As you know, Mary and I like to sit around discussing the important topics that we think could change the world and make it a better place. We refuse to waste any more of our energy on things like: the latest diet or fashion trend and how to make ourselves conform to society's current beauty standard. We call those beauty blocks. AND we have set out to encourage you to shift your energy away from beauty blocks and onto more important topics like today's topic - Reparations.  What does America owe the descendants of slaves? How can we make it truly equitable and justified?  Will reparations ever really give black people the healing they deserve?  We had a few ideas about this and we thought we'd share them with you.  Once again just giving you something ELSE to talk about.  

In the Anonymous Soul community we identify 5 major beauty blocks that plague women THE MOST and Clothing is one of them. On today's episode we talk about the massive amount of energy that women spend on deciding what to wear each day and how our internal dialogue about how we look is affected by the fashion industry and beauty culture. We also explored how the pandemic and being quarantined for a year has affected our "rules" about clothing and whether or not things will change permanently.  It was a fun conversation that could obviously go on for hours and hours but we did our best to cover it all in an hour.  Leave a comment and let us know how you feel about this very big beauty block. 

What started off as general chat before we got to our episode ended up being the entire episode because Mary got so worked up that we ended up having a very important discussion about racism, and journalism, and a lot of other things that it was hard to title this one but in general the theme of the hour was "Mary is Angry" so that's what we called it.   Mary, who rarely uses the term "angry" to describe her emotional state these days, did in fact get very angry today.  Find out what got her all fired up on today's episode and see if you agree with her.

Here is part of two of our conversation on comparing and competing.  It started off with a focus on competing but once again we realized that comparing came into play so much in the conversation that it was better to join the two conversations and call it a part 1 and part 2.  We think this episode talks more about competing but you may disagree.  The point is, we believe that both topics need to be discussed and women need to check themselves on both of these energy-sucking habits. Enjoy the episode!

We started this episode off with a plan to talk about Comparing and why women feel the need to constantly compare themselves to each other.  We knew that the topic of Competing would come up as the two are linked but we didn't realize how much until we listened to the replay.  And so, what we ended up doing was connecting our "comparing" episode with our "competing" episode and embracing the strong links between the two by doing a Part 1 and Part 2.   I hope you enjoy and I hope that we offer some helpful tips on how to stop this unhealthy cycle that is robbing you of so much precious energy that you could be using to do things that truly make you happy.  So go listen and then stop comparing (and competing).

So of course we can't talk about why we had babies and not talk about the all important question - why do people get married? Especially in today's age when there isn't as much or a moral stigma around people living together without being married.  Has the rate of marriage gone down? What are people's motivation for getting married? We get into all our own theories and a few statistics but of course if you don't hear your own reason in our list, please leave us a comment and let us know why you decide to or decided not to get married.  We'd love to know your thoughts.  Our opinions are not the only ones.  We're here just to give you something else to think about.

With all this talk about what it means to be a woman who works and has a family and all the inequities our society has built into that dynamic, of course it brought us to the question - why do we have babies in the first place? What is it that makes adult human beings want to intentionally raise children?  Is it pressure from society that this is something we MUST do? Is it family legacy desires? Issues of feeling our own mortality? We talk about all this and more on this episode.  If we don't mention your personal reason for deciding to have or not have kids, please let us know what yours is. We'd love to get as many viewpoints as possible.  As always, we're just trying to give women something else to talk about.  

Our very first interview!  Yay!  When we dreamed of this podcast we envisioned getting new and interesting conversations started amongst all women. We hoped that we would spark some lively debates about topics that we don't feel women speak enough about.  BUT - we are not saying that our opinions on these topics are the only opinions to have, quite the contrary.  To us, there is not necessarily a right or wrong on these subjects but simply that these subjects are not talked about enough.  And so one of our goals is to get other women on to our podcast to give us their opinion and their perspective.  I am so excited to have my old college friend, Jyl, on the show to discuss the oh-so important topic of what it means in today's society to have both a full time job and a family.  Jyl is a mother of a 3 year old boy, she is married, and she has a high level engineering job in the corporate world.  Listen to what she has to say and let us know what you think.  We want to hear from you too! 

Mary and I have been wondering if everything we've been saying on this podcast makes us big ole hypocrites?   Is it possible to live into adulthood and not become a hypocrite at some point? It occurred to us that actually our hypocrisies highlight the dynamic complexity of the types of conversations we are encouraging women to engage in.  Indeed our hypocrisies need to be a part of the conversations.   Therefore, we decided before we get too far into this podcast adventure to call ourselves out on our own bullshit just so that it's out in the open and we can all agree that to have these types of discussions and not have a little bit of hypocrisy mixed in is damn well near impossible. The key, we both agree, is to recognize it in yourself and call it out.  We hope you enjoy and have a little fun acknowledging your own hypocrisies right along with us.  

Why do we as women have so much trouble accepting compliments? Why do we look for compliments and then have such trouble accepting them once we get them? And why does society teach us to compliment women on how they look first and foremost?  This is the topic of today's podcast episode.  Leave us a comment on how well you do at receiving and giving compliments. When it comes to compliments, what do you struggle with? We'd love to hear about it.