I’ve had a wonderful influx of followers following my find my faves series over Christmas, so hello if you’re new (and if you’re old, I don’t play favourites here) 👋🏼 I’m Ellie, the founder of The Enthusiast & Co, where I encourage people to be more enthusiastic via this Substack, speaking1, and more. I adore tiramisu (s/o to my pal Roma for getting me a tiramisu hat for Christmas2), am a proud fangirl, and am on my journey to a more sustainable relationship with consumption. It’s an honour to have ya!
The other day,
posted about “mental redecorating”: a fun, more visual way of talking about reframing something you believe to be true, but isn’t serving you. (This, coupled with the fact that she addressed us readers as her “fine-feathered fucklings” in the post, shows you exactly why she’s a best-selling author).As a middle-class white woman with a platform based around enthusiasm, I’m always painfully aware that I am, in many ways, the perfect demographic to proselytise toxic positivity, and the weaponising of therapy speak to avoid any responsibility. I’m always hyper wary of sharing anything that suggests you can just ✨ think ✨ your out of tough situations, or ✨ high vibes ✨ your way out of, say, systemic oppression. But Sarah, as per usual, has hit the nail on the head: there can be something incredibly powerful about reframing a story that has shaped your life, some how.
Often, this is a story that someone else has told you — as in Sarah’s post, where she says “Some people call me bossy” — but it’s also often a story you tell yourself. (Sometimes, it’s both!)
In my case, it was the latter.
Back in 2019, I was talking to a coach I was working with when I off-handedly described myself as erratic in the middle of talking about something else. She responded to the main thrust of what I’d said, but then added, “Ellie, I want to pick up on something you just said there — do you think you’re erratic?”
“Oh god yeah,” I replied, laughing. “I feel like that Grinch gif!”
I’d always thought erratic was a neutral word: not something that most people necessarily aspire to, but not something inherently bad either. (And in the dictionary, this is true: “not even or regular in pattern or movement; unpredictable.”) But as we dug deeper, my coach made me realise that actually, I was not using it in a neutral way when talking about myself.
I was, in fact, using it to describe sometimes being a bit “too” loud, a bit “too” excitable, loving lots of things at once, not particularly coordinated (I once cracked my head open in school by laughing, because I throw my head back when I laugh and I hit a shelf in room B6.5 at school).
Cut back to sitting on that banquette in that ill-fated co-working space, where I’m snapping back to the present world like Raven Baxter coming out of a vision.
Even subconsciously, I was interpreting my enthusiasm — the very same enthusiasm I was making it my literal business to encourage in other people — as bad. Embarrassing. Unwanted. Unhelpful. Uncouth.
Once I realised this and reframed it, it genuinely broke something open in my brain. My life wasn’t suddenly perfect, but it helped turn the volume down on the niggling voice I didn’t so much as hear in my head but feel in my body a lot of the time. It was a classic example of “do as I say, not as I do”.
So, here’s to mental redecorating. To the people who help you see how brilliant you are, when you can’t see it yourself. To owning your enthusiasm. 3
p.s. if anyone has any thoughts on the format of Pep Talk going forward, I’d be all ears! Last year I had a fortnightly piece for free subscribers including recommendations, and sometimes public posts too. The paid option of Pep Talk currently just affords you my eternal gratitude on top of that. Is there something you’d like from me this year? I’d love to know — and you’d have my eternal gratitude! (I’m a gratitude floozy, clearly!)
want to hire me to talk at your company, workplace, or something else? Pop me an email at hey@theenthusiast.co!
a hat saying ‘tiramisu’, not a hat that looks like tiramisu, like those NFL (?) cheese hats