book gets into the action section, your first words are essentially, notice how you want to take meaningful, substantive action right now and question what that is motivated by. And I'm like, f**k Sharon, I'm like, no, give me a hammer. Give me some nails, let’s go, you know? And you're like, let's talk about mindset and expanding beyond the realities of capitalism. And I'm like, um, I don't know, Sharon, I'm going to get a raise. I'm going to get a promotion. I'm going to operate within the system. And that's very much the life I've led and the business I've built. And I want to not challenge you on that, but I want to sort of hear more about the alternative, this more expansive alternative.
SHARON: First of all, I want to say I want you to challenge me. That's the whole point, right? Is, the point of this book is to get the conversations going. It's not to read the book and put it on the shelf next to your thousand other self help books. It is to instigate conversation and make you think about things that are different, maybe uncomfortable, maybe not, right? I don't know. I'm not even attached to the ideas that are in there. I want them to spur conversation, but to the point about action, right? There's a futurist named Bayo Akomolafe who says, the times are urgent. We must slow down.
EMILIE: Yeah.
SHARON: And that, in and of itself, right? That is like, we need to dismantle everything. We need to smash the patriarchy. We need to do all of this stuff right now is like, okay, maybe. But what if smashing is inherently a tool of the patriarchy? What if there are different ways to move around this? What if we don't actually need to break this thing to create something new? What if my more beautiful world, I'm just going to create it, and other people are going to come and live in it with me, and we will have left the corporate structure, we will have left racism behind and sexism behind and all of these other things by inviting people into conversation.
So, for example, one of the ways that I really love to see this book, inviting people into conversation, is around the conversations that I am seeing readers and friends have with their partners, around assumptions in the home, the conversations that I'm seeing my friends and readers have with their families, around assumptions for how families operate and respect that we are due to our elders and how we want to navigate that. Because maybe all of this works for you. And if it works for you, then that's something to consider. And it doesn't always work for everybody. So if it works for me, I might be willing to keep my relationship going in the way that it is, and it's not going to hurt anybody. But there are also times when, for instance, in a team structure, it might work for me and it's not working for everybody else on the team. So how do we make sure that all of our teams, all of our relationships, all of our communities, all of our organizations are working for everybody in it, not just the people who are benefiting from it.
EMILIE: I get that. I mean, you take a very community organizer approach to first trying to call out the unintended negative consequences or unconscious negative realities with the American dream and individualism and the pursuit to overcome your circumstances and be this exceptional hero versus, questioning the f****ed up game we're forced to play and having those radical. I mean, it's a very radical book. I found myself just, like, reading paragraphs out loud to Brad being like, what the hell do you make of this? I'm a pretty progressive person, and you've blown past me politically on so many levels here, but I'm just, I've never, it really challenged me and made me question a bunch of assumptions, which to your point is probably the one specific challenge, I'll levy here, is I love the idea of criticizing big pharma and big capitalism and the profit incentives in our medical industry. Like, these racist, systemic, horrible forms of oppression really do prevent us from having a community, well being oriented world, and certainly country. And you point out some really interesting like, geographical differences in governments across the globe in terms of how we say that. But when we're talking about the self help industry, you write, quote, the self help industry relies on us being in survival mode for its own survival. Like a bully needs someone to bully. Publishers have no incentive to escort us out of survival mode and into more empowered ways of living and being. To take us out of the shame cycle would mean to take us out of their sales cycle, which would be detrimental to their billion dollar business. And so I'm just wondering, like, as someone who peddled self help and was complicit in that industry, tell us about your vision for the evolution of self help that you really want to see. And is there mal intent there? And does there have to be for negative outcomes to persist?
SHARON: Yeah, great question. So again, you mentioned this earlier. I don't think there's any big self help that is trying to ruin all of our lives. Right? But I do think that a lot of us are swept up by the systems. And so the diet industry, I can't remember the number off the top of my head, is something like a $5 billion industry. Now there are a lot of really smart people in that world who really want healthy outcomes for humans. That is not inherently evil. There is nothing evil about that. But there is a distinct difference between calorie restriction for the sake of calorie restriction for the sake of a smaller body and understanding what healthful life looks like, feels like, sounds like, so that we have healthier outcomes for humans. But what is the easy to digest thing? It is women, limit yourself to 1200 calories. It is don't eat after five. It is cut out all sugar. All sugar is bad. It is easy to vilify specific things and make a brand around that. It is not so easy to say, here are the ways that you can respect your body and honor nutrition and make sure to do things that are investing in your present and your future. And that's not easy to digest.
EMILIE: No. And also what you point out in the earlier parts of the book is, let's go look at the root causes. Why is it that we are here? Why is it that we're such a sick country and world? Why are we so stressed and so immobile and so why? And so you're right, this shame and blame on the individual is a much tidier argument for a self help book. Like, here's how you individually can get your sh** together to use the subtitle of my book, as opposed to saying who messed your sh** up in the first place.
SHARON: Right? But both of those need to happen, right? I don't think that there's anything wrong with saying let's figure out how to get your sh** together. I think there is a problem when that is the only thing we're sold, right? If all we have to work with are things that are going to shame us, we're not going to have the compassion for ourselves and each other that we need to actually move through and live differently.
EMILIE: And acceptance, right?
SHARON: 100%.
EMILIE: You write so much about acceptance in this book, it's like you're not saying don't aspire to be better, you're saying love yourself on the way, right?
SHARON: One hundred percent. Because the reality is, I think I say at one point, our activism is only as good as our understanding of the problem. And the reality is the self help that we give ourselves is also only as good as our understanding of the problem. And so when I say acceptance, acceptance is never resignation. It is. I accept my body as it is, I accept my job as it is. I accept everything as it is right now. And when I accept these things, I can figure out why they exist as they do. Instead of being just mad about them, mad at myself about them, I can take the time to unravel them, figure out what's making them tick, figuring out how they operate, and deciding how I want to interact with this, because I might be fully okay with what my body looks like, I might be fully okay with what my career looks like. I need to understand what I really want out of all of this, because that's how I can determine who to be in conversation with. Which is another issue that I take with self help is that it's a one way conversation always. It is rarely rooted in what I actually want. I'm just constantly searching for somebody that's going to agree with me about how to get there. And so I'm going to look for the easy solution that agrees with me already that reaffirms my worldviews about everything instead of uncovering and challenging what I assume to be true already.
EMILIE: Yeah. Which doesn't happen in our politics either, right? We're not hearing from people we disagree with often enough either. And I mean, you just span so many topics in this book. It's truly incredible how many people you're quoting and how many religious texts you've got. Bell Hooks, Audrey Lauren, and Dubois Rumi, right next to Brene Brown and Glennon Doyle and like, know thought leaders. And it's just fascinating how you speak to Buddhism and then mindfulness without, detached from Buddhism, like, you really do cover so much and kind of blew my mind. Frankly, Sharon, in terms of how you wove it all together to push self love and acceptance and push back on self help, that's shaming. You write at one know when it gets back to like, what do you mean by it's not all our fault or not all our fault? Like that balance between individual responsibility and collective circumstance. You write, when we're bombarded with the message that our suffering is our fault and are mired in the shame it causes, we miss the distinction between fault and responsibility. Where we are now is not all our fault. The historical context that led us here, the intersecting systems of oppression that impact our daily lives in complex ways, and the ways these factors have impacted our psyche and made us desperate for help, these things are not our fault. And I do think that's a really powerful reframe that you're not saying that we shouldn't seek out support and guidance. You're just saying we should really question why we're in that circumstance to begin with, yeah?
SHARON: 100%, yes. None of us single handedly created capitalism, sexism, racism, or anything else that we're living in. None of us created this. It is none of our fault. It is our responsibility, though, to figure out if that's what we want to pass on to the next generation.
EMILIE: Yeah. And you write candidly a lot of different stories from your personal experience that strike me as profoundly different than the cliche self help tropes that we and I fall into in my book, but that we've read a million times before.
SHARON: It's.
EMILIE: Here's what I was struggling with. Here's how I overcame it. Let me show you the way. Here's my sort of credibility as to why I have any reason writing this book. And instead, you left me feeling like, holy sh** Sharon, are you okay? I was like, is she all right? There was so much, frankly, like, some hard stuff that you shared. There was no tidy, and here's how I got over it know message in this book. So kind of explain to our listeners here what your personal experience has looked like in the past decade, as you've navigated this system and then as self help kind of failed you in a way.
SHARON: So it's been interesting because even in the writing of the book, I felt so pressured to leave a tidy bow on it. I felt so encouraged, gently and explicitly encouraged by editors to be like, okay, but how are we going to leave the people feeling okay at the end of this? And the reality is sometimes sh** is not okay. And we are all in persistent and just continuous cycles of improvement and, uh, figuring things out. And the reality is, for folks who are interested in these kinds of things, the dark night of the soul can take a long time to get through. Right? So this process where we're in it and we're realizing how hard it is, and we're realizing just what we're up against, personally, professionally, systemically, structurally, as a global community, it can be really, really easy to fall into despair. The reality is, life has been really hard for me for the last 38 years. I am 38 years old. You do the math, right? Like, I grew up in poverty, in the rust belt. I believed that education was the way. I threw myself into education and went into high needs, under resourced communities for my entire education career. Depression hit. Anxiety hit. Alcoholism hit, a lot of things hit. It just compounded all of the things that were already hard about it, right? And so it was impossible for me to take any one of these things apart and be like, oh, anxiety solved. Great. Like, now, my story is fantastic. I am still navigating the exact same systems, and it's still hard to navigate the systems. And I think we do ourselves and each other, quite frankly, a disservice when we paint the picture that everything's fine. There are aspects of life that are really f***ing good, and there are aspects of life that are f***ing really hard, and sometimes those happen. You know this as an entrepreneur, in the same day. Leaders everywhere know this. It is always happening all at the same time. There is beauty and hardship constantly, all the time, right? And don't get me wrong, as the events in the book are unfolding and as I'm navigating anxiety and depression and alcohol abuse,
EMILIE: And predatory student loan, yeah.
SHARON: And predatory student loan
EMILIE: Yeah.
SHARON: I'm also getting engaged and going on vacation and. Right. Like, all of these things are happening at once. And so what I didn't want to do is pretend like all of the problems are magically over with the addition of my special sauce and just read my book and everything's fine. All of these systems still exist, and I want to acknowledge that and get us kind of comfortable ending in a little bit of tension.
EMILIE: Well, that's what's so uncomfortable, Sharon. That's what's so uncomfortable about your whole book. I'm just. Every chapter, I'm like, oh, my f***ing god. I'm like, here's a new thing for me to feel bad about. And despair is easy to come by. Not that you're. I think the last third of the book is less despair inducing, but it is provocative and eye opening. And what I like what you do. I'm looking up the page right now, is towards the end, you basically say, to your point, there's no tidy finish line. But here are my commitments. I'm acknowledging my complicity in some of these systems and you know, my vision for self help. You write, quote, I see self help evolving toward inner compass work, empathy, compassion, inclusivity, courage, and being here and now without judgment, end quote. You talk about how that's connected to these inner development goals from the UN, how it's related to the leadership work you're doing now, and you basically say, here's the work before us. Will you join me? And I do think that is a on brand way to end the book, if not, you know, a little uncomfortable. It's a call to action, right?
SHARON: It is an invitation. It is a, you're not alone. It is. Hey, I'm doing this. Do you want to come play in my sandbox? It is like, are you willing to experiment and see what's going on? So that feels true.
EMILIE: Yeah. First of all, this has been such a blast from the past to be reunited. I'm also just like, thrilled at the wisdom we're gaining in the past decade. You know what I mean? We can look back lovingly at our younger selves and be like those silly young women. We thought we had it all figured out, you know, we were just one email funnel away from being a millionaire. You know what I mean?
SHARON: Oh, my god, yes.
EMILIE: And you're like, what the f*** were we doing? But I'm so proud of how far we've come knowing that the more you know, the more you know you don't know. There's a humility to that, too, but I'm just so proud of this feat. It's a hell of a book. It rocked my world, and I don't agree with everything in it, but that's not the point is it?
SHARON: Right!
EMILIE: Where can our listeners learn more about your book and the incredible leadership work you're up to and follow everything that you're up to? Sharon, thank you.
SHARON: So you can start off sharonpadobnik.com that's where you can link to all of the other stuff. The book you can find on Amazon, Barnes Noble, target, it's notallyourfault.com, available in lots of good places, is also please ask your library for it because we want them to stock it too. Please ask your local bookstore for it. We want them to stock it, too. They should be able to get it if they look for it. And then we didn't really talk about the leadership development work that I do. But very succinctly, everything I do is at the intersection of individual development and collective change, and that includes the leadership development work that I do. So you can find out more about my leadership development firm at the centerforconsciousleadership.com.
EMILIE: The Center for Conscious Leadership. And you're right, it really pairs nicely with the messages in this book. Because if you're talking about individual development, but then collective responsibility, collective transformation, that is such an obvious next step for this. So keep up the amazing work, Sharon, and don't be a stranger. This was such a delight.
SHARON: This was wonderful. Thanks for having me.
EMILIE: For links, a full blog post, synopsis, and a complete transcript of today's interview, head to bossep.org/episode440. That's bossedup.org/episode440. And now I want to hear from you. What did you make, um, of today's conversation? Have you had a chance to read? It's not all your fault. If so, I want your thoughts. I want you to weigh in. And if you haven't, I recommend getting your hands on this book, if only to gossip with me about it in a juicy but also delightful way. I guess gossip's not really the right word. I need a book club. I need more people to like, talk about this because I've been keeping Brad the dad up till all hours of the night reading him passages from this book that have really challenged me. So if you do, pick up a copy and support Sharon and support your local library or support your local bookstore. Let's keep the conversation going. Head to the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or the Bossed Up LinkedIn group and tell me what you thought of today's episode and the topics we broke down. Do you feel like we're all just complicit in a self help system that keeps us all, you know, in the sales cycle for the next self help book? I say, as I pedal another self help book about self help books, right.
It becomes pretty meta pretty quickly here. Do you feel like there's a space and a way forward for consciously dismantling systems of oppression while hacking your way through them. Or is it like a binary all or nothing? You either game the system and therefore endorse it, or you opt out entirely. I'm genuinely curious about how we ethically fall on this spectrum of how we make the world a better place. And I'm genuinely just so glad I get to have conversations like this with Sharon and with all of you, knowing that we don't agree on everything. That's not the point, right? The point is to expand each other's worldview through being able to have enlightening, enriching and disagreeing sometimes conversations.
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So let's keep that going in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook and in our LinkedIn group. And until next time, let's keep bossing in pursuit of our purpose. And together, let's lift as we climb.
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A daily habit to transition out of your workday.