125: Penney & Jenny Show — Discriminating Truth, Just-Rightness, and Making "Good Choices"

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For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

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Welcome back to one of my favorite parts of the Pivot Podcast, the Penny and Jenny Show. We are here with another installment of our latest series. The topics today that we're riffing on are discriminating, truth and just rightness. Making quote good choices. How do you trust your truth? Your anxiety signals? How do we know when it's time to pivot? What's the difference between authenticity, honesty, humility versus hiding and avoidance or even apathy? Real quick reminder. If you want to find all the episodes that Penny and I have done together, this is number nine. We have a full album now. It's@pivotmethod.com pjshow and there's a freebie from this episode that you can get by and the transcripts as well. Full transcript@pivotmethod.com125pivotmethod.com125 and I'm also just going to do a plug up front that if you have a follow up question on anything we talk about or you just want to submit an audio note for us that we're going to do on a listener Q and A episode during our next round of recording. Please let us know. We would absolutely love to hear from you and love to hear what would be most helpful for us to riff on next. You can submit a short voice recording@pivotmethod.com Ask with that. Penny, my wonderful and favorite collaborator. Welcome to the podcast.

Oh I'm so glad to be back. I can't tell you how much I love talking with you.

Me too. And full transparency. As we were debating okay, what should we talk about on this episode? Penny said, well, I guess we'll just have to trust the Flow.

So we're practicing this all the time and that's what we're going to do. So why don't we kick off with this notion of just rightness and even what you call, Penny, what you call discriminating truth, and as I often refer to it, truth with a capital T, that there's a living, breathing truth that we have in our body, in our life, at any given moment. And this even picks right up off of our last episode about navigating liminal spaces and the time in between.

Yes, I like that, the capital T, because I've often thought that too. There's a truth with the capital T which relates a lot to universal principles and how energy and consciousness actually work. And then there's truth with a small T, which is your interpretation of that. And perhaps.

You know, that evolves over time. But we're trying to get to the truth with the capital T in our daily decisions, in our way of being in the world more and more. And it's. I think we're always approaching it, you know, it's not a total absolute, you know, it's like knowledge is ever retreating, you know, the more you think you're there, there's more, you know, it's just a little next level. And I think truth might be the same kind of thing, but I think when you do act, speak and be in truth, it's a kind of an alignment of all kinds of layers of yourself, right? Of your body, your emotion, your mind, your speech, your soul and spirit. And when there's an alignment, it allows energy to flow through. When something's out of alignment, you get a snag, you know, and then things don't really work very elegantly, you know, so. So part of, I think finding truth is.

Is finding a resonance between those parts of yourself. It's kind of like low C, middle C and high C. You strike that, that one note and you can get different octaves, you can get different vibrations of it, but it's all still travels on that one harmonious path.

Harmony is one of my favorite words, actually, and I know you talk about that in frequency of finding your home frequency. And what's harmony? I'm a Libra, so maybe that's part of it. But even when I was in coach training, they had us do a future self exercise. This was 2008, and. And they had us, look maybe even five years into the future. And then we had to name our future self. And the name I chose was Harmony.

I really like what you said about finding that range because it is a range. It isn't ever unfolding. And in fact, you have some great questions that I just want to kick us off with in the guide that we're giving with this episode, and it's the one mentioned last time on Intuition and Ultra Sensitivity. You have this great list of 33 questions. How do you know? And you kick off this resource by saying, how do you know when someone is honest or telling a lie, when someone is wrong, when you're out of alignment with your core truth, when someone is capable of doing what they say they can do? And it goes on. There's 33 questions, but these aren't quick questions. It kind of reminds me of what David White calls a beautiful question. He's a poet and an author. A beautiful question has to be lived. You have to live into the answer. So another example is how do I express my fullest truth? And you can't always answer that right away. Yeah. And the piece for me that's so interesting about the layers that you said and the unfolding in the full body and soul intelligence that we. And even kind of super consciousness that we have available to us is that there are thousands of data points of truth points, actually, that our bodies are picking up all around us. And so for me, sometimes truth is about tuning in. It's trusting that actually my body has already absorbed details and information. And this is. This comes in so interesting around body language. And a lot of your questions here are about reading truth in other people. And sometimes, even if all signs or someone. Someone looks good on paper, your body is just ringing the bell of. There are 10 red flags here. And so it's kind of tuning in to the signals that are already there.

I think the body is so important. It's really the first level of knowing that we get in the physical world, you know, because it's physical. And I always talk about our truth signals and our an signals that we have. The body has ways of letting us know whether something's safe or dangerous or truthful or not. So good for us, you know, if it's appropriate or not appropriate, a truth or a lie. And we each have our own way of knowing this. But typically, you know, a truth signal feels expansive. You know, like people say, oh, I got the chills when I heard that. Of course it's true. But really, what's happening when people feel the chills? You know, it's like, I remember one person described it as I felt energy coming up my spine. It moved out my shoulders and down my arms. And that Was like, ooh, you know, there was vibration, energies flowing. And that kind of flow indicates truth. If you lean towards something, if you're drawn into something in a curious way, then that could also be truth or something that is appropriate for you or safe for you. There are other ones of spreading feeling of warmth, feeling lightness and bubbliness and energy. But basically, this is all about energy releasing from its contracted states within the body and feeling safe and open.

And sometimes you'll feel it in different parts of your body. You might feel it in your chest or in your throat, or just through the whole energy rising up from the lower part of the body to the upper part of the body.

And I heard one person say, well, it's just like their two hands came together to the midline of the body and then dropped down. See, they say it just felt like this, and they made that.

Gesture. But what's happening there is that two separate things were coming together and integrating in the center of their body. And that felt good to them. It settled in. Another time we hear, oh, it just clicked, or it clunked, or the bell rang. It rang true. And some people actually hear that kind of noise when something comes together like that. So there are all kinds of different ways that we recognize truth in a fairly subliminal way.

And it's good to examine that in yourself and say, oh, I just knew. No, how did you know? And then the anxiety signals the opposite. It's more like when something is not safe or it's not right for you at the time, you'll feel a contraction of some sort or a heaviness.

You'll feel like you repel from it, you lean away from it, or it feels like a wet blanket put on top of you. You feel solid or dull. Some people tell me they feel like the energy in their hands and feet withdraw and goes up toward the center of their body as though they're protecting themselves and their feet and hands get cold. I think that's where we get the feet of clay kind of thing.

So anxiety signals often, I think, focus a lot on the solar plexus and the adrenaline gland area where you have fight or flight reactions. So you will often, if something is not right for you, you will feel like protecting yourself and fighting, or you'll feel like running away or you'll freeze. There's another thing we do just so if you leave your body, you know, if you blank out, that's an anxiety signal. So it's interesting to know how you discriminate. Very subtle things like that what are.

Yours, Jenny.

Similar to you, it starts in the body, definitely. And I've learned to trust it more and more. Just that this is my. My hit, you know, this is my gut reaction. And.

I feel it as a. A couple things. So I do feel that I read people's energy.

Quite well. I don't think well is the right word, but I just. I see it. And I'm not someone that sees colors. Some people actually see an aura, a color around a person. For me, it's not like that, but I. I feel what's in my body. And this is also something I learned from you. But just last night I was at a kind of networking event of sorts. Usually not my fave, but there was such a difference between talking to people who were bright and energetic in their energy and then ones that were just super draining. And it's almost like there's a dark cloud. Their energy is a dark cloud or it's a. It's a vortex. Like it's sucking energy into itself. It's not really giving. It's not bright and light. And similarly, I just came from another visit to prison with Defy, where we're doing business and entrepreneurship and career mentoring with, in this case, incarcerated men. And then often I'm doing events with men, men and women who have been released. But at this visit, it was men and these. Almost everyone in the room is so bright. Their energy is so bright. And it's not what I would expect going into prison, but they have found a way. They have found, as one of them described to me, a quiet place within myself that no matter what is going on, he taps into this place. And so I just. I really do pay attention to the way I feel. I look at somebody's eyes now. I know we're. I'm staying focused on other people and reading other people and situations, but their eyes tell me a whole lot. Whether it's this aggressive, penetrating gaze or it's kind of a light. Kind eyes, as I call them. That's what I first met Michael walking down the street. And he had the kindest eyes. They even had that little sparkle in them, like ding.

And.

And. And then what's interesting is sometimes people look mean or gruff or uninterested. And then what I really enjoy is the process of starting to talk to somebod and then seeing them light up, finding some topic or something that they care about. But you. You brought up an interesting point that I think would be good for us to get into, which is how do you tell the Difference between your intuition and intuitive hit versus projecting onto someone. Or as you called it, being stuck in polarization or even misreading a situation. So how do you tell, or how does one determine what's intuition versus just some kind of reaction that's maybe triggered by somebody but doesn't actually reflect, oh, this is. This person is unsafe. Stay away.

Right. I think it takes practice, actually, so that there are some people who are very charming who. You may hold them in high esteem because they make a lot of money or they seem very successful or. Or they're just charming and they make you feel like you can trust them. And you may get taken in by somebody like that. After that, you're saying, wait a minute, there's that feeling state I had right before I got involved with that person. Now I know how to recognize it. There are other states where, for instance, let's say you have a kind of a narcissistic boss that dominates everybody, and then you really don't feel safe around that person or take it very personally, but it's really because your mother was that way, you know, and so you're being triggered from a subconscious memory at that point. Whereas if you were just in the moment and being conscious with that person, you would know what to do in each situation that you had with them. You know, it would come to you easily. You wouldn't just interpret it one way.

You know, so we, I think we learn how to discriminate. Very subtle states of being.

Like when something really is appropriate for us. And I call that being just right versus right or wrong. You know, when you think something is right for you, that means, well, I better keep doing this job because I have to make this much money every month.

That's a right answer according to society, you know, but it's not just right for you, you know, there's a real subtle difference there. All I know is that we learn through experience. And then the not so good choices are the ones that give leave you with a kind of contracted feeling, like something's off, it's out of alignment, there's no sense of joy, kindness, smoothness, ease, fun involved. And you can start to.

Recognize those very quickly. It's like that list of how do you know that? I sent you.

A lot of the ways we know things are not just a big blatant yes or no. It's more subtle feeling states in the body.

You know, I'm glad you brought.

Up joy and ease. I often ask myself how you know, or I'll say the mantra. Let it Be easy, let it be fun. And speaking of knowing what's a good choice or what's right for, for, for me in this context, every now and then I have a. An inner critic or a doubt that says, well, who says that this is all supposed to be easeful and fun and joyful. And I do believe, I think my life and my business and everything, my relationships, everything is better off when I tune into that joy. And I recently went through a training for an instrument called Strength Scope with my friend Josh Allen Dykstra. He's leading, his company is called Helios. And the whole point of this instrument is not to tell you what your strengths are, but what are your energy strengths. So just because you're good at something doesn't mean you enjoy doing it. And this instrument can give you some energy intelligence around what energizes you and what drains you. And it's not a referendum on who you are as a person just because something drains you, but it is a way to start to look and grow awareness and say, all right, these are the things that I really enjoy. I have intrinsic motivation. I'm driven to do them. I jump out of bed to tackle them. And then there's this other bucket of stuff that is going to be draining. And my approach to drainers is, what do you have to do? What can you drop? What can you delegate? And what can you automate? Drop is like, maybe nobody needs to do it. Delegate is, there are so many people doing so many cool things online now that you can find the resources you need and then automate. I've had such great conversations with people on my team about what drains you. And then we say, okay, neither of us want to do this thing. How can we automate this? And we actually learn new things. We learn software, we figure out solutions, and it's a fun creative problem solving to figure out how do we make it so nobody has to do this. But circling back, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this inner critic voice that says, well, following joy is a privilege. And you know, some would say, well, work is work. You just simply can't have that be your barometer of only what you feel energized and excited to do.

Yeah, I think we have a choice about how we look at and experience something. And you can look at it as sacrificial or if there's something that you don't 100% enjoy, I think there are ways to make it enjoyable again, self entertainment where you. And sometimes that comes by chunking it into Smaller pieces and not feeling overwhelmed by, oh, I have to do this huge thing, you know, and.

Which makes you feel extra drained. But if you take one little piece at a time and get very invested in it with your attention, it can be interesting. So it's sort of making something interesting to you, I think. Helps a lot. And at a certain point, you'll realize, I'm done.

And I'm going to move on. And this is back to our liminal space thing. I've learned a lot. Thank you. This has been very, very good. And I don't really need to do it anymore. There's more of me that wants to come out and come through. So if you stay with something too long, to me, it is sacrificial. And I am big on getting rid of self sacrifice, because I don't think it serves the soul. If you're not being all of who you can be, then you're not helping all the other beings that you're connected with. And if they're not being all they can be, then they're not giving you the stuff you need. So, you know, not being all of yourself is, you know, it just doesn't serve the flow, really.

I'm so on board with that. And maybe the difference here is just acknowledging, okay, I'm not. I'm not expressing myself fully. I'm not living my truth with a capital T. And it may take time to pivot. It may take some pivot, Runway. It may mean you have a job that you don't altogether love right now, but you're building awareness. You're grateful for the paycheck that you do have or the clients that you do have, and you build in the new direction. So I also don't think we're saying, well, the second you realize this isn't a sole goal and it's not aligned, you gotta quit. You just gotta flip the switch and turn off. Maybe you're gonna have that choice. And if you do, amazing. And as you said, it does take courage to just say, you know what? What's right for others isn't always right for me. And you. You go ahead and take action. But it's also okay to say, now, how do I build my way into a new direction? And that may come with doing things you don't love, but the thing about that is that you're gonna be so much more motivated. So now, instead of doing things you don't love, from the perspective of a martyr, saying, and being helpless and being kind of a victim of, like, I have to and that's the only way you're actually saying, how can I shift? What would be necessary for me to shift? What would I need to earn? What would I need to save? How could I grow my side hustle or grow my business or even shift my business model? That's something I've been thinking a lot about in a way that would support me more moving forward. Or oftentimes for me it's thinking, what if something happened to me? You know, what if there's something I can't predict? How would I want things to go? And I love that it often sparks really creative ideas as well. So sometimes that draining the inside of drainers or of misalignment is quite freeing because you suddenly feel like, ah, okay, you at least identified the problem rather than just thinking that this needs to be your day to day existence.

Yes, I kind of go back a little bit to the idea that when you're in something that is starting, that you're starting to be finished with.

That. Resisting it doesn't allow you to get the benefit from it. And there's nothing wrong with effort. It's not like you have to use a lot of willpower with effort. It's more about presence and attention, being invested in whatever task you're doing and then being willing to allow that task to move to the next task, to allow yourself to get as much out of what you're doing as you're putting in. And as you get to a point where you're just perfectly happy with entertaining yourself with the tasks, that's the point at which you can leave. Do you know that you can realize that, okay, something else is just about to drop into my reality and I can make this transition.

So effort doesn't have to be a drudge, it doesn't have to be heavy. It can be fascinating how much of like you said it, how do I express my fullest truth?

You have to stay involved and engaged more and more and more and more and more. And that is through simply the focus of attention into things. And when you do that, you join that thing, you become that thing and you understand there's the same self inside of everything. That same consciousness or spirit or energy that unifies the world is inside anything. And then the other thing I thought of while you were talking was when we're looking for those good choices about.

A life plan or whatever, and we say, what do we want next? I've started thinking like, how do I want to feel? How do I want to feel when I'm with other people? How do I want to welcome other people in my life? If I died, what is the thing that I really would like to have accomplished.

Before then? And it comes up often for me, it's like to be 100% compassionate because there are still an awful lot of judgments that my mind makes, and that cuts me off from pure communion. I think maybe that's why a lot of us are here, is to really learn about.

Our true self is love. That sounds kind of airy fairy, but I agree.

I believe we are here to live, love, and learn. I really think it's. We're here to live and be present to our life. We're here to love and learn how to love ourselves and others more and deeper. And we're here to learn. I think learning is inherently fun if you're learning things that are aligned with your soul's growth. And yeah, I'm so with you. And they. They even asked at the defy session that I mentioned they have us. It's called an exercise called Step to the Line, and it's really powerful. I'm actually not going to go into the whole thing right now, but the volunteers are sort of standing across from someone who's currently incarcerated, and they ask us a series of questions. And in fact, that's not the Step to the Line. Step to the Line is a little different. It's about your background, your history. This was one of the closing exercises, but we were still along the two lines. And they'd ask questions like, how do you want to be remembered? And the person I was standing across from, he said, I want people to have a smile on their face when they say my name. And I just thought that was so beautiful that he wants to have a positive impact. He wants to be loving, and most of all, he wants people to smile when they talk about him and when his name comes out of their mouth. And I just thought that was so beautiful.

So that's truth with a capital T, I think, you know. Yeah. So, I mean, truth is when you drill down into those core soul motives, I think, you know, and good choices. I heard somebody said, I don't know, in a conversation months ago. Something about making good choices made me think, well, what is a good choice anyway? Am I making any good choices? And I thought, you know, there are criteria for good choices.

So what are your criteria for a good choice?

Yeah, I think about the home frequency, which I talk about in my book Frequency, which basically that book is a game changer.

Everybody, if you're going to read any one of Penny's books. Definitely read that one. Yeah.

Well, basically, you know, that's the idea that the vibration that you are putting into the world or that you're living inside of you might as well have it be one you really enjoy. And that is basically, you know, your soul as yourself in the body and where things are flowing, where it's like a child full of themselves, willing to create, willing to laugh, just feeling good about yourself. There are a lot of ways to recognize that state, but it's a very. It's not super high pitched. It's calm and cheerful and happy and peacefully excited.

Peacefully excited. That's so nice.

Yeah, that's what I feel. Yeah. And so when you make a good choice, it allows you to maintain yourself in that state and it allows you to keep your heart open and be compassionate with others. Because I really think that there are so many things in our life that cause us to slam our heart shut or close the window on it. And we need to not learn to live with that and tolerate that.

We tolerate it too much. So, you know, if you have a conversation with a loved one and you get upset or close your heart, then the main commitment that we need to make to other people is to let's talk until we get our hearts back open again and figure out what happened. And let's not stay in that closed state, you know. And the other part of it, I think, is it allows you to be fully creative.

Because when you're making a good choice, part of, I think being alive is that we get to be in these bodies and in this world where we actually get to create things out of the, you know, the imaginal realm and idea world. We can bring those down in frequency and see what they look like when they become physical. What fun, you know, like this is really entertaining. So why would we not want to be really creative and experiment with what we could bring through, you know, and if you don't make good choices, you handicap that ability.

This term good choices is so interesting because.

It can be two things. I think some. Sometimes we use the phrase, you know, making good choices and there's a subtle. They involved what they. The outside world, your parents, partner approval, exactly what they would think or see as a good choice. And then the way I define a good choice is alignment, as you brought up earlier, and integrity. So for me, a good choice, it's almost the Buddhist principle of right action or right thoughts, right speech, right work, where good for me, just like the word right, you know, it's kind of a mistranslation when people think that, oh, right action means you gotta always do the right thing and it's this rigid set of rules and you have to have right speech. No, it's about alignment and integrity. And so for example, I think it's about, you know, the choice needs to align with your inner value system and your integrity meter. So I've talked with you, Penny, about just language, how much that matters to me. For example, I can't stand the words fans or followers or even a lot of apps measure how many users they have. I mean users, it's like drug users. Or even, even many podcasts will say my fans wanted to know from you or give something for all my followers. And I just think it's so hierarchical and icky to me. Even the word employee I've been pushing back on, I think it's done. I think the word employee is done. I've been using the phrase team members and of course sometimes I shortcut back to employee. But again, employee to me implies a hierarchy and traditional context that we are increasingly moving away from. Even if somebody is employed full time somewhere, they're a team member.

And it doesn't mean used, it means used. So it's though somebody that's being used.

Ownership.

Yeah.

And here's an example. So many people, and I don't consider myself an online marketer, I never have, I never wanted to be lumped in that bucket. But I'm adjacent because although I do a lot of keynote speaking and corporate consulting work and one on one coaching. Yes. I also have my private momentum community, some courses and I know you do too, Penny, you have courses as well and we have online offerings and there's a huge movement of, well, you've gotta run Facebook ads. This is just the way that you grow your community. Now you gotta run Facebook ads. You retarget people, you, you segment, you, you know, figure out it. The whole thing exhausts me. But not only that, the reason I don't wanna run Facebook ads or have sponsors even on this podcast is I don't, I myself don't really like Facebook that much. I have, I do one thing on Facebook and that's interact with my private momentum group. That's it. I go straight to the group page, I don't look at my home feed, I don't ever post personal updates and that's that. So why would I choose to advertise? Even though some from the outside would say that's a good choice for my business, I could grow my community or grow my business or start Testing what's going to convert to revenue, but it's not a good choice. It's not in alignment with me. And the same with sponsors for the show. I gave it a lot of thought and I thought, am I leaving money on the table? The podcast costs money. It doesn't even break even right now. And I just thought, no, I do not want to be selling mattresses and meal boxes and random things that I may or may not believe in. And that even if I really believed in a product, I'd start to distract myself. I'd be trying to please the advertisers. Does the episode fit? Does the topic fit? Was my intro okay? Was the outro okay? And. Oh, right away I just thought, no, no, no, no. So I'm going back to a listener supported model which I piloted with Patreon last year, and now I'm moving it over to a different format which I'm calling Insider. So if you do want to learn more, that's@pivot method.com insider and I'm just going to do a monthly Q and A call, private, for Insiders. That's joyful for me. That allows people, if you want, to support the show and get a bonus Q and A call with me every month. Amazing. Welcome. We can both benefit from that. But this whole notion of subscribers and just hawking different products, no, thank you.

Well, I like that because I think you really felt into.

What your integrity is, you know, and you allowed yourself to not do something that everybody else was doing, so not to be part of the herd. And then by not doing that, you allowed yourself to get creative new ideas, you know, that do fit and that are ingenious and innovative. So I think that's amazing because, you know, just rightness is, you know, when people think that making good choices means being right, that means that you're avoiding being wrong. There's so much more than these polarities that we have, you know, So I.

Think that.

I never thought about it that way. I really never thought about it that way. That by overemphasizing being right. And I think that that ties really a lot into perfectionism, which will link to some of my perfectionism episodes in the show notes. But you're right that it kind of closes off being willing to be wrong, which is. Which is how learning happens. We're wrong. We mess up, we make mistakes, we don't know the answers. That's the human experience.

The only thing I think is wrong is when you, you have that sick feeling and you know, you're Doing something wrong or you're speaking badly about somebody or doing something that violates the highest good for all involved, that's wrong. And that's how I would define it.

And sometimes I do that every once in a while and it's like it comes out of some subliminal place that I will be a disruptor in a brief like explosion of something. Not, not mean, but I'll break the energy of something apart. And. And then I'm so embarrassed and I think I was hurt everybody and then. But basically it was like it helped everything, you know, let go and move to a new level. But meanwhile I'm feeling terrible that I, you know, did this thing.

I bet that's happened to me only about six or so times in my life. And I think, what. Who am I anyway, that I can do this kind of thing, but all in the flow, I guess, you know. But I definitely agree with you about language and.

Looking into language and what it actually means and the psychology that it fosters, you know, And I'm with you. I don't like to mark it. I'd rather. I mean, who says you have to expand your base? Partly I'm thinking people find you based on your frequency and your vibration somehow through the inner realms. And yes, you can take out ads and yes, you can do all the external stuff, but it's kind of more like a ceremony or ritual that you're doing in the physical world because the real connections take place in the non physical world through telepathy and through vibration where people who are looking for somebody like you somehow will find a talk or they'll find something and then, you know, it gets connected. But it's not so much of an effort, you know, I just think I have a different attitude about.

How to be successful or what that means. By the end of your life, was I successful as a human being? You know, and stay out of, you know, I guess the big fear is that we won't have enough.

Well, it's funny. Success goes in my bucket of don't need it as a word. I purposely took it out of almost. I don't, I don't know if it even shows up. One time in Pivot, I was very conscious about not using the word success and not, not letting the publisher throw it into the, the subtitle somehow like, you know, pivot your way to career success. No, no, no, no. And I love what you said and I love your philosophy on those external activities being rituals of sorts. And here's the thing, because I see this A lot in myself and with coaching clients and the momentum community. If your heart is not in something, no amount of those outside activities are going to work. They're just not going to work. And side note, this is why I don't really believe in ghost writing. I don't believe in having a ghostwriter and I don't, I don't personally think unless you have one of the top 5% ghostwriters like Neil Strauss who writes for celebrities and has just like a totally addictive writing style, I don't think your soul's in it. I don't think the author has transferred their soul energy. I mean, with rare exception, I think if you're working with a ghostwriter and they're deeply interviewing you and it's, it is a lot of your heart and soul and vulnerability and intuitive. And they're intuitive and they're intuitive and they get you and they tune in to you. So let's say there are exceptions to this. But I've seen books come out where they've been ghost written and I, and I just see it. They don't have a soul, like weirdly. And I even say in the acknowledgments of Pivot that, that I quote Penny. I'm forgetting his name. You're going to remember him, Rui Carlo. It will come to me. But he says that every book has a soul and that every reader. Shadow of the self or something. What's the book? You'll know. I think I got.

I can't remember it either. Yeah, I can't remember either, you know, but when you're talking, it's reminding me that.

We are becoming so ultra sensitive today. You know, the acceleration of the energy on the planet is causing us to be, I call it ultra sensitive but also empathic a lot. We're picking up a lot more energy information than we ever did before. And I think that is related to what you're saying about when you don't really love what you're doing, whether you think you have to do this marketing in a certain way or if somebody else, like even the people who are reading the audiobooks of my books, I can't listen to them because.

They don't have the same knowledge or the same feeling state. I'm just sensitive to that. But I think people pick up that what was put into it is what they actually get it. It penetrates, it permeates, it translates through the form.

And we pick that up. And if it's a hollow form, we're kind of bored with it. Or there's something not very satisfying with it.

Yes. And often the creator doesn't know. I think the people who create in this way, they're not even conscious of the fact that no amount of effort without their heart and soul into it is going to, it's going to really work. Because I think if they knew that, they wouldn't maybe take that route.

And it's true what you said about audiobooks. I think there is something very powerful about the author reading their own work. And then there is something incongruous. I could imagine that it'd be weird for you to hear someone else reading your words.

Yeah, I'm sure there are people.

Who can feel into the kind of material and get the timing right and so forth, but I know one of them was kind of a.

Technically highly trained actress, like theater, like Shakespeare type voice, and started reading it and it was so formal compared to the way I am, you know, I'm much more informal and present and friendly. And I thought, well, you know, it's, it's official, you know, like that. But, but maybe a lot of people don't, don't notice it, but I think we do more and more.

You posed a very interesting question, which is, is there ever a case where one should override their intuitions or their gut sense about what the good choice is? You gave some examples, maybe to go along with others or wait for a grand group created outcome that might take longer to achieve. Is there ever a time to override your intuitions?

Yeah.

I'm still thinking about that. I mean, I think that when you're co creating with a group, you don't want to dominate the group or you don't want to disrupt the group with some shocking statement of truth. You know, that where those people are not on your wavelength and they don't understand what you're talking about.

And so there's an act of compassion and kindness in putting some of your truth in, in a diplomatic and tactful way. And yet maybe the question comes up, is this the group you want to be involved with? If you can't just throw out your point of view and have them get it, you know.

And I think sometimes if you hold back on putting your full insight out there, the group is going to take a longer time to achieve the end result because they have to work through this long process of trying to get on each other's wavelength and understand what they're all talking about.

And that. I can't deal with that myself.

Me either. I could never do group projects. I was never, ever good at them.

For this reason, my body won't stay in the room. It just.

That is so funny.

I don't know, maybe it's something again, about your point about that language really matters, that you have a sense of a choice of what wants to happen or how to solve a problem. Those are good choices too, you know, And I think my choice in life is I'm contributing it, you know, and if it gets misunderstood, I'll try to contribute more about explaining it. And then if they still don't like it, I'll just leave.

Or something.

I get it. And I think it's also, what's the right context for collaboration that allows you to speak and live according to your intuition and your gut sense? Because quickly, quickly, it will be draining that if you're in a group and you don't feel you can really speak up, you're avoiding following your intuition or you do have to override it. I'd say more than once, there's probably something going on. For me, the context is in relationship. So I was single for a long, long time. And if I ever was dating somebody, it was usually long distance, which was just safe enough for me. Like, didn't ever have to coexist even in the same city, so I could kind of keep all my routines. And for me, being in relationship is this really interesting tug on this topic, which is, well, what if my gut says, don't go, stay home? You know, that's my body's energy. But, well, you know, when do you say yes and just go along with something, you know, or. Or compromise or kind of. And then, you know, every now and then there's like, okay, my instinct was to stay home. And I went, and I'm so glad I did. I had the best time. Or my instinct was not to collaborate on this project. And I'm so glad I did. Look how amazingly it turned out. Yeah.

And actually you, the soul got through your old habit to make it a good choice in that situation.

It wasn't an accident.

Yeah. I really love the. There's research around the question. Research that shows the impact of this question that if you ask yourself, imagine that you're the main character in a movie and try to understand why is this scene happening right at this exact moment with these exact cast of characters? What are you meant to learn? How are you meant to. Meant to grow? How is this part of your hero's journey? I really love that because sometimes these intuitive hits and this connects to liminal space. We're even Avoiding something is a signal. Okay, well, this is happening at this moment in time to teach me something and to reveal a blind spot or to reveal a truth or a different choice that's available even if I'm not currently heading that way.

Right.

There's something, too, about.

Things being comfortable, like just rightness. I was just thinking too, of that. If something's just right, it lets you kind of relax into it and feel. Feel good or joyful. But sometimes things you need to do are involve a little effort or going beyond the comfort zone, and those are just right. And when you try to avoid them, it feels worse to avoid them than it does to do them, you know? And that's another of those subtle feeling states, the intuitive feeling states that you learn to recognize. I think that there's a deep comfort and there's superficial comfort.

And I think, yeah, good choices take you into deep comfort.

I think sometimes, too, you don't know a good choice until you've made it. So sometimes what I say in pivot is, decisions are data. There are times you just gotta decide something. You just need to make a choice and keep moving. And then you're gonna find out. You're gonna find out, did I make the right choice? For me, a good choice, I immediately feel relief or as you said, peaceful excitement. And then a bad choice. It's like grating on my nerves or my nervous system, like, nope, not there yet. Still haven't found it. So that can happen, too. And I think sometimes it's also about paying attention to what happens right after you make that choice. And know that for most things in life, you have a chance to keep growing and keep pivoting and keep changing. Small changes, tiny changes, all the way up to the big ones.

Right. I remember seeing. Is it Shonda Rhimes, the one who's the producer of.

Grey's Anatomy and all those TV shows. You saw her on Oprah talking about her year of saying yes, and I thought. And so she just said yes to everything for a year. And.

I thought, oh, my God, I don't think I could do that. Exactly. You know, there are things that I don't want to say yes to that I just know right away that it's not. You know, intuitively I know this is not a forward movement, but it's a fascinating idea.

It is. It's funny. I had the exact same reaction. I thought, I need to say no more. Like my homework is saying no. And you can sort of flip it to say, well, if you. You're saying yes, to something, you're saying no to something else, and the reverse. So sometimes you're saying yes to your body, yes to quiet time, yes to abundant space in your calendar. But I agree. I don't think I could commit to a year of yes knowing. I tried to commit to a year of abundant space and simplifying. And even that was just incredibly hard for me. It just takes so much work because I'm like, definitely not the one. I want to say no more. I want to listen to my intuition more at deeper and more nuanced levels.

I think it has to be to isolate your truth and anxiety signals, just to really feel that, work into that and.

Apply it to subtle things like what do you feel like eating? You know what, you know, you might have. Your mind may want to have something sweet, and then your body may really not want it. That could be something to start paying attention to. And there's also something about that we didn't quite mention was this whole idea of authenticity and honesty. And I threw in there the idea of humility because.

You know, sometimes we think humility is a lesser thing. It's like below something else. But to me, it's about being honest in the moment, what's real for you in each moment. You're not trying to be more than you are or more than is happening. You're just being real, simple and real. And that seems to regulate honesty because, you know, some people can think of honesty as being really blunt and forceful, and I don't think it has to be at all. It can be very kind.

You know, and then that leads you to just being authentic, you know, and when you make choices based on what's really real to you and simple, I think people read you as being authentic. And then, of course, they trust you.

And then you trust them, and it just kind of builds, you know, and improves everything.

That's the whole message behind transparency as well, is remove the layers, be yourself, and then people can get to know you, they can see you and want to connect with you, at least the right ones. Penny? Oh, go ahead.

Before we wrap up, are there any resources on your site or where people can get in touch? And then, of course, I'll give the usual ones after that. But anything you want to point people to.

Well, you know, I'm redesigning my website, so that should be available fairly soon now, and there's a lot of resources on there.

But, you know, the books especially, there are four books that are in this kind of transformation series, and that's the intuitive way and then frequency and then leap of perception and then transparency. And they all kind of build on the topic of personal and societal transformation. And.

They are, you know, they're loaded. People read them three times.

So they're sort of a comprehensive pioneering books on these subjects. I would suggest those.

They really are. They really are. And they unfold over time. I've definitely read them multiple times each. So. And I get new things as my as I grow, as I change, I always get new things. So yes, definitely. Check out Penny's amazing books. And again, the links we will post all the show notes@pivotmethod.com125 if you want to listen to all the episodes of the Penny and Jenny show, so that's@pivotmethod.com pjshow and we'd love for you to submit a question for a future listener episode where we hear from you and get to riff on whatever topics interest you most. You can submit that@pivotmethod.com ask. You'll just leave a quick concise voice note and then we'll work it into an episode and answer together. And I think that will be a very fun experiment for the Penny and Jenny Show. Thank you everybody for being here listening. If you don't want to miss any future episodes, please subscribe wherever you get your casts. And yeah, we're so thrilled. And don't forget we have that great handout on all those 33 questions. So you can find that in the show notes@pivotmethod.com 125 until next time. Thanks again Penny.

Thank you.

Foreign.

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