What does it mean to you to live a life with no regrets? Is that even possible?
What if it’s less about avoiding regrets entirely and more about being clear on your values, dreams, and desires and combining that with intentional practices to build a life focused on things that matter to you and the world around you?
Of course, this takes work because we’re constantly pulled in many different directions and responding to many inputs, just trying to keep our heads above water.
To lead well, we must get clarity in our values and develop trusting relationships with our inner worlds and physical bodies.
Instead of chasing a life with zero regrets, we need to learn to respond well to our regrets in the moment. If we want to look back and feel good about how we responded, we can’t numb out or bypass; we must make amends and correct our course.
Today’s conversation is with a long-time friend and colleague who reminds us that living an aligned life is a meandering path, a life that is always stretched and tested. It’s not always easy, but when we stay connected to our values, desires, and integrity, there can be ease and clarity even in the hard times.
Molly Mahar is the founder of Stratejoy, a community helping women reclaim intimate, honest, and joyful relationships with themselves for the good of all. She’s an entrepreneur, mama, writer, and adventurer obsessed with designing personal experiments that scare you, telling the truth, and her new teardrop trailer. In this episode, Molly shares her journey of living an aligned life, her struggles, and the lessons she learned along the way.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
- How Molly prepared, financially and emotionally, to embark on a year of travel and a major move with her family
- How relocating on their return may have actually made it easier for Molly to integrate her experiences
- What putting their lives on hold and being together 24/7 revealed about Molly’s relationship with her husband, their parenting choices, and how they handle conflict
- The support and practices that helped Molly get back in alignment
- Unpacking her complicated relationship with alcohol and why she knew she needed to get sober for good
- The core questions that Molly used to guide her self-reflection throughout the trip
Learn more about Molly Mahar:
- Stratejoy
- Instagram: @stratejoy, @mollymahar
Learn more about Rebecca:
Resources:
- EP 107: The Seasons of Entrepreneurship: Leading a Deliberate Life with Laura Roeder
- Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, Suleika Jaouad
- Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton
- You, Again, Kate Goldbeck
- Paper Planes – Radio Up
- MAGIC! – Good Feeling About You
- Nyad
- The Idea of You
- Saved by the Bell
Transcript:
[Inspirational Intro Music]
Molly Mahar: If I would die tomorrow, how do I feel about my life? How do I feel about how I showed up? “Did I feel successful?” and probably for the last several years my answer has been, “Yeah.” “Am I gonna have regrets on my deathbed?” And I could pretty much say, “No.” I showed up the way I wanted to.
Rebecca Ching: What does it mean to you to live a life with no regrets? And do you think it’s even possible to live a life without regrets? I think for me I wonder if it’s less about avoiding regrets and more about being crystal clear on your values, dreams, and desires and combining all of that with deliberate and intentional practices that build a life focused on things that matter to you and the world around you. This takes some work because we’re constantly pulled in so many directions we can often feel like we’re just responding to life while trying to keep our heads above water and everything together.
I also wonder if instead of trying to live a life without regrets we live a life attuned to responding well to our regrets at the moment so that we can look back and feel good about how we responded to the data from our regrets by making amends or course correcting our jobs, relationships, wellbeing, and ambitions while saying the thing and doing the thing our hearts long for.
I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with humans who navigate life’s challenges and lead in their own ways. Our goal is to learn how they address the burdens they carry, how they learn from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.
2:00
Maybe it’s just all we’re carrying right now, but I feel the pull to be more and more discerning about my life right now, how I use my time, my energy, where my focus goes. For many of us, we breathe lessons on tolerating and sucking up and competing with those who are on the same team all while trying to beat our bodies into submission to an ideal soul to us. We’ve learned to worship expediency, and in turn, trained ourselves to be quite impatient. It’s just cool, right? It has been cool to want it all now.
And I feel like so many of us, especially those of us of a certain age, mid-life — it feels weird to say I’m midlife, but I am. Older Millennials, Gen-Xers in particular, so many of us are waking up to our lives and realizing we still have time to make shifts in how we relate to ourselves, how we do life, and how we do work. We realize, “Wait, what we’ve done for the first half of our life, we maybe don’t want to keep that going. We want to course correct.” We realize how much we’ve been conditioned to believe messages about what it takes to be seen as a hard worker, successful, good enough, and as a result, ooh, we feel depleted, unwell, and disillusioned.
And I think particularly for those of us who are daughters of those who fought for victories like Title IX and other rights for women, which are crumbling around us right now in real time, we were told we could do everything, and, in fact, we’re implicitly or explicitly told, “We fought for you to be able to do whatever you want, and now you should do it all.” [Sigh] And that came with a cost. And I sense that part of changing course in our relationship with our health, our bodies, our work, family, civic matters feels less about chasing things so we have no regrets and more about being in a deep relationship with our values, our community, and feeling fulfilled and aligned instead of like zombies.
4:07
So, in my reflections, when I imagine being on my deathbed, I know that’s warped, but I think this is a thing we do when we reach a certain age, and I’m wondering what I wish I’d done differently or have done or not done, and from that, I’m reverse engineering some of those things right now, wanting to lead and live with more love. Having moments with people, just these moments of just connection, less pushing and pulling and more presence. And, you know, there are some other things that maybe feel small or sound small, but they’re lifelong dreams like learning to play guitar, getting my PhD, and writing a book.
When we lose focus on what matters, we end up pushing through and comforting and numbing and just consuming content, podcasts like this, books, social media, movies, other people’s thoughts and ideas so much so that it’s not necessarily generative, but we lose touch with who we are, what we need, and what we value. We can’t lead ourselves or others well if we’re not crystal clear on our values, if we don’t have a trusting relationship with our inner world, and we don’t trust our bodies. I believe a life lived with minimal unresolved regrets is based on how we respond to regrets in the meantime, instead of numbing them out, comforting, or bypassing them.
What’s also inextricably connected to living a life responding to our regrets is the ability to plan, to make the time to schedule, dream, and map things out instead of just cramming more into our schedules and into our lives and then just figuring it out and feeling buried. There’s an element of discernment, of deliberation, just like we talked about in my recent Unburdened Leader podcast conversation with Laura Roeder.
6:06
Again, I just don’t think it’s realistic to have no regrets, but I think it’s realistic to feel like we lived a life well. That means tending to our regrets in real time when we veer away from our values, our integrity, and our ability and capacity for love.
Now, some of my favorite foundational work to do with clients centers on clarity of values and operationalizing them because we always have to go back to our values and filter our decisions and regrets through them to help us move forward in ways we don’t keep repeating or get stuck in these same regret loops. We also need to know ourselves and our inner lives well and be clear on the burdens we carry so we understand the impact those burdens have on how we respond to conflict, vulnerability, fear and that YOU-turn work is essential to our forward-facing life. If we don’t trust ourselves and don’t have people around us who we trust to have hard conversations that keep us from steamrolling through our regrets, we miss so much.
My guest today — you know, this is a conversation between two longtime friends and colleagues, but I also hope you hear the impact of putting in the reps, of working your practices daily to stay in touch with your inner and outer life, to do the work, to plan for the dreams, to make the big decisions. She reminds us living an aligned life is definitely a meandering path that’s always stretched and always getting tested, but there can be ease and clarity even in the hard times when we stay connected to our values, to our desires and integrity. There’s a theme here, yes?
All right, Molly Mahar is the founder of Stratejoy, a community helping women reclaim intimate, honest, and joyful relationships with themselves and for the good of all.
8:09
She’s an entrepreneur, mama, writer, and adventurer obsessed with designing personal experiments that scare you, telling the truth, and her new teardrop trailer. Molly is currently writing a weekly newsletter about intentional living, eagerly awaiting the arrival of nectarine and burrata season, and crafting dozens of playlists to match her dozens of moods.
I’m really excited about you listening to this conversation, and I really hope you pay attention to some of the nuances that Molly touches on of her life and travels of the last year. I especially want you to listen for when Molly talks about why she teaches personal intimacy in her community and what personal intimacy actually is. Pay attention to when Molly shared what comes with self-awareness and the powerful need for self-kindness, and I want you to notice Molly’s clarity from her travels and how she discovered the power of asking the right questions to help her move through big decisions in her business and life.
All right, y’all, now please welcome Molly Mahar to The Unburdened Leader podcast!
Molly, welcome!
Molly Mahar: Thank you! I’m excited to be here!
Rebecca Ching: I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’ve known you for a while. So, disclosure, I’ve known you for a while, and you’ve always had quite the adventuresome spirit. [Laughs] And you took that to a whole new level.
So we’re at about a year mark where a year ago you upended your life and traveled the world with your husband and two kids. You bought an old church in your hometown in Montana and packed everything up in your little, cute California coastal town. So that’s a lot. You also run a business. Your husband’s an entrepreneur. So there are a lot of details here.
10:14
Take me back to when you realized your unrest, which led you to start conversations with your husband about work and where to live and traveling abroad really was present in your life. How did you identify that unrest?
Molly Mahar: Yeah, I mean, we’re gonna have to rewind all the way back to the pandemic.
Rebecca Ching: Let’s go back.
Molly Mahar: And maybe even before that to Trump getting elected. I mean, that was probably the first little time my bubble burst and the way I thought the world should be and how it should go, and “Obviously, it was gonna be this way,” was not so true. And then the pandemic hits, and it was this year where I had big plans to take myself to Esalen once a month to write my book. My youngest daughter was gonna be in full-time school. The nanny was — it was gonna be this whole year of what I wanted, my plans.
And, obviously, it didn’t happen. We fared better than many people. I work from home. My husband started working from the garage. My mom was part of our bubble. Their school was handling Zoom school okay. Things were happening, but I think the first time Ken — I just remember him coming in from the garage, sitting in the middle of the Costco toilet paper stash and saying, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” And I think he meant more than just through this pandemic. There was a level of clarity that he was like, “I am done running my marketing firm. I am certainly done working in the garage,” and I wasn’t feeling that way about my work, but I’ve had those moments in my life before. And so, the start of this conversation was truly with him.
12:02
I’d say, “Well, what would it take for you to be done with, at least, this type of work?” So I think it was recognizing and allowing his unrest to start it and then I think I just started getting pandemic bored and, “How much longer do we have to do this?” We had to do it as long as we had to, but that definitely started my Enneagram 7 self being like, “Well, what could we do? What could I do? What could change where I would be having more fun or more adventure or having more novelty?”
And then the random third piece was my girlfriend in Helena, in my hometown where I grew up in Montana, texts me or contacts me and tells me two of our really good guy friends just bought homes in Helena, sort of pandemic houses to ride it out out here, maybe vacation homes, she wasn’t sure. But she basically said, “Your turn! You all turned 40. It’s time to buy homes and move back home.” I said, “Really? That’s what we’re doing?” and also, “All right! I’m curious. Show me what you’ve got,” basically. I said, “But it has to be a deal or Ken won’t be interested, and it has to be something interesting, unique in some way.” She was like, “Okay! I’m on it.”
Cue a few weeks later, she sends me a Dropbox full of pictures of this church in the middle of town built in 1890 that she knew the people. They’d moved to Australia. They might be interested in selling it. It was a duplex. It was currently being rented out as a duplex. So we decided we weren’t sure what we were gonna do, but we were gonna buy this church.
It was unrest in that especially Ken was unhappy with business. We didn’t think we could make major changes in our working world without radically reducing our cost of living, and all of a sudden we had this landing place in a new home, and we’d had on our list before we had kids that we wanted to live abroad for a year.
14:01
That was always kind of a long-term, big-picture dream that I had, and all of a sudden my kids are getting older, and I’m like, “Ken, if we’re gonna do this, I think it has to be now. We have to start making plans now so that we can take off at a point where our children still like us and still want to hang out with us.” [Laughs] I’m like the window is small!
Rebecca Ching: The window is small! So I want to recap a little bit. So you cut up these different formulas because I suspect listeners — I think when we look back into our own unrest there are these different factors, and you talked about the 2016 election, which unmoored many folks that you and I know (a lot of us). And you talked about that kind of point for those who are parents where both of your kids or all of your kids are in school, where the last one goes to school, there’s like this kind of milestone moment. And then your partner is like, “I think I’m done with what I’m doing.”
Molly Mahar: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Okay.
Molly Mahar: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Once you decided and said, “So we’re gonna do this,” and you were making the plans and you were starting to reverse engineer, it took you a couple years to really plan this out. As you got closer and closer, what scared you the most about making these actual changes like packing up your house and renting out your cute, little house in Pismo Beach, California to all the logistics of planning a trip abroad, slowing down your business drastically. What scared you the most?
Molly Mahar: [Laughs] I think — yeah. Oh, so much. I was 100% scared of the money. I mean, that’s kind of a —
Rebecca Ching: Mm, sure.
Molly Mahar: — lifelong — right? I’ve done so much work on scarcity and abundance, and we make a lot of choices that maybe don’t make sense to other people to be able to do the things that we want to do.
16:00
Like I have gotten very used to renting my house out (like my actual house that I’m living in) when I travel. I tell people this, and they’re like, “Like, your actual house? Like, with your pictures on the wall?” I’m like, “Yep!” [Laughs] Yes, my actual house. My sheets. My stuff. I just got over that. So that part wasn’t scary.
Slowing down my business was terrifying because it was at a place that I felt really good about. I felt great financially. I felt great on the making a difference, and I’m gonna say, honestly still now, it still feels scary that I just put the brakes on and stepped away. That was terrifying. But at that point, we had been planning it for about two years. I was also pretty tired. My business was intense. I had to cancel and refund those live events and then try to reschedule them. There was a lot going on. I wouldn’t say I was burnt out when we started planning, but by the time we were about to embark, I was so ready for the break.
Rebecca Ching: You were cooked. Yeah.
Molly Mahar: We didn’t take off for the trip right away. We moved to a little cabin in Washington where Ken grew up, 800-square-feet in the middle of nowhere on this river in this teeny, tiny town that has a general store and a post office and maybe three hundred people. And so, I was nervous about taking my kids from their school and putting them in this tiny two-room schoolhouse for six months. I wasn’t sure how that was gonna go. There was lots of uncertainty, things I wasn’t scared about. I was not scared about planning the trip. That felt 100% within my wheelhouse. I was a little bit terrified that something was gonna go wrong back at home, like one of our parents would get really sick or just something that the best-laid plans couldn’t cover. You know, we would have to come home or our renters would leave California and we couldn’t cover the mortgage and we’d have to come home. So there was definitely the anxiety about all the things that I couldn’t control.
18:02
I think there was some fear about, “Who will I be when I come home,” and how do you prepare for that. There were lots of things that I was laying out. I was like, “What if it doesn’t go the way we think it will go?” Partly that’s a mindset of nothing’s irreversible. Even when we moved to Helena, upon our return, I didn’t know how it was gonna feel for myself, for my husband, for my kids. And so, we had some safety measures. I said, “Let’s not sell our California house yet. What if we all hate it in Helena and we need to go back?” [Laughs] Like, let’s give ourselves a little time, and now being a year home, we’re great here. This is gonna be the next season of life, and it sounds stressful when I say it all out loud at once together, but it was kind of a day-by-day managing of expectations.
I kept working with the word — and I’m not a religious person, but faith. Just like I have faith that we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. I have faith that things are gonna come together in the way that I need them to. That was all I could give myself on kind of a daily basis of just maybe trust is the word that would —
Rebecca Ching: Well, trust is a part of faith. You need to have trust to have faith.
Molly Mahar: Mm-hmm. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: And I think Brené Brown’s definition of faith is just believing in the unseen, right?
Molly Mahar: Mm!
Rebecca Ching: I want to just circle back one piece to the money. Because I suspect there are people listening, and that’s probably the first thing they’re going to is, “There’s no way I can do this.” And yeah, I share those money fears, and a lot of folks’ relationship with money — you know, we don’t have to go deep dive into it, but what helped you manage your fears and concerns around finances and just all of the things that helped your inner system give you enough critical mass consent to go do this trip?
20:00
Molly Mahar: Yeah, well, again, the time helped. From the point of this idea between actually leaving was about two years. I think the planner in me, this is a helpful piece. We knew how long we wanted to be gone. And Ken and I have traveled like this before. We traveled for ten months before we were married, before we had kids. Totally different scenario, but —
Rebecca Ching: I remember that, yeah.
Molly Mahar: Right? I kind of understood the cost of the day to day and I knew where you could live more cheaply. I had an idea of what the expense was going to be at some level. Like when I was booking Airbnbs in Europe, like, “Okay, this is gonna be more expensive. We’re a family of four now. Everything needs to be under $130 a night.” That was my budget. And I think if I didn’t have an idea of how to do that, it would have felt scarier or more nebulous. But I, a little bit, knew how to do that.
So rewind two years. I had a sense of what we needed to save for this trip and knew that we wouldn’t be making money while we were traveling. That was the goal: not to have to work when we were traveling.
Rebecca Ching: Mm, nice.
Molly Mahar: I said, “Okay, we need to cover our mortgages. We need to cover our health insurance. We need to get our minivan paid off before then.” All of these kinds of big pieces of the nut of what would need to be covered so we could go travel, and I let go of all of my help at Stratejoy, all the people, all the contractors that I had been paying. I said, “My business is at a stable place. I am going to take on more work right now so that I can save money.” I will be my own admin. I will be my own bookkeeper. I will take back all these things I have gotten rid of so that I can save.
And so, I signed up for more work for those two years but with a really specific reason of having these savings goals that I wanted to put aside before we even took off, and my husband did the same. And then going to live in Washington in the middle of the woods for nine months was — there was nothing to spend money on.
22:04
There’s nowhere to go. I cannot eat out. I cannot — so we knew that we’d be able to save some more money and rent our California house out, which was this great piece of that, and then Ken worked really hard at selling his business. But I always say this to people because that wasn’t the money for traveling. That was so that he could buy himself time. He wouldn’t have been able to travel and work at the same time in the way that we did. He needed to do it so that he could have time abundance, time freedom.
Rebecca Ching: Yeah.
Molly Mahar: Ah! But yeah, I mean, obviously there’s lots of logistics to all of this.
Rebecca Ching: Right. So there was a lot of planning, a lot of constraints that were connected to collective commitments. Your whole family was onboard. You weren’t pulling people along. But also just a lot of shared values and then these constraints. You were very clear. And so, your relationship with money and what you spent, it was really much like, “Okay, I’m gonna shift these things. I’m gonna work more in my business so that I can, then, find — so there are a lot of different things that you — the gives and takes are very intentional down to the minutia.
And so, one more question on this move. I’m curious, what brought you clarity that moving from a life that you built in California — and you really had community, you had your rhythms, you had your hikes, you had certain things, you had your favorite little shops you went to. I mean, it was dialed in. Your kids were dialed in. What brought you clarity that moving from this life in California would need to change?
Molly Mahar: Well, I wouldn’t use the word need. I don’t think it needed to change. I think I could have easily returned to California and been fine, loved my life just as I love it here. We were gone for about a year and a half between living in Washington and then traveling, and we had to go back to California to pack our house up.
24:03
And so, we had these two weeks where we were home after being gone for over a year-and-a-half, away from our neighbors, away from our friends, and in those two weeks it did not feel like we had been gone a single day.
Rebecca Ching: Wow.
Molly Mahar: Everything felt the same, and it was a strange feeling. It was like a bizarre world. And, like, I have had this transformational year of the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, and I’ve bonded with my children in this way I never would have, some healthy, some unhealthy. And then I got “home” to what we had left (quote, unquote home), and it was like no one was interested. It did not matter.
Rebecca Ching: Yep.
Molly Mahar: And so, in some ways I think I was really glad to have a change. I could go — it was easier to integrate the changes that we had undergone in a new place. It felt like a continuation instead of a backtracking. That’s just my experience. I know other people have long-term traveled, and they go home, and they love the feeling that nothing’s changed. But I found it very disconcerting.
Rebecca Ching: You know, I really resonate with that too. I really hardly talk about living abroad for four years. It was probably one of the most profound experiences of my adult life and informed so much of what I do today. But people don’t really — it’s a conversion stopper. [Laughs] And I notice that, and not as a criticism. There just wasn’t the interest.
Molly Mahar: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: It wasn’t a negative. So I remember feeling I kind of had to tuck that away. And then Helena’s not new. But it was a new chapter for your family, right?
Molly Mahar: Yeah. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: I have to say I’ve been really moved kind of hearing how you’re connecting with old friends and that kind of picking up with the roots. In a time where so many people are feeling disconnected, feeling isolated, feeling alone, I feel like you walked into this space that you could bring Ken and your kids into and you’re reconnecting and having adult relationships with some of the friends that you got into trouble with when you were younger.
Molly Mahar: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: And I get this sense that that’s been medicine for you, too, even when the world’s on fire.
26:26
Molly Mahar: I keep using this same word when people ask, “How does it feel to move back to your hometown,” and this is a hometown that I really have not spent any time in since I was 18.
Rebecca Ching: Mm-hmm.
Molly Mahar: My parents left when we graduated high school. We took off. I did not return. There were no Christmases or Thanksgivings or anything. That was not my experience. And so, it’s very much a time capsule of myself at 17, 18. That’s how it feels to return to Helena. Luckily, those were lovely years of my life, and it feels sweet. It feels comforting to have people call me by my maiden name, shouting down the middle of the street, and if I don’t have my glasses on, I can’t see who they are so I have to wait until they get really close because I’ve got no idea. [Laughs] Or I’ll run into someone’s parents in Safeway, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I hadn’t even remembered you existed until this exact moment.”
So it has been a bit of a homecoming in that sense, and then just I think one of the things that feels true is that this feels like a gift to my children. You know, it’s obviously a delight for me, but I think of my kids developing these kinds of friendships and these kinds of memories. I feel confident that this is a place where they can thrive, especially after being here a year and seeing how it’s gone. Maybe I couldn’t have said that a year ago. But at this point, I really think for this season of life, this, “I’m gonna be working hard for the next eight years, my kids are gonna be doing the school, friends, sports, dance, you know, whatever it turns into,” I will figure out where I can help and contribute in a way that makes a difference in the community here and that feels good. That feels solid. Yeah, it feels sweet.
28:17
Rebecca Ching: So I want to just talk briefly about your travels. As someone who’s lived abroad, one thing I learned is how being away from the comforts of home and even just from a neuropsychological perspective, being able to speak or read the language, you know, driving. But how being away from those comforts, those things that we do when automatic pilot are no longer present, how being in that situation can turn a crack into the figurative Grand Canyon in our own emotional or relational wellbeing, bringing things to the surface, often at a warp speed, that need attention. But often when we’re in our comforts, they get pushed back by the daily grind of living.
So I’m curious, what cracks came to the surface as you prepared for your travels and also during your travels?
Molly Mahar: It was a little disconcerting to have the Stripe emails stop populating my Stripe folder because I kept bringing it up with my friends. Like, “Ah, it feels very weird not to make any money.” I’ve always had a job. I’ve always had a business. I’ve had a job since I was 13. I feel very strange not moving forward. I’m at a standstill! But I made my peace with it. And then once we started traveling, it went away completely. I didn’t worry about it at all.
Rebecca Ching: Ah, okay.
Molly Mahar: It was just fine. It was just like, “Now we’re here, and we’ve arrived, and I can relax. The future, I’ll worry about when I get home.” The cracks that happened when we were traveling were pretty distinctly in my marriage, [Laughs] pretty severely and distinctly in my marriage. Again, I think we kind of expected it to be “hard.” But it was much harder than I thought it was going to be.
30:02
I don’t think we could have avoided it, and I think there were pieces that were not necessarily travel, but that the travels escalated them or made them come into stark reality. But my husband had just left his business of 20 years where he had been the boss of 20 people, and especially those last 9 months when he was working so hard and such long hours to sell the business and run the business at the same time, we left three weeks after that happened and into this totally different world where the trip was kind of my baby. I planned the trip. I knew the details. I knew where we were going. I was the boss of the trip. [Laughs]
The first month we were sailing, and so, that’s Ken’s domain. He’s the captain. I pulled a lot of ropes.
Rebecca Ching: In Croatia, right?
Molly Mahar: Yeah, in Croatia, yeah. I hauled a lot of lines, but he had this whole, “The kids earn their badges by being the crew,” and this was very much his domain. But once we got off the boat, there was — we just were having power struggles about everything. And I think part of it is he was adjusting to not working and not having this place to really be the king, and I was not drinking. I had committed to my sobriety right before we left, which I feel like you want to ask me about that so we can go there. So he was like partying it up, day drinking, and I’m not. And we are spending every moment together with our kids.
And so, my experience — I’m sure you’d get a different story from him. I felt like he was just questioning all of these pieces of our parenting that we had been doing this entire time. How much sugar our children ate. I mean, what felt like, to me, very random things. And we were just struggling for a big chunk of it. Not all the time. We also had these amazing experiences together. But the minutiae of it, oh, it was much harder than I thought it was gonna be.
32:19
Rebecca Ching: Those are some really big shifts, right? You both have your rhythms back home, and he had his business. Two decades running a business. That’s a chunk of — from a developmental-life-cycle perspective, that’s significant. And then that’s gone. There was no offramp for that either. And then the off-ramp of your life, you went back to the place where he grew up, where you were in your in-between before you launched overseas, and then you planned this trip. So he has all of this free time, and then put it on the parenting and all of the minutiae stuff. How did you respond? How did you guys do conflict? When he was like, “That’s too much sugar.”
Molly Mahar: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: “Why are they staying up late? Let’s play this game. They need more activity,” or whatever the thing was that he was going off on, why don’t you break it down. What did you feel in those moments? What was that initial flash that you would feel when he would ask about something and you’d feel this charge in you? What did you feel and then how did you respond to that initially?
Molly Mahar: Yeah, what I remember, well, feeling was anger, frustration, annoyance, and then the thought that accompanied that was, “This is how it’s always been,” for some of the parts, “And you’re just now paying attention and now it bothers you?”
Rebecca Ching: Ah.
Molly Mahar: Like, “Why?” I mean, again, I know why. He had time. We were together 24/7, all of us. I get why. There was no place to be a boss.
Rebecca Ching: It didn’t take away the icky feelings though, but yeah.
Molly Mahar: [Laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Even though you know the why.
Molly Mahar: But yeah, I mean, Ken and I are not conflict averse. We’ll just go into it, which is good because that’s not the pattern of my childhood. So Ken basically taught me how to fight, and I know sometimes that can feel intense for other people because I feel such safety with him that I don’t hold back, nor does he.
Rebecca Ching: Wow.
34:11
Molly Mahar: But put that in front of your eight- and ten-year-old children for an extended amount of time, and that’s where it started to get messy. People ask me, “What are your favorite memories or what are your biggest regrets?” One hundred percent the thing that I feel is the biggest regret about this travel was at some point I lost the ability to hold my adult emotional self, and it was just like there were no boundaries, and it was complete enmeshment in an unhealthy way with my children. These are the only people I have. And so, if I’m pissed at Ken, I’m telling my ten-year-old about it. Obviously, this is not appropriate. But I couldn’t control it for a while. And it was something I had to work on.
But yeah, I mean, my kids saw a whole slice of life that maybe they hadn’t been exposed to in quite that same way, and we had to work on it together.
Rebecca Ching: What did that look like? How did you and Ken repair and kind of get out? You know, once you kind of saw the loop and then recalibrate the family hierarchy with your kids and what you shared, how did you go about that?
Molly Mahar: Well, I think, I mean, there were a couple things. This went on for months. I had a complete meltdown in the Cinque Terre. This is just so funny. Travel is such a weird experience because the meltdown was precipitated by me losing my pillow. Now, this sounds ridiculous, right? It’s, like, a pillow, a feather pillow that I had been carrying around for months that I accidentally left on a train.
Rebecca Ching: It was your comfort though.
Molly Mahar: It was the one thing that I said I don’t care what else we have to leave behind, I am bringing my own pillow. I love to sleep. I’m a big sleeper. This was my pillow that had been with me for ten years. It was perfectly crafted and molded. It was my comfort. Like when I needed to cry I would just hold my pillow and I’d cry, and it would feel better.
36:07
And so, we were having big fights, blah, blah, blah, and then we arrive in Vernazza, and I realize I don’t have my pillow, and I just lose my shit, Rebecca, like lost it, could not function for the rest of the day, put myself to be at about two o’clock. [Laughs] I think that was like an, “Okay, I need some help. This is not going well.” And I remember at that point I told Ken, “If this is how the rest of the trip is gonna go, I don’t want to do it. I’m done. Let’s go home.”
What did I do? That’s a good question. There was lots of self-soothing, and I didn’t have alcohol! I had taken alcohol, my go-to self-soother, away from myself, right? So I’m doing all of this sober, totally sober without my people. I think this was the point where I got my Marco Polo, put it back on my phone. I had been fairly disconnected. I was posting photos every few days because I wanted a memory book, but I really kind of stepped away from online life in a very wonderful way. But I put Marco Polo back on my phone, and I made this long, crying, teary video for my two girlfriends who have done long-term travel with their partners and who I knew would understand what I was going through, and I just said, “I need help. I need advice. I need somebody to hear me and witness me.” And so, my two lovely friends, probably for another month, really, it felt like I had a safe place, other than my children, to turn and get some perspective.
And then eventually, we went home to Washington for two months over the holidays and caught up on our mail and did our taxes, and being back in the cabin, although we were still in this tiny little area, it was easier to have some alone time and to have some distance from my family and from Ken.
38:03
And so, and then going to Mexico, which again is kind of Ken’s realm — he’s the one who speaks really great Spanish. We were moving a lot more slowly, so we were in places for a month. So enough time to like — I could go eat a croissant on a rooftop by myself. We had kind of more space.
It eventually evened out, and I had some pretty clear understandings of the things and patterns I did not want to continue in front of the kids, and I just had to have some come-to-Jesus-with-myself moments of like, “It is not okay to tell your eight-year-old that she can’t have a Gelato because papa will be mad at mama.” Like, “Period, you can’t say that anymore, Molly,” to myself. I used my journal. I did a lot of self-coaching. Like, “Not okay! Let’s do better.”
Rebecca Ching: But you say, though, that even the cracks that became the Grand Canyon, a lot of the things that you were saying or doing that were outside of your values and how you lead yourself, you were able to catch that and recalibrate quicker because of the foundation that you had already. You had a lot of clarity of what was okay and what was not okay, right? So it’s almost like you were able to regroup to that, and I’m also just laughing too because I’ve been to Cinque Terre, and there’s just something about — I know so many people — like it’s this magical, beautiful place in Italy not too far from Pisa on the coast, and there are these different five levels of hikes. But, I mean, so many people — it’s like there’s something emotional about that place where people fantasize and romanticize travel, but it’s sometimes even the beautiful places could just bring up whatever needs catharsis, whatever needs to be released.
Molly Mahar: Yeah. You are where you are wherever you go, and when you travel that long, you could be in the most beautiful place and it, you know —
Rebecca Ching: Exactly.
39:58
Molly Mahar: I think because of the work that I’ve done and the work that I do in the world, even when I was outside of where I felt comfortable, I knew how to bring myself back. I knew at that point I had to reach out to my friends. I was hiking every day or walking every day. I had my journal. I had my tools that could travel with me. I think spending that amount of time with these three other human beings was just intense. It was gonna be intense no matter what.
Rebecca Ching: Exactly. Yeah, I think that’s a great point that it brought stuff to the surface, and you had your tells. But you had so many practices and supports and resources, it seems like you were able to circle back.
Have you had any conversations with your kids since then just about some of the things that you said or that they saw? What have you done in terms of addressing that and reconnecting with that?
Molly Mahar: Well, I pretty much talk about it all in real time. Again, from the moment of hearing that come out of my mouth to maybe the next day, “Okay, mama said this, and that is not appropriate because of this, and here’s what I’m gonna try to do better, and how are you feeling.” [Laughs] We were a good little unit, even when things go off the rails.
[Inspirational Music]
Rebecca Ching: Leading is hard. Leading is also often controversial as you navigate staying aligned to your values, your mission, your boundaries. Navigating the inevitable controversy can challenge your confidence, clarity, and calm. Now, I know you don’t mind making hard decisions but sometimes the stakes seem higher and can bring up echoes of old doubts and insecurities during times when you need to feel rock solid on your plan and action.
Finding a coach who gets the nuances of your business and leading in our complex and polarized world can help you identify the blocks that keep you playing it safe and small.
42:04
Leading today is not a fancy title or fluffy bragging rights. But it’s brave and bold work to stay the course when the future’s so unknown and the doubts and pains from the past keep showing up to shake things up. Internal emotional practices and systemic strategies are needed to keep the protector of cynicism at bay and foster a hope that is actionable and aligned.
So when the stakes are high and you don’t want to lose focus, when you want to navigate inevitable conflict between your ears and with those you lead, when time is of the essence and you want to make hard decisions that are values-aligned with confidence and clarity, then Unburdened Leader Coaching is for you where you deepen the capacity to tolerate the vulnerability of change, innovation, and doing things differently than the status quo.
To start your Unburdened Leader Coaching process with me go to www.rebeccaching.com and book a free connection call. I can’t wait to hear from you!
[Inspirational Music]
Rebecca Ching: You touched on alcohol, and I do want to ask you about it because so long as I’ve known you, you’ve had a complex relationship with alcohol.
Molly Mahar: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: And I’d just love to hear how you would describe it and what role — how would you describe your relationship with alcohol and what role did alcohol have in your kind of initial unrest trifecta of all the different things, if at all.
Molly Mahar: Mm. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Yeah.
Molly Mahar: Okay, let’s see. The quick version is I’d always had, yeah, an interesting relationship with alcohol. I can remember putting myself in sober Januarys as far back as college. Basically, when I started drinking, I knew I probably wasn’t somebody who should be drinking. And so, I would do all these tests. I would devise all these tests to prove to myself that it was okay that I was drinking. Like, “Look! I just didn’t drink for a month. Everything’s fine.” [Laughs]
44:00
Okay. Anyone who has one of those relationships with an addictive personality can realize what I was doing. I was negotiating. You know, I was making all these things so that it was okay. I was always comparing myself. “What are other people drinking?” Blah, blah, blah.
I think it was 2018, so kind of in the middle of all of this, when I wanted to do an experiment and stop drinking. The first time I went sober, I made it about 14 months. The goal was a year. I wanted to be sober for an entire calendar year, and I’d come up with this goal in November and realized, “Okay, I need to start now. I don’t need to wait until January first.”
So I remember the first weekend I was sober happened to be the weekend I was going out with our good friends to this amazing restaurant, and of course, there was amazing wine. They said, “You’re not gonna drink?! This Justin bottle from blah, blah, blah, blah.” I’m like, “Nope, already made the decision. Maybe I should put it off for a weekend, but I’m not drinking!” And this was a big change. If we were out, if we were at home, we were drinking wine. Like, yes, I was an everyday drinker. Not to excess but an everyday drinker.
That first year was hard but I also felt very proud of myself. I went through a lot of hard stuff in that year. I stayed sober through losing someone that I had loved. Eventually, I thought, “Oh, I’m cured. I’ve come to a place –.” I’d done so much work on my eating disorder when I was younger and coming to a place of intuitive eating that felt, at this point in my life, very solid and very natural. So I think in my head I thought, oh, there’d be a place where I could find intuitive drinking. [Laughs] I don’t think that’s a thing but in my head it was a thing.
Rebecca Ching: I remember you talking about that. You were kind of like, “Can I do this? I don’t have to do hardcore.” Yeah. [Laughs]
Molly Mahar: And so, I, like, went back to drinking, and it quickly ramped back up to taking a bunch of my brain space and trying to make rules to contain it. It was always more about how much space it took in my head than having external — like I never got a DUI, I never cheated on my husband, all these things.
46:11
You know, you hear people’s rock bottom stories. None of that ever happened, though it easily could have. I just got lucky probably. But it just took up space in my brain! It took me away from doing the things I wanted to be working on and thinking about and caring about. I didn’t want to be someone who thought about how much she was drinking, right, all the time. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: That’s a really good tell. Like, what are we thinking about the most? I had a mentor say to me a while back, “Whatever you think about the most is what you worship.” And that is always where I’m like, “Okay, what am I thinking the most about today or this week and what am I worshiping? What am I giving my adulation and my attention?”
So you stayed sober on your trip. Where would you say you and alcohol are today?
Molly Mahar: Since 2018 I’ve been sober for over a year three different times. I made it 15 months and then 12 months and then 13 months, and I always went back to drinking in boredom, not depression. In like, “Life is kind of boring. Drinking wine is fun,” kind of ways. And so, it was never– yeah, it was always in a positive — like spring break, margaritas in Mexico, those kinds of things. I was like, “Ah, you know, maybe this is just gonna be the pattern. Maybe this is what’s gonna happen.”
But then when we were in Washington, I was ten days out from leading my summer camp (my event with 130 people, live) that had been just dragging me down for years because of the pandemic and like, “Oh, my God. I just needed to get through camp.” And Max wakes up on his birthday and for the first time has COVID. It’s ten days before I’m supposed to leave to lead an event where we were testing. You had to get the hardcore test before you even arrived. You had to be tested upon arrival. It was still in the midst of this.
48:00
And all of a sudden I’m in this 800-square-foot cabin, both my kids go down to COVID, and I’m like, “If I get COVID right now I cannot do camp. I, the leader who didn’t hire an event planner, literally every detail is on me, every session, every –.”
Rebecca Ching: Oh.
Molly Mahar: I was like, “I’m not gonna be able to go to camp.” And I know in the grand scheme of things, this is not life threatening, this is not life ending, but in that moment, it felt like I was living with this level of anxiety that was so high that I didn’t know what to do. I was testing myself numerous times a day. I was obsessed, and I couldn’t tell anyone (I mean, other than my family) because I didn’t want to worry anyone if it didn’t happen. I didn’t want them to be in the exact position — like I didn’t tell any of my staff. I didn’t tell any of the campers. Every day was like, “Okay, one more day I still don’t have COVID.” And the level of drinking or needing to escape from my anxiety by taking shots of tequila, I was like, “Oh, this is actually a problem that I didn’t know I had because I’ve never felt this much anxiety.” Like, “Oh, shit! Look at what I do when I’m all alone staying at my in-laws house, and nobody can see me.” I’m like, “Oh, this is a much bigger problem than I understood.”
Rebecca Ching: Yeah.
Molly Mahar: And so, maybe I had two or three days of that, walking endless loops around town just trying to stay outside away from my family while still preparing for camp and still taking care of my children who both had birthdays. It was just like a disaster, and it became very clear that as much negotiating I’d been doing in my brain around, “This isn’t actually a problem,” that this was actually a problem.
Rebecca Ching: Yeah.
Molly Mahar: And so, I said, “Okay, wow. I’m done.”
50:01
June first was somewhere in there because that’s my sobriety date, and I said, “I’m done drinking, and I’m not done drinking for a year or just through camp or just until maybe I shouldn’t drink.” I’m like, “I’m done drinking,” and that was not the plan. I was planning on drinking when we traveled. I wanted to go wine tasting in Italy. I wanted to drink margaritas in Mexico. In those three months of June until when we left — two months — in August, I had to make a lot of peace with this whole way I thought this trip was gonna go. “It’s not gonna go that way. I’m gonna be sober in all those places. I’m gonna be sober forever!” And so, that was two years ago, and I’m still sober. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: Here you are.
Molly Mahar: Still sober! And once I got through the beginning of the trip with Ken day drinking for months and months, that was a good challenge, but I’d been experimenting for a long time and playing with it for a long time, and I just finally had to say this is a forever decision not a for now decision.
Rebecca Ching: Wow, thanks for sharing that. I think it’s important to share those nuanced journeys because a lot of people have complex and nuanced relationships with alcohol.
Before your trip, you wrote out some questions that were gonna kind of be your anchors during your trip that you were gonna return to, and I’d love to ask you a few of them and see where you land on them on this side of the trip and even a year into being back home. And I want to focus these ones on work because you’ve been in the online entrepreneurial space and the coaching/personal development space as long as I’ve known you, and one of the questions you wanted to ask yourself is, “How do I feel about this industry (the coaching/personal development space) overall,” and how do you feel about your place within it. What is your answer to that in 2024?
Molly Mahar: Ooh, yeah. That’s a big one. When we were traveling, I was exploring a lot of different future lives for myself in my journal and in my head. I gave myself as much permission as I could to say, “You don’t have to get home and continue at Stratejoy. You could go back to school. You could open a real estate office. You could do whatever you wanted,” basically.
52:13
I wanted there to be a lot more clarity than there was when I returned home. [Laughs] I wanted to have a plan, and after all of that traveling I had no plan. Maybe the very last month that we were traveling, I felt like I got a little closer, and one of the things I had to honestly do was ignore that question. How do I feel about the coaching industry, personal development, self-help, whatever you want to call it? That question only led me to want nothing to do with it. Like, blah. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: Mm.
Molly Mahar: So I just have to say, but I think that’s the wrong question. What I really wanted to know was what is my place in the world? Where can I best be of service? What is gonna keep me excited and learning and contributing for the next season of life, which in my mind is until my kids graduate from high school, so the next eight years. And I had to let that question go because that question would not have had my return to Stratejoy.
Rebecca Ching: Because you felt like the industry as a whole, the space as a whole wasn’t aligned or wasn’t exciting?
Molly Mahar: I don’t like people when they’re mean to each other. I don’t like — I don’t know what it’s called in marketing but where you market by only foiling yourself against someone else specifically.
Rebecca Ching: Like what you’re against, all that stuff? Yeah.
Molly Mahar: Yeah, yeah. I’ve never liked that, and I really try not to do that. I just say what I’m for and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it felt like the way that I like to run my business was not what was working or — I don’t know if respected is the right word. I just felt like it was gonna be fighting an uphill battle to run a business in the way that I wanted to run a business and things I wanted to talk about and teach right now.
And what I finally had to say was it does not matter. “That only matters, Molly, if you are comparing yourself to other people.”
Rebecca Ching: Dang.
54:01
Molly Mahar: So that was when I say I just separated, not that I’m not part of that industry and I’m not part of —
Rebecca Ching: I hear you.
Molly Mahar: But I don’t have any desire to change the industry, or you know when people say, “I’m here to help 500 women do this.” I’m like I’m not here to do that. That’s not what I’m here to do. So I had to really pull it back into, “Okay, what do I want to do day to day? Who do I think I could actually help? How am I most gonna feel effective and joyful and captivated by what I’m doing on a daily basis.” I just had to let go of what is the industry doing and what is cool to do and what are other people doing, which has kind of led to this very removed — like, I’m not on social media. I don’t consume any social — I really don’t consume much social media. I post my stuff, and then I get off. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: Nice. Nice.
Molly Mahar: And I understand that this is a little bit of a hiding-under-the-rock situation or putting the ostrich head in the sand.
Rebecca Ching: Is it?
Molly Mahar: Well, I just decided I don’t care! I don’t care!
Rebecca Ching: Okay. Yeah, I think this pressure to say you’re tapping out if you’re not reading all the things and doing all the things but I’m like, no, there’s ways of gaining information and challenging and growing yourselves outside of little squares.
Molly Mahar: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: So another question that you wrote that I’d love to hear where you’re at today is you wrote: “Is my focus on individual joy reclamation causing more harm than help in the big scheme of things?” I loved that curiosity. Where do you land today?
Molly Mahar: Okay, yeah, this is what I still think about. Again, and it’s kind of in the people that are foiling themselves against individual society, like, “We need to be part of the collective, we need to make change for everyone,” and I agree with all of that. And I do a lot of things in my own life or my personal life of trying to contribute. Especially in Helena, there’s just such a stark things that need work. But they’re close. I could touch them.
56:00
I can give money or time or a neighbor’s kind of level of helping, or I can fly my Pride flag so that my kids’ friends know it’s safe here, or when I’m asking about, “Who do you have a crush on? Who are your boy crushes and your girl crushes?” I can individually be part of the change that I want to see in the world, but it is simply not what I can teach. I don’t feel qualified to teach it. I don’t feel like I could change the angle of Stratejoy and say, “We’re gonna –,” I don’t even know what we’re gonna do!
I teach, in my head what I call, personal intimacy. How do you know yourself, trust yourself, and then act in alignment with what you decide is important. I know how to do that. I am very good at that. And I think I just had to be able to hold both of those things to be true at the same time. Like I can believe in collective change that is needed in the world, and I can step up and try to be part of that, but that doesn’t have to be what my business is focused on. I can help a woman in her individual life feel alignment or authenticity or joy and hope that that’s going to contribute to the larger good and the change without “teaching that.”
Rebecca Ching: I love it. It’s amazing how much we can get tangled in with these things that we’ve breathed in about what’s right and wrong, what we should or shouldn’t do, what’s okay/not okay, what’s cool or whatever and how that infects our own self-trust and our own clarity. I just love the process of interrogating and asking those questions because it led to such generative things for you and clarity for you in how you show up and then pour out and impact the spaces that you show up in, whether it’s the local playhouse to the food shelter to helping out a neighbor.
Molly Mahar: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: I think we minimize those things, but I think that’s where the gold is. I really, really think that’s where the gold is. If everyone was doing more of that and with a sense of love and purpose, I don’t know. It sounds cheesy, but I think things would be a lot different.
58:08
So on that note, then, how has your understanding of success changed kind of from when you started Stratejoy to what does success mean to you today?
Molly Mahar: Ooh, partly it’s the same, which is really funny that if I go back and read the things that I wrote in 2008, I don’t disagree with most of it. I’m like, “Wow, I’ve actually got a pretty clear throughline.” [Laughs] Like I’ve been doing some work with a coach on, not business stuff necessarily, but almost the mindset of how do you continue to show up for your workday after day after day, which is one of the things I came to a conclusion in my travels of I don’t think I need to change Stratejoy. I don’t think I need to change reclamation. I probably need to change how I approach it.
Rebecca Ching: Mm.
Molly Mahar: Where are the places where there’s more consistency or I call it neutrality. Like I need to bring a little bit more neutrality to my work and not rely on the ups to carry me through the downs so much, as someone who goes high, high, low, low.
Success, whether it’s “cool” or en Vogue right now, I don’t think it matters.
Rebecca Ching: Nope.
Molly Mahar: I want to feel good on the day-to-day basis, and that doesn’t mean I want to feel happy or that I want to ignore the hardship. I want to feel alive. I want to feel like I’m really present to all of it. I want to feel connected to myself, to other humans, to my family, to work, to nature. That’s kind of my version of spirituality.
I have this somewhat morbid obsession with reading death memoirs, especially if they were moms, which I know sounds terrible. But I find them really moving, and I find that they help me stay attuned to what is most important.
1:00:05
If I was gonna die tomorrow — and again, I understand it’s like a weird question, but I actually ask myself this quite frequently. Like, if I would die tomorrow, how do I feel about my life? How do I feel about how I showed up? “Did I feel successful?” and probably for the last several years my answer has been, “Yeah.” “Am I gonna have regrets on my deathbed?” And I could pretty much say, “No.”
Rebecca Ching: Dang.
Molly Mahar: Like, no. This was gonna be my time. I would feel — successful isn’t the right word to use right there, but I would feel like my life had meaning and that I showed up the way I wanted to. I didn’t quite answer your question but –. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: It does in the sense that I’m just sensing by constantly staying curious and are you anchored in these things that you listed, and if not, you recalibrate. And that doesn’t sound like you hold tightly onto things but to how you feel, how you feel in relationship.
Molly Mahar: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: There’s the adulting. We’ve got to watch the P&L sheets, and we have to look at budgets and all of those things. That’s part of adulting. But it sounds like it’s just constantly listening so that you can say, “You know what? This isn’t a one-year sobriety. It’s now forever.” To say, “Oh, wow, I didn’t like how I just showed up with my kids. I need to recalibrate,” and that just comes from a constant practice of curiosity, reflection, and practicing the rhythms, I think, in your life of what it means to be embodied. And I think a lot of people talk about it, but you really do live it.
Molly Mahar: Yeah, well, and I think it takes a good dose of compassion, too, right?
Rebecca Ching: Oh, jeez. Yeah.
Molly Mahar: Right, we’re gonna mess it up all the time, and so —
Rebecca Ching: All the time.
Molly Mahar: To have that level of self-awareness, you have to also bring the kindness because —
Rebecca Ching: Because it’s not perfection.
Molly Mahar: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly! You’re gonna mess up all the time! But that’s life. That’s part of life, yeah.
1:02:03
Rebecca Ching: But the practices that you have when you have the face-down moments, when you have the falls, the questioning, the anxiety, there’s a tethering there. It’s not like an endgame success. It’s about in the day-to-day stuff is what I’m hearing from you, which I’m gonna be thinking about that.
So, before we wrap up, I’ve got these quickfire questions that I ask my guests. Molly, what — I think I already know now — are you reading right now? Who died? Which mom-died book? What are you reading right now? [Laughs]
Molly Mahar: [Laughs] Oh, my gosh. Okay, the last book — she didn’t die — but Suleika [Jaouad] — oh, Between Two Kingdoms. I’m not reading it right now, but it’s so lovely if you haven’t read it. I can’t think of her last name. She’s married to Jon Batiste who just did that amazing documentary, American Symphony.
Rebecca Ching: Oh, yes.
Molly Mahar: Okay, watch that and then read her memoir. Her Substack is so lovely. No death but death-ish memoir.
Rebecca Ching: Okay.
Molly Mahar: Okay, but I’m currently reading — I looked at my Libby app to tell you — Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, which I just started, and I already like it. And then I also just finished — I love to read happy romances with lots of steamy sex that is specifically the enemies-to-lovers canon.
Rebecca Ching: Ooh.
Molly Mahar: Okay, so I read a good one [Laughs] called You, Again by Kate Goldbeck.
Rebecca Ching: All right!
Molly Mahar: Chef’s kiss. Deliciousness.
Rebecca Ching: All right. Great stuff for this summer it sounds like. What song are you playing on repeat?
Molly Mahar: Okay, the last two that I saved on Spotify, which is how I identify songs I like, were “Radio Up” by Paper Planes and “Good Feeling About You” by MAGIC!.
Rebecca Ching: Nice.
Molly Mahar: So you’re just gonna have to look those up. I don’t know what to tell you. The last one is very reggae-esque, and it is a perfect song for the summer.
Rebecca Ching: What is the best TV show or movie that you’ve seen recently?
Molly Mahar: Mm, not really how I consume things, but I did watch Nyad.
Rebecca Ching: Oh.
1:04:04
Molly Mahar: And I thought it was great. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: Phenomenal. Phenomenal.
Molly Mahar: My whole family liked it, yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Just the story but the acting, oh my gosh.
Molly Mahar: Ugh, I know. I know! I know, and Jodie Foster and Annette Benning and, yeah, I could watch it again easily. The movie I’m excited about watching, which kind of plays into the romance that I like to read, I don’t know I randomly saw a trailer for it called “The Idea of You,” and Anne Hathaway is in it.
Rebecca Ching: It’s really good. It’s good.
Molly Mahar: Oh, my god! It’s like my exact flavor of catnip. “A singer from the stage declaring his love for you and he’s young and hot and you’re a 40-something woman.” I’m like, “Oh, I must watch that with my girls.” I sent a group text like, “Who wants to watch this with me?” [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: It’s all and more. It’s perfect.
Molly Mahar: Yes!
Rebecca Ching: It’s the perfect Sunday afternoon I want to turn things off and all the cute things.
Molly Mahar: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: And all the extended cast really were spot on too. Favorite eighties piece of pop culture, and if eighties isn’t your jam, from whatever kind of decade is your jam.
Molly Mahar: Yeah. Well, I was a little kid in the eighties. I was born in 1980, so my favorite eighties memory is Saturday mornings, my mom would go for her long run with her best friends, and I don’t know where my dad was, probably working the emergency room or maybe he was training for his triathlons. But my sister and I would make a tray of Pillsbury Orange Rolls, like the ones that came in a tube that you cracked.
Rebecca Ching: Oh, my gosh that you popped! That you pop it open, yes!
Molly Mahar: Yep, totally, and we would watch “Saved by the Bell” —
Rebecca Ching: Oh, shoot. Okay. Yep.
Molly Mahar: — for hours while my mom was gone running. So that is my eighties favorite memory, and I also still like hot pink lipstick, which I feel like is very eighties of me to like.
Rebecca Ching: Yeah, just work it, and you work it well. What is your mantra right now?
Molly Mahar: Do I have a mantra right now? I think the thing that I’m telling myself most often right now, which I guess is a mantra, is that foundations take time.
Rebecca Ching: Ah.
Molly Mahar: I’m not necessarily a very patient person.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
1:06:00
Molly Mahar: I’m at the beginning of what I call a stage of growth. I’m at the very beginning of building out this next season of life. I think of my life as cyclical. There’s no mountain to climb. There’s no peak. It’s this series of adventures is the word that I would use, and I went through the unrest. I went through the destruction. I went through the purposeful pause. And now I’m growing, and I’m finding it kind of boring, like not bad boring, just boring boring, and so, I just keep telling myself, “This stage that I’m in just takes patience. This is a stage of having the big vision but then you have to do the on-the-ground work,” and that requires consistency, and that requires just patience.
Rebecca Ching: So much patience. What’s an unpopular opinion that you hold?
Molly Mahar: I love acapella music.
Rebecca Ching: Why is that unpopular? I’m with you!
Molly Mahar: [Laughs] It’s so embarrassing!
Rebecca Ching: Why is that embarrassing?
Molly Mahar: Oh, my God, oh, well —
Rebecca Ching: I don’t get it! Maybe I’m the dork though.
Molly Mahar: Oh, no, it’s so embarrassing.
Rebecca Ching: I’m such a dork!
Molly Mahar: Go say that out loud to someone and they’ll, “What?” I’ll be like, “You don’t think Pitch Perfect is the best movie ever,” and they’re like, “Definitely not.”
Rebecca Ching: Ever! Well it’s — okay.
Molly Mahar: Right!
Rebecca Ching: I don’t know, I mean, I’m up there. I love that stuff. There was this group in Washington, DC. I’m blanking on their name, but they would play Eastern Market on Saturdays, and I would totally go and stay for their whole set, and I would try to drag my roommates, and they were like, “Oh my God. What is this?” I’m like, “Cute boys singing –.”
Molly Mahar: It’s uncool.
Rebecca Ching: Whatever. The uncool, I’m a magnet for that. Who or what inspires you to be a better leader and human?
Molly Mahar: I mean, it’s gonna be cliché but I think it’s cliché for a reason. My kids! My kids.
Rebecca Ching: Of course.
Molly Mahar: And also, you know those moments when you just are walking along with your earbuds in listening to awesome music (maybe it’s acapella), and you feel like this could be a scene in a movie, and you stop, and you see something? Like yesterday, I had no idea that Jasmine could bloom in Montana, and apparently one of my neighbors has this giant Jasmine tree almost.
1:08:00
And I’m getting back from my hike and I’m walking through the neighborhood and I’m listening to my jams, and I just get to bury my nose in this — you know, I love the scent of Jasmine. It reminds me of San Diego! And it was one of those moments of just pure presence and feeling so alive that I try to collect those moments that are beautiful.
Having those moments inspires me to keep showing up for them and also try to remind others that they’re there. It doesn’t require anything other than paying attention.
Rebecca Ching: It’s beautiful. Molly, if folks wanted to connect with what you do at Stratejoy, where can they find you?
Molly Mahar: Www.stratejoy.com, the actual website, or I have been still holding out on Instagram and most of my stuff is under my name @mollymahar, or Stratejoy stuff, when I’m posting, is under @stratejoy.
Rebecca Ching: Molly, thank you so much for coming on this show. I’ve been wanting to have you on for a while, and I’m just so glad we got to talk about what we did today, and I just appreciate you, and thank you so much for sharing a little glimmer into your life and how you lead yourself. I really appreciate it and I appreciate you.
Molly Mahar: Aww, thank you! I hope all those embarrassing personal stories, you know, land somewhere, somewhere useful for someone. But I felt like we were just having a talk, me and you, which I always love.
Rebecca Ching: All right. Before y’all go, I want to make sure you take away some key nuggets of wisdom Molly shared with us in this Unburdened Leader conversation. Molly talks about the importance of personal intimacy in her community, what it is and how it helps us live aligned and courageous lives. She also shared the deep need for self-kindness the more we build our self-awareness because being human is hard. [Laughs] I want you to notice all the learnings Molly took away from her travels and how she discovered the power of asking the right questions to help her move through big decisions in her business and life.
1:10:00
So I’m curious, after listening to this conversation, what is your relationship with regret? Do you collect data from your regrets, or do you avoid dealing with them altogether? What regrets need some tending from you right now? And what big dream are you dismissing because it feels unattainable, when in fact, with some patience, some planning, it could become a reality?
A life of regret is one in which we continue to tolerate things that move us away from our values, our joys, and our loves, even when doing so may be conflictional with others. But putting in the reps of patience, planning, and preparing doesn’t mean we’re tolerating things, but it gives us certainly in the future that can give us hope. A life without regrets isn’t easy but it’s easier when values are clear and when you’re honest about the need to change course instead of just tolerating. And this is the ongoing work of an Unburdened Leader.
[Inspirational Music]
Thank you so much for joining this episode of The Unburdened Leader. You can find this episode, show notes, and free Unburdened Leader resources, along with ways to sign up for my weekly Unburdened Leader email and ways to work with me at www.rebeccaching.com. And this episode was produced by the incredible team at Yellow House Media!
[Inspirational Music]
Comments +