SUMMARY KEYWORDS

drinking, moms, fair play, partner, unicorn space, blueberries breakdown, alcohol, a bottle of wine, reward, mommy juice, hedonic pursuits, guilty, guilt, shame, emotional eating, doom scrolling, space, time, creativity, look at the world through behavior change, start with the curiosity sobriety, start with the connection piece, start with the completion, home, organization, pride, joy, women are quitting drinking, women, early sobriety, anchor activities, anchor activity, practice, value, values, change, road map, cards, beauty, pleasure, adventure, presence, being present with myself, pleasure, accountability partner, in your own life, good life, health, family, unpaid labor is more than a full time job, successful, communication, systems, boundaries, boundary, thrive, trust, cognitive labor, conception, planning, execution, key insight, stop drinking, lost identity, stopping drinking, quitting drinking, sober, alcohol-free, stopped drinking, mental health, appropriate emotions, appropriate times, ability and strength to weather those emotions, dopamine, sober curious, triggering, antidote, burnout, building consistency, mentally healthy, support

SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson + Eve Rodsky

00:02

Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a bus, how to sit with your emotions, when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

 

Hi there.

Today, we are talking about

fair play

and if you are a working woman, a working mom who feels like you are taking on the bulk of the stress and the workload in your marriage and your life, this conversation is for you.

 

[00:01:38]

My guest is Eve Rodsky. She’s the author of Fair Play, and she transformed a blueberries breakdown into a catalyst for social change when she applied her Harvard trained background in organizational management to ask the simple yet profound question, what would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations? Her New York Times bestselling book, and Reese’s book, Club pick fair play a gamified life management system that helps partners rebalance their domestic workload and reimagine their relationship has elevated the cultural conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care.

 

[00:02:24]

In her highly anticipated follow-up, Find Your Unicorn Space, reclaiming your creative life in a too busy world. Rodsky explores the cross section between the science of creativity, productivity, and resilience.

 

Eve, welcome. I’m so excited to have you here.

Thank you for having me, Casey.

I’m so happy to be here and we talked a tiny bit just before you jumped on and one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is I think the issues you were describing affect so many women with kids.

[00:03:00]

And we all have the same experience, but we don’t have the data to show that we are not crazy or overreacting. We don’t have the tools to change the way our lives are set up.

Absolutely. I think that’s why you’re doing really important work, Casey. And thank you to your listeners for having me.

[00:03:26]

Yes, I think I did feel like I was crazy. You use the word blueberries breakdown in my bio, which is how I started this work, right? I didn’t set out Casey to be an expert on the gender division of labor that was not on my 3rd grade. What do you want to be when you grew up board? It wasn’t what I said in law school when they asked me what I want to do with my law degree.

[00:03:50]

In fact, I probably said I wanted to be Senator of New York, President of the United States, a Nick City dancer. There was a time in my life where I thought I would be smashing glass ceilings, you know, sort of one by one by one. But if you sort of cut to my life ten years later, where I think maybe a lot of your audience lives in that space. The only thing I could tell you, I was smashing, Casey, was, you know, peas. Peas for my toddler, Zach, you know, while trying to navigate a return to work while I had a newborn baby at home, while I was trying to race to get that toddler or two.

A toddler transition program, which in America, you know, those programs last like an hour and they cost all of our money trying to return newborn baby gifts, trying to continue to mark-up contracts because I’m a Lawyer by trade on my lap racing around the city.

[00:04:45]

That was the time in my life where I realized that the life I had been given or had dreamed of all those smashing of glass ceilings really were, it was a lie.

And then, why that blueberries breakdown is, you know, where I thought I was crazy was on top of that. My husband Seth sends me a text that while I’m in the car with those newborn baby gifts and a breast pump and a diaper bag and that client contract in my lap.

 

[00:05:13]

And he sends me a text that said, I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries. And, you know, I felt crazy that day because This text that, you know, he looked at as sort of a one of many grocery texts, you know, was for me the end of my marriage. We were still together, but spoiler alert, but at that time I had to stop and pull over.

[00:05:38]

I felt like I’d been punched in the chest by this idea that I was shouldering two thirds or more of what it took to run our home and family. A statistic I was living at the time, but didn’t even know. And so, and I was the fulfiller of his smoothie needs. That was painful. But I think that if I had known that this was a systemic problem and not just an Eve problem.

[00:06:04]

My life would have been better just with that knowledge. And so, I resolved after that day really never to keep what was happening to me and my partner inside because a lot of people are afraid to talk about their partners. They say, Oh, my partner did this X, Y, Z to me, but he’s a great. Partner. I’m not here to say that.

[00:06:22]

I’m here to say that the reality is women are shouldering too much and often it’s at the expense of our leisure time because we guard the times of our partners and it’s killing us. It’s killing us mentally. It’s killing us physically.

Yeah, and the rage that you experience or the resentment or the frustration is real.

[00:06:44]

And when I was reading your book and we’ll talk about it, there were so many examples or stories that you were sharing from the women, you know, small things like the smoothie thing or what feels like small things that was, you know, sort of PTSD bringing me back to how incredibly at heart.

Heart. It was with little kids. And I know that how I dealt with it was to come home and drink a bottle of wine because that was something that I could do. That was like a quote unquote “reward” that allowed me to multitask. Right? You can drink. Well. You know, making dinner and doing the laundry and playing Candyland or Legos or whatever it is.

 

[00:07:27]

And a lot of times I was really angry at my husband. And so by drinking, it allowed me to numb out and check out and also give me that dopamine rush, you know, until the next day when all the anxiety and depression comes back. Absolutely. I mean, think about it. What do we really have to look forward to?

 

[00:07:48]

You know, a bottle of wine, a glass of wine, that is something to look forward to. I mean, if it wasn’t a real issue, right, we wouldn’t be calling it mommy juice. I think that it’s very valid to have what we call in the fair play world, Hedonic Pursuits because really what women are telling me now that I’ve been doing this work for over 10 years is it’s, it’s pretty dire out there.

 

[00:08:11]

Casey, I’ll just give you another quick story because I think it sort of will be relatable, probably to a lot of your listeners, but one of the reasons that I was able to embark on this work was because I realized it wasn’t just happening to me. And remember, this was happening. I’m surprised you didn’t get Blueberry’s text was in 2011.

[00:08:29]

There was no Casey Davidson or podcasts where I could listen and hear what was happening to other women. There was just early Facebook. We didn’t have TikTok back then, or even Instagram. So, what we had was what to expect when you’re expecting. And all I knew about having a child was that my child would be the size of a jelly bean. Or a watermelon or whatever was in those books that were extremely unhelpful.

But what, what was happening at the time too was because I think I was also into hedonic pursuits. They’re also, they can be somewhat isolating too, even though you do have time out with friends. A lot of the drinking I was doing or hedonic pursuits, like doom scrolling or emotional eating, they were sort of happening alone, right?

 

[00:09:18]

At night, like you said, when, when your child is and you’re still in their bed at 10PM because they won’t go to sleep. You know, or you’re just trying to navigate, right? Through to the next day where you have a million things on your plate to do like planning for, you can have a glass of wine while you’re planning for summer camp and doing, you know, and folding laundry at midnight after your partner has gone to bed.

[00:09:40]

So, for me, it was seeing since I didn’t have social media or this type of podcast. I talk about in Fair Play a really poignant day where I went on a breast cancer march for a friend who had been recently diagnosed with 10 women who I thought had it all together. They have it all together. They were, you know, the head of a stroke and trauma for a big hospital and an award winning producer.

[00:10:04]

And we went to honor our friend, and what I remember distinctly about this day was that we were all in pink. That was fun. We all had glitter on us. We were all carrying signs that said not just a female problem for, you know, breast cancer awareness, but the thing that stood out the most for me was around noon, on the Saturday, was the amount of silence all of a sudden and silos that we went into because every woman around noon started to use their phone and started to text.

[00:10:33]

So, we had this beautiful rate. Camaraderie until around noon where I saw all these women just texting and I’m looking over their shoulder. What are you texting? What is happening here? And what I realized was it was the same as the blueberries, Casey. There were these strong powerful women who were answering texts from their partners. Not all of them men, but most of them were, that said things like,

When are you coming home from the parade?

You left me with too much to do.

What’s the address of the birthday party?

Where is Hudson’s soccer bag?

My favorite was my friend Kate’s husband who texted her.

Do the kids need to eat lunch?

And so, that day was a big change in my life because I realized that not only was I not alone, and that, these women also didn’t have it together, but I had them help me count up what was happening to us.

[00:11:24]

And so, none of them stayed with me for lunch. They all felt too guilty, and they left to find Hudson’s Soccer Bag, and to bring a perfectly wrapped gift to a birthday party; to feed their kids lunch. Because their partners, couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t, and then the guilt and shame got too much.

 

[00:11:41]

But what they did for me was they helped me count up what was happening, and we had 30 phone calls. And 46 texts for 10 women over 30 minutes, Casey. So, don’t tell me that numbing yourself through that would not be your appropriate response. Don’t fucking tell me, productivity expert, that I should be getting up at 3am to get my me time in.

[00:12:05]

Don’t fucking tell me that I should be doing 10,000 million creative pursuits or exercising for my osteoporosis when I literally can’t have a second. Without somebody putting the mental load on me.

So, I just want to say that, I think hedonic pursuits again, whether it’s the emotional eating the doom scrolling, the mommy juice culture, they are, it’s all a natural response to what’s happening to us.

 

[00:12:34]

And because how else can we fucking cope? It’s like a symptom of the problem that. Then becomes the problem because the substance is addictive, but you wrote in that same thing that that your husband Texted or called you about this like I literally wrote next to it WTF That you know, where’s Ben’s outfit you picked out?

[00:12:57]

He doesn’t have any pants, but then after that he said well I guess we’re not going to go to the park because you didn’t leave me any clothes. Like, correct. What the fuck? And so, I think that type of rage was what let me on a path. It led me on a path to put my researcher hat on Casey, because I’m not a Therapist. I’m a Lawyer. And why I think that’s important is because we work with lots of therapists, but what is different about being a lawyer was that we are trained to look at the world through behavior change.

[00:13:35]

Behavior design, so you can ask 10, 000 people to stop at a stop sign politely, but the way you’re really going to get them to stop at a stop sign is if you pass a law. And so as somebody from my day job who works for families that look like the HBO show Succession, and your listeners should feel bad for me.

What I did for those families, as a lawyer is, I use rules to bring grace and humor and generosity to these family organizations, whether they were their foundations or their family businesses. And so, what happened to me was, I started to realize that if I could handle these very difficult families. Through 50 years of organizational management expertise, you know, that I was leaning off, of and governance, why couldn’t I start to look at the home, my home as an organization?

[00:14:26]

And so asking that question, what if we treated our homes? As our most important organization allowed me to tackle this problem. I think that what the fuck because we all are going to have that at some point where if you’re married to a man the gender roles and patriarchy are going to lead you to a what the fuck moment at some point.

[00:14:48]

Yeah. It was allowing me to look at it through a behavior design lens. If I want to stay with this person, if I still care about Seth, what would my life look like if it was run as a much more efficient organization where I wasn’t the only CEO? And that’s really what Fair Play led me down. It led me down an understanding of what could be different.

 

[00:15:09]

And I will say, you know, if you cut to my life 10 years later, now it really is, it’s different. It’s very different, Casey. It is a life where I have space and time and creativity and what we call you hedonic pursuits time. You know, what I call, unicorn space. We’ll talk about that, which is to me, the antidote to some of these heat and hedonic pursuits that we think are going to make us have that great dopamine, but it’s very short living and acting dopamine where these hedonic pursuits we’ll talk about allow you to do amazing things. Like a podcast, which you invest in and it’s hard, but you do it because, you know, at the end of the day, It feels like, I can’t believe I just did that.

 

[00:15:47]

And you bring that pride and that joy back into your life. But I would say that the problem with productivity experts is that they try to say, start a podcast first without recognizing Fair Play. If you don’t recognize the cognitive labor, the pain that goes around with this cognitive labor and the assumptions that it’s going to fall on women, then you cannot get to unlock what we’re talking about, which is this greater, more creative and sort of beautiful life.

 

[00:16:15]

On 1 of the things that I thought was validating in the book, and that I think we’ve all experienced, but was reading some of the research and some of the statistics over the broader population. And you mentioned sort of the mental organization and load, but it’s physical too, right?

So you, this blew my mind, although I totally believe it, because I’ve seen it, not just me, my friends as well, that even for guys who sort of had the same amount of workload, like split it pretty evenly prior to having kids. They actually decreased the amount of work they did after having children. When there was so much more work to do. Like, can you tell us a little bit about that? Cause that’s insane to me.

 

[00:17:00]

Yeah. Yeah. Men did less, less after kids. So why do I think that happens? Well, one woman Casey said to me with fair play taught her was that she didn’t have a magical vagina that was spread in her ear.

 

[00:17:19]

What her husband’s mother wanted for Christmas. I think that’s it. If you, if that’s what your listeners come away with, that this is work and not magical vaginas, I think we’ve done our job.

So, what happens? Well, what happens is that couples tend to become more conservative. And then, they tend to what we call sort of specialize.

[00:17:36]

So, we get into these labor divisions where because women are paid less because of the patriarchy and the motherhood penalty that eventually will become mothers, a lot of women decide to sort of quote unquote “lead into their partner’s careers”. And so, they become a secondary earner. So, what that also means is that, they’re the 1 there for when a child is sick, you know, if the school calls and the child is sick, you call the mother and then becomes this vicious cycle.

[00:18:03]

Where we start to look at men and their value to the home as paid value and women are shouldering everything else. So, those types of segmentation more conservative assumptions seep in typically to couples who are more equal after children come along. And that’s why for me, what fair play does is, it’s not telling you how to live your life, but what it’s doing, because it’s a metaphor. It’s a book, but it’s also 100 cards.

 

[00:18:33]

As you see, right? There’s an actual 100 cards. We have a visual on you can link to our show notes online. We have a deck of cards to show you that the amount of labor, but why we think that’s so important is because. If you don’t plan like you would in the workplace for this increase in labor after kids, then, and you use the three most toxic words that couples can use, which is we’re going to figure it out.

[00:19:02]

If you think you’re going to figure it out, what ends up happening is that women. What we’ve now seen because we’ve shouldered this work for so long, but we’ve now the Fair Play Policy Institute. Our nonprofit has actually studied this. What we see is that over time, unpaid labor is more than a full time job.

 

[00:19:22]

It’s a 24 hour job and because we didn’t sign up for it, because we said we were going to figure it out. We didn’t have any actual conversations about it and we breached our boundaries. We’re doing the 3 things that actually make organizations Fail.

So, the 3 things you need for an organization to be successful, Casey, are boundaries, systems, and communication.

 

[00:19:46]

What happens when you say, we’re going to figure it out, is that you end up with none. You end up with zero boundaries, zero systems and zero communication. And that’s where ultimately you lose the 2 most important things in organization needs to thrive and that’s accountability and trust. So, if you don’t have accountability, then you don’t have trust and that’s what we start to see.

 

[00:20:09]

Well, and the 1 thing I wanted to mention just from my personal experience and what I’ve seen amongst my friends is that. Even when the woman earns more, because I was the primary breadwinner, as well as a bunch of my friends where I met them all in career settings even as the primary breadwinner, women took on the role of doing, you know, significantly more with the household. And amazingly, like, also being the one to be on call when the kid was sick and also leaving work to come home, despite the fact that they were making more money and contributing more in paid labor than their spouse.

[00:20:51]

So, I mean, I think it’s also a universal problem. And I, I totally am excited to get into the solution because another stat you had was that many women had increased their workload by 21 hours per week after becoming parents, which is insanity to me.

Well, yeah, if you think of a full time work week as 40 hours, can you imagine increasing your work by 20?

[00:21:17]

I mean, it’s built in burnout and I think it’s, it’s very important for people to understand that. This is not an economic problem. This is an assumption problem based on gender. Because as Casey, you just said, as women make more money, we are consistently seeing in our research that they still shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family.

[00:21:41]

And so, there is actually some more help with what we call execution, but there is less help with what we call the cognitive labor – the conception and planning, and that actually became the key insight Casey for how if you look at boundary systems and communication as a solution, which it is for an individual home, obviously paid leave can help obviously more affordable housing, which we’re also working on, but in the individual level, we really need to see.

 

[00:22:07]

A change in women’s boundaries, how they hold their boundaries, systems and communication. And yes, it’s us, the oppressed, who has to do this start and initiate this work, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t help us in the long run. When you’re in the work, the system of fair plays for both partners. But I think what’s really important was that you need a key insight. And for me, I couldn’t get a key insight because what was happening when I was asking people about their work at home, Casey, people were saying we both handle it. But, but I know for a fact that women were the ones who were resentful and feeling burnt out. So, when I said like who does groceries in your home or who takes the kids to school or who does the medical appointments, I’d hear from a lot of couples, well, we both handle that.

 

[00:22:57]

So, really the big life changing insight. A fair play, which is the solution, which is actually not rocket science. It happens in our workplace all the time was that that you have to keep work together, that an ownership mindset and not a helper mindset was the way to go. And the way I got to this insight was asking people in 16 countries, how does mustard get in your refrigerator?

 

[00:23:23]

And once you realize Casey, that it didn’t matter which country I was in, whether it was mainland China or the Nordic countries or the U. S. or South America that women married to men are the ones that notice their 2nd son. Johnny likes yellow mustard with his protein. Otherwise he chokes. He won’t eat it.

[00:23:44]

That conception piece is done by women. Then women are the ones who monitor the mustard for when it runs low and get stakeholder buy in. They didn’t say that, but that’s I was listening for it. They get stakeholder buying for what their family needs. And that’s planning. And the reason why they were saying both was often their partner would go to the store to buy the yellow mustard, but because he’s bringing home spicy Dijon every fucking time, then that those 2 things I talked about earlier, accountability and trust are eroded because women said to me, you want me to trust my living will to this loser?

[00:24:19]

He can’t even bring home the right type of mustard. And so, then, to live in that type of oppressive system, we start to say to ourselves the most toxic thing we can say besides figure it out, which is well, and the time it takes me to tell Seth what to do. I should just do it myself. That is a terrible, terrible present bias issue.

[00:24:40]

We never want to value the present over the future. We often do as humans. Doing it now does not save you the hours and hours and hours of work down the line. And so, what I ask for people is to say to themselves, recognize that it may sound different than you’ve done it. It may sound like my partner will never do this.

[00:25:00]

But recognize that even my Aunt Marianne, Casey. Her Mahjong group practices the ownership mindset. If you don’t bring snack twice to the group, you’re out, without reminders. And the workplace, we have something called the DRI, the Directly Responsible Individual. We use this terminology of owning the conception, planning and execution everywhere.

[00:25:23]

I would not be working for Casey as her producer if I walked in and said, Hey Casey, what are we doing today? I’m just going to wait here to tell me what to do. It wouldn’t happen. So I think we all have to recognize that the ownership mindset is really the only way to go. It’s just very, very painful to get there.

[00:25:40]

If you’ve had a partner that hasn’t bought in like I and it’s like mine. The idea too of your husband, quote unquote, helping, or even if they go to the grocery store, you know, they’ll be well, my husband will be like, oh, I’d be like, great. And he can you pick up a couple of dinners? And he was like, yeah, which ones?

[00:26:00]

And I’m like, you figure it out. Do I ever go to the grocery store and ask you to tell, you know, it’s just even the assumption that they’ll walk in unless they’re told specifically that they should, it. Pick up dinner or buy something or cook. Like, it’s just assumed there will be food in the house and there will be dinner on the table.

[00:26:21]

What’s for dinner? Is like, you know, literally we have. I knew we were talking to you and I mean, I think what’s for dinner was a term that people reported was. One of the most likely to make them, make them want to make them want to drink when they would get that text or phone call from their partner.

[00:26:39]

So, it’s, it’s mind numbing. It’s work that never ends. We call it the daily grinds because men are more likely to do things they can do at their own timetable, like mowing the lawn, whereas women are the ones who have to do the daily grinds, things they can’t do at their own timetable, like picking up your child when they’re sick from school or groceries or meal prep because as much as you know, I’d love to say, I can put off feeding my child till next Saturday like the lawn.

It doesn’t work that way. Right? Children need to be fed between usually 7 and 5 and 7 for dinner, not just once a week. So, the work that is the daily grinds that never ends is the work that is falling on women.

[00:27:23]

And that cognitive labor, the conception and planning. Spoiler alert. We just did a big study. 30 of the fair play cards out of the 100, the ones that are considered a lot of the daily grinds like dishes, transporting kids to school, you know, um, in-laws management. Yes, you know, teacher communication for your children you know, food, all three meals during the week, plus the weekend meals, on and on, and what we found was in every single instance, Casey, women were shouldering themselves.

 

[00:27:56]

The cognitive labor, the conception and plan. And they weren’t getting that much help with execution, but that’s where there was a little bit of help. And unfortunately, the more women reported doing the C and P of the E, the CPE, the C and P. They, the more that they reported doing that work, that was the work, not the execution.

 

[00:28:17]

The cognitive labor was the 1 that was related to their personal and their personal burnout scores.

 

One example that I just remembered that literally drove me absolutely insane is, my husband is an educator. He doesn’t really work during the summer for, he’s a Principal now. He was a teacher for years.

[00:28:37]

When he was a teacher, he didn’t work at all, but he’s got a full month off pretty much in the summer and yet in February, when my kids were little still now, but especially when they were little and I worked full time, I planned out camps for every single month.

So, yeah. Week that they were going to be home and also making sure is there before school care is there after school care and I would block off my calendar if it wasn’t full day like is today a camp that it’s a 9 a.m. drop off and a 1 p. m. pickup or is it a noon drop off and a 4 p. m. pickup whatever it was and I did that.

And planned it, signed them up, put it in a spreadsheet, had all the details, and even started putting drop offs and pickups on my husband’s calendar until he told me that it annoyed him when I would put things on his calendar, and I was like, I’m going to fucking kill you.

[00:29:29]

But not only that, I had one conference during the summer. And so, I put it on my calendar to and honestly, I did most of the drop offs and pickups anyway, because when he wasn’t working, you know, apparently he liked to go fishing or do other. He didn’t like to be tied to the daily schedule, which is adorable, but I went away for a conference and he literally said to me.

[00:29:52]

Why did you sign them up for half day camp when you knew you weren’t going to be here? And I was just like, I’m going to, but I was the rage.

Yes. Yes. And it’s such rage because there’s so many assumptions in that, right? That this person is, is again, not, not recognizing. And it’s so painful because at the end of the day, the presenting problem is not the real problem as a mediator.

[00:30:19]

We say that a lot, Casey, right? The presenting problem. Is not a scheduling issue around camp. The presenting problem for me was not the blueberries. It was the assumption that I was going to do it because of my gender. I mean, that is so painful when you think that you have a progressive partner or somebody who’s a feminist.

[00:30:39]

And then, not only that. But it’s, it’s the opportunity costs of that time. So, I think the thing that really is important for your listeners to understand is that we have to become complicit in our own oppression. I never blame women for this, but we, we, we are living in these systems. So how do we do that?

[00:30:58]

Well, we do that because as a whole, as a society, we’ve been told and men have been told us to hence. Your partner, protecting his own time, which I don’t blame him for because society has told him if I could get away with it. Exactly, right.

Since they’ve been born. Men were taught that their time is diamonds, it’s finite, it’s meant to be protected, whereas women were taught that our time is infinite, like sand, and that it’s worthless and it’s meant to be given away for free, and so I think that’s the big underlying issue, and that’s why I call that a boundary.

 

[00:31:35]

The system, the CPE, is very easy. It’s something we do in the workplace. I hand you the system. I give you all the communication tools. But if you’re not going to recognize that this is so triggering for women because of the boundaries that it makes us breach, then we’re never going to get to the table.

 

[00:31:54]

Because we’re going to give ourselves too many excuses. My partner is better at focusing on one task at a time, and the time it takes me to tell him what to do, I should do it myself. He’ll never do it.

 

You know, there’s so many reasons we have to give ourselves these excuses because we’ve been conditioned to value and hold men’s time as if it’s more important and more valuable than our time.

 

[00:32:14]

And if people don’t believe me, you just have to look at health systems, Casey.

In 2024, there were still health systems in the U. S. calling breastfeeding free when it’s an 1800 hour a year job. We see when women enter male professions, the salaries go down. So it’s not us.

 

You know, our schools, no matter how much you tell them to call your partner, we’ll call you first.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson 

Hi there. If you’re listening to this episode, and have been trying to take a break from drinking, but keep starting and stopping and starting again, I want to invite you to take a look at my on demand coaching course, The Sobriety Starter Kit®.

 

The Sobriety Starter Kit® is an online self study sober coaching course that will help you quit drinking and build a life you love without alcohol without white knuckling it or hating the process. The course includes the exact step by step coaching framework I work through with my private coaching clients, but at a much more affordable price than one on one coaching. And the sobriety starter kit is ready, waiting and available to support you anytime you need it. And when it fits into your schedule. You don’t need to work your life around group meetings or classes at a specific day or time.

This course is not a 30 day challenge, or a one day at a time approach. Instead, it’s a step by step formula for changing your relationship with alcohol. The course will help you turn the decision to stop drinking, from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

You will sleep better and have more energy, you’ll look better and feel better. You’ll have more patience and less anxiety. And with my approach, you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go to www.sobrietystarterkit.com. You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course. 

 

[00:32:35]

Your in-laws will ask you, what you want to do for Thanksgiving? It just the whole, your entire society around you is conspiring to make you give away your time for free. And then, if you don’t do it, they get, your guilt and shame is piled on you on top. So, it’s a very, very hard thing to break out of.

 

[00:32:55]

Again, it’s why I wish I had a Casey Davidson podcast. I wish I had TikTok. I wish I had some Fair play, but I wish I had had somebody to tell me that this is normal. It’s not my fault. That, you know, I am not to blame for perpetuating these systems, that this cycle is very hard to break, and that this work requires a trigger warning.

 

I wish I knew all that.

Yeah, the trigger, the trigger warning is real, and some of it you were talking about all the different reasons that we are complicit. And I know one of the reasons that I was doing the camp thing, although this happened in every different way, including like what school you signed them up for, was I was like, I can’t physically keep my job if my kids are not in full day camp every single fucking day on a work day of summer.

[00:33:49]

So, I didn’t trust my husband to do it because it was so important to me or to get in on the right time. But at the same time, he was like, well, it’s not as important to me because I can be home, but he wouldn’t have. Like, I knew that, you know what I mean? So it’s like, And you knew it was going to fall on you.

 

[00:34:07]

That’s a thing you knew it was going to fall on you, right? This idea that what are you so worried about? You know, I think that’s another one that we hear all the time, right? Like my wife we in my research I heard so many times Casey my wife focuses on all these unnecessary things And so then what was really fun for me was I would pull out the fair play cards and I would say to men Oh, that’s cool.

[00:34:29]

Okay, so let’s talk about what you believe is unnecessary.

Okay. Childcare. So, quickly tell us what the cards are. Just an overview.

Yes, yes. So the cards are from my research, which started as, and I talk about this in fair play, is should I do spreadsheet? It is evolved into a system that is a metaphorical card game, but it’s also a physical card game where the goal of the game is to distribute cars based on your perceived fairness.

 

[00:34:58]

And you read deal cards that you don’t want to hold forever and there’s some maybe you do want to hold forever. Like, I like to hold gifts. I love to give gifts. I don’t mind that card. So I hold that card for pretty much probably forever unless it’s my own gift. But then, I also buy my own gifts, too. And that doesn’t bother me.

[00:35:14]

I buy my own gift.

Exactly.

So, I get what I want. Yep. So gifts are mine. But there are other cards like dishes and laundry that are absolutely going to have to be retail because no one’s going to want to hold those cards forever. And what’s so beautiful about them is they allow you to dispel some of these notions.

[00:35:31]

So again, my partner does all these unnecessary things. So, when you look at some of them, I’m not going to read all 100 Casey, but they’re childcare helpers. So, like hiring babysitters, if you want to go out cleaning the home, doing your dishes, taking out the garbage. Securing groceries, buying couches, like home furnishings a TV, home goods and supply, that would be toilet paper, home maintenance, fixing a leaky pipe before it breaks home purchase or mortgage or rental hosting other people, doing the laundry taking in the mail.

[00:36:10]

Providing meals for you and your family, including school lunches, weekend weekday dinners, weekend meals capturing memories and photos. So, that’s what I did. So, I went through all 100 cards and I would ask men what, what are these, are unnecessary and it would stop people in their tracks because there was nothing that they considered unnecessary.

[00:36:34]

They really didn’t and it would always end up being something like birthday party celebrations for their own kids, where maybe they thought their partner was going overboard because they were sending a paperless post and booking a, you know, a play, play party area as opposed to just doing a cake, you know, for the family.

[00:36:52]

But or spirituality, like somebody wanted a child to go to Sunday school and the other person didn’t but those are values, conversations, Casey, that I was surprised families weren’t having with each other. They weren’t unnecessary. Most of the things are necessary for all those cards. If you’re like, okay, this one’s unnecessary to me.

[00:37:15]

You’re like, great. I’ll take that 1, but that’s 1 out of 100 or 3 out of 100. Right, there’s so even if you want to have a partner, who’s really, you know, contrarian and they say nothing, you know, the basic is necessary. We still found that there’s 50 out of 100 cards that would be in play that basically you have to do.

[00:37:37]

If you have children and you don’t want Child Protective Services coming to your house. 50 of the 100. So there’s nobody out there that can argue to me, my wife, my partner is doing unnecessary things. It’s just a bullshit argument that people say. And often actually we see that argument a lot, Casey, in divorce.

[00:37:56]

Because what happens is that a lot fair play cards are great for if you’re divorcing too, because they’re great for, you know, setting up your, your, your divorce agreement, because so many people forget all these things and how much they cost, like, every 1 of these cards has a cost to them.

[00:38:14]

And unfortunately, a lot of the Systems now for divorce and alimony and child support are very basic like food for kids, but they’re not thinking about camp. They’re like, you said, you know, childcare in the summer. They’re not thinking about who is, you know, paying for a bar mitzvah. If I care about that spiritually. So, this is, these are good tools for lots of things, but I think what it helps you dispel as we said earlier, is that that these are somehow Frivolous, minted.

[00:38:44]

Gotcha, I’m here to ruin your life, partner. No. Or like, you’re uptight. Why are you so uptight? Why are you so These are our humanity, Casey. Just chill, right? Right.

So, you want to tell me memories and photos aren’t important? Like, what is the “why” of this? The why of this is because, I’ll let you know, Casey, I live in Southern California.

[00:39:07]

Every person who I know who lost their home, or who almost lost their home, told me the only thing that they were going to bring out of their home was a photo album. Don’t tell me this is unnecessary. This is our humanity. It’s the only thing you would bring out of your home in a fire. So, every single one of these has meaning to it.

[00:39:30]

And the problem is, we don’t have conversations about values and meaning and that gets back to the secret formula of the solution. Start where you are. I’m not here to tell you dive into the cards today. If you’re Casey and me, you know where we had somebody saying why are you scheduling summer camp for half days?

[00:39:52]

Or you have a surprise you didn’t get blueberries partner. In that case for Seth and me, I had, I could not work on my system because I didn’t have yet until I developed it. And I couldn’t work on my communication because I was so angry. Everything I said to Seth was sort of from a verbal assassin point of view.

[00:40:07]

Casey, I had to work on my boundaries. And then, when I finally did that and I said to myself, Oh my God, this is not about blueberries. This is about Seth and my value of how he views me and my time. And I was able to really sit down with him when our emotion was low and our cognition was high. And I was able to say, look Seth, you know, what I’ve noticed about our relationship is that you have three hours after our kids go to bed to work out, finish a PowerPoint deck and sit on the couch watching SportsCenter where I’m doing things in service of our home until my head hits the pillow and that’s still two hours after you go to bed and I’m just letting you know, I’m not going to live like that anymore that this is not going to, this is not working for me and I’m not going to live like that anymore.

 

[00:40:58]

And so, whatever the consequence of that was going to be Casey, I was willing to live with it set did step up and we started to really work through the fair play system on our communication on my boundaries. But it took that game changing. I love the way you said that because that to me is not Nagging or complaining or you need to help more or this isn’t unfair.

 

[00:41:24]

It’s just like, I am NOT going to live this way anymore. End of sentence, right? And then, the solution needs to come, but it’s not.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. There’s a lot of fear in there, Casey, because this is why I think this work requires a trigger warning. Because when I said that, all I could do is control myself and know that I was not going to live that way anymore that I wanted somebody who was going to be an owner, or I was going to do what a lot of women in my research told me change their lives, which was 3 words – court ordered custody.

[00:41:57]

And so, I didn’t know which way it was going to go. So I think that’s why it’s so painful, this work, because at some point, look, if you’re a new millennial couple or gen Z couple who I love, and we have thousands of them in fair play, and they are ready just to get to the system, it’s a really fun, easy way to divide up labor.

 

[00:42:18]

But so many of us have been so burned by trying to communicate about these issues and it not working or our boundaries being breached so many times that it is a more painful conversation. I just want to acknowledge that. And part of this today is a 101. We’re not here to tell you to do anything with this knowledge except for just to live with it and to know you’re not alone.

[00:42:41]

Just live with what you’re hearing and just know you’re not alone. That’s really this 101 of what today is.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, when you were talking about just sitting there and, you know, watching SportsCenter and stuff like that, like that used to drive me crazy in the mornings. Cause I would get up, get the coffee, bring it to my husband in bed. And he would sit there on his phone while I got both kids up, got my daughter dressed, did X, Y, Z, got the lunch, drove her to daycare. And he would literally get the coffee. Flip through his phone, get up after me, shower, and then leave and you know, like How can you get up 45 minutes after me and leave the house before me when I am not chilling?

[00:43:28]

But the one thing I want to say to anyone listening to this, who is drinking more than they want to or waking up feeling like shit is, sometimes your partner can turn that on you and can gaslight you and can use that to their advantage. And it’s, you know, we sometimes blame ourselves and, you know, I used to get really resentful and irritated and then I would drink and I would wake up and be like, what the hell is wrong with me?

 

[00:43:56]

Get my shit together. Sometimes it’s easier to be angry and turn that on yourself, then to stand up for yourself and put a boundary into place. And so, I got to tell you that stopping drinking, you know, for yourself makes it so much easier to put these boundaries into place and to advocate for yourself and to stand up for yourself.

 

[00:44:18]

So, just something to think about as well.

Yeah, I want to add. Can I add something to that case, which I think is so helpful?

So what, in researching my second book, which was about identity loss in women and, and is very adjacent to your work, because like I said, I was witnessing all of this pain because of this unpaid labor and, and burnout that was coming up in these hedonic ways of coping.

 

[00:44:48]

So, when I research, I decided to write a 2nd book just about this issue because it was so prevalent that there were so many that’s unicorn space. Correct? Because I find your unicorn space.

 

Exactly. And why I decided to do that is basically just too many stories of women who had lost their identity after children, and there just wasn’t enough room and fair play to, to talk about these women.

 

[00:45:12]

But while I was researching what, why we lose our identity. Why, again, we’re turning to things like mommy juice or edibles, a lot of people start to turn to edibles to get through their weekend with their children was because of the definition of mental health. So, I want to just say, because it’s so similar and helpful for what you just said about your super curious listeners.

[00:45:35]

The definition of mental health, and my kids say this all the time now, my mother doesn’t want me to be happy. And I’m like, well, that’s not exactly the case, but I think it’s very important to understand that mental health has nothing to do with happiness. What mental health is, I read about this in my second book, is having appropriate emotions at appropriate times. And having the ability and strength to weather those emotions.

So, let’s break those 3 down.

Appropriate emotions. The ones we were just talking about. Rage. Resentment. Sadness. Curiosity. Like, what the fuck? Surprise. This person is sitting there scrolling on their phone when they hear, you know, the child burning the pancakes downstairs. I mean, just shock. Disappointment. So, these are appropriate emotions for women, especially after kids. Then they’re happening at appropriate times. So, those two pieces of mental health are check, check. We’re having the appropriate emotions. We’re having them at appropriate times, which are like anytime we look at our, our partner’s face and their ass is down while our ass is up.

But then, it’s the third piece. It’s the ability and strength to weather those emotions.

So, do we have the ability and strength to weather those emotions? We can do that in two ways. We’re going to weather them. We have to, we have to cope in some ways. The easier way to weather those emotions because they are very difficult ones is to drink is to emotionally eat is to take those edibles because they are numbing.

 

[00:47:13]

They numb you, they also provide short term dopamine things to look forward to admits all of these appropriate emotions, which are really hard. But what if I’m here to tell you that true mental health is the appropriate emotions, which are what they are at appropriate times. But the ability and strength to weather them comes from what I call unicorn space.

 

[00:47:37]

The antidote to this type of burnout, Casey, is not the hedonic edibles or the mommy juice. What it is, is being consistently interested in your own life.

 

I wish I had an easier thing to tell people. I wish I had something to sell you. I don’t. All I’m here to tell you is that we now know the long lasting effects of being interested in your own life on your dopamine on your endorphins on your oxytocin doing.

I can’t believe I just did that experiences like I’m here to tell you that Casey with a glass of wine versus Casey with a podcast, the curiosity you need for that podcast, that the connection you need with others for your podcast, and the completion point of doing something that made you scared.

 

[00:48:25]

Those are the things that help us weather those emotions. So, we need. Even if you’re just sober curious and you’re still in the hedonic pursuits, which is fine. It doesn’t mean I stopped emotional eating. That’s how I weathered COVID. But there are other things we can start to do to understand that we want to add you to mania in addition to the hedonic and the, like I said, is these unicorn space experiences.

 

[00:48:51]

You will know if you’re having 1, because the way, you know, as you say, afterwards, I can’t believe I just did that. I went to Provence with 3 sober girlfriends this summer for 2 weeks and I felt immense guilt at spending that money and taking that time without my husband or kids because I knew they would love it.

[00:49:09]

I’d never gone on a trip. I’d gone to like California, but not to Europe and it was incredible. And it brought me so much joy. Like, before, during and after, you know. It was just, you know, and one of the quotes that I want to talk about how to get started with this work, but one of the quotes for myself last year, I read something about like,

Being the main character in your own life, not a supporting character.

 

[00:49:36]

And I just was like, I am 48, 49 years old, at what point am I going to do main character life shit, you know? And so, that was my goal last year. And it was, it was pretty awesome. And by the way, it’s a great, great thing to do. If you still are not convinced this is important work, just remember what one woman said to me.

[00:50:00]

She said, I don’t really mind doing it all, but I mind that my three daughters are watching me do it all. It is. This cycle breaking it’s going to have to happen at some point in some generation. Like, why not let it be now? And why not let it be you and I think the hardest part because I think some people can maybe envision. Maybe a girl’s trip once a year.

 

Casey, but why?

[00:50:26]

What I say is so triggering to people is because I said, the antidote to burnout is not being interested in your own life. It’s being consistently interested in your own life.

 

Yeah, that’s true.

So, I mean, I did it for the first time in exactly as an adult, certainly 16 years since I had a child. So, the consistency is what people are pushed up against and get, you know, sort of uncomfortable with.

[00:50:49]

But what I’m here to tell you is that building in that consistency is what allows us to be mentally healthy. It allows us to weather those emotions.

 

The days I was writing my book, I write about this in my second book, and a ninja kicked me in the eye. I was getting this huge fucking black eye, and I remember thinking to myself, if I hadn’t, you know, written two chapters this morning, this black eye incident would, would be a lot worse.

[00:51:16]

It would be a lot worse mentally, it would have spiraled me, it would have been like, why did I, you know, have kids, like all the blah blah blah down that rabbit hole. But the fact that I knew I was going to be able to get back to my writing practice the next day. And maybe even journal about the kick and why how angry I was.

[00:51:31]

I had a black eye and how hard parenting is. I did. I missed like, how who kicked you and how did you get the black guy? My daughter? Sorry. My daughter, she was a toddler and I had written that morning. I was writing my 2nd book and while we were together, like, she didn’t want something. I was behind her feeding her something.

[00:51:49]

She basically. Kick me.

Oh, yeah.

Well, she was sitting in her chair and just hit me.

Right. I totally thought that could happen now. I mean, I’ve been a parent. So humbling and somewhat unsatisfied. A lot of it is like, what have you done for me lately? And like, you’re doing all the things and then they scream it.

[00:52:14]

Oh, it’s, it’s really, it’s so hard and existentially. It could be worth it. But for a lot of people in the day to day, you know, we have many surveys that show that people would rather be getting a root canal than taking care of their kids. Because it sounds like a vacation to sit, like, in a chair, you know, put on some earbuds.

[00:52:36]

Oh, my gosh. Like, how wonderful. And then, not be guilty about it. So, I think. You know, for me, maybe it would be fun to end on a, there’s an exercise. I didn’t plan on doing this, but I think it would be fun because I think it helps people understand this practice and it can start your listeners, you know, who’ve heard a lot today with, you know, sort of where do I start?

[00:53:00]

I usually like to start with. With a way to access your, your values, your core values. So let’s, let’s maybe let’s just end with that. Should we do it exercise together?

Yeah, let’s do it.

Yes. These are not for sale. These cards are just prototypes, but you can listen and play along, please. Or if you’re a listener, so this is what I’m going to do for you, Casey.

[00:53:23]

What I’m going to do is. I’m going to read 50 choices of cards for you. So don’t stop until you hear all 50, but what I want you to do with these, and we’ll see why we do this because really. Back to that mental health definition of appropriate emotions, appropriate time, the ability and strength to weather it.

 

The ability to whether it really has to do with our value system, what values we have living in alignment with those values. But my problem, Casey, was similar to the Fair Play research. When I start to interview for Unicorn Space, and I ask women what their values are, they would mirror their roles. So if parent, partner, professional were the things that were making, burning them out, their values were still family, friends, and my partner.

 

[00:54:15]

So like, love. Love, Family, friends. Not saying that those aren’t important and not going away in health. You know, you get those, but they don’t tell me anything about you. I just, they’re, they’re your roles. And again, obviously, we all want health, but, but let’s. I want to know about Casey, so if you also would give those values.

[00:54:38]

Then I want you to do this exercise with us because this is how you can start consistently being interested in your own life. We start, we back into it by a unicorn space activity.

So, I have 50 cards of what women have reported to me that they do for their unicorn space. We start with that. That’s not where we’re ending.

[00:54:55]

So, what I’m going to do is read you 50 choices. I just want you to pick one card, Casey, that’s interesting to you. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be something you did in the past or something you want to do forever. Just something that you’re like, Ooh, that card speaks to me. But listen to all 50. So, you want me to listen to all 50 and then pick one?

[00:55:11]

Correct. Because I want, I want your listeners to play along. So that’s why I want them to hear them all. Okay. Ready?

Pottery, language and anthropology, health and wellness, sports with balls. Restoration and renovation, cooking, baking, coding and engineering, stitching and needles, metallurgy, that’s like making jewelry, arts and crafts, memories and archiving, rhetoric, that’s like speech debate, running for office, sports with wheels, beauty, that’s not putting on makeup, that’s like the TikTok tutorial people, theater and production, snow sports, triathlon, woodworking, photography, gardening and farming, florals, Racing, arrows and axes, building and DIY, teaching, running, performing, design, research and learning, math and sciences, event planning, finding, collecting and forging, fashion, writing, games, that’s like escape room, puzzles, cards, Rubik’s cube, solving fast, other worldly pursuits like tarot, astrology and magic, video games, designing, creating them, genealogy and lineage, dance, Martial arts, travel and culture animals.

[00:56:30]

That’s like, raising, showing, writing them. Outdoors. Water sports, spiritual wellness, circus. Storytelling and or music. So, I just need one card. I know there may be more than one. See, I was writing stuff down and I found a ton. Right now, I’m going to say travel. Travel, okay. Yes, I heard you speaking about your Provence trip.

[00:56:57]

But tell me, so these are the two questions I’d want your audience to ask themselves. One, why did you pick travel? I love beauty and I love seeing the world and I love adventure. Oh, I love those.

Okay. So this is, you already got to some of your values, which I love, but let’s take it a step further. This is the part where I think the exercise becomes really interesting.

[00:57:21]

I want. When you were in Provence, I want you to think of being at like a market or discovering lavender that you’ve never seen before, or just the shocking beauty or, you know, laughing with a friend, What values did this bring up for you? I’m going to give you beauty as a value, and I’m actually going to give you adventure as a value.

[00:57:45]

So, you already put 2 values on our board, but I want 3 more values that you can, that it brought up for you when you were on that trip or when you think about travel. I would say.

[00:58:00]

Being present, I don’t know if that’s a value, but like, that’s a value. Presence is absolutely value.

Yeah, connection with like, everyone I see in the people I’m with and pleasure.

 

[00:58:12]

I love it so much. Okay, so that’s it. So, what’s so beautiful is I’m going to get these back to you.

We have beauty, adventure, presence, connection and pleasure. That’s the Casey I’m interested in. That’s a good life, man. You know, I’m not interested again. I want you to have health. I want you to have your family.

 

[00:58:35]

I’m not interested in that, Casey. I’m interested in the Casey that explores beauty, adventure, presence, connection and pleasure. What’s beautiful about it is, you can have an accountability partner in your own life, whether it’s those people you went to Provence with, but what I, and yourself, and what I want you to be asking yourself is not, did I get to travel this year or when am I booking my trip?

 

[00:59:00]

That is because again, that takes you out of the goal of the consistently interested in your own life. Instead, what I want you to do, and everybody who did this exercise and came up with their five values is I want you to ask yourself at the end of each week, Casey, did I get to experience beauty this week?

[00:59:15]

Did I get, did I get to experience adventure this week? Did I get to be present with myself this week? Did I get a chance to feel real true connection this week? Did I get a chance to feel pleasure this week? And I’m not saying you have to do something that brings up all 5 every week, but I want you to do something that brings up at least one.

[00:59:34]

Or at least to and to concentrate on that as something that’s worthwhile and important in your life.

Absolutely. And then, you can start. That’s how you start to set your boundary.

If you’re not sure why you would do fair play. If you’re in that spot, like, well, what’s the point? Because I don’t even have anything I’m interested in again.

 

[00:59:52]

What I want you to start to say is I’m somebody who believes in beauty adventure. Being present with myself, connection, and pleasure. And so, to prioritize that, I need more time not to do the fair play cards.

Yeah. And that that is that is it maybe it’s again, it’s a hike local hike where you’re just going to take 1 picture of beauty that weekend, maybe it’s something where it’s a local adventure where you’re going downtown to eat the spiciest food that your city has to offer, but you’ve never eaten anything spicy before, you know. Maybe pleasure is just the self-care massage, you know, maybe it’s on like being present could just be sitting in your quiet house with a cup of coffee in the morning by yourself.

[01:00:38]

I mean, that could be a moment of…

Absolutely! As in, or going for a walk could be beauty and pleasure and adventure, but what’s even beautiful about the description of your presence. If that’s a value that you care about, that means you can’t be planning the kid’s doctor’s appointment. When you have that coffee, you can’t. You have to be sitting just with that coffee, and notice that alone is revolutionary. That you’re sitting in a morning when your kids have to do something or your partner needs you. That is, that’s the goal.

[01:01:10]

So, I would like for us to practice our values and they will change if you pick a different card. We would have probably seen different values. But what I love about this is that they can change, but it gives you something. It gives you a road map to ground yourself. And that’s what I love. 1 thing I will say is when do those cards come out?

 

[01:01:31]

Because I do have a date because I really love them.

Oh, it’s great. Yes, we’re in a prototyping them now. So I, but I will send you a care package, Casey. So, you can have them. It’s really also fun. It’s fun to do with your partner. It’s fun to do with your kids. It’s interesting to see what they pick and how the reason I wanted to say the reason I love that is.

[01:01:53]

On this podcast, we talk about a lot of things when women are quitting drinking in an early sobriety. And one of the things is finding what I call anchor activities, which are sort of activities or plans that ground you during the time when you would normally drink or to break up the day. So you need an anchor activity for Saturday and you need one for Sunday and you need one for.

 

[01:02:16]

Thursday night when you would normally be drinking. And you also need a ton of sober treats. And a lot of women, when they stop drinking, literally it’s consumed that and work and overwhelm and stress and life, all of their interests. So they literally don’t know what it is they like to do other than drinking, which is also socializing and girls nights and happy hours and whatever.

[01:02:41]

And so they need to discover that. And so, one of the reasons I love this, these cards and ideas and exercises about value is it can give you a starting point of an anchor activity. It can give you a sober treat or many, and then it can also give you the time to brainstorm and experiment with what it is you enjoy.

Outside of drinking. And so, like, just when you were talking about them, I was like, yes, every woman needs this because it’s hard to get started with a blank piece of paper. No, you can’t. And I think, you know, the beauty of this is I just want to say that. When you have a sober treat the way you just said it what I encourage people to do is pick one of the three that you think you’re missing.

[01:03:29]

There’s 3 things that are unicorn space activity has they, it has curiosity. I wonder something it has connection with other people, and it has a completion point as 1 of my friends said, that’s the hardest thing for her because she’s so excellent at so many things that having this new activity.

[01:03:50]

It’s hard for her, and it’s hard for her because what, you know, she doesn’t really suck at things. So, it’s hard to start from the beginning.

 

So, a lot of people conflate perfection with completion. So, what I’m here to say is, pick the one where you think you’re lacking. If you think to yourself, well, I don’t even know how to be curious anymore.

[01:04:08]

Start with the curiosity. Like, what do you want to wonder about? If you feel like you’re lonely, then start with the connection piece. And if you feel like you have a lot of curiosity and you have, A lot of connection with others, but you’re that graveyard of unfulfilled dreams, as my friend called herself, then start with the completion.

[01:04:27]

Like, you want to just complete something. You don’t care what it is.

I love that. I cannot wait for your unicorn book to come out in the cards. But I also want to say that this book is a huge starting point.

So, I’ve read Fair Play. I love your work. I’ve done a ton of reading and research about it. And I think it’s so important because, when women are doing 80 percent or two thirds or whatever it is of the additional work.

 

[01:04:54]

I mean, 21 hours a week, I believe it. And I don’t know how you would have time to do anything for yourself. But not only that, I think a lot of us are unhappy with it.

And you know, you’re not meant to go through your life just gritting your teeth and then checking out I used to talk about like, I’d come home from work and literally knock myself Unconscious as quickly as I could and then do it again the next day.

And I was like this is not what I want for my life, even though on the outside it looked great. Yes, well, I think that, that’s so many of us and until we’re willing to start sharing our stories, Casey, and thank you for your work, (being vulnerable with your listeners) until we start to share our stories without shame, it’s never going to end.

[01:05:43]

And so, we’re here to, as we said earlier, break these cycles. We’re here for you. We want to support you in any, and all of the work that you want to do, on yourself and we recognize that you’re not, it’s not a silo, we can’t snap our fingers and say life is going to be better. It’s a booth and there’s a lot of work we have to do systemically to make it easier to be a caregiver in the United States.

[01:06:08]

But all I can say is that we’re fighting for you. I’m here. We’re here. Our communities here, the Fair Play Policy Institute is doing that work as well. And where can people find you and follow up and learn about what you’re doing to where they get in touch. So this is again, we are a nonprofit fairplaypolicyinstitute.org.

[01:06:27]

You can find all of our resources there and then follow us on social media. Fair play life is our social and Eve Rodsky, if you want to hear my random political rants, but all of this content is that you can find it  @fairplaylife on Instagram.

Perfect. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and your work.

[01:06:46]

You too, Casey. Thank you.

[01:06:48]

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hello Someday podcast. If you’re interested in learning more about me, the work I do, and access free resources and guides to help you build a life you love without alcohol, please visit hellosomedaycoaching.com. And I would be so grateful if you would take a few minutes to rate and review this podcast so that more women can find it and join the conversation about drinking less and living more.