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I’ve been hinting for a few weeks now that my business and my podcast are changing. And the time has finally come: episode 362 is the last episode of Raise Your Hand Say Yes. 

Next week, my podcast will have a new name, new intro and outro music, and new cover art. But it will still be me chatting in your ear about the things that are lighting me up and interviewing fascinating people. I hope that everything changes and nothing changes. 

How I Got Here: Why I’m Changing the Name of RYHSY

After nearly seven years of recording Raise Your Hand Say Yes, you could say that this change has been coming for a while—or even for 362 episodes. 

We are constantly evolving. That’s just a fact of human development. And after simmering on this evolution for the podcast, I knew it needed to happen. 

This all started with some inconvenient internal whispers about the name, Raise Your Hand Say Yes. I’ve joked with podcast guests and Inner Circle members before that sometimes we want to say yes enthusiastically. And sometimes we want to say no! And then there’s all the space and nuance on the scale of “hell yes” and “hell no.”

I still love the phrase and the invitation to go for it. To start before you’re ready. To take bold action, and trust that you’re going to figure it out. But I also believe that sometimes we need to put our hands down, sit, and rest for a minute. 

Life isn’t black and white. There are a lot of beautiful colors available to us in between. 

Our brains want to run on autopilot and ignore the inconvenient whispers of our intuition. After hearing the same fairytales of how our lives should look and feel over and over, we end up hating our intuition. We fight against those deep seeds of truth, or we try to numb ourselves just enough that we don’t hear them anymore. 

As I talked about in Episode 360: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Fear, we’re afraid that the whisper means we have to burn down everything we’ve worked to create. Changing the name of RYSHY after six and half years doesn’t invalidate the past 362 episodes. It just means that we get to talk about something slightly different in a somewhat different direction.

But if you don’t let the whispers into the room because of your fear of change, the dissonance is only going to get bigger, louder, and stronger. And eventually, it’s going to light itself on fire whether you want it to or not, because you keep pushing and trying to make it work. 

What to Do if You Hear an Inconvenient Whisper: Open the Door as Slowly as You Like

If you have one of these nudges of intuition, it doesn’t mean you have to jump in right away to change everything. Rather than thinking, “this is a sign I need to change everything,” you can see it as a loving and grace-filled invitation to look a little deeper. 

Open up the conversation with yourself and sit with the discomfort of the whisper. You’ve done more uncomfortable things in your life than this.

You might think, “But what if this leads to everything falling apart?” And to that, I say, well, what if? What if you trust your ability to figure things out as you go? Ignoring the whisper guarantees everything falling apart. Listening to it and taking action from there changes the trajectory. 

As an enneagram three, I am not patient. I will make a mega to-do list just to cross things off. The whisper to change the name came during a difficult time. We’re all home, and my energy is constrained. And because of that, I’ve had to move slowly. 

Have I enjoyed that? Nope. But letting things take as long as they need to is a gift that I’m giving myself. When you develop photos from film, you have to let the chemicals do their work. When you make a soup, you have to let it simmer to get all the goodness and flavor. Whether it’s chemicals for photos or heat for soup, the same factor in our lives is time. 

Continue Taking Care of You First

While you’re taking your time and letting your whisper develop into something new, you need to keep taking care of yourself.

While I worked on this change for the podcast, I prioritized my sleep. I prioritized taking a daily walk. I ate things that lit me up and made me feel good. I talked to people who made me feel good. I spent time with my family in ways that were delightful and read books that brought me joy. 

That’s because stepping into an inconvenient whisper requires so much energy. It’s much more energy than just doing what we’ve always done. 

And for many of us, what we’ve always done is just being the go-getter, the hand-raiser, the yes-sayer. Taking care of yourself is putting your hand down and quieting the “now what?” on repeat in your head.  

You don’t have to wait to get to a certain level of achievement before you can start taking care of yourself and honoring your needs as a human. You can take care of yourself now without “earning” permission. 

Stay in the Place of “Not This”

So if you’re taking your time to find the right answer and taking care of yourself, how do you keep going while you search? 

For this change for the podcast, I didn’t demand any answers. In the past few months, I’ve been talking about change. I’ve been talking about pausing. I’ve been talking about asking questions, looking deeper, and trying to get to the root of it. 

I stayed in the place of “not this,” à la Elizabeth Gilbert, or as Rob Bell called it on a recent episode of his podcast, the South Star. I went through a lot of, “I know it’s not that. Could it be this? No, not this. Or that? Maybe. Or not. I don’t know.”

We aren’t usually comfortable with the phrase “I don’t know.” But I knew that the way I was doing things was honestly making me miserable. The way I was approaching most things and the rules I was following were making me unhappy. 

I kept telling myself I had to have a “leg
it” business. I needed to talk to you about certain things. I needed to look good on paper.

So I took my foot off the gas and slowed down, even as every fiber of my being said, “you’re not allowed to slow down.” Because I knew that if I didn’t slow down, I was going to drive this car off a cliff. 

Allow Everything to Be Frustrating and Uncomfortable

People love to ask, “what’s new? What are you working on?” And I had to let it be frustrating and uncomfortable when I had to say, “I don’t know.”

At the same time, I tried not to live in the version of the story where this change was shitty. Instead, I showed up to the not knowing from a place of faith. I trusted the process.

We’re trained to believe that it’s either all or nothing. That slowing down is the same as giving up. That we need to gold star and honor roll our way through life. But slowing down doesn’t mean that everything will all fall apart. You might need the slow down so you can recharge.

What All of This Means for the Future of This Podcast

We’re saying goodbye to Raise Your Hand Say Yes. We’re setting it on the shelf. The archives will still hold all of the conversations we’ve had. And I’m so thankful for everything I’ve learned and how it brought me to today.

Here are the takeaways I hope you get from this change:

1. It’s okay to want something to change. Even if something is mostly working, and even if it doesn’t make sense to you. Even if you don’t know what kind of change you want. 

2. It’s okay not to tell anybody for a while. You can keep it a secret and hold that baby bird seedling of an idea close. Write it in your journal, or not. It’s yours. 

3. It’s okay to let it take loads and loads of time. Boatloads of time, if you need it.

4. It’s okay to doubt it. There were so many moments of doubt for me during this process. That’s okay. I gave myself the insurance policy of, “I can always keep RYHSY if that works better.” 

5. It’s okay to feel wobbly. I feel pretty good about my decision at this point. But I put off writing this all day because I had that slight wobble of nerves in my tummy. 

6. It’s okay if every step you’re taking feels wobbly for the rest of your life. If we’re embracing change and embracing the process, we’ll always be at the edge. We’ll probably always feel wobbly. But that’s why we want to embrace that radical self-belief, so we can keep moving in the right direction. 

7. It’s okay to take it one step at a time. Maybe that feels frustrating, or like it’s not enough, or too slow. But that’s also okay! You can trust that you’re going to figure things out as you go. 

Whether you’ve been with RYHSY from episode one or just joined me, thank you, I love you, you’re amazing. Keep following those inconvenient whispers for yourself, but also for the rest of the world. 

Resources

• Get on the waitlist for the Inner Circle

• Episode 360: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Fear

• Episode 358: Radical Delight and Where I’m Finding It

• Elizabeth Gilbert’s Not This card

• Rob Bell’s RobCast, episode 303: South Star

• Episode 354: Tiptoeing Into Radical Self-Belief

Timestamps

• [01:17] How I Got Here: Why I’m Changing the Name of RYHSY

• [13:52] What to Do if You Hear an Inconvenient Whisper: Open the Door as Slowly as You Like

• [18:36] Continue Taking Care of You First

• [20:53] Stay in the Place of “Not This”

• [23:15] Allow Everything to Be Frustrating and Uncomfortable

• [25:43] What All of This Means for the Future of This Podcast