A Spell for Receiving Support
Our dominant culture fetishizes individual achievement.
It demands that we reject co-creation and collective effort.
It insists that solitary hard work is the only path to success,
and the clearest sign of our value as human beings.
This week, we’re exploring Where this lie comes from,
Why it’s utter bullshit, and How you can opt out of its toxicity.
Subscribe! Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Pandora | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn
Mentioned:
Brigid Schulte’s book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time
Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign speech (the “you didn’t build that” portion is at 52:59). https://www.c-span.org/video/?307056-2/president-obama-campaign-rally-roanoke#
Make Magic:
The next time you’re thinking about getting help,
taking ease, or investing in your own growth,
don’t wait until you’ve “earned it.”
Embrace the idea of seeking the support
that empowers and amplifies the life
you are already living.
Transcript: A Spell for Receiving Support
Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here.
Hello, my love. I’m so happy that you are here and listening to this episode today, a spell for receiving support. Whew. This is something that is very, very alive in my own life right now. I have some new experience, some new perspective on this, and I’m so excited to talk to you about it.
So, I want to give you one heads-up. My professorial identity is going to come out a bit [laugh] in this episode. Did you know that once upon a time, that’s what I wanted to do? I wanted to be an English professor. But it turned out that the academic circles were not my circles, so I’m here. But I love to see how all of my previous work experiences do sort of show up in the work that I do now.
And, as I was preparing today’s episode, taking some notes, I thought, “Oh, my gosh, totally professorial Natalie is coming out today.” And why is that? It’s because in order to understand our deep reluctance to receive support, in order to understand why it is frightening and hard to allow ourselves to receive support, we have to look pretty intensely, I think, at the dominant cultural narrative around work.
So, here we go. Where I want to begin is in the 2012 presidential campaign in the United States. So, this is Barack Obama going for re-election against Mitt Romney. And Barack Obama gives a speech where he famously, and bizarrely controversially, says, “You didn’t build that.”
He was talking about business owners who don’t want to pay taxes, and he was saying, “Hey, you know, the roads and the bridges that you use to transport your goods, you didn’t build that, meaning, you benefit from our society having shared resources, and you didn’t build those.” So, why was this so controversial?
Well (a) it’s because Barack Obama said it, right? [laugh] We’re not far from the days where Barack and Michelle sharing a fist bump was hyperbolized into evidence of some kind of radical, you know, takeover of the United States. So, for sure, that’s one part of it.
But why else was it controversial? It was controversial because it flew in the face of the dominant idea in United States capitalist society, and this dominant idea has been present since the very beginning, and what it is, is the Protestant work ethic. So, the Protestant work ethic emphasizes three things: diligence, discipline, and frugality. Hmm? Think about that for a moment.
Our culture has a relationship with diligence, unceasing work, discipline, head-down adherence to the rules, and frugality, no extra spending—diligence, discipline, frugality. And, for a moment, let’s look at where that came from. So, the roots of that Protestant work ethic are in Calvinism, and Calvinism is a Christian doctrine that says, “Listen, very, very few of us are saved, meaning, going to heaven. Most of us are damned. And the saved can prove their salvation—to themselves and to one another—through working, through showing up and working to thank God for being saved.”
Now, the saved are not actually sure they’re saved. [laugh] They hope they’re saved. And, so, they must work as hard as possible. Like, you could not work enough to prove and to believe in your salvation because there’s always that little doubt that it might not have been enough; that you might not be one of the saved ones.
So, what comes out of the Calvinist ideology is a deep individualism; an individualism that says each of us is in this alone. You have a deal between you and salvation, between you and God, and probably most of your neighbors are damned [laugh], right, because almost everyone is. You might be saved, and so you have got to be focused on your own work, be diligent and disciplined, and be very frugal. No extras for you.
We’ve talked about this on the podcast before. When do you get to enjoy? When do you get to relax? After the work is done. Now, with Calvinism, that meant maybe, maybe, maybe when you go to heaven. Here in the dominant culture in the world in the 21st century, it means you get to enjoy after the work is done.
Diligently, disciplinedly do a full day of work. Then you can enjoy the evening. Diligently, disciplinedly do a full week of work. Then you can enjoy the weekend. Diligently, disciplinedly do a full lifetime of work. Then you can enjoy retirement.
It’s even built into lots of time off policies that employers offer, right? You earn your vacation through days worked. So, we have this idea that the enjoyment comes after the work. First, you have to work so, so hard and so, so individually.
So, in 2012, when Barack Obama says to Republican businesspeople who consider themselves disciplined and diligent, very hard-working, and who consider themselves frugal in not wanting to pay taxes, and Barack Obama points to obvious material proof of our co-creative, sharing society, and he says, “You didn’t build that,” it profoundly disturbs the whole idea of the Protestant work ethic with its Calvinist roots.
It also disturbs a prevalent theory that we have about capitalism, and capitalistic success, and work. And this, my friends, is thanks to a German sociologist—he didn’t think of himself as a sociologist but he’s one of the first sociologists—Max Weber. And Max Weber writes in the late 19th century that, basically, capitalism is enabled by this Protestant work ethic; that it’s through the Protestant work ethic that capitalist success arises. Right?
And you know this [laugh] somewhere in the deep, deep cultural knowings, because we have all been taught this. We’ve been immersed in a culture that prizes diligence and discipline and frugality; that not only prizes it but also equates it to moral worth, right?
The dominant culture says, if you work so hard, individually, all on your own, if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you are unceasing, unwavering in your dedication, then you are good. Then you deserve to spend your money on whatever you want—maybe even an entire social media company, right? [laugh]
Our culture says, work hard, then play. Work, work, work, earn, earn, earn, and only when you have achieved—on your own, we imagine—success, then you can do as you like with your money. This whole narrative depends on us imagining that each of us individually through hard work creates success—on our own, by ourselves.
When Obama says, “You didn’t build that,” he makes visible what this whole way of seeing the world really wants to forget and deny and ignore, which is that we are actually all in this together. We are co-creating. We are sharing. No person is doing anything alone ever. We are never alone. We are always, always connected.
Now, am I sitting here recording a podcast by myself? Apparently, yes. But I’m using tools designed and made and packaged and mailed and delivered and set up by other people. Other people are taking this recording, and bringing it to you. And without you, there’s no podcast.
Just like without all of the books and articles that I’ve read, there’s no historical background. Without the language that I’ve learned and you’ve also learned, the language that we share, there is no podcast. We are all in this together.
This is something that Martin Luther King Jr. points out in his criticism of Weber, and it is like so deliciously succinct, I want to share it with you here. This is what Martin Luther King Jr. says. “We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves, and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both Black and white, here and abroad.”
Um, yes, and—little feminist addition—capitalism also depends on the invisibility of caregiving work. Capitalism is built on having certain kinds of labors not count: caregiving labors, householding labors, domestic labors, basically. Capitalism depends on all of those just somehow magically being taken care of so that the various labors our culture has decided count, right, the ones that are paid, the ones that contribute to the GDP, so that those can continue.
I remember hearing once a woman say, “Yeah, my husband said, ‘I make the money, and you spend it.’” She was a work-at-home mom. I love to say “work-at-home” because “stay-at-home” is just like [laugh]—it’s not really “staying” when you are caring for children, and you are caring for a home and all that goes into householding, right?
But that idea—“I make the money because my labor counts because there’s a dollar amount associated to it, and you spend it”—there is a deeply fucked up, deeply erroneous, deeply exploitative logic present here. And, again, it is one that is very individualistic, and denies the co-creativity, right?
The roads and bridges do not repair themselves. The toilets and showers don’t clean themselves. The meals don’t cook themselves. The children don’t raise themselves. The fields do not maintain themselves. The cotton never picked itself.
But Calvinist-Protestant work ethic would pretend that it was so and/or would conscript all of these exploited people into the same logic, right, saying, “Hey, you might be saved, enslaved person, woman, but the way we know is that you are diligent, disciplined, and frugal.” Right?
And, so, my friends, please see how those values—individual diligence; discipline; following the rules; sticking to the system; and frugality, spending as little as possible—please see how those actually support a status quo in which people with privilege, people for whom it is easy to pretend that they are doing it alone, right [laugh], because those labors that don’t count are so hidden, and because they are so convinced of their own worthiness of salvation, see how those values, that ethic that is so deeply ingrained in us, supports the worst version of capitalism.
OK. Let’s make really clear now, what does all of this have to do with you and I opening up to receive support? And I do want to pause here for a co-creative moment to say that my understanding of these relationships was so profoundly enabled by a book written by Brigid Schulte. It came out several years ago. It’s called Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play when no one has the time.
I super, super recommend this book to you. Apparently, she’s working on another book about gender equity and overwork, overwhelm, burnout. I’m super excited for that.
OK. So, with that said, let’s look at why is it so difficult, so scary to open up to receiving support? So, number one, because of this deeply ingrained ethic of diligence and discipline, we imagine that easing up, choosing something easier is profoundly dangerous, and not only dangerous but it’s like unethical.
Again, this is so twisted around when you understand the origins of it. But it’s this idea that, like, you should be able to do this yourself. And if you can’t figure out how to do it yourself, meaning, if you can’t work hard enough or work smart enough—P.S. thank you, Benjamin Franklin for adding that to the culture [laugh], right?
He had this whole, like, “If you can optimize your life, you can do anything.” Sound familiar? [laugh] Go to the self-help section of a bookstore, and you will find lots and lots of, “If you can optimize your life, you can do anything.” Right?
So, easing up, meaning, getting some help at home, getting some help, some mentoring, some coaching, some guidance, receiving help, an assistant, someone to take some of the stuff that you’re really just not that good at off of your plate, it’s not only dangerous and kind of proof of your badness, your unworthiness [laugh], right, it is also not something you get to do until you have earned it. Right? You cannot have support until you have earned it.
And what does this look like? This looks like, “Well, I’d love to hire a coach to help me grow my business. But I don’t get to hire the coach until I’ve worked on my own, by myself, hard enough to earn the money to then merit hiring the coach.” Right? It’s this idea that I have to do it alone. I have to achieve some kind of success on my own, and only then am I allowed to receive support.
And, again [laugh], there’s also this individualistic streak that says, “Actually, receiving support should not even be necessary. I shouldn’t have to be needing help. I should be able to do it all by myself.” Right? See if any of these sound familiar.
You know, if I could just get a good system going in the household, if I could just parent my kids to help with the chores and clean up after themselves, then I wouldn’t need any help keeping my home clean. Right? Oh, if I could just be disciplined enough to wake up really early to go exercise, then I wouldn’t need to hire a personal trainer to show up for. Right?
We do have this logic deeply embedded in the dominant culture that says, “Yeah, you should totally be able to do this all alone. And, in fact, the more you do alone, the better you are as a person.” It’s like receiving support is evidence of your weakness. Receiving support is selfish to the point of unethical.
And, my friends, just think about this for a moment. Given what we know about the effects of the Protestant work ethic in capitalism over the last handful of centuries, this makes no sense. This logic depends on us looking out only for ourselves, and ignoring and denying that we are never doing anything by ourselves.
So, a spell for receiving support looks like this. We are all in this together. We cannot do it alone. We are all in this together. We cannot do it alone—because what really happens when we acknowledge that is the ease that comes from co-creativity, is a sharing of resources, is a turning away from overwork and individual suffering, and toward co-creativity and sharing of success.
So, I’d love to tell you a very practical way that this has manifested for me recently, and it is in hiring help with my householding. Now, I have been my entire adult life deeply resistant to the idea of getting help cleaning my house. Why? Because I’ve believed all this shit that I’ve been talking about in this episode.
I should be able to do this. I should be able to figure it out. The messiness, the dust bunnies, it’s just proof of my badness, my laziness, right? That’s what the Protestant work ethic wants you to believe. If you can’t do this, there is something wrong with you, right?
And then when we add on the way that our modern capitalism exploits to the point of invisibility labors like housecleaning, and we add that into the mix [laugh], the gender aspects of it, the not-counting of household work as work, it’s no wonder that I wasn’t acknowledging actually how much time it requires and, additionally, how much skill is involved. I cringe a little bit as I say this but, like, I am not an efficient cleaner, and I don’t really know how to clean well. Like, I never learned that.
It is a practiced skill. I remember my friend Emma saying this to me actually. She hired some help with cleaning, and she said, “You know, when these cleaners leave, the house is cleaner than I ever could have imagined. It’s clean in a way that I don’t know how to do.”
And, again, this is part of that exploitative logic, is sort of saying that, like, ugh, anyone can do that work. No, I assure you [laugh], some people are much better at it than other people. Right?
So, finally, I got some help with my housecleaning. I found Maria. She is so incredible, and we have a beautifully co-creative relationship. She has a small business, and I am an ideal client of hers. Right? I love to show up in a way that is very generous and very flexible and very appreciative of the contribution that she makes to my life and my household. I’m a client of her small business, and I want her to succeed.
And, so, I show up in a way that says, “Hey, I honor and value you and your contribution. Thank you so much in co-creating success with me.” Like, I get to contribute to yours, and you are definitely contributing to mine. We are all in this together. We cannot do it alone.”
And that is the world that I want to live in, and I believe that might be the world that you also want to live in, a world in which we acknowledge we’re all in this together, and we can’t do this alone; in a world in which we are working toward a circulating of resources rather than a hoarding of resources; a sharing of success rather than a stepping on the backs and shoulders of people on our way to success. Yeah?
OK. So, that’s one way of opening up to receive support. Here’s the other way I’ve opened up to receive support—in receiving coaching. This has been so important, and what I want you to know—and I’ve said this, I’ve told this story before on the podcast—but what I want you to know is that when I invested in coaching, I had not already accumulated the money. I had to go find it. I had to borrow. I had to take a real chance.
But, in that moment, I knew that I couldn’t do it alone. I knew that I needed somebody asking me hard questions, loving me, supporting me, cheering me on in my corner, but also helping me to see some of the assumptions I was making that were holding me back. And, again, this was very, very scary to ask for support because—Calvinist-Protestant work ethic—frugality.
No, no, no, no, that’s not the way it works at all. We don’t spend any funds that aren’t necessary and, P.S., almost no help is necessary because we are all in this alone—is what that ethic says. And, so, to say, “OK, I haven’t, quote, unquote, earned it yet, but I know that for me to be able to step into this next phase fully, and with so much less fear and suffering, I need help.” Right? It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that that makes so many people think, “Oh, this is so selfish. Getting this kind of help, spending money on my support is so selfish.”
But, again, it’s a twist of that logic that’s telling you, “You must defer ease.” Right? Ease comes when you’re dead and in heaven because you’ve worked hard enough. Ease comes when you’re retired because you’ve worked hard enough. Except that we can never ever, ever seem to work hard enough, and so ease never comes, unless we choose it; unless we choose other values.
We choose the values that Barack Obama was pointing toward in 2012: co-creativity; a culture that acknowledges that we’re all in this together; shared resources that benefit everyone; an acknowledgement that the culture we have is exploitative; that it devalues and discounts the work of so many people. And that since we’re all in this together, since none of us can do it alone, we all do better when we take care of one another, when we support one another.
When I invest in support for me, for my household, for my mindset and my business growth, what I am doing is entering into the circulatory flow of resources. I don’t actually need to hoard them, or I don’t need to put them into the places that the status quo prefers that I put them. Right?
Where does the status quo think my money should go? It should go into real estate that largely supports the status quo, into stock markets that largely support the status quo, into sanctioned education that largely supports the status quo. Right?
But when I say, “No, I actually want to invest in health and support and wellness, I want to take my monies, and I want to circulate them in communities that are dedicated to all of us helping one another, I want to acknowledge in investing this money here and now, I am helping to create the world that I want to live in,” what happens when I do this is I do find more abundance—of course I do. I feel better. And, my friend, I want this for you too.
So, take a moment and think about it. Where are you sick and tired—literally sick and tired—of doing it alone? Where are you deferring investing in yourself, thinking, “I have to earn it first, and then I can get the help”? Where are you discounting or denying some of the labors that are rendered invisible in our culture?
And how can you begin to step more fully into what I think is a much more generous and generative reality, the reality in which we declare we are all in this together? We cannot do it alone. Let me step into a circulation of support, a circulation of resources. Let me not wait to see if I’ve ever done enough to deserve to feel good, and let me instead step into goodness right now.
Whew. OK. That was a word and then some. I hope that you found it inspiring. This is where I want to say, how is this episode getting to you? Well, my amazing producer, K.O., is going to sit with it, and he’s going to refine it, and he’s going to make it sound beautiful in your ears.
K.O. then sends the recording to Sara. Sara Baum from Sharp Copy Transcription is the person who transcribes the episodes. I don’t use a bot auto program to transcribe. That’s why they are so beautiful and joyful to read. This creates so much ease in my business, and hopefully for you if you like to read the episodes rather than listen to them.
So, Sara transcribes the episode, and then Sam—my incredible co-creator in all things business—Sam is going to make a beautiful thumbnail. That thumbnail is going to include a picture that has been taken by a talented photographer. It may have been Shannon Acton. It may have been Monique Floyd. It may have been Lesley Whitehead. But you’re going to see a photo that some skilled photographer took.
She’s going to put it all on a website that is created and hosted through Squarespace, which I’m sure has many, many creators there, right, and then comes to you through a device that is also co-created by so many people. That’s the reality of this.
Our culture prefers to say, oh, my gosh, Natalie Miller, she has an amazing podcast. It’s hers. But it’s not mine; it’s ours. It’s ours. Let’s step into that world. Let’s build that world together. Thank you so much for listening. Bye for now.
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.
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