Conjuring Integrity feat. Emma Gannon

When I read The Success Myth by bestselling author Emma Gannon,

I knew she really got what integrity was all about.

It sounds wonderful. But, like most things that serve our whole selves,

it’s Really. Fucking. Hard.

It’s a lifelong practice that’s constantly evolving,

with tons of ups and down, victories and setbacks.

Emma Gannon joins us to talk about her relationship with integrity,

and how putting her values first has changed her life.

Subscribe! Apple | Pandora | Spotify | TuneIn | YouTube

Mentioned:

Emma Gannon is a Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction author and award-winning novelist. Her most recent book, The Success Myth, was chosen as a “best book of the month” by Apple. She runs the popular newsletter The Hyphen on Substack at http://thehyphen.substack.com, and she’s on Instagram @emmagannonuk.

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, by Dr. Richard Schwartz

Make Magic:

Living in integrity isn’t a straight line.

It’s a living process. It expands and contracts,

ebbs and flows, grows and sheds.

It requires us to embrace all the parts of ourselves,

and listen closely to the messages they're sending us.

Transcript: Conjuring Integrity feat. Emma Gannon

NATALIE MILLER: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here.

Hello, my love. I am so deeply excited to share today's conjuring episode with you. Joining me is Ms. Emma Gannon. Emma Gannon is a Sunday Times bestselling author. She's a novelist. She's a podcaster. And more than all of that, or perhaps in order to do all of that, she is a woman of huge vitality and deep integrity.

So that is what we talk about today. We talk about integrity vis-à-vis her latest book, The Success Myth: Letting Go of Having It All. In our Show Notes for today's episode, we've got a link to her book. We've got a link to her Substack. And I am confident that after you listen to our conversation, you will bustle on over there, and get connected with Emma Gannon. OK. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[Music]

NATALIE MILLER: Emma Gannon, I am so excited to have you here today. Thank you so much for being here for a convo with me.

EMMA GANNON: Thank you so much. I've had you in my ears while I've been doing the shopping, and hoovering the house. I love this show.

NATALIE MILLER: Oh. Well, it is so exciting to have you on here. And I just read your book, The Success Myth, your latest book, I should say, because you are quite the prolific author. And I have to tell you, I read this book, and I said to myself, this is a book about integrity. This is a book about, like, integration of what people see and how we feel. This is a book about integration of like our true desires and our ambitions, and just I got integrity vibes and chills [laugh] as I read the book. And I'm so excited to dive into that today, to talk about what it looks like to conjure integrity. What does that word mean to you from the get-go?

EMMA GANNON: Thank you, by the way, because this is the first book where I cried at the end of the audiobook, and I felt like this has come from a deeper place, this one. Integrity, I love that word, and I love how it does mean being whole and sort of complete and solid, like a solid foundation. But I guess my first thought about integrity is actually difficulty [laugh], the fact that being in your integrity means you're being very true to yourself, and that cannot mean it makes sense to others sometimes. So it's a word that fills me with a lot of good feeling, but it also makes me feel like, ugh, it's a hard thing to do.

NATALIE MILLER: I love that you're saying that because I want to have a rubber-meets-the-road conversation about [laugh] it. I think integrity is one of those very lofty things. It sounds wonderful, just like meditating for an hour each morning sounds wonderful. But in actuality, like, it's fucking hard.

EMMA GANNON: It's really hard, and also I feel like there's a chain reaction. You become more in your integrity, and everything in your life starts to fall away or change, or it's literally like the dominoes going down. You're thinking, oh my god, I've put that down, that thing, to be more in my integrity, and now everything is shifting. That's what I found.

NATALIE MILLER: No, absolutely. And like it makes sense, right, because if we are organizing our decisions around what other people want, around what society tells us we should have and do, if we're organizing our decisions, like, around the externals, when we shift to an internal organization [laugh], like, no, I'm actually going to do things that are in line with my values and with my desires, my body, my heart, of course things will fall apart as we shift from that external structure to the internal structure.

EMMA GANNON: Totally, and I don't think we're taught really how to do it. So when you do start doing it, it does feel really countercultural, really like you're hitting a wall. You can feel very isolated and very alone because even though it feels good in your body, and it feels good in your head, there are so many ways where you just feel like you're being pulled back in, because if you're living—we live out of integrity our whole lives, really, until we kind of stumble across going into this new phase. And, like I said, everything starts changing, you know, from friendships to our daily habits, to the work we take on, to the decisions we make, to the way we interact with our family. It's funny, because I've been talking about work really through my whole career in my books, but really I'm talking about life. They are one and the same.

NATALIE MILLER: There's this amazing line, there's a lot of amazing lines [laugh] in The Success Myth that are just like very—I felt as if you were putting your hand on my shoulder, looking at me dead in the face, and saying this thing that was so true. And I thought, damn, I feel that all the way down to my toes. Actually talk about, if you don't mind, this moment with which you begin the book, which is a moment ostensibly of huge success.

EMMA GANNON: Yeah. So I guess to set the scene, I've been chasing success in the sort of traditional realms for my whole life, up until probably about two or three years ago where I started thinking about this book, which was I was really on a mission. I really bought into the girl boss culture. I really bought into, well, all of the culture in TV, media, radio, telling us, especially as women, to be successful in a very external way, in a very validated way, in a very performative way. And I feel like the blinkers were on, and I felt very much like asleep at the wheel [laugh], just living my life on everyone else's terms, and actually doing really well, if we want to say well in terms of society's expectations.

I was making loads of money. I was doing loads of speaking gigs around the world. I had Instagram followers, whatever. And I was also interviewing a lot of people who were successful and quite well-known for my podcast at the time as well. And the penny just dropped, and it dropped in this hotel room, which I open the book with, where I had everything on paper that I wanted. I was at the top of the mountain. I had got the thing. I had won the awards. This was my moment. And I just felt so confused. I felt so existentially disappointed because it's never that thing. It's never the thing. We think it will be, and sometimes I think, well, I haven't reached it yet then.

But I think I just became so disillusioned with the idea of success because it had been a lie to me. I was chasing the wrong thing. So that's where I start the book, because being successful on other people's terms is not truly success. And so I'm on this new journey now where I actually want to go in rather than out. And I know that sounds like a cliché, but I really feel like I'm living it at the moment.

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah. So the passage that was my first hand on the shoulder, eye-to-eye moment [laugh] with you at this text was—

EMMA GANNON: [laugh]

NATALIE MILLER: —"My inner voice was nudging me, but it was being drowned out by talks, clapping audiences, Instagram likes, and posting pictures of myself online. In reality, I felt like if someone prodded me hard enough, I would fall over and everything would come crashing down around me. It was becoming harder and harder to ignore the feeling inside."

So this turned toward the inner voice in a world where external validation and all the shoulds and all the advice and all the what other people think, right, is so loud. I'm doing this too right now. Let's talk to our sweet listener about, OK, but practically, what does that look like? [laugh] Like OK—

EMMA GANNON: [laugh]

NATALIE MILLER: —there's an inner voice. It's whispering, it's drowned out by all of the kind of markers of success. But the shoulds, the trappings, right, of success, how do we begin to hear it and listen to it?

EMMA GANNON: Well, I would say that, like with everything in life, nothing is overnight, and nothing is just quickly solved. This is an ongoing process, but also it's lots and lots of tiny steps, and it is a muscle, I believe, that we have to build. And really, I suppose, what I'm talking about in the book is flipping the sort of paradigm of your life, which is if I went into a room and there was, I don't know, a group of people, and they made me feel uncomfortable, I used to leave that room, and think I was the problem. I felt uncomfortable because I did something wrong. And I wasn't X—insert whatever—enough for them.

Now I walk into that room, I feel uncomfortable with that group, and I leave that room thinking I did not like that, and I have to trust that. That made me feel uncomfortable. That was not a room I want to be in. That is a huge thing, and that isn't something, I don't think, that we can know when we're a teenager or know even in our early 20s. We're not given the tools, you know. Education is a whole other topic. But learning to really trust that as being the truth, your body is not lying to you, your body knows more than we think it does, it starts quite small, I think. And also, like I said in the book, like, I would hear the voice, and I would ignore it, for years. This wasn't like, aha, I've heard it. It was growing louder and louder.

NATALIE MILLER: Oh my gosh. In my own teenagers, I do see the glimmer of a new way, and probably it's partly because I'm their mom [laugh], right? And they're growing up just like in a different time in a different way. One of the things that they do that just knocks me out, it makes me so happy, is they know when they need alone time. We are a household of people who need alone time [laugh], so we spend a lot of times in our separate quarters. And without apology, without shame, without even hesitation, they will just declare, "I really need some alone time." And they'll take a snack in their room—

EMMA GANNON: I love that.

NATALIE MILLER: —and close the door. It's incredible. I certainly didn't feel able to do that when I was a teenager.

EMMA GANNON: I love that. Actually, I spent some time with my nephew recently, who's 12, and he said to me, "Why do adults make an excuse when they want to leave something?" And I was like, "Oh my god, we do do that, don't we?" And he said, "Yeah. I just say when I want to leave." And then I looked at him, and thought, you know, that's so wise and so great, and I'm so glad that he thinks that. But then I also thought, I hope there's not a time where you're socialized out of that, because I feel like we're so in tune at a young age, and then that changes. And it's like you want to get that back almost.

NATALIE MILLER: Yes, absolutely. So that when the inner voice gets louder, I find that, for me, it begins with stress. It begins with like irritation, resistance, resentment. For me, that's how it starts [laugh]. For me, it starts more on the kind of like angry side of things. [laugh] That's where I'm like, ooh, I don't like this group, this engagement, this commitment I've made. You know, that's the first thing that bubbles up in me. What is it for you? How does that voice first present itself for you?

EMMA GANNON: Ooh, that's interesting. Well, one of the times where it got really loud, and I remember it really clearly, I was on a train, and I was coming back from an event that I didn't actually want to do but one of my agents at the time had put me forward for, and it looked good. You know, they wanted me to do it; not good or bad, just that was the reality. And I remember being on the train, looking out the window, and I just heard this voice, and it was quite quiet, and it just said, "I feel trapped." And I just thought, oh, that's a bit of a scary thought. I feel trapped. I feel trapped.

And I think now when I look back, I think—and I know, you know, people say it's like your inner child or the inner you or whatever—I feel like it was my creative side, this side of me that wants to play. I think that side of me or that part of me felt really trapped. It was like a kind of, you know, you're squashing me too much. This is scaring me, because I believe, you know, I've been through really bad burnout of the past year, and I believe that that sort of flame, like that spark, that thing inside us that grows when we're happy and shrinks when we're feeling out of integrity, I feel like burnout is when that burns out, like it actually burns out, and you can't do anything.

And now I have to protect that spark with everything. And if that means disappointing my parents or if that means turning down money or if that means, you know, not going—I don't know—to a friend's party when I said I would, but I don't feel like it anymore, the spark's more important, which I know conjures up feelings of am I being selfish? And I know you talk about all of those sorts of feelings that we can reframe.

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah, yeah. I think for me that's maybe like a next phase after the voice is whispering. When it starts to—when we lose that spark, and it just feels like, I don't give a fuck. I don't care. Ooh, I don't like that feeling, Emma.

EMMA GANNON: It was scary.

NATALIE MILLER: I don't like it. [laugh]

EMMA GANNON: Oh, I don't like it. And you know what? I wish I had heard the voice more. I wish I had paid more attention to it. I wish I hadn't got so ill. I wish I hadn't let myself get to that point. But I am grateful for it, actually—

NATALIE MILLER: Oh yeah.

EMMA GANNON: —because I've now seen how fizzled out it can get. And now it's like that's a non-negotiable. That can't happen again. I won't let it.

NATALIE MILLER: Same, same. I love to trace the trajectory for people, right, because it's like you may be—this may be happening for you, and maybe you know it, but maybe you haven't recognized it yet, that irritation that you feel, or that feeling of being trapped that you feel, or that apathy that you feel. All of those could be the inner voice just begging you for attention. Ignore it long enough, and what I find is, like, the buck stops with the body. [laugh] Body is like, "Actually, no, no more."

EMMA GANNON: Yeah. Yeah, the body is like, "You've put me in so many situations I never wanted to be in. I cannot do this anymore. I've tried, but I can't."

NATALIE MILLER: I will not, and in order to get your attention, what will it take? Migraines? Chronic pain? Insomnia? Diarrhea? [laugh] Like, the body has a lot of tools at her disposal [laugh] to let us know that we are out of integrity. I've talked a lot on the podcast about my experience of that. Emma, do you want to share any of your experience of it?

EMMA GANNON: It's totally revolutionized how I see my body. I mean, I actually wrote an apology to my body during some of the really bad bits of burnout where I was so thankful. It really got me through when my brain was just, you know, goo. And the way I see it now is, yeah, there's a real respect there. You know, sometimes we get ill out of our control, of course, but now I just pay attention to the warning signs, and nourish it before it needs to beg to be nourished. I think that's what's changed for me. I feel honestly so lucky. I know some people have awful things happen to them through stress, some things that are kind of irreversible.

And I feel like the way it manifested for me was, it was quite scary. It was quite sort of PTSD sort of symptoms. It was feeling very, very disorientated. I couldn't really look at my phone for longer than five minutes. The world sort of seemed like it was behind glass, like nothing really seemed real for a bit. That was really, really scary. I have had—touch on wood—I've had really good mental health for my whole life. Like, I'm not someone who has suffered actually in that department much, so for that to have happened to me so drastically, because I was so out of alignment with myself, I find that very fascinating. But what about you? I know that you talk about this topic a lot and share.

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah. No, for me—well, I will say this—I had a very intense several years of finally moving into integrity. So a long, long time when I was doing work I preferred not to do, when I was in a marriage I preferred not to be in, and when I was pushing myself in an unsustainable way, those were sort of the three ways in which I was out of integrity. I was doing what I didn't want to do with who I didn't want to be with [laugh], and I was not honoring that in order to give as much as I was giving, I needed to receive more.

And it's like I had a tab with my body like you have a tab at a bar. [laugh] I had a tab, and I just kept ordering more projects. I just kept ordering more commitments, more like being overgenerous, overextended, over-responsible, over you name it. And eventually I went to put one more thing on the tab, and my body was like, "No, and, in fact, it's all due now. Like, not only are you cut off, but you now have to pay." And so for me, that looked like migraines, weird chronic pain, like gut imbalance. So I didn't have like digestive issues, but my microbiome was completely out of whack, which fucked with my hormones.

Like, listen, it's like a whole thing, right? Like [laugh], it compounded, the interest compounded on all of that borrowing that I had done from my health. And really now, I mean, it's taken me a couple of literal years, and now finally I'm coming out of it. But, to your point, from the beginning, coming out of it means investing in myself, and centering myself in a way that the world would really prefer I do not.

EMMA GANNON: Oh, I just got shivers, you saying that. That was powerful. It is powerful.

NATALIE MILLER: It is.

EMMA GANNON: And, you know, something I really got from you in one of your previous episodes was this amazing thing you said around, you know, how sometimes we'll push ourselves to a deadline, and then give ourselves the bubble bath, or then give ourselves the walk, or then give ourselves the chocolate cake or whatever as a treat. I've really started reversing that. I do it first. I do the lovely yoga workout first. I have the bubble bath first. [laugh] It's a very revolutionary way of doing things, but it's amazing.

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah. Oh good, I'm so glad. Yeah, no, that has been key for me. That has been key for me, this idea that to have structural integrity, I guess, right, structural integrity in myself means that I cannot subtract from my energy more than I deposit into it. And, yeah, that is enormous.

EMMA GANNON: I have a question for you, actually. I'd be interested to know around, carrying on from that analogy of cost and money and debt and all the rest of it, I'm realizing that there was a cost to me having all that money and having like whatever, you know, being really successful on paper, which it still feels uncomfortable for me, by the way, to kind of feel ungrateful for what I had. Like, I am grateful, but it came at such a cost to my health that I think of it in negative terms now, that time of my life. But there is also a cost to being in your integrity, I have found, which is I am earning less. [laugh] I am living in a smaller way. I am seeing less people. I am doing less work. And I guess I'm curious from your perspective of whether we can have both.

NATALIE MILLER: Well, Emma, you know I always believe we can have. [laugh]

EMMA GANNON: [laugh] And a part of me feels like we can. A part of me feels like, actually, if you go further down this path of being in integrity, guess what, you reap a lot.

NATALIE MILLER: Yes, 100%. I mean, I will say I, now doing the work that I truly love to do, I am more financially successful than I've ever, ever, ever been. Now, for me, being financially successful doesn't just mean like having huge bank accounts. It also means treating people the way that I really want to treat them. Right? So there's still kind of the stress that goes with that, right? It's like, oh, I don't even know where they come from, right? I was going to say website. But where even do these messages come from that say, "What you really need to have are diversified investment portfolios. What you really need to have is a home that, you know, are building equity in, which"—you know, all of these kinds of—this is what—this is actually what financial success looks like.

And I have to stand in it, and say, no. For me, financial success looks like donating money. For me, it looks like paying people well. For me, it looks like investing in healthcare in its myriad forms for myself and my family, etc., etc. So this is how I would answer that question, is like, yes, there is—it is costly to be in our integrity because we are going against the grain of the dominant culture. That's challenging. That's difficult. That puts a strain, I think, on us.

EMMA GANNON: Yeah, yeah.

NATALIE MILLER: And/but the more we do it, and the more we do it together, like the more we're doing it in community with other people, you know, I get to read your book, and I get a little deposit of clarity and courage, and you get to listen to Mind Witchery, and you get a little deposit of clarity and courage. Like, we do it together, and it does get a little bit easier, I think.

EMMA GANNON: I love that. I think that's amazing. And I think, you know, it's so true that you do attract what you're giving out. And now that my vibe has changed, it's so amazing what is coming into my life, because I'm operating in a totally different way, and people are dropping off, but new people are coming in, and it's, yeah, it's great.

NATALIE MILLER: Well, and, you know, that was actually the other thing that I wanted to talk about with you regarding integrity, which is that it's not like it's a fixed state, right? Like, it's not that like, oh, don't worry, Emma, keep acting in integrity, and eventually you'll have it all, right? I think it's rather much more like everything in this universe, which is that it expands and it contracts. It ebbs and it flows. It grows and it sheds. Like actually it's this kind of living, pulsating, evolving process or way of being much more than it is like a status that we could achieve and maintain as such. What do you think about that?

EMMA GANNON: Yeah, I love that. I think that's right. But also I think that ties into feeling compassionate actually for your past choices as well, because it's very easy to look at a photo of your younger self, and think, what are you doing? You're out of integrity. But we don't know whether some of that was being integrity to that person who you no longer are. There are choices that I made back then that maybe felt right, maybe they did. And I get into a real habit of evolving, and then I'm like, well, this is 2.0 me, and everything I did beforehand was wrong.

And it's like, actually, I don't want to go there. I don't want to feel shame actually for some of those choices. I do think it's all part of it, because I wouldn't have written The Success Myth if I hadn't lived all those different lives. So, to me, it's, yeah, it's like what you said, it's shape-shifting all the time.

NATALIE MILLER: Absolutely, yeah. Well, you wouldn't have been able to write the line, "I wore a suit of success armor," which I think will ring true for so many people. This suit of success armor, like, look at me. I've got the bestseller titles. I've got the followers. I've got the gigs. I've got the agent. I've got the team. I've got the apartment. I've got the—right? [laugh] It's like—

EMMA GANNON: It sounds so exhausting [laugh], and it was.

NATALIE MILLER: Yes. Yeah, for sure, right? And then to know, oh, that's a suit of armor, and inside of that doesn't feel so invincible and strong.

EMMA GANNON: Yeah. It's many, many layers of covering up, really. And also, another reason why I suppose I'm grateful to have come out the other side, and have all these reflections is I can see it now in other people; not that it's any of my business. But I think that's what's exciting to me, if I do more coaching or I'm doing more writing in this space, is it's the dominant culture, isn't it? That's the dominant force. And to be able to look at it from an awareness almost outside of it, it's been really eye-opening.

It's like I can see the cogs, and I'm in the factory, and I can see how it's all being made, and it's frightening to know that. Sometimes you don't want to see that. [laugh] That's why we numb out, and why we drink, and why we, you know, don't want to look it in the eye. And I feel like when you go through this, you can't go back. That's the other thing. I had a lot of grief, a lot of grief around shedding that skin, because it's like a one-way door out of it, really.

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah, it does feel like that. It does feel like a sea change. And, at the same time, I wonder if a helpful way to think about it that could kind of blend this compassion that you're talking about, and also this clarity of perspective is to remind ourselves that really what we're always doing is creating our lives choice-by-choice. That's a spell I'm casting in my own Time Witchery every day these days. I'm like I create my life choice-by-choice. [laugh] I create my life choice-by-choice.

And so to say, you know what, sometimes I might choose to get the Botox because I am sick of being distracted by the wrinkles on my face. And, yes, I would love to fully inhabit my feminism and body positivity, and I would love to rail against a culture that won't let anyone, especially women, age. And/but today I choose three injections, and I forgive myself for it because, you know what, it's fucking hard to swim against the current all the time.

EMMA GANNON: Yes. Oh my god, I love that because, even if you're living in the culture, and you're trying to pass the test, whatever that is, like, be the good whatever, or live up to everyone's expectations, there's no point in sort of freeing yourself from all of that, and then also putting all the rules back onto yourself. You know, we limit ourselves in the, you know, this is the new me or—[laugh] we do it all the time with trying to live up to something, I suppose. So really I love that, and I feel like maybe you can wipe the slate clean every day. Isn't that the point? [laugh]

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah, or just honor that like, gosh, there are—I loved how you invoked the idea of parts, right? There are all of these different parts of me, and there are some parts who are vain, and there are some parts who are so conditioned by ideas of financial success. And, you know, I love Dick Schwartz's book. He's the founder of Internal Family Systems. I love his book No Bad Parts because that book says, you know what integrity is, is every single part of you is welcome, including the one who just wants to lose 10 pounds. Right? Like, she's welcome here. She still gets a seat at the table.

EMMA GANNON: Yeah, I love that. I've actually done some therapy in that department, and it was life-changing because what I needed to do was link up the little girl, like, the little Emma who used to read books under the cover, and want to be an author, and all that stuff, I needed to like link her up with me now, and sort of honor her, and honor that side of myself. And actually, that is really what this was all about is the kind of shiny, performative Emma was dominating, outdoing all the other parts, I suppose, and actually what it was is getting back into alignment because—I talk about this in the book—we are social animals. We do like status.

I love the fact that I'm coming on your podcast today. I love the fact that people are buying my book. I do like that. I'm not shying away from that. But it's just like that is one part, and there are so many other parts, and I'm not worth any more or any less just because I have a sticker or a label or a trophy. It's like feeling like you are enough, I guess, is the quest, isn't it? And I feel like I'm going more towards that now.

NATALIE MILLER: Well, feeling like we're enough, and listening to all of those different parts, right? Like, how much does shiny, performative Emma get to relax with a novel? Probably not much [laugh] when she's like fully on, and fully booked, and traveling, and making reels.

EMMA GANNON: That was it.

NATALIE MILLER: Right?

EMMA GANNON: Yeah.

NATALIE MILLER: It's like, well, what about the one who just likes to read? [laugh]

EMMA GANNON: And I think that was the part going, "I'm trapped. I want to read. Go away." [laugh]

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's so funny, I had a New York Times email in my morning inbox this week. It was talking about Montecito, California. I guess Montecito—Oprah has a place there, and Harry and Meghan have a place there. And it's like Montecito, it's the place for the new American dream, which is wellness. That was kind of the premise of this article. But, of course, as a clever writer would, the author of the article was like, yeah, basically this is be so rich, you can enjoy your life. [laugh] Be so rich, you can live in luxury and calm and peace, and you've got time to treat yourself like the queen you are.

And I wondered, Emma, what you think about this little, ugh, like niggle that I had with that? [laugh] An inner voice said to me like, yeah, but remember how none of us is free until all of us are free? Remember how actually we're all in this together? We're all on the planet together. On the one hand, I really appreciate this idea of wellness and wholeness as more important than like the striving first one to land on the Mars success, right, like the kind of Muskian, and Zuckerbergian kind of, you know, world domination thing. I like this idea that's more about wellness and wholeness. And, at the same time, I don't know, I'm curious how you think about, yes, being in integrity is self-centered and/but how must it also be evolutionary in a communal way?

EMMA GANNON: I believe like this book is, yes, it's kind of my story or whatever, or some research I've done, and a topic I'm passionate about. But the Trojan horse of the book is that the fact that we are in a bit of an existential crisis, collectively, and what is success if it's not for all of us? What is success if it's not successful for your city, your town, your country, the world? We are in such a scary time. We know that. We don't need to kind of get really anxious spirally about that. But now is the time to realize that more and more and more and more and more is not sustainable, and it never was. There is nowhere up to go now. We have all of the things.

A lot of people obviously still don't. We have a massive gap. But, on the whole, on the whole, we're in a pretty good time in history that we have access to most things that we didn't have 100 years ago. I look around my house, and it's like how could I want more? How could I want more than a TV and a sofa and a bath and a garden? Like, it blows my mind, actually, the level of comfort that so many of us have, and yet we're not satisfied, and yet we want more. And yet I look on Instagram every day, and I have to really check myself when I see someone in the South of France or living in Montecito or whatever. And the corporations, they want to grow. And it's like but can Starbucks get any bigger? No. [laugh]

So I really feel like we're in a time now where people just want to take something off the pile, they don't want to keep adding on, because we're getting to breaking point. And the second, I guess, the second thought on what you just said about this sort of wellness being, you know, be really rich, and then you'll be well or whatever, is I love that quote that's "everywhere you go, there you are." You can be depressed or suicidal or ill or anything in the Maldives. You are you, and it really doesn't make a huge amount of difference what view you're looking out of if you're suffering inside.

NATALIE MILLER: That like tees up perfectly another passage that I wanted to read [0:37:19] I think from the introduction. "No matter how high up the ladder of society's definition of success people climb, I've seen the same insecurities, doubts, health problems, domestic stress, creative block, and uncertainty over the future. I've seen people reach their life's goal, and realize that instead of a marching band celebrating the long-awaited milestone, they just want to crawl into bed in a dark room for a week.

I've had people admit that when they finally reached their dreams, it was then that their life started to fall apart. I've heard stories of people who look like they're smashing it, but are actually having an internal crisis." And then you ask, "Is being outwardly successful everything it's cracked up to be?" And then I will also say, yeah, and is being successful in a way that is unsustainable, is that all it's cracked up to be?

EMMA GANNON: There was actually an article in The Times, The London Times a while ago, which was saying that, you know, in a cost-of-living crisis, so many of us, our mortgages are going up, and the cost of having a child is going up. Childcare is so unaffordable at the moment in the UK. I know that there's a whole host of problems in the US. The cost of being alive is so high at the moment, and I think that is what's really hard to sustain is you create a life that has so much upkeep. It has so much stress. It has so much around it, because we're trying to keep up with the Joneses, and feel like we are enough, and have the new sunglasses, and be the person on that holiday or whatever. And it can be, you know, insert into the blank.

But sometimes I just think there must be an easier way. But that's the countercultural scary thing, because I interviewed a lot of people in the book who turned down promotions. These amazing people [laugh] who were just like, "Why would I want that? Why would I want a bit more money and a whole load of stress? Like, I'm cool with what I have." And I found that very freeing to hear about.

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah, super freeing. Oh. I love having this very grounded and real conversation about integrity and about like—it sounds great, doesn't it? [laugh] It sounds great.

EMMA GANNON: [laugh]

NATALIE MILLER: But it's difficult. And, to me, another point you make in the book, I would say, another Trojan horse [laugh] in the book is that success maybe isn't actually completely positive. It maybe isn't completely happy. It maybe isn't completely kind of existing on the spectrum of like, yay, emotion. Because if success is actually really about wholeness and truth, then the truth and the reality is that there is pain in this world, and it is lonely sometimes to go against the grain.

EMMA GANNON: Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because I'm fully aware that if we are in this cost-of-living crisis, people probably don't want to hear about, you know, poor celebrities or poor people who have everything, and they don't like it anymore. Like, I know that that tiny violin could be not really what people want to engage with. But the reason why I really feel passionate about talking about it is because I feel like that's the very illusion we do need to crack, is we look at the TV, and we think, well, they've got it all. They're perfect. They're fine. And actually, we know that's not the case.

We know from really tragic stories of people taking their own lives, people who are having all sorts of awful crisis, who are in and out of hospital or whatever. We read about it in the news. We know that these people who have loads of money and loads of freedom and loads of everything aren't happy. And I feel like that, as like a former journalist, I'm like that's interesting. The thing we are meant to want, they don't even want it. Why aren't we talking about that? Why aren't we telling kids that? Because one of the pieces of research that kept coming up is that young kids want to be famous. They want to be TikTok stars. They want to be known. And I don't blame them. But I just think, oh god, we've got a lot that we need to unpack with that.

NATALIE MILLER: That just makes me think so much about something you point to a lot in the book—which, everyone, go get this book, The Success Myth, it's just so good—is being image-driven or image-conscious or—you have a whole chapter about the tick box, right? Like, here are the ingredients to success, tick, tick, tick, tick, just like check them off, and in the end, there you are, successful. And when we're driven by that rather than by values, and, I mean, what I would call vibes but like feelings, right, it's like is it really successful if it feels degrading? Is it [laugh] really successful if it stresses you out? Is it really successful if your body is screaming at you to fucking stop it already? Is it successful if it means you exploit people, you know?

EMMA GANNON: Totally.

NATALIE MILLER: Like, we're not paying as much attention to those bits as we are to the lists, and how it looks.

EMMA GANNON: Yeah. And, you know, back to what we were saying at the start of the episode, you can feel so kind of like, ugh, I'm going to breathe out, and feel good about this, and then the next minute, you're reading the news or you're on Twitter or you're in your daily life, and you see the Mark Zuckerbergs, you see the Elon Musks, you see the rewards that people give people who live in that sort of macho bro culture, dominant, aggressive, hustle, scaling. Like, it's everywhere. It is a booby trap out there. And that is why this is something that I have to check in with every single day. It's not like I'm done now. I've learned that lesson. It's like a practice every day.

NATALIE MILLER: Lesson there, Emma, what is your kind of integrity or integrating practice? What does that look like for you? How do you check in?

EMMA GANNON: Well, at the moment, that actually involves being sober. [laugh]

NATALIE MILLER: Good for you.

EMMA GANNON: Yeah. So I wouldn't say I quote, unquote, had a problem with drinking. Like I—well, even saying that, now I know, I did [laugh] because it interfered with my life. So I think for me, it's just really staying clearheaded, really staying in a way where my nervous system is not really out of the window of tolerance. I need my body to feel as calm and as relaxed as possible for it to kind of compute the signals.

So it involves not really looking at my phone in the morning. I do some really gentle yoga. I mean, no, it's not really yoga. It's just like stretching my body, to be honest, in my own way. And I have a little turtle on my desk, actually, which I touch every morning, because it's sort of like reminding me just to take the really slow little steps. But it's—yeah, I check in with my body a lot now, and not drinking alcohol has changed that for me. And I'm not saying that that should be [laugh] the blanket solution for everyone, obviously. But, for me, I can't be numbing. I have to feel a lot more now.

NATALIE MILLER: I love that distinction between calm and sedated. [laugh] I think that's so important, because we sure do a lot of sedating, whether it's with substances or television or scrolling or, I mean, my goodness, right? It's a very stressful life we live, and so of course all parts welcome. All the parts are good, including the one that just needs to scroll Instagram for hours on end.

EMMA GANNON: [laugh]

NATALIE MILLER: And/but let's put someone else in charge of [laugh] the afternoon maybe.

EMMA GANNON: [laugh] No, you're so right and, like you say, all parts are welcome. But, for me, it's just about awareness as well. So it's like you know what you're doing. It's almost like you're like, oh, that part like is doing that thing now, and you kind of allow it. But I don't want to lose that awareness of numbing out or escaping. I want to be like I'm watching it. [laugh] I'm watching it happen.

NATALIE MILLER: Yeah, I love that, like, again, like compassion and that clear perspective, right? Oh, I see. I see what's happening. Yeah, I love that.

EMMA GANNON: Well, thank you so much for having me, and for reading the book. That is—you know I love your work, so it's a big endorsement. Thank you.

NATALIE MILLER: Oh my gosh, so wonderful to have you here. So I'm sure now my dear listener is going to want to have more Emma Gannon in their life. What's the best way for them to have more of your thoughts in their orbit?

EMMA GANNON: Well, on the topic of integrity, I actually have a Substack where I write every week, and it is so incredibly freeing to have my readers pay for my work in a sustainable financial way where there's no ads. There is no plugging of any sort. It's just a very clear transaction and interaction. And if you like my writing, that is the place to go for longer reads and all sorts on there. And it's The Hyphen on Substack.

NATALIE MILLER: The Hyphen on Substack, so beautiful. Emma Gannon, thank you so much for being here. I hope you'll be back. I think we're not done.

EMMA GANNON: I hope so.

NATALIE MILLER: I think we're just getting started.

EMMA GANNON: I think we could talk for hours.

NATALIE MILLER: Mm-hmm.

EMMA GANNON: [laugh]

NATALIE MILLER: All right, sweet listener, check out The Hyphen on Substack. Check out The Success Myth. It's such a lovely book. And thank you for being here, as always. Till next time. Bye for now.

[Music]

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world.

Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time.

End of recording