I did something recently that was genuinely hard for me — not complicated, just vulnerable. I needed to ask about ten people for something, and every single ask was nerve-wracking. And then the universe made me ask again. And again. And what happened on the other side of all that asking was not what I expected.

Kate Bowler writes in No Cure for Being Human: "We are as fragile as the day we were born, and we will need each other if we're going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between, but there's no cure for being human." Needing people is not a design flaw. It is the design. And the silence around the need costs everyone more than the ask ever would.

Question to carry into your day: What are you protecting someone from needing, that they might actually want to give?

Ready to do this work with real support? Book a discovery call and let's talk about whether the Stop Starting Over System is right for you. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall-organic

If this one is sitting with you, write me at [email protected]. I want to hear about it. I read every one.

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Last week I sat in coaching session after coaching session hearing people make declarations about their lives with complete certainty — certainty that came not from experience but from fear. A business coach I worked with years ago had a question he would stop me with every time I did the same thing. Nine words.

It stopped me cold then and it stops me now. Pema Chödrön writes in When Things Fall Apart: "When we think something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all."

Fear and knowing are not the same thing. But they feel identical from the inside — and that is the whole problem.

Question to carry into your day: What are you treating as a fact that is actually a fear?

Ready to do this work with real support? Book a discovery call and let's talk about whether the Stop Starting Over System is right for you. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall-organic

If this one is sitting with you — if you recognize the declaration, if you know exactly which fear you've been treating as a fact — write me at [email protected]. Tell me what you thought you knew. I read every one.

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An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast

I have been saying the same thing to people for twenty-five years — in treatment rooms, on retreats, seventeen miles deep in the forest with someone who desperately wants to be out of it.

And last week my social media coach said it back to me, and my mouth dropped open.

Urgency is never wisdom unless there is a lion chasing you. Everything else is your fear of trying to speed up the process.

Question to carry into your day: What are you trying to rush that is quietly asking you to stay in the process a little longer?

Ready to do this work with real support? Book a discovery call and let's talk about whether the Stop Starting Over System is right for you. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall-organic

Let's Stay Connected:

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• Questions or want to share your story? Email me at [email protected]

An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast

Last week Danny, my seventy-five-pound lab mix, accidentally ran a little experiment for me. I had been giving him these yak milk bones and then taking them away before he overdid it, and every single time I gave him one, he went at it so frantically he would sometimes make himself sick.

So I tried something. I put five or six of them out on the floor at once, just to see what would happen. And the frenzy stopped. He picked one up, chewed for a while, put it down, wandered off. Because he finally felt secure in the supply.

Today's episode is about what Danny showed me about the places we grab and can't stop, and why the answer almost never turns out to be more discipline.

Question to carry into your day: What are you grabbing at, that you might be able to put down, if some part of you actually believed the supply was secure?

Ready to do this work with real support? Book a discovery call and let's talk about whether the Stop Starting Over System is right for you. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall-organic

Let's Stay Connected:

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• Questions or want to share your story? Email me at [email protected]

An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast

In today's episode, I'm sharing a conversation I had with my best friend during her surgery recovery week, when the house unexpectedly went quiet and she started running through a list of hobbies to pick up to fill the silence.

Tricia Hersey writes in Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto that we don't have to be everything, that we don't have to know everything, that we don't have to do everything, that there is space for the unknown and space for curiosity and mystery, and that we are allowed to stay here for a while.

Today's episode is about the cultural script that says empty time is a problem to solve, the spiritual alternative of being human beings instead of human doings, and what becomes possible when we stop filling the quiet and start living inside of it.

Question to carry into your day: Where in your life is the quiet asking you to stay a little longer before you fill it back up?

If the loop with food, your weight, your body, dieting, and the whole starting-over cycle is at least partly about not knowing how to be in your own quiet, the Stop Starting Over System was built for you. Book a discovery call and let's talk. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall-organic

Let's Stay Connected:

• Subscribe on YouTube
• Instagram: @mollycarmel
• Check out my Pocket Sages on my Amazon Storefront
• Questions or want to share your story? Email me at [email protected]

An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast

In today's episode, I'm sharing something I have been carrying for a long time and have not really known how to talk about, the loss of a friendship that was a main character in my life for decades, and the strange, unnamed ache of grieving someone who has not gone away in a way our culture knows how to recognize.

Francis Weller writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow that grief was his gateway back into the breathing and animate world, that it was through the dark waters of grief that he came to touch his unlived life, and that there is some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.

Today's episode is about the quiet grief of friendships that have ended, the language and ritual we have never been given for that kind of loss, and the spiritual practice of giving it the full place it deserves.

Question to carry into your day: What friendship grief have you been carrying without permission to mourn?

If this episode reached you, I would so love to hear from you. Write me at [email protected] and tell me about the friendship grief you have been carrying. I read every one.

Let's Stay Connected:

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• Questions or want to share your story? Email me at [email protected]

An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast

In today's episode, I'm sharing the trip I almost didn't take, the inner voice that told me I had to go anyway, and what was actually waiting for me on the other side.

Melody Beattie writes in The Language of Letting Go that courage and strength, ability and resourcefulness are never lacking when we follow the guidance within and trust in its direction, and that all doors will open and our steps will be guided, when the desire is spiritually sound.

Today's episode is about the quiet inner pull toward something your rational mind says no to, the spiritual practice of going anyway, and the truth that the why often does not show up until you arrive.

Question to carry into your day: What nudge from your innermost self have you been ignoring because it doesn't yet make sense?

Ready to do this work with real support? Book a discovery call and let's talk about whether the Stop Starting Over System is right for you. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall-organic

Let's Stay Connected:

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• Questions or want to share your story? Email me at [email protected]

An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast

In today's episode, I'm sharing what I noticed while I was with my best friend the week after her major surgery, and the moment when one of our friends, who had had the very same surgery a few years ago, came over to take her on a walk and then sat down with her for coffee.

Vivek Murthy writes in Together that human relationship is as essential to our well-being as food and water, and that loneliness is not a verdict, it is the natural signal that reminds us when we need to connect with other people.

Today's episode is about how a real village actually gets built, the quiet practice underneath being held, and what is available to any of us, today, if that is not yet our experience.

Question to carry into your day: What is one small act of tending you could do this week toward the village you want?

If the loop with food, your weight, your body, and dieting has been a lonely place for a long time, that is not a coincidence. The Stop Starting Over System is a comprehensive program built with community at the center, because this work does not respond to discipline alone. Book a discovery call and let's talk. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall-organic

I would love to hear from you!! Write me at [email protected] and tell me about your village, or the one you are building. I read every one!

Let's Stay Connected:

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An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast

In today's episode, I'm sharing what happened the day my calmest friend in the world finally yelled, after the accumulated weight of all the well-meaning advice she had been getting during her divorce became too much to hold.

Megan Devine writes in It's OK That You're Not OK that some things cannot be fixed, that they can only be carried, that grief no more needs a solution than love needs a solution, and that companionship, not correction, is the way forward.

Today's episode is about the quiet harm of unsolicited advice, what's underneath the impulse to give it, and what real support actually looks like when someone we love is in something hard.

Question to carry into your day: Who in your life right now needs your companionship instead of your correction?

Ready to do this work with real support? Book a discovery call and let's talk about whether the Stop Starting Over System is right for you. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall-organic

Let's Stay Connected:

• Subscribe on YouTube
• Instagram: @mollycarmel
• Check out my Pocket Sages on my Amazon Storefront
• Questions or want to share your story? Email me at [email protected]

An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast

In today's episode, I'm sharing the call I made to my spiritual advisor twelve hours after I drove my new car off the lot, the way she gently laughed at me, and the pattern she has been watching me run for eight years.

Jack Kornfield writes in A Path with Heart that we live in a sea of conditioning patterns that we repeat over and over, yet we rarely notice this process, and that the work is to drop below the level of the repeated recorded message and feel the energy underneath.

Today's episode is about the strange panic that hits the moment we commit to something, the pattern almost all of us run, and the spiritual move that finally takes its power away.

Question to carry into your day: What pattern are you ready to start catching as it runs, instead of believing what it tells you?

If this same pattern is running every time you commit to a new way with food or your body, and your system tries to overturn the commitment the moment it becomes real, the Stop Starting Over System was built for you. Book a discovery call and let's talk. https://link.allyone.io/widget/bookings/mc-discoverycall

Let's Stay Connected:

• Subscribe on YouTube
• Instagram: @mollycarmel
• Check out my Pocket Sages on my Amazon Storefront
• Questions or want to share your story? Email me at [email protected]

An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast