From Power Over to Power With feat. Elijah Shannon Selby
Feminist Leadership Coach and Mentor, Elijah Selby, joins me in a candid conversation on navigating the complexities of the coaching and marketing world. Through collaboration, trust, and shared responsibility, we can break free from conventional coaching and marketing norms that rely on the matrix of control, manipulation, and fear. Our collective growth and empowerment depends on meaningful transformation where vulnerability, curiosity, and mutual respect thrive.
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Mentioned:
Elijah Shannon Selby is a Feminist Leadership Coach and Mentor and the host of Business as Activism Podcast. She works with people who want to make a difference in the world and understand that when they dismantle internalized paradigms of oppression, they are impacting external paradigms of oppression. You can find her on IG @elijahshannonselby or work with her one on one to disrupt the way you do business.
Adrienne Maree Brown Emergent Strategy: https://adriennemareebrown.net/book/emergent-strategy/
Make Magic:
To reshape the coaching and marketing world (and the world around us), we must unplug from the matrix. Empower yourself to discern authenticity and integrity. Challenge conventional narratives. And, embody your values to foster genuine, authentic connections.
Transcript: From Power Over to Power With feat. Elijah Shannon Selby
Natalie Miller: There are so many questions in power with.
Elijah Selby: Ooh, yes.
Natalie Miller: And I feel like power over is like decrees, declarations. Like, power over is saying, "This is the way that it is." And, you know, power with is like, "Well, what else is there? Have we accounted for everything? Like, what else do we need to keep in mind? What could be better?"
Elijah Selby: Yeah.
[Music]
Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I'm your host, Natalie Miller, and I'm so glad you're here.
Hello, my friend. OK. Here is a very fun offering I have for you this week. So I was recently on a podcast called Business as Activism. It's hosted by Elijah Selby. And we got on like a house on fire, as they say. As we were talking, we just had the best connection. No surprise, she is also a feminist coach for entrepreneurs.
And we had the most potent conversation about money, and pricing, and charging for services, and just all that goes into the financial aspect of trying to do good in the world, which is, like, it's quite a topic, right? [laugh] It's like there's a lot to say.
And in that conversation, we touched upon this moment of the difference between power over and power with. So power over, meaning, you know, having power, and using it to dominate versus power with, which is having power, and endeavoring to share it.
So we rightly said when we touched upon this concept, oh, this could be a whole other conversation. And then we decided to go ahead and have a whole other conversation about it. So that is what I have for you here on Mind Witchery today, Elijah Selby and I talking about power with instead of power over.
And if you'd like to hear the conversation that spawned this conversation, All About Money, I hope you'll go over to Elijah's podcast, which is Business as Activism. Link, of course, is in the show notes for your convenience. But go over there and listen—I invite you—to that episode also. These two are a pair. It's like salt and pepper, oil and balsamic vinegar. They go together so well.
So without further ado, here is my new friend [laugh]. Like, these conversations actually kind of immediately birthed a friendship between the two of us. We didn't know each other before we were on each other's podcasts, but now we really do.
So enjoy this conversation with my friend, feminist coach for entrepreneurs, Ms. Elijah Selby. She is so smart, so insightful, and so fun to listen and talk to. I think once you get over to Business as Activism, you will find lots of episodes that will be of great interest to you.
And, of course, I hope that this conversation and these conversations inspire you to join us in creating, in conjuring a more power-with oriented world than the power-over one that sometimes feels ubiquitous but maybe isn't necessarily. OK. I hope you enjoy the show.
Natalie Miller: OK, Ms. Elijah Selby, thank you so much for coming over to my house for what is part two of a conversation that you and I started over at your house—
Elijah Selby: Yes.
Natalie Miller: —on your podcast, the Business as Activism podcast, which highly recommend, five star. And we were talking over there about money and pricing, and how we do with money in business. And one thing that came up in that conversation was a distinction between power with and power over. And both you and I were like, oh, if we start talking about this, this episode's going to be two hours long. And so we decided to come over here and talk about it.
Elijah Selby: Yes, and I'm so happy to be here on your podcast. And I will say, yeah, 10 out of 10, highly recommend. You're amazing. I'm so happy to be here. And, as you just said, this power over versus power with conversation is so rich. And I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today, because I'm a little obsessed with it.
Natalie Miller: Well, it's important. OK. So, before we begin, I wanted to say two things about us. One is that we are both intersectionally feminist business coaches, so just so everybody knows that's what we do in the world. Number two, we are both white ladies.
Elijah Selby: Yeah, we're both white.
Natalie Miller: So I just want to fully acknowledge that you and I are about to have a conversation about power, and you and I are both coming from a place in our culture that is highly privileged.
Elijah Selby: Right.
Natalie Miller: So saying that from the get-go, and feeling like that is especially important to say at the beginning of our convo here.
Elijah Selby: It's so important because, obviously, as aware as I try to be, as much as I try to teach myself—I mean, I do teach myself, I do listen, and I have learned, you know, I've lived on the planet in this body, a white body. I have an education. I have a passport. I own a home. I mean, I have a lot of things that I'm probably—that are a place of privilege that I try and have awareness of, and I'm certain I don't have awareness of all the things. So it's like a constant come from, and I think that I love that you pointed that out, is really all I'm trying to say. Thank you.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. Important, right? Like, we do.
Elijah Selby: It's so important.
Natalie Miller: We're white. We upper-middle-class. Like, that's where we are. OK. So power over versus power with, two different ways of understanding, almost even, I would say, two different ways of understanding what even power is.
Elijah Selby: Very true. It is two radically different concepts of power. When I think about power, the first thing that comes to mind is oppression, abuse, subjugation. I have a mental image of a white dude, honestly, in charge somehow in the corner office, right? I think of business. It's interesting. But, obviously, power extends to all areas—politics, obviously.
And I feel like the word "power" in and of itself can be triggering, particularly to women and marginalized people, because the constant view we have of what power is, the constant examples we have of power are oppressive and cause harm. And how can we think about being empowered ourselves if we have subconscious thoughts around power being harmful? I think that that probably comes up for many people around taking our power.
And I think that there's a link to money because if we see people with money causing harm, and then we want money, what are the subconscious/limiting beliefs, to speak coach-ease, you know, that come up for us around obtaining money, around obtaining power? And so we are in the process right now on the planet, I believe, of creating new paradigms.
So this paradigm shift around power, I think, is probably I want to say the most crucial shift that needs to happen but also so hard for people to understand or comprehend or even imagine what powered with looks like, feels like, how that shows up. Do we even want to use the word "power" because it's such a, like, dirty word?
Natalie Miller: Yeah, love. So power over largely on our planet right now, the dominating systems in play are power over systems, right? Like—
Elijah Selby: That is right.
Natalie Miller: —you have a boss that you work for. There's a president who calls the shots. There's a chairman—and I'm using that [laugh]—chairman of the board. Power over is like hierarchical. Power over is, I think, kind of like assuming that there is only so much power to go around, right?
Elijah Selby: A hundred per cent, it's considered it's finite.
Natalie Miller: It's finite. It's like, well, there's only this much power, and so what piece of the pie, what chunk of the pie do the most powerful have? And then whatever's left over is what the other people get.
Elijah Selby: Yes. And this is such a symptom of patriarchal thinking, this win-lose concept that we can see applied across many different areas in life. So either I win or I lose. Like, so if I don't win, I lose. And if you win, I lose. Right? So I, at all costs, have to win. I, at all costs, have to have power and maintain power. Therefore, right, I will use fear. I think fear is a major tactic used. I mean, even just if you think of work, like, the fear of losing your job if you don't comply, right? And we need to pay our bills.
Natalie Miller: Yeah, fear, divisiveness—
Elijah Selby: Divisiveness.
Natalie Miller: I really am kind of liking that idea of like the pie that gets divided up, right? It's like there's only so much to go around, and so we hoard.
Elijah Selby: That's right.
Natalie Miller: We hoard. We withhold. We are in finite thinking, yeah, totally.
Elijah Selby: Very finite thinking. And you know what's weird? And this has just occurred to me, and I think this links to money. You know where we're not in finite thinking [laugh] where we should be is like when capitalism comes into the game, and the whole goal is constant growth as if resources were limitless, as if our planet were limitless. Right? So I shouldn't be chuckling about that, but it's like, oh, isn't that ironic? When it suits our purposes of making all the money we possibly can, we're willing to throw out the idea that things are finite.
Natalie Miller: Or, like, we're willing to throw out the id…you know, it's funny. This is [laugh]—
Elijah Selby: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: I'm watching season two of The Gilded Age right now. I don't know it—
Elijah Selby: Oh, I've heard it's so good. I've heard it's so good.
Natalie Miller: It's pretty good. So in Season 2, like, one of the new money people on the show, right—there's old money and new money, that's a whole thing—one of the new money people on the show has railroads, and there are unions organizing, right? And I was just thinking about, well, power over is willing to say the opportunities for creating railroads are endless but, at the same time, it's like but my margins are not. My profit margin is not, right?
So I'm going to selectively, in capitalism, I'm going to selectively apply the limitlessness, and then but I'm going to say, no, I'm sorry. I don't have enough money to give you a raise or provide healthcare for you or, you know, there's just not enough. Look at the budget, there's just not enough here, right?
Elijah Selby: That's right. I mean, of course, I think of Amazon, and how they treat their employees, and what they give and what they don't give, and this idea that there's not an enough. But there's enough for Jeff Bezos, more than enough, and there's also enough for the shareholders.
Natalie Miller: Right. You know what that makes me think too? We can figure out how to get you the—I don't know—face cream that you want today.
Elijah Selby: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: We can innovate, and we can get so fucking creative, we can figure out how to let you order a face cream at 10 a.m., and receive it between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. At least where I live, that's how it works, right, same-day delivery. But we can't figure out how to have humane working conditions. Sorry, can't figure that out. Like, it's so fucked.
Elijah Selby: It's so fucked, and then the twisted rationale behind it. I want to mention something that I think a lot, a lot about. So I talk about this in life and on my podcast that we're plugged into the matrix, so the matrix being patriarchy and systems of oppression, so patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, all of those things.
Natalie Miller: Ableism.
Elijah Selby: Ableism, fat phobia, transphobia, homophobia, right, all the things. OK. That's the matrix, and so it can be challenging to unplug from the matrix. We can do it, and it takes people helping us see things differently. And that makes me think, you know, the matrix is essentially culture. And I think a lot about what is culture? Why is this our culture? How does culture happen?
I'm a total layman in this. Like, [laugh] people have written treatises on what culture is. But the thing that I just—my jaw drops are—I just can't stop saying to myself is, like, culture is made up. This is just made up. This is made up. This is made up. This is made up. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Totally. Totally. I mean, I dare say, Elijah, that is the hill you and I die on, actual Business as Activism, Mind Witchery is saying, like, listen, we can think about this differently. We can do this differently. Like, we absolutely can.
Elijah Selby: Not only can we, people are doing it differently. And you and I are just like one little tiny—like, I always like to think of—I see the globe. I'm very visual, like so many people. I'm not alone in this. And I see it's sort of like—in my mind, the globe is dark, and like it's nighttime. [laugh] And there's just like little lights coming on, little lights all—but it's all over the world all the time. And we're just, like, there's so many of us, and it has to be a collective. And we're just part of the collected people turning on the lights in whatever way we can.
Natalie Miller: In whatever way we can, yeah. And I think, like, turning on the lights in the dark, because that was another thing that I was really thinking about when I was, you know, preparing, as I do, in my head in the shower, for our conversation. [laugh]
Elijah Selby: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: I was like, you know, the thing is we live in a power-over world. That's inescapable.
Elijah Selby: It's real. That's happening.
Natalie Miller: You and I cannot, like, unilaterally just like flip a switch, and we don't live in that world anymore. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to do power with in a power-over world.
Elijah Selby: That's right.
Natalie Miller: Actually, I have an example of this, if it's cool to share—
Elijah Selby: Oh, please.
Natalie Miller: —like just to start this power-with conversation. So I remember [laugh], of course, I can't remember the name of this article or podcast or person. But I remember years ago reading about a woman who was a lawyer, had a law firm, like, she was at least, like, nominally had begun, was the founder of the law firm. And at her law firm, a full-time job was 32 hours a week. So she expected her lawyers—and these are lawyers, right [laugh]—she expected lawyers at her firm to work 32 hours a week. And notice how I slip into power-over language as I say that: her lawyers; she expected.
Elijah Selby: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: No. What I mean to say is in the organization that she had founded, together they decided, they agreed that a full-time job was 32 hours a week, right? Meaning that, OK, this is like four days, right? And so what she said is that the number one question she got was not, "How do you do it?" The number one question she got was, "Can I come work for you?" Right?
She was like, "Listen, you've got to do it. Like, not everyone can work over here in this firm. I have my firm, but you've got to do it. You can do it." Right? And I do think there is just an immense amount of like creative agency we've got to exercise if we want to make this power-with thing work. Like, we can't expect it to just like appear for us or be handed to us, you know?
Elijah Selby: Right.
Natalie Miller: We've got to make it.
Elijah Selby: We have to make it. Thank you for that amazing example. I love that. And we have to make it. You're right. So I just want to reflect that what you and I do, so, I mean, it is about the work we do, but also I know everybody, like, so many people are doing this work it. And the thing that feels really important for anybody listening is that when we dismantle a belief inside ourselves internally, when we dismantle internalized paradigms of the patriarchy, etc., we set ourselves free to make different choices.
When we make different choices, we're absolutely contributing to the change, to a new way of being. And I wonder if you have found this, because this is another thing I think about a lot, that we as humans can feel, speaking of power, really incredibly disempowered in this world, like, unbelievably disempowered and disenfranchised.
And there's a level of living, which we are, of course. I mean, that's like you said. We're living in a power-over culture. We can't—let's accept that reality. Let's not try and deny that. And I desperately want people to feel some measure of empowerment, whatever that can be. And some people feel incredibly empowered, thank goodness.
But for people that really just feel totally disenfranchised to the point of just being apathetic and it doesn't matter, I feel this desperate urge and need to say, you know what? Actually, just by doing your inner work, and then making shifts, even small ones in your world, that's how we create change. And it really truly is. And we are so powerful in that way.
And it's not to say we can't start a union where we're working and, like, really be that person. But not all of us are going to be that person. And, I'm sorry, I'm just like spiraling on the human psychology here, because I feel like when people think they can't be that person, then they do nothing because, again, they feel disempowered.
Natalie Miller: Yeah, totally. It's choice by tiny choice, right?
Elijah Selby: Yes.
Natalie Miller: And like one of my little ditties, one of my [laugh] top 10 tunes is we exist at choice, and we do. I do believe that. I do believe that we exist at choice. We always have a choice. Now, we don't always have limitless choices, but we do always have choices, and we get to choose how we show up. So let's talk a little bit, if it's cool, Elijah, what does power with look like then? So we know what power over looks like.
We see it every day. What does power with, like, how is it different? What does it look like? So where power over kind of assumes a finite amount, there's only so much power to go around, and there's only so much money to go around, there's only so much food to go around, there's only so much—
Elijah Selby: So much housing, so much medical care.
Natalie Miller: Exactly. Power with says what?
Elijah Selby: It says power is limitless. It's not a finite quality, right? It's expansive. I think power with prioritizes connection and community. I even think nourishing. And also I think that there's this piece, I can't quite find the words for it, but it's this piece about—so power over is this need to be like, I'm right, and you will listen to me. It's very paternalistic, right? I know what's best. And then power with, you know, feel free to help me with language here. Like, it's respectful. It's connective. It's—
Natalie Miller: Yeah. It's like—
Elijah Selby: —trusting.
Natalie Miller: —co-creative—
Elijah Selby: Co-creative.
Natalie Miller: —and collaborative. I think it maybe lets go a little bit of the idea of what is right—
Elijah Selby: Yes, I think it does.
Natalie Miller: —like, that binary thing, right or wrong, good or bad. And instead, it's kind of like what are the values here, right? Another coachy thing we love to talk about, like, what are the values here, and how do we embody those? How do we live into those, right? And so that's very different from what's the right thing to do. It's like, you know, we want to be generous. How do we be generous here? Or we want to be innovative. How do we prioritize innovation here, right? It's like a little—it's more spacious.
Elijah Selby: It's so spacious. I love that you just asked a question. In other words, I was imagining you sitting in front of a group of people asking, "How do we get innovative here?" Which is different from saying, "Let me tell you, we're going to get innovative, and here's how it's going to be."
Natalie Miller: Exactly. Yeah.
Elijah Selby: So the energy of how do we get innovative here felt expansive, and it felt, I mean, I just imagined—again, I'm just so super visual—I imagined that energy touching everybody hearing that sentence right around you.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. But I think the point is, right, there are so many questions in power with.
Elijah Selby: Ooh yes.
Natalie Miller: We're all asking the question, and we keep asking questions. And I feel like power over is like decrees, declarations. Like, power over is saying, "This is the way that it is." And, you know, power with is like, "Well, what else is there? Have we accounted for everything? Like, what else do we need to keep in mind? What could be better?"
Elijah Selby: Yeah. I love this, and this occurs to me, something that people ask and think about when they hear the term "power with" is, well, how does anything get done? Because it's hard to imagine, because it's not what we are shown. So they start to imagine a space where it's this sort of interesting pure democracy, and therefore we can't do anything until we reach full agreement.
And there are some spaces like that. But the piece that I always want to say here is, power with does not mean there's no leadership. And I think that that's an important distinction. When I was reading Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree—
Natalie Miller: Maree Brown.
Elijah Selby: —Brown, and she—I'm not going to remember exactly. But she talks about an organization of shared power, and how trust, trust that we all have, for example, we all believe in the mission statement of the organization, and we all have its mission statement, you know, and thriving as our best interests, and our goals. And so that when there's a problem, there are the shared powers.
Different people can take leadership on that because, for example, if I was in an organization that was having a coding issue [laugh], I would not be able to take the lead on solving that at all. However, I might have valuable input into what the solution might look like, right?
Natalie Miller: And, you know, when I think of it that way, I think, gosh, this organization is so strong in its multiplicity of perspective, in its diversity, in its different people with different strengths and different ideas. And, like, to me, it feels so balanced and also, like—I don't know—fruitful, alive. Like, it's, you know, it's that co-creativity, right?
Elijah Selby: It's that co-creativity.
Natalie Miller: And it's funny, you know, like, we said that with power over, we have a lot of fear. We have a lot of control. In power with, I guess, what's the contrast here? Instead of fear, we have—?
Elijah Selby: Well, I think creativity, and I think—
Natalie Miller: Creativity.
Elijah Selby: —that's—I'm sort of like, yeah, the opposite of fear might—or one opposite of fear might be a space to be creative, a space, because creativity means that your idea might not work out. Right? So there's a freedom from the fear that you'll, quote, unquote, fail. So creativity, and what was the other word you used? You said—
Natalie Miller: Control.
Elijah Selby: Control.
Natalie Miller: Control, yeah.
Elijah Selby: Well, there's definitely a letting go of control, and I think that that can be hard for people.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. I think there's like, I mean, there's connection, maybe, or—
Elijah Selby: Connection, thank you.
Natalie Miller: Connection, and there's like a great deal of empathy also, I think, right?
Elijah Selby: Empathy.
Natalie Miller: Like, I think we're, like, when we're doing power with, like, we really are honoring the perspective and experience of the other person. And we're thinking, you know, we are thinking, like, no one's free till everyone's free. Like, we're [laugh] really saying, you know—
Elijah Selby: That's right.
Natalie Miller: —we're all in this together, and the best solution is going to be the one that is taking all of these different perspectives into account.
Elijah Selby: And I think that there's something else. I'm just thinking I had mentioned a couple moments ago this paternalism that can show up in power over. Like, I know what's right. I have to be right. So in the power-with space, there's—maybe we don't know the right answer. We're allowed to say, "I don't know." We're allowed to be uncomfortable in that, and that it doesn't diminish us.
Natalie Miller: One hundred per cent, oh my gosh. We aren't masters of our environments, right? No. We're all figuring it out all of the time. There is, I think, this like deep respect for the reality that everything is always changing. And, listen, like how countercultural is that in the business space, because what are you supposed to do in the business space? You're supposed to find your three-step method—
Elijah Selby: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —or your nine-part framework. You're supposed to distill it down to the winning formula that gets results every time. You're supposed to know.
Elijah Selby: Oh, what's the first thing you learn? I mean, I learned this years ago. I don't know what they're teaching now. But when I first started my business, and took my first business marketing class, one of the very first things I learned was, establish yourself as the expert. ~
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Elijah Selby: Establish yourself as the expert. And, boy, did that set me in a tailspin, first of all, because I was just starting out.
Natalie Miller: Yeah, totally.
Elijah Selby: And I had things to learn [laugh].
Natalie Miller: Yeah. And like where is, like, (a) where is the room to learn if you have to be the expert? And then (b) there's some sense of like, I've got something you don't have.
Elijah Selby: That's exactly right.
Natalie Miller: And that's why you have to pay me for it.
Elijah Selby: It's gross.
Natalie Miller: It's gross. It's gross, and it doesn't feel good. Yeah.
Elijah Selby: And I want to say to anybody listening who's a coach and building their business, because I do think that not only is this messaging we've received, but it's, again, what we view in the marketing space often. I think this is changing.
But this idea of establishing yourself as an expert and slash I'm the one that has the answer to your problem is something we see, a messaging we see happening with people that are, quote, unquote, successful. I'm entering a landmine here because what does successful mean? What does it mean? Like, there's so many things here.
So people that we see as successful, and often what we see as successful is people that are making a lot of money. So it's so tempting to imitate that in our marketing. But, more than that, it can feel like truth. It can feel like it's true that that's what we have to do. It's one of those weird things like, again, plugged into the matrix, it's really hard to see a different way when it's not being presented to us. And then we literally see evidence of that kind of manipulation working.
Natalie Miller: Well, I mean, I think this circles back around again to we live in the power-over world. In the power-over world, that's how it works. You say, "I've got something you don't have. It's the answer to all your problems." Right? Like, I think what also for me is bound up in this, Elijah, is here's the result I'm going to get you. I think a couple years ago, I just decided, I was like, you know what? I have no idea what's going to happen when we work together. I literally have no idea.
You might shut your business down because you fucking hate it, actually. You might need to leave your husband. You might need to open up your relationship. Like, you came because you thought that you had a marketing issue but, actually, you needed to be polyamorous. I don't know. Right? I have no fucking idea what's going to happen when we work together.
And I think every, like, messaging coach or marketing person I would work with would be like, you really need to dial in the promise. What's your promise? And I'm like, dude, I don't have one. It is disingenuous to say, "I know exactly what I'm going to get you," because, like, (a) I'm not getting you anything. We're co-creating. And, frankly, you are doing the 80% of that co-creation. [laugh] I'm just asking you some questions, right? And then (b) how do I know which direction we're going to go until we start working together?
Elijah Selby: That's right. And also even just the question, you know, that we ask our—or I don't know if you do—I do ask my clients, "Well, what is it that you desire? What is it you want? It can be anything." And it's often an incredibly difficult question for people to answer, because they've actually never asked themselves.
But even if they do have an answer, when we start working together, right, just as you said, you thought you had a—your example—you thought you had a marketing problem, but really you needed to be polyamorous, when we start coaching, and asking questions, and unpacking and all the things, you know, what you think you want may not be what you want at all.
Natalie Miller: Totally.
Elijah Selby: So here's a good question, Natalie, because I think—I'm sorry, I'm going off a little bit here. But I bet you people listening that our coaches are thinking, or business people, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, well, if I don't tell people what my result is, how can I get people to work with me? And I'm just—
Natalie Miller: Oh yeah, totally.
Elijah Selby: I'm just like curious what your answer is to that. Do you have an answer to that?
Natalie Miller: OK.
Elijah Selby: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: So I think that, again, when we shift away from controlling the outcome, and we talk more about what the values and vibes are that we're living into, we have a lot more room, right? So like once upon a time, I taught in a coach training program. And something that became super discouraging to me is, all of a sudden, this question got very popular there, and no one would kind of stop this question. The question was, what would you like to get out of this session? Like, to me, that is a controlling, close-minded, like, what would you like to get out of this session says, "We need to produce a result."
Elijah Selby: That's right.
Natalie Miller: And also, right, I as the coach need to produce the result for you. And I'm just like, everything is fucked up about that. I'm not here for that, right?
Elijah Selby: Well, it's limiting. It's very limiting.
Natalie Miller: It's so limiting, and it assumes that the coach somehow has the ability to manifest that, right?
Elijah Selby: That's right.
Natalie Miller: Like, well, you know, I want a solution to, you know, my like marketing funnel or whatever. And it's just like, well, fuck, like, I mean, right?
Elijah Selby: Mm-hmm [laugh].
Natalie Miller: And I think this actually does go along also with my sense, Elijah, that so many people, especially in business, quote, unquote, coaching, who call themselves coaches are actually consultants.
Elijah Selby: Absolutely.
Natalie Miller: They're not coaching at all. They are giving the method, the solution, the advice. They are not actually coaching. Coaching is a different thing. So I could—
Elijah Selby: I love that.
Natalie Miller: I could ride that horse around the arena for a while, but I won't. So here's just an example. This is what comes to mind for me. What I say instead, well, actually, really, truly what I do is I'm like, "What is up for you?" And I tell them, "I trust that whatever is occupying your mind the most is exactly the key to unlocking your magic." Like, you could be thinking about how you can't stop purchasing eye creams.
Elijah Selby: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: You could be worried about how much eye cream you are purchasing, and we could have a coaching session about that, and it would get down into how you feel in your aging body, where you feel out of control, where you feel pressure to show up perfect. Like, it is going to lead to the good stuff always, always, always, right?
Elijah Selby: A hundred per cent. It's so fun.
Natalie Miller: And that's just, like, I'm just going to be present with you, and I'm going to trust you, and I'm going to trust that whatever you're fixated on holds the key to what you need, right?
Elijah Selby: Because it does.
Natalie Miller: Because it does.
Elijah Selby: It does.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. If I were going to ask a question, I might ask something like, "Where would you like new perspective?"
Elijah Selby: That's a great question, Natalie.
Natalie Miller: Well, thank you.
Elijah Selby: I love that.
Natalie Miller: Because where would you like new perspective or where would you like clarity? Like, that clarity gets a little controlling for me but, basically, I'm sort of saying like, "Listen, I don't know what we're going to see, but we can agree together where we're going to look."
Elijah Selby: I love it, and I often say—I almost feel like you've said this, and I don't remember if you did, so I apologize. But I often say, "Well, what's present for you today?"
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Elijah Selby: And that's essentially the example you gave of the eye cream, right? What's present for me is I am perseverating around all the money I'm spending on eye cream, and then, you know, I can just imagine my client being judgmental of the fact that they're perseverating around that. And it's like, oh no, that's the perfect thing.
Natalie Miller: Totally. No, that's the place.
Elijah Selby: Look at that. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Ding, ding, ding. No, exactly, right. And so I think that, yeah, I think that's the thing. And I love kind of saying this and pointing this out because what I also find I always need to do, especially at the beginning of a coaching relationship—now, once we're going, they trust. They're like, "Oh, good, I can't wait to find out why. [laugh] I can't wait to find out why I'm so pissed off at my neighbor for smoking pot on the balcony every night." Right.
Like, it eventually works out. But in the beginning, because my client is usually coming to me in the power-over world thinking, "Natalie is a magical coach who is going to solve my problems," even though I haven't promised that at all, they're thinking that, and they're thinking all these power-over things. "I've got to maximize our time together. I have to make the most possible out of our precious session that we have together." Right?
And when we are able finally to relax into that co-creative mode where it's like, "Listen, we can't get this wrong. When we talk about what's present for you, when you lead the way, and I ask my questions, that is, actually, that is going to help you figure out like whatever it is that needs to be figured out right now," there's so much trust in that. There's so much co creativity in that. And that is, I think, power with, and that's the place where it's like, no, Natalie is not going to save you. Like, that's not what this is. We're working together. We're doing this together.
Elijah Selby: Yeah. My number, like, one paradigm, foundational paradigm of my coaching is that coaching is co-creative. It just is.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. And I do think—Elijah, I wonder if you agree with this—I do think like in the online space—
Elijah Selby: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —in the space of, you know, business coaching, etc., I do think a good number of people have had experiences where they were promised the method or framework or approach that was going to fix everything, and it didn't.
Elijah Selby: Well, I mean, I'll raise my hand to that.
Natalie Miller: I mean, I'll raise my hand to that.
Elijah Selby: Yeah, I mean, for sure. In fact, I think having those experiences is what helped me unplug from the matrix, so to speak, because I was so miserable paying thousands and thousands of dollars. I've spent thousands and multiple thousands of dollars—I've been coaching since 2011—on promises made through frankly brilliant marketing, like, brilliant marketing. And then the actual program was a shell.
Natalie Miller: [laugh]
Elijah Selby: [laugh] I mean, it just—I was like, are you kidding me? But then my process was making myself wrong first. First, I had to make myself, like, well, clearly something's wrong with me because it worked for them, and look at their seven figures, and they're this and they're that. I don't know what finally led to the light bulb going on. But, anyway, thank goodness it led me here, which is like, oh, that was just marketing, and it's like not the thing. It's just not the thing.
Natalie Miller: Right. Yeah, no, totally.
Elijah Selby: [laugh] To be brilliant, it's just not the thing. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Totally, yeah, no.
Elijah Selby: Let me just being profound here.
Natalie Miller: Well, listen, like, not for nothing, you know, self-blame, that is such a feature of the power-over world, right?
Elijah Selby: Oh, thank you, yes.
Natalie Miller: The power-over world is really hoping we will blame ourselves, right? Oh, it's not that, you know, the health, quote, unquote, care system is bullshit and impossible to navigate. It's that your lazy ass just like keeps procrastinating talking to the insurance company about please covering the mammogram that you got, right? We do accept, I think, so much blame for the power-over systems that are not delivering on their promises.
Elijah Selby: Right. Oh, I just think it is a genius, it is an evil genius of the system that screws us over, and then makes us responsible for being screwed over. Like, it's genius. And I want to say one more thing, which is that this marketing—I [laugh] laugh about this because I got, you know, an email, like, a marketing email from somebody. "Oh, can I talk to you about whatever?" I don't know what the product was. It was some product.
And I didn't respond to the email because I kind of, whatever, I didn't need to respond. I wasn't interested. It was clearly a cold call thing. Maybe it would've been nice for me to respond, but I didn't. And then another email was sent that I actually missed. And then the third email came, and the person said, "Well, it's clear you're not interested in building your business. Let me know when that changes."
Natalie Miller: [laugh]
Elijah Selby: And I [laugh] just like, honestly, thank goodness, laughed out loud so hard. But I thought, look at that, just that utter and complete manipulation and shame. I mean, it was absolutely trying to shame me so that I'd be like, "Oh no, no, no. I want to build my business. Wait, wait. You know, don't think badly of me. Don't think"—or whatever.
Natalie Miller: Exactly.
Elijah Selby: I don't even know. Yeah. Ugh.
Natalie Miller: Exactly. And you know what? This is what I will say when we come back around again to that idea of the vibe and the values. It's like you can feel inside, you can feel inside the approach and the tactic, like, what's happening in there. We have to trust ourselves, right? But like every time I get a cold DM—which it looks like they've eased up for a while. But, boy, whew, we go through cycles—I'm sure you get them too—the cold DM—
Elijah Selby: All the time.
Natalie Miller: —and it's telling me one thing. It's saying, you know, "Oh, I'd love to help you get more clients than you could ever imagine, on repeat, whatever." You know, it says the message. But when you feel into it, you're like, this is an unsolicited message that feels desperate. Like, this is an unsolicited message that feels manipulative, like you said, right?
Elijah Selby: And it's not about connection.
Natalie Miller: No, it's not about connection.
Elijah Selby: It's 100% not about connection and, oh, this topic, I think of this, I get so many DMs, and I get them on all the platforms. And I've then seen programs that sell the method, right? This is how to get people through your DMs. And I think, oh, they're just following a script here. There's nothing real here. So it is not power with at all, it's not connection, and it's kind of not power over either. It's sort of just weird and—
Natalie Miller: Sad. [laugh]
Elijah Selby: —sad. Yeah. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: But I do think, you know, that is really important. I feel called to say that, you know, once upon a time, I was both a customer and a coworker in a place that had a really inspiring message, a really inspiring message that said, "We should all be millionaires." That is so inspiring, right?
Elijah Selby: Totally.
Natalie Miller: And, again, we have to look at, OK, but what is happening in there? What's the vibe? What are the values, right?
Elijah Selby: Right.
Natalie Miller: Is this just a message, or is this actually happening? What does it mean if you say we should all be millionaires, but no one on your staff makes very much money at all? Right? Like, there's not integrity in it. And I think, for me, that actually turns out to be such a key feature of power with versus power over, right, because the power-over people, why are they so fucking scared?
Elijah Selby: Why are they so—well—
Natalie Miller: If they're so powerful, why are they scared?
Elijah Selby: Because they are plugged into win lose, binary, finite mentality. And if things are finite, you better grab on tight, and not let go.
Natalie Miller: You better grab on tight.
Elijah Selby: It's fear, yeah.
Natalie Miller: Totally, it's fear, right? And then, but, you know, like—
Elijah Selby: It's unfortunate. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: I'm like so with you. It is, it's unfortunate. And it's like, so when we're getting that vibe or when we're seeing, oh, the values don't appear to be embodied, I think this is just so key, because when we're embodying the values, Elijah, it's fucking messy. It's not always pretty. It doesn't look polished—
Elijah Selby: At all.
Natalie Miller: It's a lot of like, how do we do this, right?
Elijah Selby: That's right.
Natalie Miller: Like, I don't actually know how to do this. We've got to figure this out together, right?
Elijah Selby: That's right.
Natalie Miller: It's, you know, in a traditional marketing sense, not a good look.
Elijah Selby: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: It's not a good look to be figuring things out, right? And, yet, how much does the belief that we have to have it all figured out, that it has to be perfect, that it's win or lose all, like, how much does that actually like hamper our creativity, and prevent us from like living into possibility, living into hope, and creating something better?
Elijah Selby: Creating something better, having our life be good, having the lives of the people around us be good, improving the world, all of these things. And I just want to reflect on what you—the example you gave around the message is inspiring, but what's behind it? What are the values? And this is just something that I think about a lot, and that I touched on and have touched on with you and other people, and you have too, which is what's interesting to me is this idea, again, they're plugged in, so they can't see.
I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt [laugh] to a point. Don't get me wrong. I also hold people accountable for what they're putting out into the world, and the actions that they, take and who they're. I think there's always a point where people think they're really doing good things, that they are embodying their values. But there's X, Y, Z that they've been taught on how to make that happen, and they can't yet see that those actions are in direct opposition to what they're espousing, because the human mind is so good at cognitive dissonance. [laugh] Like it's—
Natalie Miller: It is.
Elijah Selby: —really good at rationalizing our behavior, and not seeing the forest for the trees, and whatever other metaphor we want to bring to it.
Natalie Miller: Yeah, no, totally. And, again, we live in the power-over world, so when I look around at all the examples of everyone else who's doing this, and who's being successful, I'm mostly going to see power-over examples.
Elijah Selby: You are.
Natalie Miller: Right?
Elijah Selby: That's exactly right.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. And that's like a reason I think that I'm so glad we're having this conversation, and also to just encourage so much all of our other, our fellow feminist revolutionary co-creators out here, right? Like, we've got to talk about this. We've got to talk about it out loud. We've got to say, you know what? Fuck a promise. Fuck promised results. I'm not going to do that anymore. So what's, like you said, OK, well then how do you talk about it? What's another way, right? And by having the conversation, and by asking the questions, I think we give new examples. We give—
Elijah Selby: A hundred per cent.
Natalie Miller: —different ways of thinking about it and doing it, right? And I think that how can you start to see you're plugged into the matrix? You hear from somebody who's not.
Elijah Selby: That's exactly right. That's exactly right, piece by piece.
Natalie Miller: Oh my gosh, so good. Elijah, again, we could keep talking for like five years.
Elijah Selby: I know. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: But do me the biggest favor, please, and tell our friends, in addition to checking out Business as Activism, your podcast, where else can they come to hear you talking about such things?
Elijah Selby: Thank you. Oh my gosh. I think the place I show up the most is Instagram. And my Instagram is Elijah Shannon Selby, just my name, Elijah Shannon Selby. But I also have an Instagram account called Business as Activism. So you can find me in both places.
Natalie Miller: Yes. We shall put that into the show notes and, you know, I look forward to whatever co-creation we end up, however else we continue to co-create, Elijah, because I feel like you are my people, very much so.
Elijah Selby: You are my people, Natalie.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Elijah Selby: I just have—I feel so much joy being connected to you. Thank you so much, just so grateful.
Natalie Miller: Thank you so—oh my gosh, OK, love fest. So, sweet listener, thank you so much for listening. I hope that you got something fun out of this conversation. Like, write to me, to Elijah with your questions and your thoughts and, like, let's keep co-creating this conversation, and keep co-creating a world in which, maybe just maybe, power with is a viable option. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much. Bye for now.
[Music]
Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world.
Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time.
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