🎙️ Resilience, Healing, and Creative Dysregulation with Kelly Wilde Miller

David speaks with Kelly Wilde Miller, an emerging writer and speaker giving voice to the necessity of authentic self-expression. She is a self-help author, who wrote and published her first book in 5-days, an award-winning speaker & creator of the growing newsletter Wild on Purpose.

They talked about:

🌀 The concept of creative dysregulation

💼 How to overcome dysregulation in entrepreneurship

🌟 Turning criticisms into creative power

💫 Embracing vulnerability and authenticity in creativity

🌞 The challenge of joy in everyday work

🕔 The process of writing a book in five days

This is just one part of a longer conversation, and it's the third part. You can listen to the earlier episode here:

Part 1: 🎙️ Dreams, Doubts and Creative Conflict with Kelly Wilde Miller (Episode 105)

Part 2: 🎙️ Decisions, Self-Integration, and the Power of Alter Egos with Kelly Wilde Miller (Episode 108)

🎙 Listen to your favourite podcast player

🎧 Listen on Spotify:

📹 Watch on Youtube:

📄 Show notes:

[00:00] Introduction

[01:47] How a tough breakup led to a new career

[04:05] Overcoming dysregulation in entrepreneurship

[05:34] Embracing creativity after criticism

[07:55] How to stop being dysregulated as a creator

[11:41] The essence of creative dysregulation

[13:22] The power of vulnerability in creative expression

[15:05] The challenge of joy in everyday work

[17:56] The process of writing a book in five days

[22:09] Lessons from publishing a book

[26:45] Writing is a journey of self-discovery and transformation

🗣 Mentioned in the show:

Creative Dysregulation | https://amzn.to/3xIbSAu

MDMA-assisted psychotherapy | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA-assisted_psychotherapy

Nervous System Mastery | https://nsmastery.com/

Steve Jobs | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

Convertkit | https://bit.ly/convertkit-de

Adderall | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall

99designs | https://99designs.com/

Grammarly | https://www.grammarly.com/premium

Paul Millerd | www.theknowledge.io/paulmillerd/

The Pathless Path | https://amzn.to/3Qn37kp

Google Docs | https://www.google.com/docs/about/

WhatsApp | https://web.whatsapp.com/

👤 Connect with Kelly:

Twitter: https://x.com/kellycwilde

Website: https://www.kellywildemiller.com/

Newsletter and Podcast: Wild on Purpose by Kelly Wilde Miller | https://www.wildonpurpose.co/

5-Day Creative Momentum Challenge | https://fivedaycreative.com/challenge/

Creative Regulation Self-Assessment | https://creativedysregulation.scoreapp.com/

Book: Creative Dysregulation | https://amzn.to/3xIbSAu

👨🏾‍💻 About David Elikwu:

David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.

🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge

🌐 Website: https://www.davidelikwu.com

📽️ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/davidelikwu

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/delikwu/

🕺 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@delikwu

🎙️ Podcast: http://plnk.to/theknowledge

📖 Free Book: https://pro.theknowledge.io/frames

My Online Course

🖥️ Decision Hacker: http://www.decisionhacker.io/

Decision Hacker will help you hack your default patterns and become an intentional architect of your life. You’ll learn everything you need to transform your decisions, your habits, and your outcomes.

The Knowledge

📩 Newsletter: https://theknowledge.io

The Knowledge is a weekly newsletter for people who want to get more out of life. It's full of insights from psychology, philosophy, productivity, and business, all designed to make you more productive, creative, and decisive.

My Favorite Tools

🎞️ Descript: https://bit.ly/descript-de

📨 Convertkit: https://bit.ly/convertkit-de

🔰 NordVPN: https://bit.ly/nordvpn-de

💹 Nutmeg: http://bit.ly/nutmegde

🎧 Audible: https://bit.ly/audiblede

📜 Full transcript:

Kelly Wilde: Identifying like what is the thing you really want to do, keep taking methodical steps to get there while, you know, taking care of yourself too. The money is real, the rent is real, all of that. And you might need to do something that's less joyful to get that done. And keep opening more space gradually to let in that, that joyful work, that joyful creativity.

This week, I'm sharing the third part of my conversation with Kelly Wilde Miller, who is a writer and speaker advocating for authentic self expression.

Now, Kelly was challenged to write her first book, Creative Dysregulation, in just five days. She's an award winning speaker and the creator of the growing newsletter World on Purpose.

Now i've previously shared the first two parts of this conversation, which were incredible I definitely urge you to go back and listen to both of them if you haven't already.

In this part, you're going to hear kelly and I talking about this concept of creative dysregulation and what that actually means.

We talk about how to overcome dysregulation in entrepreneurship. And in your writing, we talk about the struggle to find joy in everyday work. And the process that Kelly went through while trying to write a book in five days.

We also talk about writing. We both shared some of our experiences writing and the power of writing to take you on a journey of personal transformation and self discovery.

So, this was a really great episode. You can get the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io. And you can find Kelly on Twitter @KellyCWilde.

Now, if you love this episode, please do share it with a friend, and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts, because it helps us tremendously to find other listeners just like you.

David Elikwu: I think this is probably a decent segue into the concept of creative dysregulation, which you brought up before, but really we're kind of entering this, you know, entrepreneurship chapter of your career. Probably, maybe we can talk about the last five years or so. I think you say you went off the far, far side of woo, trying to, you know, find yourself and figure things out. And then coming off the back of that, being able to try and develop a business and figure out, you know, what you're going to be doing and how things are going to work, and I'd love to hear more about that, that journey as well.

Kelly Wilde: David, how do you do your research? This is incredible. Yeah. The Farsight of Woo is going to be a, hopefully an illustrative book I make someday or a play or a musical.

Yeah. Five years. So 30 to 35 for me. I was in a tough time at the end of my twenties. I went through a horrible breakup. The kind of breakup that maybe everyone has once in their life. But the kind that like completely rips the rug out from under your feet and you just have no idea who you are, what is up from down and real heartbroken for like a year and a half. And was also so lost work wise.

So I graduated school at 25, between 25 and 30. I most of the time was still being Tori. I worked at a PR and marketing agency, which I hated. I hated just working. I'm not very, a very good employee. I'm not a very good nine to five employee. Everything I tried to build, it just didn't work. And I had adrenal fatigue and insomnia and depression. My body was falling apart. And so by the time 30 came around, I was ripe for some type of awakening experience.

And that is when I started going down the healing path. For me, that looked like, I look like ayahuasca, going to retreats, working with coaches, working with energy healers, eventually psychotherapists. I think it was, I was 31 when I had an MDMA psychotherapy session that absolutely changed my life. Underground, still not legal, so I won't give any details about that, but it absolutely changed my life for the better. And I saw on, in what ways I still wasn't giving myself permission to even exist. And so I, after that felt permission to be here and to exist as who I am. And it took a couple of years for that to fully integrate.

I kind of stopped pursuing work in a big way. It was just so unsettled and I was working with some intuitive people who said like, right now is not your career time. Right now is you healing. I was doing a lot of stuff around childhood and my parents divorce. Learned a lot about complex PTSD. And that is also when I, throughout this phase, I realized how dysregulated I was.

So my husband, Johnny has a course called Nervous System Mastery, and he teaches all about nervous system regulation. And became very clear how dysregulated I was and how I was kind of chronically in a fight or flight response. And when I went back to start creating and sharing things with the world. I did it in a really kind of manic and dysregulated way and nothing could really launch in the world from that place and having Johnny, my partner as a mirror in my early thirties, showed me that there was other ways of building, which were sustainable and gradual and totally at ease with a lot of confidence and self assuredness, but no grasping. And that's how he's embodied creating his course and his business.

And so I was living with a very intense reflection of how different my orientation towards creativity and entrepreneurship was based on the man that I was with, and that was actually so healing to see another way possible, which then helped me start to unpack why I was so dysregulated as an entrepreneur.

And one of the reasons was, some of my early stories and imprinting that became a belief structure was something my mom would say when I was really young, while we did live in the Bay area, while we did see the whole tech boom going on was creativity is great. We are all creative. Yes, have lots of ideas, but only the 1% are going to make it.

So my mom like hyper fixated on the Steve Jobs's of the world and said, "See, only those are the ones who are going to make it as entrepreneurs. You clearly aren't one of them. So just go get a job and be a regular person."

Those were kind of the stories that I picked up and that, now that I'm reflecting more, I think was also driving my mom's decision for me not to go to school. Why go into so much debt to be a university student when I'm just going to get a job and go be a regular person? And I can do, I can do that with community college. And I use this word regular just very loosely.

And so I had to work on all that. I had to work on that and actually find the way to feel so intrinsically empowered. I keep saying this phrase, to know that I am an entrepreneur. I'm very creative and I'm capable and I'm deserving and I'm worthy of building something on my own. And so through lots of different practices and modalities, like, all the healing stuff I already mentioned, but breath work, somatic work, emotional processing skills. I learned how to become more regulated in my body, In my life, in my expression, and then eventually in my work. And I'm still every day massaging that out as I create and share my voice and share my products and services with the world. New layers are constantly revealed, but right now I can finally say for the first time in my life, I am a more or less regulated entrepreneur who knows that she can do great things in the world and is doing great things in the world slowly, slowly.

So I had to learn where my like physical and energetic and emotional boundaries are, and then pair my ambition and my visions with that and learn how to hold that type of creative tension. You talked about tension earlier. It's like the tension to like do big things and really be expressed and I have to acknowledge like I get tired easily and I get overwhelmed easily and I get emotional easily.

And so, saying yes and to both of those realities of who I am.

David Elikwu: I guess the question that might be useful for a lot of people listening is essentially, you know, how to stop being dysregulated as a creator and how to create things effectively and going back to that word tension.

I think even for me, when I think of, Hey, myself as a creator, me as someone that wants to make things, I love creating things, that is the time when I feel the most alive, I do street photography and I just love being able to, you know, you stand there in the middle of traffic and you just see the souls hurtling by and you get to see everything and everyone else is still inside their own world. And that's something I love, and it's really interesting. And I also like writing both fiction and nonfiction, et cetera. But what I find interesting is, you know, sometimes people say, so I used to work in corporate law. And people say, Oh, you know, you need to be a particular kind of person to enjoy corporate law because it involves a lot of reading and blah, blah, blah. And I'm definitely that kind of person. I find work very easy and I find creativity often quite hard. Maybe there's a bit of a slope or curve on that where sometimes I think it has to get hard and then maybe it becomes easy again. But I've definitely found that, that journey interesting. You know, I can a hundred percent just throw myself into, I mean, I left law a number of years ago now, but I enjoyed the work I was doing. That wasn't the reason. The reason was, I guess the hours, right. And if you ever want to, let's say get married or do some other things. I probably wouldn't have had the space or time for that at the time. I don't think there was anything else that I was focused on apart from just working during that period. I was at this particular firm for about five years or so. And yeah, I would perfectly be content just to, you know, you throw yourself into the machine and just get chewed up.

And but it's easy because you can just get told what to do. Like the work gets put in front of you and you can just munch through it. And there is no cognitive pressure. I mean, you know, obviously there is some anxiety that comes with the job and there is some definitely some emotional turmoil that comes with the job. But at the same time, even if you're working until 2 AM. or whatever.

Actually, it was strange that I could, I think as soon as it got to maybe half four in the afternoon, I probably get a sense of if I was going to be working late that day or not, and maybe this is a distinction from me, from some other people, I don't know if everyone else reacted in the same way, but as soon as I know, Oh, I'm going to be working late today. Like there's no way I'm going to get out in the next few hours, I would just completely relax because now I know I'm going to be here for a long time. Why rush? You know, why I'm not going to stress myself anymore. And actually, then I can relax. I had a special pair of shoes that I had. I kept in the office, when it got to maybe, let's say eight or 9 PM. I would change out of my, like, leather shoes into my, like, yeah, they were like slippers, like these dark slippers. And I'll just be padding around the office. I was very comfortable. And so, it's strange how there's this duality where, okay, for some people that's really hard. That's like soul sucking and who wants to do that?

But maybe that's true. Cause I do feel like my soul is being sucked when I don't have the freedom to be creative and to do those things. It's interesting how that can be easy for me. But then the creative part, which is the thing that I actually love and the thing that I actually want to spend time doing is.

Can feel very chaotic and it can feel difficult and there's so much stress and tension and, you know, ah, you know, do I sit down and force myself to work? Do I do this? Do I do that? There's things that I want to do. You know, the current novel that I've been working on, I've been working on it since 2018. That's like six years. And I've only just submitted like the first 10, 000 words or so for this writing prize. I mean, I've written loads more than that, I think, Probably over 200, 000 or so, but the point is that isn't done. It's not easy. And I care about it the most. And if you work backwards from the things that I care the most about to the least about, it's almost like that's the order of ease. So, I wonder how that resonates with you.

Kelly Wilde: Yeah, it resonates a lot. Now of course, so creative dysregulation is this phrase that I coined and I'm trying to kind of define, but every person I talk to, I just, we all have a different experience with creativity and the way dysregulating experiences arise, look a little different. But generally the way I've been defining it Is as we start to step toward our creativity as we begin to start taking action on a creative idea or project some type of mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual crisis will arise, which if big enough could threaten the whole thing entirely. And not just threaten the idea and the project, but could also threaten the creator itself and start to be self harm.

And to me, that looks like someone who doesn't launch a project and then comes back at themselves and says, look, I'm an idiot or I'm a failure. I'm clearly not meant to do this, which was a story I told myself for a really long time.

The theory I'm working with, so I have five areas that I explore within creative dysregulation and one of them happens to be around authenticity and identity. And I think it's much bigger than we give ourselves credit for or give this credit for is, do we truly identify as being a creative person? And to what degree are we willing to even be seen in who we are? Not just be seen in our creativity, but I believe one of the most vulnerable things in the world is to be seen in an authentic expression, which is why we put these masks on and these different personas, because it's easier to hide behind a character and an alter ego versus letting just the raw, uninhibited expression of ourselves come through.

And when we are creating from some place that's really deep inside of us, I think the sharing of that is vulnerable and so therefore even the making of the thing is vulnerable because you're also like meeting yourself in more authentic and true ways, which is scary. I think we all have a threshold of how intimate we are willing to be with ourselves, our life experience, our emotions, especially emotions.

And when we are creating from that deeper place, we usually need to tap into some type of emotional truth. I'm starting to reflect on my past stories and I want to tell the story of Tori. One of my future projects is actually the story of Tori is going to be a musical. And I know that in order for me to write it. I have to go to the depths of the pain of that process of that time in my life, the pain and the beauty, the whole spectrum of it, but to sit at my computer and then start writing, but be connected to that is like not easy. And I think it actually takes like practices in order to fully do it.

And so that's just one theory of the things that we care about most are because they're so true and aligned with who we are. But then it is quite scary to be that person in the world, especially if, if you do come from a background where you were following more of a default path, taking the steps, being the good student, then the good college student, then the good employee. There's so much artificiality in that whole path. And then we get confused at like, who am I even really? Another thing I talk about in the book is that, knowing to what degree are you in your joy and your genius zone. A lot of times we just get really good at things. Like I'm good at a lot of things because I've studied and tried so many different things, but the things that actually bring me joy is a significantly smaller amount of things.

We can get really conditioned to just do things we're good at, you know, just get the job done without actually feeling a lot of joy or happiness along the way. And joy is very vulnerable, that's something that's come up for me in my healing journey in a big plant medicine ceremony, I realized how much fear my body was holding to eat that blocking me from the joy. I was afraid of what joy feels like. Joy is overwhelming at times. And we live in a society where we kind of want people to be like neutral plus 5%. percent happy, you know, be friendly, but the person who's like, overjoyed is a lot, it's a lot for us to be around someone like that.

And so I don't even know if a lot of us are in our full expression of joy most of the time, which means we're not usually working in our joy most of the time. And we're just kind of slogging through stuff we're good at.

I've been like figuring out my whole Email sequencing. And I've been like in ConvertKit trying to like do funnels and stuff. I'm like, I'm not finding a ton of joy here, but I, I have to do it. And so I find my ways of doing it and I align it with different energies, my more masculine kind of zeroed in focused tactical energy. And that part of me can like find more joy in it.

But ultimately, the biggest joyful expression that I think I can have, one of them, is to perform on a stage in Broadway and sing and tap dance, which was my first love language, and be seen in this whole physicality of who I am. It's not me sending newsletters. And so I acknowledge I have not fully given myself permission yet to do the thing that brings me the most joy. It terrifies me and it feels so far out of my comfort zone right now. So I'm methodically taking steps to get there. So I think identifying like what is the thing you really want to do, keep taking methodical steps to get there while, you know, taking care of yourself too. The money is real, the rent is real, all of that. And you might need to do something that's less joyful to get that done. And keep opening more space gradually to let in that, that joyful work, that joyful creativity.

David Elikwu: Yeah, I love that. And this book that you wrote, you wrote it in five days, which you mentioned in passing before, but that is crazy. And okay, to clarify, not just that you wrote a book in five days, but a book that is actually good, that people actually like to read, that people actually have read. I think that's different from, you know, sometimes you have someone that sits in their cage and, you know, cranks up some words and nobody even looks at it and they say, Oh, I wrote a book. It's real and it ends good. What was that process like?

I also think I remember you saying that, I think even by day four, you weren't completely happy with it. So what was that process like? And also, would you have considered yourself a writer before you wrote that? Because I know that, Hey, you were just challenged to, to do this thing, to write this thing. And for a lot of people, sometimes whether the challenge comes from inside or it comes from externally, sometimes if that doesn't resonate with our Identity that already exists that also creates some fear and some tension, some apprehension that, ah, can I do this thing? Can I step out and make this? I don't know. I don't know if that's me. I don't know if I haven't done that before. I don't know what it's going to be like, et cetera. And there's loads of excuses that we could give to keep ourselves from stepping out into that thing.

So I'd love to know how you felt navigating that.

Kelly Wilde: Yeah. So I was challenged by a couple of friends to get this concept of creative dysregulation out into the world in a mini book. And the challenge was to write 30 pages ended up being 86 Kindle pages. So, you know, Kindle's kind of small. It's a short book.

I actually just got a message. Someone sent me a screenshot yesterday of someone else who messaged them saying, I read Kelly's book twice in 36 hours. So it's so short that you can read it twice in a day and a half.

And the idea was, it's so meta, there's so many layers here, the idea was that I would overcome my own flavor of dysregulation, which for me is a lot of the self doubt I talked about, if I give myself too much room to make something, there's too much space for self doubt to creep in and perfectionism to creep in and derail the whole thing.

Five days was the amount of time that I reasonably was like, I could write 30 pages in five days. I mean, I've probably in college getting out term papers wrote somewhere the equivalent of that in like, three days with Adderall and coffee. And I knew I didn't want to pull that maneuver, but I was like, I think it's actually possible for me to do it.

But also so tight that I wouldn't have time to overthink the whole thing. The cool part, I mean, so many cool parts about it, but I decided to just tweet about it right away. And of course all the Twitter folks who are creators and love this kind of stuff, like there was just this like celebration and kind of rallying around me in this book process.

And day one, I actually spent predominantly working on the cover design because I was working with a designer from 99 Designs, and I knew that a five day turnaround for a hired designer was also a lot to ask. So I did the cover first and then I was tweeting about it and like, I was like, here's the six options. What are your guys' favorites? My favorite happened to be everyone else's favorite. So then I'm like, here's five iterations of that one. And then we're just like, I'm basically like co creating it with a bunch of strangers on Twitter. The final cover design, there was a huge change that happened and it was largely influenced by this wonderful woman, Michelle, who physically drew a new thing down. I don't have it next to me, but it, took a photo of a piece of paper where she drew it herself. And I was like, that's fabulous. Sent it to the designer. Next thing I know, like that's what's happening in the cover.

And because all this was happening, there was this momentum building and all this stoke and everyone just like, yeah, Kelly, you can do it. And I was also asking people, I sent a quick definition of what creative dysregulation means. And I said, if this resonates with you, please send me a DM or an email with your story. And I think I received a dozen stories and some people really elaborated. They took, you know, paragraphs to explain their creative dysregulation stories.

And that was so fueling and motivating of like, this is not just my thing. This is not just my life experience that I'm writing about here. And so I even took some of their words verbatim and popped them in the book and just said like, here's examples of how it shows up for other people, which, you know, helped me buy like three pages worth of writing, like through other people's work.

So by the, and then by the time I launched, it was, yeah, of course, day four, I'm like, Oh, there's all this stuff wrong with it. And I took me until day four to even kind of know what the story, the whole arc of the book wanted to be. Day four and five are actually the most intense. I tried to do very minimal editing. I edited at the very end with Grammarly pro. So I basically had AI do most of the editing. My friend, Paul Millard, who's one of the ones who challenged me. He's the author of the pathless path. He kind of was looking at a Google doc version of it and adding some notes. But most of his notes were this rocks, keep going, which having that type of friend in my corner, and in fact, the guys who challenged me, which were my husband, Johnny, Paul and our other friend, Adam, I was in a little WhatsApp group with them, and they were just like constantly cheerleading me. And cause I think they knew Kelly just needs to write. This is not the time to have some existential philosophical conversation on what this book even means or is it, am I making the right editing choices? Am I making the right storyline choices? It was just like, go Kelly, go. And that was so helpful. It was so helpful because I just had all these mirrors of people being like, yes, yes, yes. We want this. This matters. And enough of people saying like, and this is good enough so far.

So when I hit publish, I was exhausted and I was like, I don't even know how I feel about it. I knew I hated the ending. I still hate the ending. There's still in hindsight, there's so much I want to change. I felt a lot of insecurity afterwards. In fact, I thought I was going to go right back into rewriting and improving it, but I realized that that decision was coming from an insecure place in me who actually wanted to apologize to the world for publishing an imperfect book. I felt this, like, sense of, I'm sorry, everyone who bought it, the like 500 people who bought it. I just delivered you this very like imperfect work in progress. Who does that? Who publishes a work in progress? And to make myself feel better, I called it The Minimum Viable book, the MVB. I'm calling it V1 you know, but then the feedback started rolling in and people were saying things like, I've never felt so seen by a book before. I've never exhaled so much while reading a book before.

Just this morning I got a message from someone saying like, you've described my life experience in ways that I have been like looking for. There's been some critical feedback of like, you talk too much about spirituality in the book and this is sort of like some things, but for the most part, the feedback's been largely excellent.

I do know that the version that is out there in the world is not the complete version. And so what I've been sitting with and wrestling with over the past couple of months, it's four ish months or so. Do I leave it as is? Or do I overwrite it and do something different and improve it? And I've had very strong opinions from people who are like, don't change it. It's done. Just move on with your life. It's done. Including some authors that I really respect. And yet, that advice doesn't feel like my truth. And so my truth feels like the phrase creative dysregulation is so potent. It is describing people's real experiences in a way that no other phrase has. So I need to do right by this phrase. And now there's this new wave of enthusiasm coming up in me as it's maturing. So I've got a lineup of researchers and experts in different fields that I'm going to talk to from early childhood development to attachment theory, to nervous system stuff, to somatic healing, to just people who are experts in creativity in general, and really be like, what is this? What is this? Why does it happen?

I have my own improvements of my own stories, how I want to tell the story. there's an assessment I offer in the book and I'm in completely over, overriding that and improving it. There's going to be a digital assessment available soon that people can take as a standalone thing online. So that'll be really cool, a creative regulation, self assessment.

And generally what I learned, cause in the beginning when Paul challenged me, he said, ship, quit and learn. So Ship is like, get it out there as fast as possible. Quit, step away, and learn. And that's what I did. I shipped it super fast. I quit. I learned. And now with those learnings, I feel a more mature, deeper, more thoughtful articulation of it coming through. And I don't think it's going to override that five day magic. The five days was there to just get that momentum. And boy, did it kick off momentum.

Yeah, now I feel like I'm on a multi year journey of really understanding what it means and eventually hopefully working with a publisher on getting it out in a bigger way.

David Elikwu: Yeah, I love that. And what a way to test the idea and see if it's something people are interested in and just giving it to them and letting people interact with it.

The last question I'd ask is actually just connected to what you just said, which is essentially, I mean, the book is about creative dysregulation obviously we've thought that in the past. I'd love to know maybe a bit more about what you learned in the process of writing it? And if, you know, you feel more creatively regulated in the end, after having written it and more prepared to go into the next things that you go on to write.

Kelly Wilde: Yeah, well, I'll tie it back to the question you also asked previously, which was, did I see myself as a writer before writing this book? I see myself as a communicator, that's one of the talents of Gemini's. I have a lot of Gemini in my chart.

I've been a communicator since I was very young. And so I've always been a strong writer, a strong speaker. But I don't define myself as a writer the same way I see a lot of online writers do, who are just like, I'm a writer, and here's my newsletter, and here's my blog, and here's my essays. I'm like, I just, when I sit down to write, I think I more or less write well, and I find enjoyment in the process sometimes.

I don't love writing. It doesn't bring me a ton of joy the way it brings other people joy, which is why I also am trying to figure out my strategy for writing a longer book because I'm not the person who just looks forward to sitting down and writing every day. But what happened when I sat down to write it is my identity started to change. I think publishing it and be like, well, now I'm an author. I'm Like here's a title I can claim, which really anyone who just uploads a document into Kindle can technically claim, so I don't like put a ton of weight into that, but the identity of someone who can have an idea, take action on it and share it with the world that is now the identity I'm working with that is very empowering, and is very regulating for me because so much of my dysregulation came from very wonky identity structures around who I am and what I'm allowed to do and what I'm capable of.

So writing this book, it just was a an experiential permission slip to create stuff in the world. I know I'm going to create a lot of other things that aren't books. I felt a little dysregulated afterwards cause I was like, I have to, I have to improve it now. And oh my God. And then I got really stressed out and then Minnie burned out again. And now there's this because I decided I want to work with a publisher, and that's a multi year process, there's this like, really cool wave of like, patience coming through me, and I'm just like, yeah, this book's going to take as long as it's going to take, and I know I'm capable of making it happen, I know I'm going to need help, I know I have the capacity to ask for help now. I don't feel the frantic, like, I need to prove myself energy, I also, something really happened where if someone doesn't like this or doesn't like me and how I wrote it, I'm cool with it.

Example is, Johnny and I were in New York and we met with a, a book agent, a very reputable book agent. And when I shared with her about this book and the five days and how I published it, I basically received her rolling her eyes at me and looking at me like I was an idiot. I'm like, who does that? It was basically my worst fears, like came true. She said, you know, that that's nice. It was like, that's nice. And just kind of gave me an energetic pat on the head and then like continued to ignore me or just kind of disregard the topic.

And I, at first I felt a little punch in the gut of like, Oh, You did a bad thing, Kelly. You did it. Your deepest fear came true. You, you tried to express yourself in the world and someone hates it. Someone hates you because of it. And then I actually like 20 minutes later, I was laughing like, Oh, it's just her stuff. That's her story. She has no idea what's unfolding here for me.

And there's so much magic and there's so much serendipity that's taken place. And I just feel myself in real right relationship with me as a creator, the book, the concept, it's like the pieces are coming into form. And because of that, there's a lot of regulation now, as I work further towards building out the ecosystem and listening to myself more deeply.

No one actually gave me the feedback that I should work with a publisher. That is entirely my knowing. And the fact that I ignored, more or less, I took the advice and I, you know, siphoned it through my own filtration system of very distinguished authors. I'm not going to name drop, but they are creators who are very well known for being high quality creators. Millions of followers we're like, Kelly, just you're done. It's all good. I was like, I'm not going to put you on some pedestal right now because you've created at a higher level or you've done more things. My knowing says that this is the right next step.

And that feels so cool when I can just anchor into that. And ultimately I think the ultimate decision making authority is them their own knowing their own heart and intuition. And it can take some time to get there, but once you've locked in, it's like, can't really get out of that again. It's a good spot to be.

David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.