Finding Your Unicorn Space with Eve Rodsky

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi.

00:00:03
Speaker 2: This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:08
Speaker 1: And this is Sarah Hartunger.

00:00:10
Speaker 3: I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

00:00:17
Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life.

00:00:32
Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: This is episode two hundred and thirty one, which is airing in early January. This is our first episode of twenty twenty two. We are looking forward to a great year of best of both worlds episodes. Would love to hear from people what you want to hear from us over the course of the year, so please send in guest ideas, topic ideas, your listener questions. We want all of them. And today's guest, in fact, was a listener request. So Eve Rodsky is going to be joining me for a discussion of how to Find your Unicorn Space. That's her new book about finding your Unicorn space. She is also the author of fair Play, which I know a lot of our listeners have read over the past few years. That's a discussion about how to equitably split both household labor and the mental load associated with it, turning it into a bit of a game. It was actually a rees's Reese Witherspoon's book club selection. It was a New York Times bestseller, so I know we're all very excited about that. Just a quick listener note, this episode contains the interview portion contains a little bit of profanity. So if you're in a situation where you don't want to have that playing out loud, and you know car speakers with kids are at work, just giving you a heads up. It's a great interview though, so please stay tuned for that. So, Sarah, do you have a unicorn space? A unicorn space is that wonderful creative place where you really feel at attached to your own life, invested in your own life, You're doing something just because you love it.

00:02:04
Speaker 4: What is that for you?

00:02:06
Speaker 3: One hundred percent my blog that first and foremost. I started that in two thousand and four when I was in med school because I was like, I need something that's just for me, and that was it, and it was purely for many many years. I didn't even have any kind of like side hustle attached to it. There were no ads until like twenty twelve or something like that. I love writing there, and then as an extension of that has been this podcast and my other podcasts. So all of these endeavors, which are all closely linked, are absolutely my unicorn spaces. It's where I feel like I can be myself and share and connect with others, and like the time when I'm doing these activities goes so fast and it feels like it's just for me.

00:02:46
Speaker 4: So definitely all that stuff.

00:02:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the interview, Eve actually declares this podcast must be my unicorn space, so I guess that's that's probably true. I mean several parts of my work, I'm one class is like would you do this on a nice desert island, And the answer is yes, of course, I'd write on my blog I have. I don't try to make any money for my blog, although it's all related, right, because it builds the platform which then you know, people buy my books or you know, listen to the podcasts, or you know, hire me to speak or things like that, so it's all part of the platform building. But yeah, I treat it as just my own expression. There's very little that is optimized about the blog. If I were attempting to make it more of a hot destination, I would definitely do it differently. But I use it more as you know, what I want to write about, and if people want to come read it, that would be great, But if they don't, I guess I'd probably still do it. Singing in a choir is possibly my unicorn space even more I it would be a pure expression of it, because that's that's not numerative at all.

00:03:52
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's.

00:03:53
Speaker 2: Just me making music, performing it with fellow singers and enjoy learning difficult things. And I really feel invested in my own life when I am doing that and being a performer a musician in a way, that is something I've always loved doing.

00:04:16
Speaker 3: I feel like music and art are probably common ones. And my husband one hundred percent would be the same as you. It's his guitar and his like guitar learning, and he's in this like weekly band situation, and I can tell it's like fully fits the bill.

00:04:31
Speaker 4: So yeah, I feel.

00:04:32
Speaker 3: Like artistic endeavors have got to be it for a lot of people.

00:04:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:04:36
Speaker 2: Well, and hopefully in the course of this new year of people listening to this in the new year, you can think about what your unicorn space might be, what you would like to challenge yourself to do that is solely for you, but is not just you know. I mean, there's things we do just for us, like watching Netflix, but it's creative that you see through to completion and that you are willing to share with a community. So those are the three c's that EVI will talk about to really define that unicorn space of what just really makes us the happiest. And of course we talk a lot about fair play too, because I know that we have a lot of listeners who have read that book, and that's probably why she was requested, even though we're very excited about her new book as well. So with that we'll go ahead and listen to Eve. Well, Sarah and I are so delighted to welcome Eve Rodsky to the program. So Eve, can you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners.

00:05:27
Speaker 4: Hi, Laura, my name is Eve Rodsky. I'm the New York Times bestselling author of a book called fair Play and a new book out called Find Your Unicorn Space. And I like alliterations, so I like to call myself an author, attorney, an activist. But I'm not what I did not think i'd be. Laura on my third grade what do you want to be when you grow up? Board, We're probably said, like veterinarian or astronaut. I definitely did not expect to be an expert on the gendered division of labor, which is what I consider myself now. And you have two children, right, I have a third now, yes, yes, So when you so graciously read and blurbed fair Play, there was just a new one that has just come into the world. So now I have Zach who is thirteen, Ben who is ten, and Anna who is five just turned five.

00:06:27
Speaker 1: Wonderful, wonderful. Have to keep my count straight. I can't remember how many I had.

00:06:32
Speaker 2: Because I was like, that's four kids, Like, oh no, actually she is five, Yeah exactly, They just well, I think they don't keep coming at this point, but five was good.

00:06:40
Speaker 1: Three is wonderful.

00:06:41
Speaker 2: Yeah. So you know, many of our listeners are professional women, two income families, kids still at home, and so we're definitely going to talk about your new book on Finding your Unicorn Space. But we want to start with fair play because that's what a lot of our listeners are probably familiar with. So tell me what led you, as a lawyer or attorney to keep our injart alliteration here to create the.

00:07:06
Speaker 4: Fair play system.

00:07:08
Speaker 1: What was the genesis of that?

00:07:10
Speaker 4: Well, I think, Laura, they always say, right, research is mesearch, And so what happened to me ten years ago? It's actually the anniversary, very close to the anniversary of my what I like to now call my blueberries breakdown, or at least that's some of my husband, Seth calls it, because ten years ago, after right after my second son, Ben was born, Seth sent me a text that said, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries, and that led me down an entire new professional journey. Laura, who would know that? He keeps saying, I really wish I'd never said that text, but he's also happy he did because it's definitely changed our lives. But what I don't get to explain in fair Play is really, and I think especially now post COVID or in the midst of this next round of where we are, you know the scene so when I got the I'm surprised you to get Blueberry's text, I was already texting and driving in my car, which is a bad thing. I was racing to get my older son, Zach at his toddler transition program, which we now are finally reckoning with that in America it costs our tire salaries and is about seven minutes long these daycare programs. I had a breast pump and a diaper bag and the passenger seat in my car gives her a newborn baby to return in the backseat of my car and a client contract in my lap. Because I had opted out of the traditional workforce. Now that was ten years ago. Where I used to use the word opted out, I guess now I would say I use the word forced out because I think any professional woman who's not in the traditional workforce has been forced out, or at least in my research, I've never found one woman who hasn't had an experience that felt like a death by a thousand cuts for her. What I remember about that day was as I would hit the brakes because I was racing already I was late to pick up Zach, this pen would sort of back up between my legs, Laura, because I was marking up the contract analogue and it would just sort of stabbed me in the vagina. That's what I remember about that day. So being stabbed in the vagina by a pen is sort of how I think I would describe the entire pandemic situation for all of us women. But it was the first time in my life where I had a reckoning that I did not have the career marriage combo I thought I was going to have. And I pulled over, which we don't do lightly in La, to cry and to really think about how cliche that my marriage was going to end over being the fulfiller of my husband's smoothie needs.

00:09:36
Speaker 2: Want those blue bears got ye and your responsibility to procure them?

00:09:41
Speaker 4: It was my responsibility to procure them, and you know, I just kept thinking. You know, I think the sad part was I thought I was so unique then, And I think that's why I decided to write fair Play eventually, because as I start to research this issue and realize I'm not unique at all, And as see Wright Mills, my favorite so sociologists says, you know, private lives or public issues or public troubles, I think I realized back then, though you know, I'm the product of a single mother, I had vowed I would have an equal partner. I'm a Harvard Trade mediator. I'm literally trained in difficult conversations, that's my specialty. And still I found myself silently suffering, crying over the resentment and unfairness that I perceived was unique to my marriage. So you came up with.

00:10:28
Speaker 2: This system and one of the things that I think you know, I mean, obviously gender division of labor is not exactly a new topic, as you said, it's not the first person perhaps to experience this, but you've turned it almost into a bit of a game, right that you really think through your systems and what the work is in any household, and then set up, you know, ownership of the different tasks. So can you can you describe that system a little bit for our listeners?

00:10:55
Speaker 4: Absolutely so for me, you know, Laura, as I started to to understand that this was not just a meat issue, that our time choice is women, which is where you and I intersect. While we may have more time, it's often chopped up into interruptions and little pieces and expectations and defaults. That's why I called myself the she fault, not because it just applies to heterosisgender relationships or marriages, but because this is an issue that you know, two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family fall on women. I mean, that is the statistic. I was undeniably living that day, but I didn't even know. And so I think what any you know, self respecting professional women would probably do at that time. After I started to read about the words invisible work, mental load, second shift, like you said, that have been around since the nineteen sixties, you know, I started to make a spreadsheet because dah, you know it should be easy if it's invisible, right, Laura, I could just make it visible and then solve all my problem. So the system was actually not a system when it started. It's probably started the way a lot of us start, which is a list. And it was a really good list. I'm very proud of that list. It was called the I Do Spreadsheet. It had ninety eight tabs and two thousand items of invisible work from women's sourced across now seventeen countries, but then across the country. Remember this is ten years ago. I didn't have social media. I didn't have a Laura to tell me anything I had myself, and what to expect when you're expecting, which just tells you that your child's the size of a jelly bean, right, So I didn't realize this was also maybe happening to other women. It was not a sophisticated conversation as it is now. I credit part of that to you, Laura. I really thank you for your work, but I think you know I do. Spreadsheet was a very cathartic experience. It was women who I didn't even know calling me up saying, you know, Eve, you forgot sunscreen. And I'd say, well, obviously you don't know how to use Excel because you have to go to scroll a tab seventy two under Medical and Health Living. If you scrolled down there, I promise you under line sixteen, there's two minutes for sunscreen. And then they would say, well, two minutes for the application, but you forgot the thirty minutes for the chase. And I was like, oh yeah, I forgot thirty minutes for the chase, you know. And it was this beautiful cathartic experience and made me realize that I was not alone. That was what it was for it was a communal experience to realize, Wow, there's a lot of invisible work that is happening in modern households. But when I sent it to Seth Laura, the nineteen million megamte spreadsheet, and I definitely did it with all the context of being a communications specialist. And I say that sarcastically. I just sent it to him with the subject line, you know, can't wait to discuss and why that's important That he didn't respond. He gave me a monkey emoji back, the see no evil monkey emoji. I didn't even get. The courtesy of a response was that it was a very important day where I had a reckoning that list alone don't work. That we've been making lists for one hundred years possibly, And so that day I had a decision to either do what my friend said got her more fairness, and she said, it's just three words, Eve, It's called court ordered custody. So that was an option or not I could lose myself and resign myself. I did everything to make this beautiful seduce spreadsheet and it didn't work, resign myself to doing it all, or I actually had a third option, which is what I chose, and it was this idea that what if I became my own client and my day job is I work for families that look like the HBO show Succession, And your listeners should feel bad for me because it's a lot like the family and that show. It's very triggering work. But what I do for these families is I create systems. I'm an organizational management specialist. I design, through laws, through governance, through organizational management concepts, systems to make really difficult decisions around you know, financial issues, governance issues, decisions. And so one day I said, you know what, I'm going to ask a very profound question. What if we treat our homes as our most important organizations? That became the most important question I think I've asked in ten years, because, like one man said, he said, oh, you mean like the opposite of my home where we decide who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take it on the rug. And I said, yes, whatever, that is the opposite of that. And then I start to understand that systems, the idea of systems in the home. Even though we have fifty years of knowledge about how to create systems for organizations, none of us give the respect and rigor to our homes the way we do other organizations. Even my aunt Marian's Majan group Laura has more clearly defined expectations than most homes. You don't bring snack twice to that group, you're out. And so the system, right, the system is based on this question, what if you treated your home as your most important organization?

00:16:11
Speaker 2: That sounds like a good, good idea. So we're going to take a quick break and be right back with Eve talking more about fair play, and then I promise we will get to it.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: Unicorn spaces well, I am back.

00:16:32
Speaker 2: With Eve Rodsky, who is sharing her wisdom on how she came up with the fair play system. So we've got, you know, the list that doesn't work of all the stuff that Eve does, and then she sends it to her husband and he's not going to look at the list. We need to come up with systems. And one of the cool things about this was the idea of like complete ownership of a task. And I think that this is something that like you said, you know, your aunt has to bring the snack, like she's going to bring it, she's going to think about what it is or coordinate with other she's gonna bring it, she's gonna, you know, dish it up, she's gonna take it home afterwards. There's there's not this you know, lack of clarity about who is doing what with what.

00:17:10
Speaker 4: And hey, you're a partner, but you forgot to remind me to bring the snack from my sack, to remind me to bring Yeah, it doesn't work like that, even in the Maja, it doesn't know like that.

00:17:21
Speaker 2: And one of my favorite examples of the whole complete ownership that you gave in fair Play was that if somebody is responsible for let's say baseball, and getting the kid to baseball with all their equipment right, and they forget the batting helmet and the child borrows a batting helmet and gets lice as a result, they own the lice.

00:17:41
Speaker 4: They own the lice. I think that you just signed out, you signed you just you described it so beautifully. They own the lice. You know what? This is the interesting part. It's not hard because we you know, we don't we don't walk. You're not going into your producer Lauren saying, you know, hey, what should I be talking about today? I'll just wait here to tell me what to do. I mean, none of us exists in that type of lack of agency in any place other than our home organization. And so I think what was really important for me was asking in seventeen countries the second, I'd say most important question I ever asked, and this exactly gets to the EU and the lice. It was how did mustard get into your refrigerator? I love that question so much because there's condiments all over the world. You can submen your condiment. But what was so beautiful about it was that especially in heterocys gender partnerships, and this happened in the Nordic countries that we look at as shangri la. It happened everywhere. It was a universal theme that I heard from women. I'm the one responsible for seeing them. My second son, Johnny, likes French as you know, yellow mustard because he won't eat his protein. He'll choke on his protein, and I need him to eat his protein. That conception is something we get paid big bucks for in the workplace, coming up with new ideas, noticing and then I would hear also from women that they were the ones who were monitoring the mustard for when it's running low and getting stakeholder buy in from their family for whatever they needed from the grocery list. That's also another phase we know from the workplace. It's called planning, and we also get paid the big bucks for that. And then I would hear the crux of oh yeah, and then I send my partner to the store and oh my god, Eve, you want me to trust it with my living will. The he can't even bring home the right type of mustard. He brings some spicy dijon every time, and I ask for frenches yellow mustard. And why that's so important is because as a presenting problem, that's not the real problem, which is what we say as mediators. The real problem is the worst thing that can happen to your organization when you lose accountability and trust. And so once you recognize that it's actually stuff around it, the gender and stuff around it, why we don't value you our own time, Laura. You know you've been devoting your whole life to understanding time. That's harder. But if you can actually believe that your time is diamonds and you deserve as much time choice over your day as your male counterparts, then you can The system is not that hard because ownership is actually a very very conception, planning and execution. Staying together is the way that you increase motivation and increase standards. And that's really it's not it's not rocket science, but it is. It is hard for people to hear because it's definitely not the way they do it. We lose accountability and trust in most of our home organizations because we break up the cognitive labor, the conception and planning from the execution.

00:20:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, sadly, I am the one in our family who comes home with the wrong kind of mustard.

00:20:49
Speaker 4: But how you can do that's how you can do what you do, right. I mean, I think that that's the beauty is I see you.

00:20:57
Speaker 1: Nobody likes that bustard, Laura, why did you buy that?

00:21:00
Speaker 2: I don't know, not.

00:21:01
Speaker 4: Only mustard, but it happened to anybody. It's just that the typical person it's happening to is women. But I do think that it can happen to any family structure, any family.

00:21:13
Speaker 2: But I want to get into that idea a little bit more of because breaking apart the accountability because it doesn't not being able to have full responsibility for something can be pretty disempowering.

00:21:24
Speaker 1: As well.

00:21:25
Speaker 2: And so why you know, when people probably hear first about you know, your system or any other sort of thing that's supposed to create a more equal division of labor, the person being is like, yay, let me sign up my husband, right, And it's usually the person who feels they have been doing more than their fair shoe wants to sign up the person who has been doing less in any form of couple. But what's in it for the person who may have been doing less? I mean, why should they want to do like, why should you know your husband want to do anything other than send you a monkey emoji on this? I mean, what's in it for them? Because, as you know, with mediating anything, like, nobody's going to accept something where they feel like they just lose. So what's in it for them?

00:22:11
Speaker 4: Well, it's a great question, I think. So now that I have probably the longest longitudinal study of unpaid labor now going over ten years and thousands of interviews, what I always heard from men, again especially once married to women, was you know, women, as we know, are feeling overwhelmed, burn doubt, they just want to take off their plate. But men The number one thing that men said that they hated about home life. Wasn't that they didn't want to do more. It was that when I tried to do more, I have no place to do that. In organizational management terms, if I was coming into an organization and I heard that, I'd call that a psychological safety issue where someone doesn't know their role. And so I almost think it's actually why fair Play became a love letter to men. I actually think it's worse having control and overwhelm is horrible, but I almost think it's worse to come in with no psychological safety into a place, your home organization, where you think you're supposed to be a part, and not know where and when to pick up which mantle. And so I'll just tell you a one minute story actually from the horse's mouth from this man Richard, who recounted the story of his life post fair Play. Where you know in a system, Laura, as you know, but your listeners who may be less familiar with systems although they know it from their workplaces. A system is that so you don't have decision fatigue. So again, so you're not deciding who's taking the dog out every single time right before it's about to take it back on the rug you want to customize your defaults so that you can say, oh, garbage, I never have to think about it. Right, That's how your that's the ownership mindset, is how you lighten your mental load. But this man, Richard understood and Amy that part of fair play is understanding that building your deck together, right, Understanding what you want to do with your time again, which intersects with your work, Laura, is a very important part of that onboarding. Going to who does what with the fairplay system, which is a metaphor of one hundred cards, is just a list. So what makes a system a system is buy in, collective buy in, going through your deck together to say, do we care about school service? Actually no, none of us are going to volunteer this year. We are done with that, burning that card. What about watching the kids? Well, yeah, I have a five year old, so sadly she still a jests if I don't watch her. So I have to keep that card in my deck. Packing and unpacking backpacks. Well, I'd like to get my kids to do that for themselves, but someone has to oversee that, right. So you start to have these conversations about what you want in your deck. So Richard and Amy decide to keep magical beings in their deck because they told me had a great conversation about loving the two fairy growing up and Sanna and Amy's irish. So there's even something called like lucky leprechaun. I think it's called or some leprechaun, And Richard says, I will hold that card right with full ownership. So as you can imagine the first time their second daughter loses sorry, this is her second tooth, second daughter, second tooth, the tooth fairy doesn't come. So back to accountability and trust. What Amy says she would have done before fair play is use her verbal assassin communication to say, you've lost trust in me, You've ruined our child's life. There's no magic that will ever come back in her life. And eviscerated him for the mistake. And then Richard told me he would have blamed Amy for not reminding him to carry through and to put the dollar under the pillow. After fair play, what Richard tells me is that he feels empowered to carry through his mistake back to the own the lice. He emails at gmail dot com and creepily he gets a response that he prints out for his daughter that says, sorry, I'm backloaded on teeth. I'm going to come to night. He prints it out and says, oh wow, look the tooth fairy has been backloaded on teeth and now she's coming tonight. And guess what. When she's late, she brings double the money.

00:26:10
Speaker 1: And it's interest an early lesson.

00:26:13
Speaker 4: And lakeees and I don't know, there is something so empowering about that story. It's such a small story. I have a million other stories that are bigger that can tell you about sort of household transformation, but that's a recent story that it feels very powerful to me because it's so small. You can start where you are, but you can see the difference in the dynamic of how that couple is looking at each other in terms of accountability and trust, and that's what's in it for men.

00:26:43
Speaker 2: I love that magical beings is a card. Yes, of course, something that one needs to think of. And there's all sorts of magical beings that turns out some like the Leprechaun I didn't even know of.

00:26:56
Speaker 4: So there you go.

00:26:57
Speaker 2: Yeahs to the topic of time, because of course, one of the upsides of you know, having systems is it frees up mental space. It frees up time when you share ownership of the different tasks, that also frees up more of our time, so feel less overwhelmed, and some of that we can use for what you are now calling unicorn time unicorn.

00:27:18
Speaker 4: Space in your life.

00:27:20
Speaker 1: So Eve, what is this unicorn?

00:27:24
Speaker 2: Not really the creature, but when we refer to our lives speaking of these magical beings.

00:27:30
Speaker 4: Well, yes exactly, I love magical beings. And for you know, the idea Laura, right, that we can have sustained attention for things that we love as women, not our time interrupted every three minutes and forty two seconds like it was during one time journal study in the pandemic is still highly subversive. And the idea that we have the space to dream, to idate, to tinker, to do things that make us fundamentally who we are. Those active suits often get devalued the way women's time gets devalued, the way anything women does, you know, gets the value. I mean, look, we call breastfeeding free in this country when it's really a full time job of eighteen hundred hours a year. So why I call the unicorn space is because of course I want people to have women to have the space the space to dream, the space to believe that they can devote time to the things that they love. But like the mythical equine, right like the unicorn, it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist until we claim it. We put those fundamental boundaries around our time, and too many women were saying to me that they did not believe they had a permission to be unavailable from their roles as parents, partners, and our professionals. And if they felt unavailable, Laura, it was maybe to get a manicure. It was maybe to do some commodified wellness that society allows for us to do. Run in the park. But this is something completely different. This is not self care. This is not friendships, which are important. The true antidote to burnout in what I've seen now in my happiness and identity research, is being interested in your own life. And I ask everybody out there, what is your unicorn space?

00:29:21
Speaker 2: For Laura?

00:29:22
Speaker 4: I will I'm going to put words in your mouth and say, I believe your work is probably your unicorn space, or at least one of them this podcast, because you have the three c's of what the second book found in Creative Women, which was a curiosity to understand something differently, which you did and you were revolutionary in your TED talk. The connection, the ability to share it with the world, which is really scary, but you took that step. And then the most important thing is the completion, right that even if you're on a podcast you don't like the way your guests are speaking, are you ask the wrong questions, you still edit it and get it out there. And those three things of curiosity plus connection plus completion were the anecdote to burnout that was connected and associated with people who were self reported that they were able to thrive during the pandemic. And it's not just about economic privilege. It's actually the opposite. The people who have more economic privilege get more obsessed with defining success in extrinsic milestones, and they really can lose their intrinsically motivated values in a way that people who didn't identify as the one percent were able to tell me that creative capital was important to them. The higher we get up on that success wrong, the more I saw that we were losing our fundamental values and identity.

00:30:47
Speaker 1: Now do you think everybody has one of these things?

00:30:49
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure a lot of people are not really accustomed to thinking of themselves as a creative person. And I remember one of the exercises in your book was that you think about yourself on an island, but not like a survivor style, like you're you're gonna be with comfy chairs and food and you know Wi Fi. But if you were off there by yourself for you know, a month or two, like, what would you do? And I suspect some amount of people would be like, well, I wouldn't write a novel. I'd like, you know, watch streaming TV. So we do we have? I mean, do we all have these things? Or I mean if we're not moments that we do what we do, tell them Okay.

00:31:28
Speaker 4: Well we don't. And that's the thing I think. And you know Professor Lori Santos, I spend a lot of time in happiness Labs, Laura and and one of my favorite was Professor Laurie Santos. She teaches the most popular class at Yale called the Sides of Happiness or I don't know what the class is called exactly today, but something like that. She says something really beautiful about making your leisure time more nutritious and what we find in terms of mental health and longevity is that you know, Look, your listeners, I'm here to tell you that you know like that. I'm not a big inspirational quote person, but you know, like the Vivian Green quote that I do love, which is life is not waiting for the storm to pass. It's learning to dance in the rain. So many of us don't dance in the rain. We freaking drown in the rain. And we think possibly that maybe you know, zoning out on Netflix is going to bring us that umbrella. But what we see now is that's called hedonic well being. And if I can nerd out for a minute, that is associated with short term happiness. But there's something called you demonic wellbeing, which is what's this. It's the intersection of meaning and happiness. And we don't always have that because a lot of us have meaning without happiness. That's called wiping asses and doing dishes. And I know I have meaning and raising my kids, but believe me, it is not happy in the moment for a lot of times. For me. Other times I do have happiness without meaning, and that's the Netflix binging plus emotional eating that I did throughout the entire pandemic. But when you're at that intersection of meaning and happiness. Like I said, that curiosity plus connection plus completion, that flow state, whether like I said, I put words in your mouth when you're on that Ted stage, it is really really important. It is not optional actually, because we need that umbrella if we want to have mental health and longevity, because right now it's not good. Women are being diagnosed twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety disorders as men. Women are, as we saw, burning out to the point where due to childcare concerns plus everything that has been on our plate, we are you know, being forced out of the workforce and droves. It's and we have labor force participation lowess it's ever been. So it's not a great scene for women right now or for other marginalized populations and creative capital. And it doesn't have to be a you know, a paint brush. It could be with Laura did like I said, the Ted talk. You know, one person said to me on the desert Island that they would cross pollinate mangoes and pineapples and make a mang apple because they were interested in horticulture. I don't care what it is, but being interested in your own life is something I can't tell you what it is, but I can tell you how to find it, or at least how other people find it. And that was really what the second book was about, inspiring people to start really thinking critically about their active legacy, what they want to be defined as now, not later.

00:34:35
Speaker 2: Now, well, just to get curious, right, like it, don't have to think about what's my passion because it might not be one thing for the rest of your life, and it might not be, you know, the perfect thing, but just you know, be curious about different things.

00:34:46
Speaker 1: And notice, when you're happy, that's it.

00:34:49
Speaker 4: You're good. That's like all about the life. I think you did a beautiful job there. It's literally that's it. Be summering up, you're a great summarizer, curious and then feeling the clues. I think what was so interesting to me was probably the most interesting finding to me, was that happiness, the pursuit of happiness, makes you more sad because the idea that I'm going to be happy, right, I'm going to gratitude journal myself to death, right, it doesn't. It doesn't work that way. Happiness has a place in our society, but what we're finding now is that it works best as a clue. Your feelings are clues. And Robin Arzon talks about this beautifully because she's a highly creative peloton instructor. She creates these beautiful classes and uses great music, and she used to be an attorney and she moved to this fitness world. And she talked about how for her the clue wasn't only happiness, because she loved it when she was in teaching teaching classes, but it was jealousy was her clue. That she was very jealous when she talked to her friends who were doing things other than being a lawyer, and listening to that jealousy was important for her as well. So feelings are our clues. And I hate the word passion because you know what, when I'm you know, drowning in invisible labor, and you know, people are calling me Zach's mom, I don't even have a name anymore, and I have a sand in my thong because I've been crawling through a freaking sandbox with my kid. What are you passionate about? I feel like I'm going to give someone the finger. You know, someone asked me that. But I do think the idea of what this book explores, which is values based curiosity, because, as one person said to me, well, I am curious about scrolling my friend's Venmo transactions. I was like, okay, that's awesome. I didn't realize you can scroll Venmo to see what other people are purchasing. Apparently you can, and I've been doing it lately. She showed me how, and I was like, whoa, this is really weird. My friends like, like, they apparently have a lot of dogs, because there's a lot of dogs sitting on there. But that not that type of curiosity, really curiosity that aligns with your values, and our values change, and so that's why I encour people and I have some exercises to really re examine and understand your values. Now what are your values today? For me, I'm all in on gender justice and community, creating actual physical Unicorn spaces Laura. But a value that's very Jewish that I had in my life for a long time was obligation. And I said, you know what, I'm sort of done with obligation for a while. I'm sick of being obliged to wipe those and do those dishes, and I want to find a new way. So I retire to value obligation, and I brought two more values to the forefront. And so it's a lot of understanding yourself, but really doing it with some compassion because as you said earlier, it's this is not something you know, what makes you uniquely you and how do you share that with the world is not a question that we're typically asked at a typical cocktail party. Yeah, exactly.

00:37:53
Speaker 1: Well, so this has been great.

00:37:54
Speaker 2: We've been hearing all about, you know, how to achieve fear play and how to figure out out what we're going to do in our Unicorn space, the things that make us feel connected to our own life, the things we want to have as our legacy of how we enjoyed life, which is a great way to you know, get this to our question we always ask at the end of our episodes, which is about our love of the week, something that you are really loving right now. And this may not be a pure Unicorn space thing because I'm doing it with my kids, but I actually really do like it. Which is building complicated lego structures. So this is going to air in early January, but we're recording this in December, so we've been doing various legos Christmas sets I love my ten year old and twelve year old, and I did a Santa's visit house. I think we're going to go buy the one at Target that's the Elf Clubhouse, because that looks really cool too.

00:38:52
Speaker 1: But it's, you know, just.

00:38:54
Speaker 2: Something that's very fun and you know, you kind of really get into it and it's semi creative. I mean, you're making this thing that didn't exist before. And so I've really been enjoying the Lego Christmas sets. Love I love you so much.

00:39:10
Speaker 4: For me, I would say part of my unicorn space, which is to inspire other women in near unicorn space. My love of the week has been three or four different women that I've got I've got to watch just through social media that have been sharing their unbelievable unicorn spaces with me. One of them, I will shout out my friend who's a confectionery roboticist and her name is Abigail, and so she was sharing some of our holiday creations with me. She makes like movable gingerbread houses and so same thing very holiday for me. But I don't. I can't make a movable gingerbread house, but I have been inspired to bake again. It's one of my favorite things to do, and also dance dances come back in my life. I got to see West Side Story this week. A few of my friends are involved in that production, and so just pulling up Jerome Robbins and trying to learn a couple of sort of you know, dance moves and sort of going back into Latin dance. I used to love salsa and tango. So this week I've sort of been down a rabbit hole inspired by Latin dance and gingerbread house baking and can you combine those two? Yeah, I was like, can.

00:40:31
Speaker 1: I what can I do with these two things?

00:40:34
Speaker 4: Exactly?

00:40:35
Speaker 2: It's like a board game, you know, and you have like two disparate cards and come up with a story of them together.

00:40:40
Speaker 4: Well, it's so funny you just said that because I'm sending you that. Actually I actually created a remix game which does that, which has it's a Cards against Humanity where there are fifty cards. You're getting one in the mail in your influencer box. But it's a really fun, fun Cards against Humanity that I would ask you to play with your kids, where you remas. My friend's card was art and then I had ax throwing. She's been really angry about what's happening with reproductive rights. So I said to her, why don't you start creating some rage art. And so she's taking my idea of doing some protest art. And then we're going to go to one of those ax throwing places, Laura and literally make art by throwing hatchets at her art rage art. So who knows? Who knows what your remix will be. You can be a roboticist who combines it with confections as Abigail, but thinking about curiosities of what you could do even you know what, even if it's just five minutes a day, Bring a spiritual friend along, bring a you know, accountability partner with you to some of these. You know, you share your curiosities with the world because you never know where it's going to lead you. You just don't.

00:41:46
Speaker 1: You never know. Well, this has been great.

00:41:49
Speaker 2: So Eve Ronsky again is the author of Find Your Unicorn Space, which is a brand new book. She's also the author of fair Play, which has been out for a few years but definitely worth checking out as well.

00:42:00
Speaker 1: Where can our listeners find you?

00:42:02
Speaker 4: Yes, everything related to these themes are on fair Play Life. We definitely are most active on Instagram, but sort of the darker, angrier version of all that is that Eve Rodsky.

00:42:14
Speaker 2: More of the rape, more of the rage, the Instagram side, and the dark angry side.

00:42:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, the dark angry side is my personal Instagram. You can find me there. That's sort of the rage side of the rage art and more of the art side is on the fair Play Life Instagram handle. But we answered DMS, we'd love for you to share with the world what you love to do. Like I said, my love of the week was seeing women in their full power, whether it was crocheting Harry Potter dolls making their robotic cakes. Another woman showed me her she want to ribbon and dressage, which I didn't really understand. That's I guess apparently some version of I won't even say it, but you've got you'll know out there what it means. I didn't know. I'm from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Yeah, I don't.

00:42:59
Speaker 1: Didn't have any horns, the fancy horses there.

00:43:03
Speaker 4: We had power play and methadone clinics. We did not have horses.

00:43:08
Speaker 1: No, no, all right, Well, thank you so much for joining us.

00:43:12
Speaker 4: Thanks Laura, so good to be here.

00:43:14
Speaker 2: Well that was an awesome interview. Great to hear from Eve Rodsky. She is such a character and I always love listening to her.

00:43:21
Speaker 1: So we Our question this.

00:43:24
Speaker 2: Week is from a listener who has a very related question to Unicorn Space, which is how do you let go of guilt when you go to pursue.

00:43:34
Speaker 1: Your own activities sometimes?

00:43:36
Speaker 2: So I think we have slightly different feelings here, Sarah, So why don't you go ahead and talk about yours?

00:43:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would love to say like, I don't have any guilt. I don't feel like I have tons of guilt, but I still don't feel like this is a non issue or a non challenge. I do think that looking at my week as a whole always helps. This week, I had a couple of nights where I had late commitments. I had a work meeting one night, and then we had our Patreon meet up which was really found the other night. And both of those times or nanny put the kids to bed one night, my husband to the other, and I definitely was like the guilt was seeping in a little bit, but zooming out and thinking about the whole one hundred and sixty eight hours and being like, Okay, well that's two out of seven and I'm probably doing bedtime the other five. That definitely really really helped. So just having a more holistic perspective and not focusing on like the one Wednesday or whatever, when I actually have something that's for myself. I also, you know it's a little cliche, but like I am a better person when I do things for myself. So if I want to be you know, able to be nice and calm with my children rather than you know, a tired, reactive, mean mom, then I need to sometimes serve my own needs. So sometimes and that's what I sometimes find that line of thinking a little bit martyrristic, like, oh, I can only enjoy myself so that I can be a better mom. Like I don't love that trope. But at the same time, like I'm a human. I need to take care of myself and so like if workouts help me to stay seen, it is going to benefit everyone else. So I can just appreciate that as a necessary part of self care.

00:45:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am a human.

00:45:11
Speaker 4: You are a human.

00:45:12
Speaker 2: All of our listeners are humans, and as such, we have our own interests. Like that's because we are a human, we are not defined solely in our relationship to other people, whether that be our family members or our work for that matter, that is not the sum total of who you are. And so it's fine to have an extra space for that.

00:45:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.

00:45:36
Speaker 2: I don't feel guilt. I mean partly because I do have that one hundred and sixty eight hour perspective and it is just so imprinted on my brain that I know, if I take one night to go do choir practice, I am probably the one doing bedtime the other six nights. And heck, I probably am doing bedtime when I come home from choir practice, because like the kids have somehow not wound up in bed. So I mean, this is just the reality. Even if I do another night, I mean, it's rarely more than two nights a week that I'm gone, and so then yes, the other five are all on me. And if that's the case, then I don't think I need to be stressed out about the two.

00:46:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, just like I know, I.

00:46:21
Speaker 2: Do a ton of stuff for my family, Like I can see it on my time logs, and I could see it just in the reality of life, like somebody was wrapping the Christmas presents that we were airing. This in early January, but we recorded in December. I spent like three hours yesterday wrapping Christmas presents. Like somebody did that. Hmmm, I wonder who. Anyway, So the kids have their activities and I have Fine. That's pretty much how it goes.

00:46:46
Speaker 4: I love it.

00:46:47
Speaker 3: It's inspiring, let's.

00:46:48
Speaker 1: Hope all right. Well, this has been best of both worlds.

00:46:51
Speaker 2: I was interviewing Eve Rodsky, who's the author of the brand new book Find Your Unicorn Space and also the author of fair Play, which is about how to achieve a fair split of the mental load that comes with running a household.

00:47:04
Speaker 1: We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:47:10
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram.

00:47:17
Speaker 2: And you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.