Navigating Celebrity Culture—How Personas, Platforms, & Profits Are Hurting the Church with Katelyn Beaty
Episode Notes
Today’s conversation is a fascinating deep-dive into celebrity culture with Katelyn Beaty, editor and author of “Celebrities For Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, & Profits are Hurting the Church.” We explore the dynamics of celebrity culture and its profound effects on both the church and our personal sense of worth and mission.
Here’s what we cover:
1. The importance of developing an inner locus of control
2. How celebrity culture impacts the church
3. Parasocial relationships & influencers as attachment figures
4. Reevaluating what true success looks like
5. How to discern trustworthiness in people you follow
Resources:
- Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church by Katelyn Beaty
- Podcast conversation about the connection between Christian celebrity and narcissism with Chuck DeGroat
- The Beaty Beat Substack
- Saved by the City podcast
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 119: Drawing Strength from the Past —The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance with Dr. Jemar Tisby
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Thank you so much for being here, Katelyn. I devoured your book, Celebrities for Jesus, this summer. It came out a little bit ago. When did it come out?
Katelyn: It came out two years ago.
Alison Cook: Yeah, it's been a while and I've seen it and I've had it. It was really timely in my own life as I was processing some of the things I was bumping up against in the publishing industry. So a little bit of my background–I started out in the academic world. My PhDs in psychology and religion and I did a bunch of academic research.
Then I ended up publishing a book. My coauthor and I published a book on a model of therapy. It's called Internal Family Systems, IFS. It's the impetus for the movie Inside Out. That's how everybody knows it. We published a Christian adaptation of the IFS model. So we took the IFS model and integrated it with Christian theology.
I didn't understand platforms. We were writing this book and we had no clue. I don't even think I had a social media account when it came out in 2018. The book ended up doing pretty well, and there I was, in a world that has been very confusing to me to sort out. So that's a little bit about the backdrop. I share that with you to say, I think it was timely this year. I've been wrestling with some of these pressures that I feel or frustrations that I feel. Then I read your book and I thought, oh my goodness, this explains so much. Before we dive into the topic, Katelyn, I'd love to know what led you personally to be interested in this topic.
Katelyn: Yeah. It's a great question. I work in book publishing now, where celebrity dynamics are very much in play. But before that, I worked at a journalistic publication covering events and trends in the American church, and starting in 2015/2016. there seemed to be this slew of stories related to pastoral moral failure scandals.
Katelyn: It's often very hard for institutions to recover after a scandal and seeing so many of those stories and seeing a pattern and feeling very sad about, like, why does this keep happening? The answer to that is very complex and multilayered, but I'm convinced that one of the undeniable dynamics at play in those stories is celebrity power.
The ability to influence people using the tools of social mass media, but without a lot of embodied proximity or accountability. I’m asking not why these particular people are pursuing that kind of celebrity power, but also what it is about us, as either churchgoers or consumers or readers or social media users, that really props people up and kind of fuels this celebrity power dynamic.
So it's really meant as a kind of personal reflection, a way of asking, where have we gone wrong?, even more so than what went wrong with those other people. There's something in the water, and my book is an attempt to try to understand what's in the water.
Alison Cook: That’s so good. That thread runs throughout the book–here's the problem and how have we participated in creating it? It’s in a very non shaming way, but rather a curiosity about what is this? That's what I pulled out of the book.
We talk a lot about curiosity on the podcast. A lot of listeners, Katelyn, are coming out of church hurt, a lot of church abuse, they've experienced some of the pain and the fallout of some of these, maybe not even the public moral failings, but some of the culture that we've created.
I want to touch on a little bit, even when there's no celebrity in the sense of millions of followers, there is still something that trickles down into a church culture, where a figure at the front of the church can become this local celebrity figure. And when something goes awry there, it leads to tremendous hurt. So this affects us on numerous levels.
Katelyn: You're right that it's not just the mega church pastors that can be put on pedestals. You can be in a church of 150 people,but if you still have a relationship between leader and body of people that gives a leader undue authority or power, I'm sure you've come across this in stories from your clients, where there can be a spiritual power attributed to someone with celebrity.
This idea that God wouldn't have given them a platform if God didn't want them to use it. And then you start relating to this person as not necessarily a God-like figure, but they have a lot of power over your spiritual life and imagination. And when there is some kind of, failure, fallout, or disappointment, because this person is human, they are flawed like the rest of us, there can be incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance.
Like, I had put some measure of trust in this person, and I had, in some ways, taken their words and actions to be divinely ordained, and now the mask is off. Something's been exposed. They're actually human like the rest of us. They're flawed. They may have deep, serious kinds of pathological or mental health issues to address that have gone unaddressed. It ends up affecting my view of God because I conflated the person and God in my imagination.
Alison Cook: Exactly. That's so well put. I see the two different pieces of this. The first is, how did this sort of culture of celebrity get created? The second piece is, how can we better equip ourselves to not get sucked into it?
As you're describing, whether towards celebrities in the news or on social media, or whether in our local communities, how can we be equipped? One of the things I talk about a lot in my book, The Best of You, is the idea of an internal locus of control. Many of us as Christians, depending on our faith background, were raised to not trust ourselves, and to only trust external authority figures.
That actually backfires against us in situations, as you're describing, where we actually need to have that inner discernment, that inner locus of control, not only with our pastors, but with any human with whom we interact. Because we're all fallen on some level.
We have to, at times, be able to trust our feeling that something doesn't feel right. This doesn't line up. This isn't working for me. It might even be with someone you love, a good friend or a spouse, where you're like, I don't think this is right. We have to develop that muscle.
So I want to get there. We have a responsibility in this. I also think, culturally, there are so many layers to why we don't have that muscle. One involves some of those toxic messages. “Don't trust yourself. Your emotions are bad”. I talk about these all the time on the podcast, but another layer to this is what you're describing, which is this systemic promotion of celebrity culture among our Christian leaders.
In the book, you describe this culture of celebrity; you describe three features of it and you describe this idea of how folks are given social power without proximity. You look at it from a lot of different angles about how different industries, the publishing industry in particular, but others are actually fostering it. So talk to me a little bit about that.
Katelyn: Yeah. Obviously, celebrity power is not relegated to religious communities. We are in a time of celebrity, for reasons that are more complicated than I can get into or articulate. We have, I would say, in the last 100, 150 years, in large part because of mass media and the tools of mass media, the ability to communicate with many more people than you could physically in person connect with.
Starting with newspapers, but also radio, television, and of course, social media, has added jet fuel to this dynamic. But culturally speaking, we have moved away from institutional authority where authority comes from someone's credentialing or formal authority administered by a body of other people saying, yes, you have this authority because of your training, because of your experience, because of your intelligence, etc.
Now it’s about individual authority or charismatic authority, which is more about a person's ability to woo crowds. Oftentimes, celebrity is very much connected to oratory power–you want to sit around and listen to them–or charisma–they are the kind of person you want to be around. They're magnetic. Maybe they're traditionally physically very attractive.
So all of these non-institutional ways that people gain social power, we see that across all industries, and by and large, especially in the evangelical world, where there's a bit less emphasis on institutions and more emphasis on entrepreneurship. Evangelicals have historically been very pro media and use whatever tools that are at their disposal to reach as many people as possible with the gospel.
We're going to embrace these tools. The evangelical world has by and large mimicked what works in the broader mainstream world when it comes to celebrity. Why not? Why shouldn't we have Christian celebrities? Because those celebrities can reach many more people than any kind of local church or local leader could. Celebrity also works because it makes people a lot of money. There are market financial incentives to keep the celebrity machine going.
I think what we are recognizing is that there are costs both for the celebrity figure who has the celebrity attached to them, as well as for the people who are following the celebrities. We talk about parasocial relationships–I feel like I have this friendship with this person, even though I have never met them. I don't know what they're like in an actual relationship, but I have this heart connection to them.
Part of the antidote for all of this is the profound importance of embodied relationships in which you can be known for the good and the bad. We all need those communities. We all need places where we can show up as our full selves. That is true for the celebrity too, maybe especially so for people who find themselves with celebrity power, because the kind of loneliness and isolation and pressure to keep up the celebrity persona can be really intense.
Those dynamics actually are contributing to problems of bad choices, mental health problems, mental health challenges. You hear people say, I would never want to be that famous. I think there’s a good reason for that. Now, some of us do want to be famous, but we’re seeing the cost of celebrity for the person who has it.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that non-shaming thread throughout the book. You're trying to name something that you're seeing without shaming. Those of us who are a part of participating in it, and those who are pursuing it or find themselves with a platform–there's a cost to a lot of it. As I was listening to you I was thinking about this sort of charisma-focused platform that's removed from expertise.
I think about Hollywood, where that kind of charisma, that very specific ability to emotionally connect, and you become a famous actor and we love watching them on film. There's that draw to that Julia Roberts or whomever it might be. But we're not expecting that person to be our moral leader. We're not expecting that person to be our spiritual leader.
When you parlay that into the Christian field where they are literally using those same tactics that maybe the Hollywood actor would use to win over an audience. And a part of me cringes a little bit, not in judgment, but in, oh, I don't want that from my spiritual leader. Not that it's wrong to be a charismatic person. You can use those gifts well.
But we talk a lot on the podcast about spiritual bypassing, which is attributing spiritual reasons, attributing God to things that are not in fact, necessarily spiritual. When I hear someone with a large platform saying, “God gave me this platform”, I think to myself, did God give you that platform?
Katelyn: I mean, Alison, you're reading my journal. Yes. I think that's a reasonable question.
Alison Cook: Not to be cynical and not to even judge the person's gifts or the sincerity of their heart, but did God give you that platform or did that platform come from all these other ways? You're in this industry, you're in publishing. So yeah, what do we do with that?
Katelyn: There is some wisdom in that little internal cringe when you hear someone with a big platform saying, God gave me this. I think you're right that something in us recognizes there's some kind of dissonance between celebrity power and spiritual leadership in the way of Jesus, in the core Christian understanding of what it means to be a shepherd of souls, which is a different model from a CEO leader.
We have imported understandings or models of leadership from the business world often to great effect. This has worked for a lot of Christian communities. Is there something about that model or understanding of leadership that misses the fundamental core of what it means to try to lead others in the name of Jesus?
Obviously it goes without saying that a core aspect of that is humility. A leader is not there to puff up themselves, but to truly serve. Like you, this is not me saying all platforms are bad, don't use the gifts of charisma you've been given. It's not that if a church is bigger than a hundred people it's bad.
It's not that. It's a kind of spirit or posture of leadership. A lot of Christian leaders or influencers, writers, there's a sense of starting with such good motives. I'm not in this for myself. I really do want to help others, I want to serve others, I want to encourage. But if you get more celebrity power over time, it starts to become self-justifying. It starts to feel really good.
It starts to maybe have an addictive element to it. So the things that you would have said no, that's too self promotional or too self involved three years ago, now maybe you would do things that you wouldn't do before because the celebrity is working for you.
Alison Cook: And that Christian narrative of, “God brought me here” can magnify that. It's so subtle, and you do such a beautiful job of exploring that in the book. Those last few chapters take us into what is actually the way of Jesus, and you use the metaphor of the ring from the Lord of the Rings, which I loved.
You come down pretty hard, again, in a non-shaming way. You also say in the book that there's clear ironies, like you and I are on a podcast speaking to tens of thousands of people. We're all dealing with this on some level, in our local communities, whatever tiny amount of celebrity we may have.
So we all have to reckon with this, but man, I thought it was powerful that you really liken it to the ring. Talk a little bit about that.
Katelyn: I'm happy to talk about the Lord of the Rings any time, any place, and I will try not to get into all the narrative details, although I could. The ring is JRR Tolkien's image of power and the temptation of power. Obviously he's not talking specifically about celebrity power, but various characters in this great trilogy are grappling with the lure of the ring, what I could do if I had the ring, how much power it would be. Gandalf in particular, he's a very good figure because he will not even entertain the possibility of trying on the ring.
He knows that the first place where you go wrong is thinking, I would never be tempted by that. My heart's in the right place. I only want to do good. I only want to serve God. My motives are pure. What could be the problem? Being honest with ourselves, maybe to borrow from the world of therapy and spirituality, and our shadow sides.
Alison Cook: Exactly.
Katelyn: The parts of us that oftentimes we can't even see or we don't want to see, but the parts of us that do hunger for power, that do hunger to feed the ego or the false self. I don't have tried and true practical tips for how we can all avoid celebrity, because as you alluded to, you and I are swimming in the waters by the fact that we have these platforms as writers, teachers, and communicators.
I do think that there are ways to mitigate the temptation of celebrity, but at the very least, it's something we have to be very aware of in ourselves. We need a level of self-awareness, self scrutiny, and inviting others who we trust and who love us to be an honest mirror back. Is there something about how I'm going about this that feels off to you? Because I might not be able to see it, but maybe you can.
Alison Cook: I will tell you, reading your book, you describe some things in the publishing industry and it was helpful to me. It was a little bit of a mirror. It was like, oh, those are some good points. If I'm doing those couple of things, that's a yellow flag. That's why I appreciated the book so much because you're talking about it.
If we don't talk about it, how can we do the work of holding up the mirror to ourselves? I love that health starts first of all, with a humble self-awareness of the parts of us that look at the ring and want it. The other question I think is interesting is, what about me wants to attach, and I use that word intentionally, to this persona?
What about me needs or wants to attach to this authority figure or this influencer? What about me wants and needs that person to be perfect, or to be a savior or a rescuer or something that is not possible? I think there are some attachment needs there and it reminds me of the Israelites. God was like okay, I'll give you a king, but the king's going to disappoint you.
There's something in us that almost wants to bypass the work of being in messy human relationships where there is no perfection. Those are some thoughts I have. I'm curious how that lands on you.
Katelyn: It's fascinating to hear you frame our relationship to certain celebrity figures as a kind of attachment. They're serving or feeding some kind of need for us. Otherwise, we wouldn't develop that attachment. I wonder if it's, as you said, “could someone just tell us what to do and how to be in the world?”
If I can locate that kind of authority externally into an idealized leader, then it relieves some pain. It may be internal anxiety about, how do I know how to be a good person of faith in the world?
Alison Cook: I think that's part of it. In my own life, if I look at those folks, because I have them, I want to attach to them. It's not all bad, but I'm curious about that. What is it? There's a reason. There's a reason that person is someone I want to idolize. What is that telling me about me?
Katelyn: I'm thinking about the set of writers whose books were very powerfully formative in my faith earlier on in life as I was entering into adulthood. I still think about those writers or theologians or pastors and I feel so grateful for their work.
I might say, God used them in my life to spiritually mature me. There's a difference though, between appreciating someone's work in the world and attaching to them in a more emotional, parasocial way. I'm under no delusion that any of those writers are any less or more human than I am.
Alison Cook: Yes. Or that God is specifically using them any more or less than he is you or me.
Katelyn: Yeah, that's a really good point. Especially as Americans, we really want external proof or fruit of serving God. We want something measurable. So thinking about how many churches have really focused on numerical growth, and numerical growth can be great.
But we're so quick to see something growing and saying, oh, it's working. God is blessing it. Bad things grow too. Or things can grow and have both healthy and unhealthy elements mixed in. I think we can be tempted to be quick to associate something growing with something being blessed and the person who seems to be growing it being uniquely blessed. We can't live under that illusion anymore.
Alison Cook: Yes, it's such an important distinction for us all to really look inside our spirit. I love what you're saying. It doesn't mean we can't be like, oh man, this writer, this person has changed my life. Their writings are a powerful use of their gifts. But we should be wary of equating those gifts with a special kind of blessedness.
I interviewed Jemar Tisby on his new book, The Spirit of Justice, and that book, oh my gosh, it is filled with stories of Christians who never got fame or notoriety for the brave steps they took as a result of their faith in Jesus in impossible circumstances.
In fact, many of them received horrible consequences for taking brave steps. I was reading this book going, how do you make sense of the gospel of, “I'm blessed because I have a big platform”, when this to me is the fruit of a life in Christ, and it sometimes looks really tough on the surface.
It sometimes means folks won't like you. I think there's a misnomer there that size, that fame, that celebrity, that public notoriety is equated with a special kind of God's blessing, that flies against the face of the gospel.
Katelyn: Yeah, what you're getting at and what it sounds like Jemar's book is illustrating, is that there's a distinction between success and faithfulness. And faithfulness is the goal.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Katelyn: Success is measured by external output of numerical growth or sales, or these external markers of what the world would call success. Most people are not called to be faithful in that realm. I really wanted to emphasize in my book how important it's been to me to hold my parents and people I grew up with in the local church as models of faithfulness, over and against the temptation to equate faithfulness and success.
My parents are the most “salt of the earth” people. They show up for each other. They show up for our family, for their local church, for their neighborhood, over the long haul, in really ordinary, unglamorous ways. That is so beautiful to me. The reality is that for the vast majority of us, that is what we are called to be and do. That is going to be the locus of our faithfulness. And that can be enough for all of us.
Alison Cook: Returning to that time and time again. I think in this culture, really returning to this is the good work. This is the good work, the good fruit of being in my daily life. I think it's very revolutionary in our culture to lean into that deeply. In those last couple of chapters of the book, it's that call back to the beautiful, good work of faithfulness.
Katelyn, since the book came out a couple of years ago, and I know you're still writing, how do you in your own life hold that tension of faithfulness and success?
Katelyn: I will say, it was an interesting experience trying to launch a book critiquing celebrity, when most book publishers want authors to use their platforms to promote their work and play into some of these celebrity dynamics. I wrote this book critiquing a numbers focus and yet I was checking the sales numbers for this book on a regular basis.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That's honest. Yeah.
Katelyn: So obviously I did not write this book because I figured all of this out. The actual launch of the book was a real stretching exercise of ultimately giving the results to God, and believing ultimately that the fruit of our good work is going to be grown because of God's work in the world.
It doesn't all depend on us, and that can be a real relief. I really try in my writing, to focus on the content of the writing itself rather than the Katelyn Beaty show. That performer element is very much also a part of my personality. But, there's something about trying to focus on the value of the work rather than offering myself as a persona.
What I want to offer and what I think is actually most beneficial to others is the writing and thinking and research rather than the Katelyn Beaty show. I'm so glad to not be in book promotion mode anymore. You always feel like you could be doing more and that can be really depleting.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Katelyn: I'm also an introvert, so I like being at my desk and writing most days. So I don't know if I'm answering your question very articulately, but I feel like I've experienced the very tensions that we're talking about.
Alison Cook: What I hear is that you wrestle with those tensions, and you honor them. I think that's the path to health. As you said, it's not a binary. It's not, I never struggle with that. I'm good. That would be a cue that you do. When we talk about, for example, I know you've done some presentations with our friend Chuck DeGroat who talks about narcissism.
Katelyn: Yeah, we've done a podcast conversation about the connection between Christian celebrity and narcissistic personality traits in leaders, and I'm happy to share the link for that.
Alison Cook: For those of you who want to dig deeper into the link between narcissism and this kind of celebrity we're talking about, we'll link to that in the show notes. But one thing is, when people say, how do I know I'm not a narcissist? The fact that you're asking the question with genuine curiosity is a good sign.
Anytime we're able to look inside and go, oh I'm showing some of this–that's the beginning of humility. There's a wrestling in that, which is so important no matter what we're doing in the world, naming and being honest about some of those different tensions in ourselves.
So I love that you're saying that. I think that's really honest, and paradoxically, that ability to know ourselves is actually what makes us more trustworthy and brings that around to folks who are given a platform of authority.
One of the things I look for is some of that ability to wrestle with. I remember reading Eugene Peterson's biography, and one of the things that stood out to me was how much he wrestled with inner tensions around these topics. I'm really struck by the connection you're making between self-knowledge and self-trust.
We need tools and places where we can interrogate ourselves in a gentle and loving, safe way and be honest with ourselves. I think you're right that it's either the people who say oh, I'm not tempted by numbers–
Katelyn: “It's not about numbers for me”. I'm like, is it a little bit though? Sometimes that's actually a greater warning sign than someone who says I'm wrestling with this.
Alison Cook: I agree. Or someone who says I'm only doing this for you, or I'm only doing this for God. We're more complicated than that. To me, that cues, oh, you're not aware of that shadow side. Again, that doesn't mean I have to completely tune that person out and turn them off.
But it is a cue where I go, huh. How much has that person really reflected on, which might be a cue that at some point, because if people haven't done their own work of really looking at that shadow side, they're setting themselves up potentially for that ring, for that success to get the best of them.
It gives me a cue over time, so I'm not as disappointed or I don't put as much stock in the person. I can hold it a little bit loosely, that idea of who they seem to be putting themselves out to be. You talk about the issues with power without proximity, and that really stood out to me.
I've thought about it a lot, since reading your book, about really prioritizing the proximate in my life. Really prioritizing the proximate. If at any point I'm looking too much to folks I don't know or don't see on a day to day basis, that's a problem. Who are the people in my immediate life? What are those relationships like?
Katelyn: Yes. Are those relationships places where I'm ultimately loved and valued because of my output or because I'm keeping up this really impressive celebrity persona? Speaking personally, my friends and family value the work that I do and have cheered me on when the book came out, and also, that's not the kind of thing that establishes the care in our relationship.
It's, “I like you for you. I care about you for you”. Yes, this public facing work is a part of you, but it's only a part of you. It's not the main thing, and if we're in feedback loops where we're only ever getting positive reinforcement for the celebrity persona, we're in fewer and fewer spaces where we're free to show up as our full selves and rest in that belovedness, apart from what we're producing or doing for other people.
Alison Cook: I love that. That's so well stated. I'm curious what projects you're working on now. Where are you headed next?
Katelyn: Yeah. I work in book publishing in my day to day job–I'm the editorial director for Brazos Books, which is an imprint of Baker Publishing Group. I really enjoy being able to curate a collection of books that our team thinks will benefit readers, and it's really fun to work with authors and see their books come to fruition.
I really enjoy my work at Brazos. I try to write pretty regularly at a substack called The Beaty Beat, and that's really to keep my writing and journalistic juices going. Occasionally, I will write for a media outlet, and I also have a podcast with my friend Roxy about navigating life and faith in New York City, where we both live, and that's called Saved by the City.
So those are the things that I'm working on. I'm not currently working on a new book idea. I strongly feel that no one should write a book until they absolutely have to. I don't want to write a book to write a book. I don't think most people should. That might change, but for now I feel very content writing on the side.
Alison Cook: I am so grateful for the work that you did. For the listener who resonates, as I know many of you will, this book, Celebrities for Jesus, has a rhythm that is very objective. You name things, you're honest, but you're not cynical or shaming. That felt really important to me because we see enough of that that's also not helpful.
In many ways, because I can have a cynical part of myself, I want to be able to name things without indulging that part of me. You go into some of the things that happen behind the scenes in the publishing industry that I had no idea about. But these things, it's very real and I think it's helpful to know, because it'll help you be more discerning about people you follow, when you know a little bit more about what goes on.
I thought it was a really beautiful, helpful book for all of us living in this culture. So thank you for doing that work. I know it probably wasn't always easy. I'm sure you got some pushback on it. But it sure ministered to me and I know it will minister to a lot of people. So thank you for doing that. To close, I like to ask all my guests, what's bringing out the best of you right now?
Katelyn: I'm not saying this because I'm talking to you, a licensed therapist, but I'm about to turn 40–I think by the time this episode airs, I will already be 40. As I'm sure a lot of people who are about to turn 40 feel, I feel like I'm entering into a slightly different life phase that has prompted all sorts of big questions of discernment: What do I want my life to look like in 10 years? How do I know? Can I trust my own desires? Is that something I should follow?
I've been meeting with a spiritual director here in New York for the last year or so, and having a space to ask some of those questions and discern what the next phase of my life could look like with God. It's a new framework, not how do I discern the one thing God wants me to do that’s inscrutable and mysterious and I need to make sure I'm on the right path, but rather, what if you and God dream together about what this next stage of life could look like?
It's been healing and freeing and grounding in a stage of a lot of change for me, a lot of internal change. That's bringing me life.
Alison Cook: I love that. That leads right into the next question, which is what needs and desires are you working to protect?
Katelyn: Oh, wow. I feel like I've talked to a lot of peers recently who are in a similar life stage, and all of us have said something to the effect of, I'm learning to say no more.
I'm learning to be more discerning about what I give my time and energy to. I don't feel as obligated to say yes to everybody just because they ask me for something. I think at a previous stage in my life, I felt a lot of duty, maybe especially like a Christian duty to, if you're a good Christian, you give whatever people ask of you.
The need I'm protecting is recognizing that the resources of time and energy are finite for all of us. You are free to say yes to the things that really align with your true self and what brings you to life or makes you come alive, rather than simply the things that you feel like you have to do because someone asked you nicely to do it.
Alison Cook: That’s awesome. You're preaching to the choir with that. This is a big topic on the Best of You Podcast: how do we disentangle and differentiate from those parts of us that are so conditioned to the needs of other people. So I love that. I'm so grateful to you for the work that you do and the way that you're doing the work.
The way that you are trying to embody the very things you speak about means a lot. I think that's what we need. I'm so grateful. Thank you for giving us your time today.
Katelyn: Yeah, it was a lovely conversation. So thanks so much for having me on, Alison. I loved it.