When I became pregnant with my second child, Mila, things started unraveling.
The 5th stage of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is called the Belly of the Whale, where the hero must die and be reborn. That’s what a lot of motherhood felt like, except I felt permanently stuck in the whale, definitely not a hero, and wondering when my fabulous rebirth was going to start.
I had a lot of rock-bottom moments. And then after Mila was born I had some more moments that I realized were actually rock bottom and made the other ones look… not so bad in comparison?
There was a day that felt like the real bottom. It was a very normal afternoon — a screaming 2-year-old and hair pulling and a wailing baby who needed to be fed an hour ago and a spilled cup of coffee and a stroller that wouldn’t open and the tiny terrorist in my head yelling at me that I better get it together and be the patient, boundaried, competent, effortless mother perfectly executing all of Dr. Becky’s advice and simultaneously feeling fulfilled OR ELSE. The words bad mother were on a cruel repeat inside of my head.
I was on my knees — not to intentionally pray but remember the stroller wouldn’t open — and I said a prayer to please make the voice stop and just be a friend to myself for one second. Not even a minute because that felt too overwhelming and honestly not even a best friend but just a regular friend. What would happen if I just gave myself some regular friend kindness for one tiny second?
And all of a sudden I heard another voice inside of my head — God/ess? My higher self? Oprah??? — say “Liz, you are loved.”
I started crying and I definitely spilled some more coffee but in that one second the family nervous system relaxed, and things in my inner world started to reorganize. Maybe that’s when the rebirth began.
I remembered the thing I knew to be true, but kept forgetting:
When we want to spark real change, we need to make experiments, not ultimatums.
Because the terrorizing voice — this amalgamation of internalized patriarchy, inner critic, social conditioning and hustle culture — that tells you that you better create a masterpiece today and that tells me I better stop being a bad mother or else — speaks in the language of ultimatums, shame, and threats to keep us from changing, creating, and becoming who we are meant to be.
Becoming our fullest and most expressed selves is what that voice fears most.
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Experiments work because they give us space to explore new ways of being without excessive pressure. At its most basic definition, an experiment is about trying a new way of doing something. Experiments inspire language like What if? What happens when? I wonder what would be possible…
A spirit of experimentation breathes new life into our creative space, and simultaneously requires us to begin changing our relationship to achievement, a necessary step in any kind of creative progress and expansion. Success is defined through learning, not achieving.
Each time we have the courage to make experiments instead of ultimatums, we strengthen our ability to invest in our superpower of curiosity over the cultural pressure to always have the right answer.
That 1-second experiment was a turning point for me — not only did I start getting effective support for the postpartum depression and anxiety that I didn’t even know I had, but I started trying to bring experiments instead of ultimatums to as many areas of my life as I could.
Piece by piece, I started unraveling the internalized pressure that had infiltrated all the areas of my life as a new mom (and honestly for the 3+ decades prior) and found some creative space again. It was not an instant 180. But I felt myself coming alive.
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10 Reasons Why Experiments Catalyze Creative Expansion:
1. They create heat, not pressure
2. They invite our courage, ambition, and curiosity to exist simultaneously
3. They eliminate shame and significantly quiet perfectionism
4. They shift our relationship with achievement by centering the learning, rather than the results, as success
5. They require curiosity to be the driver of our work
6. They offer a clearly defined container for meaningful action without a feeling of obligation or existential dread, and the agency to keep going or stop at any time
7. They give us space to explore under-expressed, emergent parts of our identity
8. They allow us to explore our questions about the status-quo through our creativity
9. They give us permission to explore our edges without knowing if it’s going to work or feeling like a failure
10. They feel light in our body
One of the great paradoxes of a creative life is that we need our ability to achieve and our value of excellence to do the work we’re here to do, and we simultaneously need to evolve our relationship with achievement each time we want to expand creatively.
We may have judgments that approaching our creative and change processes through experimentation means we won’t summon the necessary discipline or follow through. What I’ve found as I’ve researched this approach is actually the opposite — the framework of experimentation is so incredibly effective in catalyzing creative leaps that it often organically leads to solid commitments or principles in new areas of creative work that feel inevitable and appealing, instead of forced.
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8 Prompts to Inspire a Spirit of Experimentation in Your Life and Work:
- What’s feeling stuck? How could an experiment help?
- What’s a goal/habit/shift that you want to create that feels heavy or pressure-filled? What happens when you turn it into an experiment?
- If you were your own coach, what creative leap would you give yourself permission to go for in this next chapter?
- When you imagine taking the pressure off of achieving your creative vision, how do you feel?
- If you knew everyone would benefit, and you couldn’t fail, what would you let yourself explore over the next 4 years?
- What area of your life might blossom from the spirit of experimentation?
- Where do you feel excessive pressure right now? What happens when you replace it with curiosity?
- When you consider that success = learning, what happens to your body?
May these prompts remind you of a muscle you already have. Imagine Little You for a moment before outside forces governed your creative process. We know how to do this. We just have to remember what it felt like before the external pressure.
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Experiments for a new decade:
I am turning 40 this year, and it’s feeling major — more than the other milestone birthdays for some reason. 2 of the things I am most interested in prioritizing in this new decade are wisdom and fun. As part of my turning 40 project, I am creating a series of personal experiments over the course of this year (I might do 40!) so I can learn more about the quality of life and work I want to prioritize in this next chapter:
Some of the experiments so far include:
The Create The Rules Experiment — Letting myself do the opposite of several of the entrepreneurial rules I’ve been studying over the last 15+ years and seeing what happens
The Integrity Experiment — inspired by Martha Beck’s life-changing The Way of Integrity — an experiment to stop lying to myself to make other people comfortable
The Social Media Experiment — Giving myself permission to be off social media when it doesn’t feel good (which kept me nearly entirely off the platforms for several months!!), and find other places for activism, supporting people’s work, and connecting with you (like this newsletter!).
The Decluttering Experiment — Allowing me to fully indulge in my passion for Feng Shui and general obsession with the relationship between our environments and our inner being. I’ve probably given away nearly 50% of our stuff and rearranged our entire house several times but it WORKS.
The 15 minutes Experiment — One thing I’ve been amazed at so far, is the truly magical effects of simply telling myself that a daily/weekly/monthly routine is an experiment instead of a habit. I think it appeals to my variety-seeking self who gets existential dread whenever I got locked into something ongoing that has no apparent end. Even if you decide to keep an experiment ongoing, it feels lighter than a habit to me. I’ve had a habit of writing for 15 minutes a day for a while now, but I added 15 minutes of meditation and movement, every dayISH (not at a specific time since kids are unpredictable but whenever I can fit them in), and it is now one of my favorite parts of the day.
The Hugging Experiment — I realized that some of my discomfort around physical touch meant that I was always breaking hugs with my kids first. So in this experiment, I wait until they break the hug. My son’s hugs last several minutes long! Wild! It also challenges some of my beliefs about time, which is connected to…
The Don’t Rush Experiment — Self-explanatory. Extremely hard. And potentially life-changing…
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So, when we want to expand into our next creative chapter, we can:
- Take the pressure off
- Make experiments, not ultimatums
- Be open to what happens
My invitation to you is to bring a spirit of experimentation to whatever is budding or emergent within you and your work. Maybe you replace an ultimatum with an experiment. And then notice what happens. Notice how this affects your eyes, your drive, your spine, your collaborators, your creativity, your aliveness, your breath, your spirit.
What’s something you want to experiment with this spring? Comment below and let me know what’s resonating.
I believe in you, and your beautiful creative evolution.
