[00:13] Rachel: Hey, writers. Welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast that will help you write a book you're damn proud of.
[00:18] Emily: I'm Emily.
[00:19] Rachel: And I'm Rachel.
[00:20] Emily: And today we want to talk about balancing creativity with our personal lives with our guest Corey Leger, who is a creative coach, an actor, and one of my oldest friends. Welcome, Corey.
[00:36] Corrie Legge: Thanks for having me.
[00:38] Emily: I'm so excited that you're here. This is going to be such a juicy conversation, but before we dive in, can you share with folks kind of who you are and what you work on? And I mean, we know how you got here. Well, it all started when I was 14. How you got to what you work on today.
[00:57] Corrie Legge: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Corey. Obviously, I started as an actor from I mean, it's so cliche to say, but like everyone says, from the ripe old age of I can't even remember when, my grandmother likes to take credit for bringing me to my first play at three years old, and I just stood on the chairs and was like captivated by everything happening, which, if you have children or around children at all, you know that three year olds do not sit still or stay captivated. So I think that says something. So I've been acting since forever, but coaching came to me not that long ago. I've been coaching in some capacity off and on forever, without really realizing that it was what I was doing. But I really leaned into starting working with actors and storytellers. A lot of people who are multipassionate in the storytelling world, whether they be filmmakers or writers or actors or some combination thereof, a couple of years ago, and I haven't looked back. It's been incredible to help these people bring these stories to life. And everybody has a story and everybody is creative. I truly believe that. And so being part of the process that allows them to continue to embrace that part of themselves has been so rewarding.
[02:18] Emily: I love it. Can you define for us a little bit more like that term multipassionate? Because I think it's so important, because it's one of those things that I feel like people shy away from doing. Like, we have a tendency to want to be, like, single, passionate.
[02:33] Rachel: Yeah.
[02:34] Emily: So talk to us a little bit about the difference.
[02:37] Corrie Legge: Yeah, I hear all the time, and I'm sure you guys have as well, like, niche, be niche. Everybody needs to have a niche these days. And it's all about getting hyper focused and hyper really going into one direction so that you become the expert in it. And I know so many creative people who just feel so icky about that, because when they say they're going to focus on one passion, what they're really feeling is grief and loss over all of the other passions that they're saying, you know what? I can't do this anymore, or it's not going to be my priority anymore. And that doesn't fuel creativity. All it does is fuel resentment and it fuels this guilt and this loss within us that can cripple your creativity. So I believe the complete opposite is that if you are somebody who is multipassionate, all of those things that you are excited about and it doesn't just have to be creative passions, it's all of the passions in your life, including travel and family and all of these other things that make you you, all of them are important. And embracing all of them and finding space for all of them in your life is going to make you the happiest and most fulfilled version of yourself that you can be, which is therefore going to translate into whatever art form you want to convey that story within or art forms.
[04:11] Rachel: Plural.
[04:13] Corrie Legge: So to me, that's what multipassionate means is having all of these different domains of your life and areas of your life and interests and passions that you embrace fully.
[04:25] Emily: Yeah, I love how that definition includes not only other creative passions, but just like general life passions. You're not like just a writer or just an actor. Right. And I know we're going to talk about that more today, but I like how you expanded that definition. Because when I asked the question, I was thinking just like multiple creative pursuits, which even in and of itself, I feel like is so harmful and hustle driven, this idea that we have to specialize in something, otherwise we'll never be good at anything. I definitely have felt that it's like that fear of a career change or a creative pursuit change or something else you're going to do. It's like, oh, well, if I didn't start doing X when I was five, there's no point. And it's that factory mentality of like, you should be good at one thing, so then you're really good at that one thing. And I like how you described it being how that builds grief and resentment for all the other things you don't get to pursue. I love it. This is going to be so juicy. Okay, so we've already started talking about this, but you brought some topics of balancing creativity with our personal lives to chat about today. Why have you brought it and why is this so important to you? Because I know this drives everything that you work on.
[05:47] Corrie Legge: Yeah. So I actually try to avoid the word balance because in my head, the word balance means you need to like if you visualize I know this is a podcast, but if you visualize a scale, which is what we think of when we think of balance, you need to take from one side. If you take from one side, then it gets off balance and you're always moving one to the other or one to the other. And there's this idea that if you lose from one side, you need to lose from the other or vice versa. Whereas I like to think of it as harmony because everything in all of the different pieces of your life and we have a lot of different domains in our life, right? Just for some examples, like we've got family relationships, we have play, we have financial, we have career, we have your environment. There's all these different domains of life. They all need to work together in order for you to be the most fulfilled version of yourself that you can be. And that not to overuse the word happy, but the happiest version of yourself that you can be. And I think that there's this idea of balance. Like I can spend this amount of time doing this and this amount of time doing that and then I am balanced. No, there's going to be some give and take always. And everything needs to work together. Because if you ever have conflict between what you say you want in your personal life and what you say you want in your career, that's going to eat away at you. And that friction is going to cause you to hold yourself back in one domain or both or all of the domains without even realizing it. I always go to my example because I think it's easier to think of it with an example. So as an actor, one thing that I had kind of been drilled into me for so long was this idea that if you are a successful, quote unquote, successful actor, and if you are a quote unquote serious actor, then what you should be working towards is a series regular on a network TV show. That is the label of success. Or be a list, or be on an original Broadway cast. Those are kind of the three things that you can be and that is success as an actor. Well, I thought about what a network TV show actor's life was like. Like a lead in a network TV show and what I wanted to be as a mother. I'm a mom, I have two kids and I have always known that I wanted to be a mom. The life of a lead in a network TV show and the life of the mother that I wanted to be did not work together. Actors on leads shows, they tend to work like twelve hour days, five, six days a week, nine months out of the year, like ridiculous schedules. And I wanted to be a mom who could go and volunteer in my kids classroom or be there at Little League and still be able to act. And I never for myself. Translated hey, these two things that I say that I want don't work together in one single human being's life. That's not how that works. And it wasn't until I was able to bring my awareness to that fact that there was this tension between the two top goals I said I had for myself. When I was able to redefine my definition of success as an actor.
[09:25] Emily: Oh my gosh.
[09:26] Corrie Legge: Everything opened up for me. Like, suddenly everything felt so much better because I wasn't defining my goals in my life by somebody else's definition, I was defining it by my own. And I think that it's so scary in any kind of creative career to define success on your own terms, not on somebody else's terms, not on the top dogs quote unquote top dogs terms. Because when we look at people who are hyper successful in a single field, a lot of times we're just looking at their career. Who's to say that the rest of their life is what they want it to be? Oftentimes it's not. And when I recognized that and I was like, oh, I'm not just trying to be like the actor Corey, but I want to be the human Corey. That was game. And so I went into coaching to help other people find the courage and the tools and the skills they needed to get to that point for themselves as well.
[10:32] Rachel: I have been watching or I just started Rain Wilson's documentary on peacock, the Geography of Bliss. Have you heard of it?
[10:41] Corrie Legge: I haven't, but that sounds amazing.
[10:43] Rachel: It's really good so far. I just watched the first episode and Rain Wilson's an actor, an amazing actor and he has always struggled with anxiety and depression. And so he went on this journey to find out why some places in the world are happier than other places. And so. That's why it's called The Geography of Bliss. He's traveling around the world to see what makes the people in Iceland one of the most happy countries in the world when they live in one of the most severe environments in the world. And it just is stuck in my head right now because it touches on two of the things that you just talked about and the first one is that the people in Iceland all have they talk about it as if they live multiple realities. But it's basically idea that they're multi passionate. Like none of them are just one thing. They're farmers, they're politicians, they're bakers. Like every single person has a wide variety of things that they do that are just accepted. And there's a full conversation that Rain has where he talks about how in the United States you're basically told to have one lane and you stay in your lane because people need to be able to define you to know who you are. And if you start to deviate from that lane, then you're almost ostracized a little bit. You're treated like you don't take life seriously or that you're not focused or that you'll never get to the expertise level of something. There's a lot wrapped up in there like what Emily was saying about Hustle culture to fully agree with and perfectionism and all sorts of stuff. But the happiest countries in the world just do whatever they want. They can have multiple passions that they like to do. And they are in harmony because especially again, I've only watched one episode, but in Iceland, their world is constantly changing. The environment changes every single day. Like you could have snow and sun and rain all in the same day within an hour. And so they have a phrase that's just called, oh, it'll all work out. That's their national Icelandic phrase, it'll work out.
[12:55] Corrie Legge: And that's like their attitude. But I feel like they live in.
[12:59] Rachel: The harmony that you're describing because especially with parenthood, everything changes every single day. And you can go through phases of teething where you don't sleep for days or it could be great and yeah, all of a sudden, oh my God.
[13:16] Corrie Legge: I slept through the night.
[13:17] Rachel: What the heck? This is what it feels like to be a human again. It's never the same, but I think that's what's so striking about your analogy about balance, because the picture of balance is that once you have it, you maintain it. And I think that's impossible. Like you can't maintain that balance forever. In a normal human being's life, everything is constantly changing. So I really like this idea of harmony and kind of addressing something every single day. What do I feel like doing today? What's going to be healthy for me today? What's my version of success today? Sometimes it's like even on a daily basis, you need to define that for yourself.
[14:00] Corrie Legge: Like you said, especially as parents, sometimes it is getting to work a little bit late so you can have that dance party with your toddler. I did that this morning. He wanted to dance with me and I'm like, you know what, this is more important than me working on some random email sequence that I need to do. I'm going to hang out with him for ten minutes and we're going to have a dance party.
[14:24] Emily: Yeah, I really like this. Not redefinition, but this swapping of balance with harmony. Specifically because of what you were talking about with the loss. Right. The image that balance has of like, well, and I think parenthood is one of those things where we feel that a lot, right? Where it's like, oh, if you're going to focus on work, then that means you're giving up on part of your parenting, or if you're going to focus on parenting, you're giving up on your career. And I hate that because that's not how it works, it's not how we should be looking at it. I think the word harmony is such a better way of being like, how can I be in harmony with the things that I want to do and the person that I want to be today, this month, the next five years? And looking at that definition of success, it's like not just what do I want my success with my writing to look like, but what do I want my life to look like in five years? And that's a beautiful way of looking at that because people just yeah, we get hung up on that word balance, for sure.
[15:36] Corrie Legge: And balance creates this image of like, there's two buckets and we are so not just two buckets, we are so many buckets.
[15:44] Rachel: Yeah. This is like such a common question, though, that we get as coaches, too, and that we see in our writing communities of how do I find the balance between these two things? And I remember a question that we got from one of our members a few months ago where he was literally asking, should I quit something I love so I could focus on writing. And no, I don't think any of no one should. But there's all sorts of pressures because he was feeling that the expectation that if you don't put 100% of your energy behind something, you're not going to be good at it. And if you're not going to be good at it, then what's the point? If you're not going to be good at it, you're not going to make money at it. And if you're not going to make money at it, you're not going to be successful. And if you're not going to be successful, no one's going to care about you. So there was all sorts of things wrapped up in that question, but that's where we find ourselves when the expectation is that our creativity should be monetized or valued by that success versus I just like doing it, so I'm doing it. We had such a great discussion with him, but you could just see how much he struggled with what you were describing, that friction, where he was realizing that the writing life that he wanted was not lining up with the person that he needed to be. And so he was looking for areas to sacrifice. But sacrifice, I don't think, leads to harmony.
[17:19] Corrie Legge: Brand that on a mug or something, that's the resentment.
[17:24] Rachel: When you sacrifice, it breeds that resentment. And the belief is that you must sacrifice to be successful or to be this multi passionate, or to be like, an expert in this field to achieve some measurement of success or validation. When we're talking about parenthood, like, of course you have to sacrifice some things to be a parent, et cetera. That's not what I'm talking about. But you don't have to give up a piece of your creative life to do something else that you feel like is more air quotes important?
[18:02] Corrie Legge: I'm actually reading right now, so julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way also wrote a book called The Artist's Way for parents. And I'm reading it right now. I've had it for like two years and it's been sitting there on my.
[18:18] Emily: Bookshelf, finally doing it.
[18:19] Corrie Legge: I'm finally reading it and I'm so excited. I texted my husband, who literally was in the other room, but I texted him, I was like, I'm twelve pages in and I'm already loving this and it's not that she's presenting ideas that I'm not familiar with. It's a lot of the same ideas in the artist way itself. But she is framing it within the world of parenthood that suddenly it's so validating. Because some of the struggles that I've had around it being like, well, yeah, morning pages would be great if my kid wasn't waking up at 04:00. A.m. I'm not going to wake up at 330 to do this. And also she's in my room, so I can't set an alarm without waking her up. It was so validating to have things framed in a way that was like for me as a parent and looking at creativity as something that can be shared and nurtured in your children and fostered in your children by you doing it yourself and either bringing them along on that journey or just letting them see you do it and letting them see you set boundaries around your own creativity. She talks about how she was a single mother and when her daughter was a toddler, she had to write because that was how she was going. Not only was it how she was going to fuel and nurture herself, but it was literally her income stream. And so she would tell her daughter, not now, Mommy's working. And she would be sitting there in the room, and her daughter would be playing with her toy horses. And she said, that Mommy's writing, mommy's writing. And her friends asked, did that breed resentment in your daughter? And she's like, no, it fostered a love of writing for her. Suddenly, her toy horses became journals and notebooks of her own, and she learned how to set boundaries around her own creative time because she watched her mother do it and model it for her.
[20:19] Rachel: I love that Rose is at the age she's just about to be three, so she's at the same age, I think, as your son. And she has now started like, she knows when my computer comes out, Mommy's working, and she'll start saying, Mommy's working. And so the other day, she got her little toy laptop, which is over there in the corner, and she sat down at my desk and started typing, and I had the cutest little pictures of it, but it did breed a little bit of guilt of, oh, so she knows. Why am I trying to hide it from her? But she knows when I'm working. And I have been worried that she's going to start thinking that she's not as important as my work, because now she knows what it means for me to be working. So that's a little helpful to hear that there's shades, obviously, of how to go about this. But, yeah, maybe she won't start to resent my computer desk and like being in the office because she likes to play here. She likes to pretend to be me while she's on her computer. It's really funny.
[21:27] Emily: She's so cute.
[21:29] Rachel: She's a sweetheart.
[21:32] Emily: So this is so good. I really want to talk about how because we've talked a lot about redefining success, right, and finding that harmony and how do you start? Because Rachel and I have talked a lot about how to set writing goals and how to set the mindset of setting goals for your projects, right. But what we're really talking about here is how do you set goals for your life, right? I'm curious. When you're working with clients and working on this with folks, where do you start? It feels so big. How do you figure out what you want? Because we're not asked that very often. We're asked, what lane do you want to be in? But we're not asked, what do you want your harmonized life to look like? That's a big question. So where do you even start?
[22:23] Corrie Legge: Yeah, it is. It's a huge question. And like you said, we're so used to focusing on one thing, and also we're used to quick results. Like, everybody wants the quick solve and the get rich quick scheme or whatever, or how do you write your novel in 30 days? And suddenly it's a huge success. Everybody's looking for that fast result, and unfortunately, there is no fast result with this kind of work. It is a long process of self exploration and self discovery. But I think what's beautiful about that is it's a long process because it's never ending, because you can constantly be changing and tweaking what you think your vision of your life, what you want your vision of your life to be, not what you think it is, but what it is for you in that moment. Like we were talking about before, it can change from day to day, week to week, month to month. I think it's important to have kind of a big picture of the big picture ideas that you're working towards, but even those can shift and flux as you learn new things about yourself and what actually brings you joy. It is okay to change your mind, and it is okay to pivot or to shift or to tweak. All of these things are fine. But as a starting place, as, like, a way to even start the conversation, I like to have my clients look at a life pie. You might have heard of it as a wheel of life, but it's what I was talking about before with those ideas of the domains of your life. So what you do is you zoom in on the different areas of your life. So, okay, what do I want my relationship with my family to look like? What does that mean? And it can be concrete. I want this many kids. I want XYZ, or it can be abstract. I want to embrace the ideas of passion and creativity within our home, those kinds of things. And then you shift, okay, what do I want my financial life to look like? What do I want my career life to look like. And you dive deep into each of those domains. I can share a resource with you and the listeners, if that would be helpful. And once you've kind of dug deep into each of those, then you pull yourself back out and you look big picture. Okay, I've done the work in each of these domains, but how do they fit together? How do all of these puzle pieces actually work? I want to be a multimillionaire, but I want to not work at all. Okay, well, how do those things fit together? Where is some places there may be compromise, or some places there just needs to be some creative thinking around it as far as maybe this hasn't been done before or done by somebody I know, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done. What are the things that I can be doing in my life to be working towards that goal? I had a client one time who was really struggling with she was starting a theater company, and she was struggling with this idea of being a creative director but still wanting to be an actor. And she's like, well, no creative director at any kind of successful theater is also an actor. That doesn't happen. And I was like, or it hasn't happened yet, or you haven't seen that role model. That doesn't mean that that can't be your version of your life. That just means you need to tweak the way that you approach some things in being a creative director or in being an actor to let both of those things coexist in your world. It just means that you might not follow the normal path for either of those things. But that doesn't mean that it can't happen. It just means things need to tweak shift. You might need more help. Maybe you're a co creative director, so that half of the year you can be acting. There's so many different options and different ways of adjusting things. You don't have to follow one written path for each objective you have for your life. There's not just one way of approaching anything in life. There are so many different angles you can come at it with, and you should just find the angle that works for you. And then the other piece of this that I think has been paramount for me, for my clients, for anybody who's kind of doing this deep work of figuring out what I call it, your dream creative life, what that dream creative life looks like for you is ongoing reflection. And for me, that takes the form of morning pages, which, again, is the concept that Julia Cameron presents in the artist way. But it's this idea, and I don't think it has to happen in the morning. She's very adamant that it has to happen in the morning. I think if it happens at any point, it's great. Definitely doesn't always happen in the morning for me, so I tend to call them pages instead of morning pages.
[27:24] Rachel: Your daily pages.
[27:26] Emily: Exactly.
[27:26] Rachel: Oh, I like that. Daily pages.
[27:29] Corrie Legge: It's three pages of free flowing writing that just can be anything. I'm going to be honest, a lot of times it's me whining about things.
[27:39] Rachel: Or lots of to do lists.
[27:41] Corrie Legge: I like to do lists, but it just gets it out, or at least for me, and for a lot of my clients too, have found that the things that are important to you keep coming back. And the places in your life where there is this maybe unnoticed or unspoken friction are what come up a lot in your pages. And when you can bring that attention to it, then you can address it, but you can't address it until you know it's actually there. So having some kind of way of bringing things to the surface is super important.
[28:15] Emily: Yeah, I found journaling to be really powerful in that way as well. I think we talk a lot about Amy McNee. Her instagram is inspired to write and she also got her inspiration for her journaling stuff from Cameron. And so I took some of her journaling classes and that's exactly what happened. It brings those ideas and just like, what's going on in your subconscious up to the surface so you can examine it. And one of the exercises that Amy I can't remember if Julia also does this, but one of the exercises that Amy suggested once that I tried that I find to be really helpful in this future success definition is she asked. It was a journaling prompt, I think, to write down if you were to visualize five years from now.
[29:07] Rachel: Right.
[29:08] Emily: Like, everything that you're working towards five years from now, what does a perfect day look like? Just like, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, what does that day look like? And obviously, I probably do this exercise maybe once every six months and it changes constantly, which I think is an interesting way to allow yourself to learn more about yourself and what you actually want. But the power of it is that in those small things, like, I want my morning to look like this, you start to learn not only what do you want from your career, but what do you want your life to look like? What do you want your mindset to look like? How do you want to approach your life and approach your day and approach your relationships? And I found that to be really helpful because even though so much of it for so long felt so far away, there were things I could do in the moment to start to work towards that vision. And I think, Corey, you had a post that was very similar to this the other day, which is why I was thinking about it, because I was like, oh, yes, I've done that. And. It's so powerful because it brings that creative stuff and that life stuff together into that single place of how can you start to adjust your life to make that vision possible in the smallest ways?
[30:24] Corrie Legge: Yeah, it's all about those micro shifts, right? It can be so daunting and intimidating to make a giant leap or feel like you have to take this giant leap, but oftentimes it's those tiny little shifts that get you one micro step closer to what you want that can be so rewarding and so fulfilling. And if we just keep taking those tiny little baby micro steps, eventually we get there. But if you're always stopped and stuck because it feels like such a big leap, you're never going to get there because you're never going to take that giant, big leap.
[30:58] Emily: Yeah, because sometimes I think it can be overwhelming to be like, where do I want to be in five years? Because it just feels so big and far away and impossible in so many ways. But when you can look at the big buckets of things that you want to have changed and then be like, okay, how can I take a tiny step towards that? I think the first time I did this exercise was probably three or four years ago, and I remember being like, oh, wow, I really wish that I could just not work. I think I was still working my day job. So I was like, I just wish I could write until I didn't have to do anything except write or whatever I wanted until 10:00 A.m. Or something like that. But at that point in time, I was structuring my day so that I was working really early. And I remember having this moment of like, oh, I don't have to do that. I could restructure my day to like, yeah, I can't take the whole day off yet, or I can't free up my morning yet because I have this day job that I have to do, but I can make this tiny micro shift to open up a little bit more morning time for my writing. And it felt like so much agency and power, like, oh, okay, I am empowered. I can take steps towards this. Even though I feel trapped in this job, even though I feel trapped in this situation, it's like taking that power back a little bit.
[32:23] Corrie Legge: I think I love that it's not so often people are focused on, when can I quit the day job? But it doesn't have to be that giant of a step right away. It can just be, how can I restructure my day so that I can use the time that I feel the most creative for my creative work instead of for my day job?
[32:41] Rachel: I love that I think these exercises, people use them as the end point of, like, I want to work towards that. But more often than not, for me, it tells me more about what's going on in my current world than anything else. Because the first thing that came to mind when I was thinking, what do I want five years from now? It was like a good night's sleep.
[33:07] Corrie Legge: That'S like, okay, these exercises, wherever you.
[33:12] Rachel: Envision yourself five years from now can be anything. But there's also a lot that you can draw from what you're struggling with in this current moment that then can help you find those next step pieces, those micro shift pieces, because I don't know. Yeah, I would love to have a beautiful house on the hill and be able to write all day, but I also would like to eat a meal by myself that's more about my current life.
[33:41] Corrie Legge: Right.
[33:41] Rachel: So maybe I'll just eat a meal by myself and start making those tiny micro shifts, and maybe I don't have to be in charge of every meal of the day, and I can work towards shifting that away. Yeah. I'm thinking so much more of like, okay, this is way more informative for not where I want to work too, but what I need to change now.
[34:04] Corrie Legge: Yeah.
[34:05] Emily: We can get so mired, I think, in just how we've been doing things, and it becomes automatic, and we don't question why we've structured our days certain ways or why we're making certain decisions. And when we start to think about, really, it's like, what does freedom and happiness look like five years from now? That can open up like you said, like, oh, this is what I want right now. Yeah.
[34:29] Corrie Legge: And I just want to throw another version of that exercise out because I love the ideal day exercise, but for me, I actually felt like stilted by it being a single day because I was like, I don't want my days to look the same every day. So I opened it up to be like an ideal week and let myself explore a few different versions of what my days could look like in different capacities. And that helped me approach that exercise with more joy, because I found that because of all the different creative passions that I have, trying to fit it all in a 24 hours period meant that I got no sleep. It just didn't work. But when I opened it up to a week or even thinking about the year and being like, okay, well, I want my summers to be devoted to this, and I want my fall to be devoted to that. That allowed me to get from the exercise what I think the purpose of the exercise is without feeling constrained by the 24 hours parameters. So if anybody listening feels that way about the ideal day exercise, just open it up for yourself to be a week or a month or even the year at a big picture level.
[35:43] Emily: Yeah, I love that. That's a good point, because I think for some folks, thinking about a whole year could be really overwhelming, right? And you won't get to the juicy specifics that we're talking about with, like, what do you want that morning to look like so that you can start to get to those really detailed, specific things you can take action on. So I love that from a day to a year, what do you want your life to look like?
[36:07] Corrie Legge: Whichever step feels least overwhelming or some combination thereof. Like you said, there can be some really beautiful discoveries when you do focus on a single day or even a single week. But then big picture, especially for anybody who kind of has those bigger projects that have long timelines, like writing a book or creating a film or anything like that, that isn't going to happen on the day to day level. I mean, it does happen on the day to day level, but it also happens over a larger timeline in terms of what focus is going towards, what part of the project. So having kind of those variations, and also for people with children in school, your ideal day in the summer is going to look very different than your ideal day during the school year. Or it might I'm not going to say it will, but it might look very different. And that's okay too it'll probably look.
[36:58] Emily: Different depending on what age your kid is, too. Exactly.
[37:02] Corrie Legge: Yeah. It doesn't change much for me right.
[37:03] Emily: Now because none of my kids are.
[37:05] Corrie Legge: In school, but I know there's a light at the end of the tunnel where my children will eventually be in school. Actually, my toddler starts like three half days a week in September for preschool, and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's.
[37:23] Emily: Crazy.
[37:25] Corrie Legge: But I'll still have my four month old.
[37:29] Emily: Okay, so we talked about defining success, right, and getting some insights on how you can shift your day to day. But let's talk about priorities because that's like the next step. I feel like in the day to day piece of moving towards that life that you really want, that harmony that you really want for yourself. And we've talked about how we don't like the word sacrifice. We don't like balance, we don't like how those things are tied together, but we do need to prioritize. And so how do we prioritize in a way that doesn't feel like sacrifice and doesn't feel like breeding resentment?
[38:08] Corrie Legge: I love that I have been having my clients do this exercise, and it's been really eye opening for me, for them, for everyone. So I'm going to present it to you all as well. I'm a big advocate for approaching your days and your week with intention. So knowing what it is you're prioritizing in the week as far as what are the big things that you want to tackle this week. And again, we're not just talking about career, but it could be life things, too. Anything that is kind of top of mind, top of priority list for you. But I think the value comes in recognizing if those things don't happen, why didn't they happen? So one thing that I encourage people to do is let's say that you wanted to finish. I know that you guys don't like page counts, but just for simplicity's sake, let's say you wanted to write 3000 words this week or whatever it is, and you only wrote 1000. I have people take a look at it and use the words I didn't prioritize XYZ, whatever it was. The goal was there's this idea around priority and maybe that's not a great example because you might have prioritized your writing time, but the words didn't come. So let's think of it more as I wanted to write this amount of time and then that time wasn't prioritized. I think that there is this societal stigma around not prioritizing work things as being bad. And I want to reframe that because it's true. You didn't prioritize it. If you said you were going to spend 4 hours writing this week and you didn't spend 4 hours writing this week, you didn't prioritize it. But that doesn't mean that it was the wrong decision. Why didn't you prioritize it? Did you not prioritize it because all of a sudden your entire house got strep throat and everyone was miserable. Okay, then you prioritized your health and your well being and your family's health and well being over writing for 4 hours. Maybe that was the right decision for you this week. And that's okay. Instead of prioritizing your writing, you prioritized your family's health and well being. That's fine. Bring awareness to why it wasn't prioritized. So that you can either give yourself the grace of knowing that you actually prioritized what is truly more important to you or the honesty of you know what? I actually just kind of went down a rabbit hole of Instagram and was on reels for 3 hours and that's why I didn't get to my writing time. Okay, then you prioritized the dopamine hit of instagram over your writing time. Is that what you would like to be prioritizing moving forward? If the answer is no, then great. You've brought some awareness to what it is that you need to shift in order to really prioritize the things that you truly do want to be prioritizing. But I think that there's this idea that if you don't meet all of your goals and checklist items like check, check, then you failed. And that isn't always the case. It's so important to know what actually happened in your day or your week that either allowed you to do the things that you wanted to prioritize or forced you to prioritize something else instead. I think that bringing that awareness to I didn't prioritize X, I prioritized Y can help you in the long, like over time, bring your priorities to where you want them to be and help you reestablish habits or bring attention to bad habits that aren't serving you in the long run.
[41:54] Emily: Yeah, I love this idea of bringing awareness to that gap. And I think you could probably do it in the positive as well. Like, yes, I did reach three K or I went to five K or 5 hours or whatever your measurement was. And analyzing why. I think that question can be really important or really insightful as long as it is coming from a place of unshaming, which I think is what you're getting at because yeah, okay, maybe you didn't reach your hour mark for writing because you kept going down these instagram rabbit holes. And instead of shaming that, we can ask, well, why did I do that?
[42:39] Corrie Legge: Right.
[42:40] Emily: Why did I prioritize this other thing? Not just what did I prioritize, but why? To get at, okay, I'm terrified of this next scene, or I don't know where to go next in my story or the emotion of this scene was not in line with my emotions this week, and I just couldn't go there. Right. And so I think we can use that exercise. I like this idea of, like, I prioritized this over this and then just like, no judgment. No judgment in there. Just, Why did you do that? That's a really good.
[43:17] Corrie Legge: I just really.
[43:18] Emily: Like that approach because I think it brings that harmony piece into it of like, how do I get more in harmony with what I want to be doing and how I want to be feeling and how I want to be talking to myself? Because I think that shame piece can be hard too.
[43:33] Corrie Legge: Right.
[43:34] Emily: In the harmony piece is like, we should all work on how we talk to ourselves, and that's a good way to do that.
[43:44] Corrie Legge: Go ahead, Rachel.
[43:47] Rachel: For about the first 15 minutes of pretty much every coaching call I do, we talk about this exact thing. And we don't use the term prioritize, but it's the same idea. And we start with, like, how did this week go? What happened? That's usually like, the first question that I ask is, like, what happened this week? And inevitably, there's always some sort of I felt really good about this, or I didn't get to what I had planned to do because of this very valid reason. But there's always some sort in the first four months of our coaching program, there's always some sort of attachment to I didn't get to this thing and I feel terrible about it, and we have to explore that. One of my clients is a teacher, and she was going through a crisis at work and didn't get to what she wanted to do, but also was carrying all of the stress of that crisis on top of feeling like she didn't achieve her goals. And we spent almost our entire call just talking about that because we are, like you said, conditioned to believe that if you don't achieve these things, that's somehow a bad thing, but really you're literally just surviving. And I think that's been a huge eye opener for me of sometimes you just survive and you made it. That's amazing. Congratulations. You're here because often it doesn't feel like you can get through it, but you do. And that deserves to be celebrated just as much as hitting that goal or meeting whatever expectation it was that you had. But I don't love the term prioritization because it does feel like every day is different for me. I do really like the idea of letting go of the stigma. The stigma is very present in my life, but I do really like that asking, so what happened in this week? What did I really like and what did I not like and why? And the awareness is really what we're aiming for. Where did you spend your time and why? Because it's not like you did nothing. I hate that when people are like, I didn't do anything this week. I'm like probably not incorrect. You probably did a lot of stuff, but you're looking at it in the framework of I didn't do a lot of X because you were doing all of the other things that it requires to stay alive. That's a lot of stuff for a lot of people. I also want to clarify if you are in sometimes, and I've been in this spot of being in a depression state where it does feel like you're doing nothing because you're in that depressive state, that is what I mean by you're surviving.
[46:40] Corrie Legge: And that's a really big feat for.
[46:41] Rachel: A lot of people to just make it through. That still is very important.
[46:49] Emily: Yeah, we can hyper focus. I think as a culture we have a tendency to hyper focus on whatever that goal you set was. And goals, we've talked about this before. Goals have they're a very useful tool, but we have to have that awareness when we do or don't meet them as to why we were able to or weren't able to without that judgment and shame.
[47:15] Corrie Legge: And something else that I think can be really challenging for creatives around the idea of goal setting. I'm a huge advocate of goal setting, but maybe not in the way that everybody is used to thinking about goal setting. Something that's important to remember is with creative pursuits, there is very often not a linear path. It isn't like you're going to make the same milestones on a consistent basis and blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of invisible work that goes into being creative and that invisible work can be really frustrating and feel like you are doing nothing because you don't have anything to, quote unquote, show for the effort and the work that you're putting in. But I love I heard this analogy one time and it has stuck with me. Emily, you'll appreciate this with your science background. If you take an ice cube and you put it on your counter and you were to measure the temperature of that ice cube, that ice cube's temperature would slowly start to climb from up towards 32 degrees. But if you're observing the ice cube, nothing is changing. It is still an ice cube sitting on your counter. It looks like nothing is happening. But under the surface, the temperature is rising, rising, rising, rising. But you don't see that change until it hits the melting point, until it hits 32 degrees. That's invisible work. There's all this internal change and shift and growth happening within that from the outside world, from tangible marks of quote unquote success or growth. You might not see any of them. I'm sure there's a lot of examples in the writing world as actors, it comes up all the time. And all of the effort we put into our craft and growing as performers, that doesn't always translate to bookings, that doesn't always translate to any kind of obvious metric until all of a sudden it does. Until all of a sudden you hit that melting point and things start to actually happen for you.
[49:22] Emily: Yeah, we do talk about that a lot in writing because I think it comes in two ways. One is right, like your leveling up of your skills takes time.
[49:37] Corrie Legge: And you.
[49:37] Emily: Don'T always see those skills clicking into place until they've been brewing for a while. And then also, just with story, like the story you're working on in general, our subconscious does a ton of background work. So much background work. And so, yeah, it's taken a lot of awareness for me to realize that, especially personally from my process. That's a huge part of it. It's like giving space and time to allow things to sink in and then they'll kind of explode out of me. But it feels like nothing for a while. So, yeah, I think that it's really important to have awareness around what your process looks like in that way as well. Because we're not factory line workers. It's not going to be the exact same every day.
[50:25] Rachel: I think timeline is a really big question mark that often it changes all the time, especially after you become a parent, or if you take on extra responsibilities or whatever it is that's in your life that is taking up time, it affects whatever the time expectations you had for this goal was. And especially, I don't know if this is what it's like for actors, but in the writing world, all of the work you're doing for your book, it's like, boom it's out. And then all of a sudden, okay, I did it, it's done. But all of that work that still happens behind the scenes and the subconscious work that still is impactful and meaningful and fulfilling and successful work, but somehow, unless you get your book out, it doesn't mean as much. And that's obviously not true. But then when you take a life that is multipassionate and you have all these responsibilities that timeline extends. And that was a big thing for me of finding that friction at the beginning of our call, what we were talking about, of the life that you expect for yourself and the timeline you held for your goals, they probably don't align, and there's nothing wrong with that. And especially if you need to push that timeline back, that happens. That's life. That's what it looks like. To find in my life, Harmony, is knowing that I can either bring something forward or push something back, depending on what my life looks like. But there's all sorts of attachments to that idea too, and all sorts of stigmas to the idea that you have to rush to complete something, but you don't, why you don't. It's all these expectations, and I think being honest about what you can do in your phase of life might feel uncomfortable at the beginning because being honest about what you actually are capable of doing in a specific time frame might be different than what you expect yourself to be able to do. But once you bring that honesty to it and you let go of the shame, then you're like, oh, well, that's not a big deal if I publish my book next year versus this year. And then all that pressure. Is gone and you can let go of the shame narrative and start actually taking the concrete steps towards that thing instead of letting the guilt and the shame fester and create the resentment for the rest of the pieces of your life. Because just timeline is something that is constantly shifting when you are trying to find what I would call balance. But I love the idea of now calling it Harmony. I do feel like people have unrealistic expectations that then they hold on to for way too long and way too hard when they just need to let it go and reevaluate depending on whatever phase of creativity they're in at a specific time.
[53:32] Emily: Yeah, I love this idea you had, Corey, of in that conversation. When we have these conversations with writers, it can be really painful to be like, oh, my timeline is not what I thought it was going to be.
[53:45] Corrie Legge: Right?
[53:46] Emily: That feels like loss. And I think what I've really gathered from this conversation with you, Corey, is bringing in, okay, but what are you gaining, right? Like, what are you focusing on instead? What are you choosing to prioritize over that fast timeline? How can you celebrate that and really claim that instead of feeling like, oh, I've just extended it for two years, because that's realistic for me, and it feels like failure, but whatever, it's balance, right? That's that sacrifice resentment instead of looking at it that way, look at what you're doing instead, because you can choose to extend that timeline for very specific reasons that you can then own and celebrate, and that might change your mindset around it.
[54:40] Corrie Legge: Awesome. Thank you.
[54:41] Emily: This has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. Corey, can you tell us more about how can people work with you? Where can they find you? All of the things?
[54:50] Corrie Legge: Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. This has been an absolute pleasure. And I know Emily said it at the beginning that we've been amazing best friends for so long, but I feel like sometimes people say that and they don't actually mean it or they've been like work best friends. I just want to caveat. We have actually been best friends since we were like 14 years old in high school. So this has been a dream to have this conversation. And Rachel, it's been a pleasure as well to get to know you more. So I am on Instagram at creating with Corey. Corey is spelt C-O-R-R-I-E I'm. Also, my website is creatingwithcori.com as well, and I'm going to share with these lovely ladies some resources that we kind of talked about that can walk through the life pie and some goal setting stuff as well. And feel free to email me too. I'm [email protected] yay.
[55:46] Emily: Thank you so much, Corey.
[55:48] Rachel: Thank you. All right, if you want to build a successful, fulfilling and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.
[55:56] Emily: Sign up now to get our free email course, the Magic of Character Arcs. After seven days of email magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers flipping pages all through the night.
[56:05] Rachel: Link in the show notes. We'll see you there. Thanks. Bye.
