How “Toxic Grit” Can Help You Have It All And Actually Love What You Have

Natalie Tysdal (01:23)

Amanda, so nice to meet you and have you on the show.

Amanda Goetz (01:27)

So great to be here. I'm so excited about this.

Natalie Tysdal (01:29)

Well, I know this is a big month for you because your book is coming out. And as soon as I saw the title of the book, I'm like, I get it. I need this. I need to understand more. So toxic grit, correct? And tell me about it. Where did it come from? Why did you write it? And it sounds like it's been something in the making for a while.

Amanda Goetz (01:44)

Yup.

It has, it definitely has. So the subtitle is How to Have It All and Actually Love What You Have. And I'll share this story briefly to kind of set the tone of the origin of this book, which was, so I was leading marketing for The Knotts, the wedding company in wedding magazine. And I had three kids under the age of four and I had just filed for divorce. And I was

It was a typical day in my life at that time, which was like, get up, get ready, get three kids ready, take two preschools and one stayed home with the nanny and then I dropped them off, get to Starbucks, grab my Starbucks, like get on the subway, go downtown, all the way through the day and I get home, get all three kids finally down, it's about 8.30 at night and I was rocking my son to sleep.

And I took out my phone because you know, with three kids, you get really good at like holding your phone and like holding a baby at the same time. Right. Exactly. And I wrote the phrase, you can have it all. And I just sat there thinking to myself, like, where is the friction coming from? Because I'm breaking. Like what is happening here? And obviously I know I was going through a divorce, but like even still, I was talking to friends at that time who were in

Natalie Tysdal (02:52)

Well, dinner's cooking, yeah.

Amanda Goetz (03:18)

good marriages and they were struggling. And I realized it wasn't about the all. It wasn't about like the work and the family. It was the you. Because when I looked at my day in hindsight, I could start to see these kinds of different characters I was playing throughout the day in this movie of my life. And the version of me that loves work, which I called the CEO character in the book,

That version of me doesn't want to leave every meeting early to go pump, didn't want to like have to leave work at 4.30 so I could get home and relieve the nanny at five. That version of me cares about ambition and goals and hitting those goals. But then the mom version of me, the one that's sitting there rocking a baby, doesn't give a fuck about work and Slack and email and all of that. So I have these kind of competing

use competing versions of me inside of myself. Now let's layer on the version of me that just wants to go, go back and drink, drink and party with my girlfriends and have a girls night out. The version of me that wants to go on solo vacations and explore the world by myself. The version of me that actually does desire pleasure and intimacy and sex. The version of me that's independent. The version of me that wants to be in relationship. Like we have all of these

parts of ourselves that we keep trying to seek alignment for. And in that moment, I could really see and start to understand what I later coined as character theory in the book, but that I needed to separate and identify these different parts of myself and start to be more intentional about not only auditing,

my life to say which characters have been written off script for too long and then intentionally writing them back in and in a way that is allowing character development to happen more regularly across these different diverse characters versus what I think happens to many of us that are juggling work and family is that, okay, all these other characters and versions of me, I'll resort to vacation.

It's like, they'll come out on vacation. It's like, that is a huge barrier to entry for those other characters. So I wrote this book for all the people who are like, am doing all the things and yet feel very numb and disconnected and I can't figure out what's happening. And so it's very, very practical.

guide that kind of takes you through re-meeting each of these versions of yourself. Some of these, for many women, may have been written off of the movie for a while. And go ahead.

Natalie Tysdal (06:22)

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, no, I just,

I relate to it in so many ways. And it's like the moment when you were rocking your baby and thinking that I remember having that. ⁓ when I looked at the GM of one of the first TV stations I worked at and she had three kids and she was running this. And I just thought, well, she can have it all. Why can't I have it all? And I hadn't had children yet. And then only to have three of my own and realize she probably didn't have it all, but boy, she put on a good face and made it look like.

Amanda Goetz (06:45)

Mmm.

Natalie Tysdal (06:55)

She did. And that's what so many of us do.

Amanda Goetz (06:58)

And it's the all at once thing is what character theory is really about. There are days and weeks and months, like right now being on a book tour and gearing up for this long book tour. There are months where my CEO character is intentionally the main character. Then there are going to be months where I call it driving the speed limit. I'm going to drive the speed limit at work.

Natalie Tysdal (07:12)

Yeah.

Amanda Goetz (07:26)

And then I'm going to allow some other characters to be more in the spotlight. Like I'm going to coach my son's basketball league and going to do, you know, be more active in my daughter's Girl Scouts troop. It's the intentional imbalance of life that we actually need to allow for and stop guilting ourselves in creating hierarchy. And I want to say that again, hierarchy is so important in the

micro and macro of life in that in let's take like a very tactical example. This happens to many of us, especially if you work from home, you're working from home and your kids are home. Now I will literally designate a hierarchy for the next two hours. Work is the top priority. Mom is a second priority for the next two hours. What does that look like?

I'm going to set the kids up so that maybe they're watching a movie. I feed them and they're ready to go. And I tell them, I'm setting the Amazon Alexa timer for two hours. If it doesn't go off and no one's bleeding, you don't come to me. I'm not going to be available. And over time, my kids have really learned to respect that boundary. Now, here's the tricky thing. When that two hours ends, I have to honor

that I committed to transitioning back into mom mode. So it's the managing of the expectations. So it's awareness. I call it the ABCs of the, the multiverse of all your characters, awareness of what character you're going to be in and what's the hierarchy there, set the boundaries so that you can be in that character for as long as you've determined, communicate it to everyone else when you're going to be switching out of that character. So

If I tell my kids in one hour, I will come back out and we can play Legos or whatever. If I don't do that, then they're never going to respect that I am committing to that. So I have to honor that. And the thing that I find in my coaching sessions that's really, really hard for women to do specifically is we have kind of two traps we all fall into. And I write about this in the book, the significance trap and the urgency trap.

Natalie Tysdal (09:34)

bright.

Amanda Goetz (09:53)

When we create hierarchy, let's say we put mom mode on the front burner and work mode is second. Okay, I'm gonna play with my kids for the next hour. I'm gonna set up Amazon Alexa timer and I'm going to sit down and play cars with my son.

A Slack comes through or someone comments on my LinkedIn post. We are sucked back in and it's this other version of us that is trying to take over the plot line. Now, urgency trap, when everything is urgent, nothing is. Where does that come from? Why are we so quick to pick up our phone and want to look at that email and respond immediately?

Well, it's deep down roots of, well, if I don't respond, what will they think of me? Will they not think I care? Will I lose their love and affection and attention? Or will I lose the gold star that I'm trying to earn from them? When in reality, we're adults, there's no gold stars here. And so setting that boundary, if you've said that this is the hierarchy, it's date night.

And I am going to be on date night mode. And I've said that that's the hierarchy and something else like people are texting or the, the whatever happens in life. It's like, the exterminator can't come tomorrow. Whatever. Insert any life thing. If you allow that to suck you in, you, what does that say about the, prioritization of, of those? Are they really ax?

that important to you. So there's urgency and then significance trap. If everything is important, nothing is. I'm such a believer of the 80-20 rule. Like you can get 80 % of the impact from 20 % of the work most of the time. And this is proven over and over again. The people that get promotions at work are not the people that clean out their inbox every day.

Natalie Tysdal (11:49)

Hmm.

Amanda Goetz (12:07)

They're the people that do the best project. They push that project forward that actually solves business needs and makes more money. best happiest children in the world aren't necessarily the ones with moms who packed every lunch and made every dinner. It was about emotional connection and could they actually feel that they were emotionally connected to their parent. And as someone who is now

in a co-parenting relationship for the past seven, eight years, I can tell you that every child psychologist that I've worked with has says it only takes one household to really affect the children as long as they have stability in one household. So that's 50 % of the time. If your kid can have a good, stable emotional connection, they're going to be okay. So I just think that

We tend to forget that 80-20 rule, and I've said this to so many stressed out working moms. If you only have 20 % to give and you give 20%, then you gave 100%.

So I go through this process that I call the minimally viable day, which is, okay, in an ideal day, what do you need to feel whole? Like which versions of yourself need to come to light? For me, I need to move my body. I wanna have at least, know, well, let's go to the ideal scenario. I wanna move my body for an hour, like have a good workout for an hour. That's the ideal scenario.

Ideal scenario with my kids would be we have dinner together, we spend time together, and I tuck them in. Ideal scenario with my partner is we have one hour of uninterrupted time to reconnect emotionally, physically, whatever. And then ideal scenario for deep work, I'm working on for at least two hours without meetings and distractions of important work to me. If I can do those four things, that's an ideal day.

Now what I want to implore someone to do is think about the characters that you show up as in a day. Think about the ideal scenario. Then I want you to go all the way down to what's the minimally viable version of that that would mean that you felt pretty good about that. So that might be for me, okay, I didn't do dinner with the kids because I was working later that night and I intentionally said that was going to be the case. I have a really present tuck in.

like a good 20 to 30 minute tuck in with them where I'm talking to them and I'm not distracted. That's the minimally viable version. If I can't do a one hour workout, then I have a minimally viable version, which is a 20 minute walk on the treadmill. I don't get sweaty. I can jump into a meeting right after. I can, you know, it's moving my body still. So it's this sliding scale of enoughness that when we start to look at it for each of these characters,

you stop chasing gold stars in this all or nothing approach. And we start to look at life as this true compounding interest of showing up in these, for these different versions of ourselves.

Natalie Tysdal (15:23)

Yeah.

Yeah, just so valuable. mean, I could pick so many things out of what you just said, but the biggest takeaway that I'm hearing in all of that is defining those characters, those roles, and then not having them mix. I mean, that is so difficult when the notifications are going off or when you think your boss is watching and I better reply quickly or...

Amanda Goetz (16:04)

Mm-hmm.

Natalie Tysdal (16:05)

It's the dopamine too. It's that quick. I mean, we all, we all struggle with it. Our children especially struggle with it. And maybe this is something good to start teaching them and their characters from being a student to being a friend to all of those things, because they just, they mix and we don't even realize. Like I've got my watch on right now. It's been buzzing. It's bothering me. And I very intentionally.

Amanda Goetz (16:17)

Yeah.

you

Natalie Tysdal (16:33)

should take it off before I even do a podcast because even just the thought that it might be going off, I just did another podcast on this. Even if the phone is just there, it's not going off. You're thinking, but it might be going off because it's in the room with you while you're working or your kids are studying, whatever that case might be.

Amanda Goetz (16:43)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And the thing about distractions is I use the 10, 10, 10 rule. Will this matter in 10 minutes? Will this still matter in 10 days? Will this still matter in 10 weeks? And obviously, your kid, you get the call. I was just on a call and somebody's child was sick at school.

And they had to take the call from school and they went off camera and they took the call from school and they're like, Hey, I have to leave. Right. That, that will matter in 10 minutes. Right. Your kid's sick. You need to go get them. But how many times if we use that analysis, my friend is texting me because she had another dating hilarious story that that will still matter in 10 hours and I can get back to her and.

Natalie Tysdal (17:29)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Amanda Goetz (17:47)

this kind of t-shirt sizing of response time really starts to re-center yourself. And I have a couple of tools for people, especially if you work for someone that I've used throughout my career, which is, if somebody came to me as an employee and said, hey, I'm going to check Slack at 9 a.m., 12 and 4.30 so that I can spend my time more focused.

on solving these problems, I would be like, yes, please. I'm not paying you to respond to me fast. I'm paying you to solve the issues for the business and to generate revenue. So we have to create these kind of managed expectations of availability around ourselves. And so now whenever I enter a Slack environment,

Like I just took on a new full-time role. And similarly in the little Slack like response thing I have, I check Slack at these three times during the day. If you send me something at 10 AM and the next checkpoint is 12, you're going to wait two hours. And then.

Natalie Tysdal (19:03)

Yeah, yeah, which is funny

because Slack, so many people think Slack is so that you can be immediately available and it shouldn't be that way.

Amanda Goetz (19:13)

It shouldn't, and your most impactful work is undistracted work. So why would I want somebody employed for me that is literally only in Slack? Because that means that they're not staying focused on the work at hand. And the same goes for every role. Like how many of us go on vacation or we're like, I'm going to relax tonight.

Natalie Tysdal (19:21)

Right.

Amanda Goetz (19:44)

And then you sit down and your phone is in your hand and you are thinking about a birthday party you have to plan or you're planning out something else or you're scrolling. And rest is an interesting thing because most people associate rest with physical rest, right? Like I need to sleep, but there's so many other kinds of rests. There's sensory rest, sensorial rest.

When you're overstimulated, need to allow yourself sensory rest. There's cognitive rest. You've been thinking a lot. I need to not think so much. There's emotional rest. I've been feeling a lot. And let me tell you, most people pick up their phone and scroll, and yet they're really needing emotional rest. And think about what you're looking at on social media.

Is that giving you emotional rest? No, you're feeling a lot of feelings when you're scrolling social media. So I, I talk about this all in the book because each of these characters kind of feeds into different things that we need as humans. And it's important for us to audit which kinds of, of basic human needs that we're lacking, but also which types of rests we're not allowing ourselves.

And if you really do need sensorial rest or emotional rest, how can you give that to yourself? Like, what do you actually need to build into your life to get that?

Natalie Tysdal (21:18)

Yeah,

yeah. I'm also hearing, and maybe this is just reflective here for myself, that so much of this is learning to discipline yourself. The discipline of understanding, this is who I am right now. This is my boundary. Like all of those things. I mean, I have two young, not young daughters, I have two young ladies, both after college, when in college.

and then I have a high school son. And I don't think discipline is an easy thing. I know it probably wasn't even when we were young. I think it's even harder today because so much is at our disposal, at our fingertips. We didn't have all of those temptations growing up that are right at their fingertips. So what tips would you have for learning to discipline yourself to have these boundaries?

Amanda Goetz (22:08)

Thank

When I became a single mom and my life became forced compartmentalization, right? So when I started dating again, I'll use this as an example, but when I started dating again, I realized like, okay, I will date when I don't have my kids. And so now I'm compartmentalized and I'm non-mom Amanda and I'm getting ready for a date so then I can be this like,

different version of myself. can be the sexy, flirtatious, fun, not stressed about work and not stressed about like pickup and all of that. And it was such an epiphany for me now getting married again that I have to create this compartmentalization in my life. Like think about now after, you know, if you've been with somebody for a while, think about

the things you talked about on your first few dates. Chances are it wasn't.

Like logistics, wasn't like, what are you doing Thursday at two? You were talking about like dreams and who you want to become and how you're growing and changing and evolving. And this idea that like we have forced compartmentalization when you become a single parent. I'm like, I have to continue what I just learned into getting married again. So now going back to your question about discipline, forced compartmentalization is

really important. If you want to focus on yourself or achieve a big goal, I know, I don't know if you've read Eve Rodsky's latest book, find your unicorn space, but she talks about in the book, how her and her husband started to separate. Like you take Saturdays, I take Sundays. You're with the kids on Saturdays. I'm with the kids on Sundays. You get a full day to go do what you need to do to make yourself

feel good. For her it was writing. She wanted to go write and research and get away. And she needed to get away so she could do that. Force compartmentalization to the best of your ability, given what you have at your disposal. That might just be, hey kids, I'm setting an Amazon Alexa timer for one hour. I do this thing where I take a mommy bath every day.

So after I've been working all day, my CEO character is a very like assertive, intense character. The mom version of me is very silly. She loves to be silly and dance and tell fart jokes. That's my crowd right now. like, and so I need to create these separations and these transition periods. I go and I take a bath after I get the kids, we get home and I say, I'll be back. I'm going to go become a mommy.

Natalie Tysdal (25:10)

You

Amanda Goetz (25:12)

And they know it. They let me go and have 30 minutes to just decompress, to transition into that mode. And for me to say out loud, for the next two hours, I'm going to be a mom. And anything that happens work-wise can wait for two hours. And guess what? If somebody needs to escalate something, they can text me. And they know how to get a hold of me.

but I don't need to check Slack. I don't need to check my email for the next two hours. So what I, to kind of summarize this compartmentalization, it's again, awareness of the character that you're in, setting a transition, and then understanding how long you want to be in that character. And that really helps really bring in some of these less dominant characters. Like sex, like for many women,

Natalie Tysdal (25:42)

Yeah.

Amanda Goetz (26:06)

Creating a transition sequence for sex is so critical. So many women, myself included, cannot go from mom mode straight into being intimate. You're touched out, you need sensory rest, sensorial rest, you cognitive rest. So what is your transition sequence? How do you allow yourself to...

kind of separate from one character to the other and allow yourself to fully transition into it because there is a version of you, very much so, ask any divorced woman, like going through that post-divorce phase where it's like, yeah, I forgot I have a sex drive. Like it's in there. You have that part of yourself that's still in there and you have to kind of allow that character to come out and come into the spotlight. So the discipline really comes from acknowledging

the compartmentalization, the boundaries, and the transitions that is needed to get into it.

Natalie Tysdal (27:06)

I've just never thought about the need for that transition time and how important it is. Because we do, we go directly from one thing to the other. Sometimes I find myself even just being in the car for a few extra minutes and it's just almost that like, I just need to breathe for a minute before I go into the house or into the store. And it's a safe place to do that. Yeah.

Amanda Goetz (27:30)

Yeah, but that's

so important. That is a transition sequence. Some of us, like it can be viewed as like, ⁓ you're, you're just sitting in your car. It's like, no, that is a very intentional moment for you to sit there, take some breaths, maybe listen to a song that gets you in the head space of whatever the next character you're going into, whether you're going on a date, you're going to see friends, you're going to be in mom mode, you're going to whatever. Allow yourself to say,

Natalie Tysdal (27:34)

Yeah.

Amanda Goetz (27:59)

Okay, I was just in work mode. That version of me is really intense. I'm going to soften right now, maybe listen to a song that makes me excited to see my friends, or I'm going to listen to a podcast of two friends talking and remind me the amazingness of girlhood and that I can like, that there's a version of me, a character inside of me. All she wants to do is connect with her friends. All she wants to do is just sit here and laugh about the

dumb as shit and allow that transition to take place so that that character can fully enjoy the moment they get in the movie of your life rather than just going through the motions, which is why the subtitle of my book is, actually love what you have, because when we don't create that intentionality, you can just robotically move through life.

Natalie Tysdal (28:52)

Yeah, yeah. And that's the toxic part of it. Well, I love so many things that you've told me. I'm absorbing them all now. I can't wait to get my hands on the book. The character ⁓ that you've created, all of the different, I've never thought about all of the different ways that we need to decompress from our senses, ⁓ our feelings, all that. I mean, it's beautiful and so, so, so important. ⁓ If we want to show up.

professionally and for our families. The book is coming out. Tell people where they can get it and where they can learn more about you.

Amanda Goetz (29:31)

Yeah. So the book comes out October 21st. And fun fact, I turn 40 on the 22nd. So it's a whole new era of life, which is very exciting. ⁓ it's anywhere books are sold, Barnes & Noble, Target, Amazon, ⁓ and also local bookstores. A big part of becoming an author that I didn't realize is like, I really want to support the local bookstores.

Natalie Tysdal (29:40)

Great.

Amanda Goetz (30:01)

⁓ And it's a good thing to have diversification apparently of where your books are sold from. It's a good thing for publishers to see and all that. So it's been fun. I've been pointing people towards a lot of local bookstores. So if you have a local bookstore that you love, you can literally go in and they can order it for you from there, which I always think is a good thing as someone who comes from a small business family. So yeah.

Natalie Tysdal (30:27)

I love that and supporting

them and finding you on social media and your website. I'll put if you want to mention those, but I'll put them in the show notes as well.

Amanda Goetz (30:35)

Yeah, just that the Amanda gets. ⁓ Instagram is a fun little sneak peek at all. If you're interested in watching the behind the scenes of launching this book into the world, it's going to be a wild six weeks. It'll be fun. My CEO character is very much in the spotlight for the next three months. And then she takes a back seat for a little bit while I enjoy the holidays and get married. ⁓ And then toxicgrit.com is where you can learn more about the book.

You can put your order number in when you order the book. You will get a copy of the free digital workbook companion as well as a bonus chapter that will not be published that is very fun bonus chapter. So ToxicGrit.com to learn more about the book.

Natalie Tysdal (31:10)

Great.

Great, I'll be doing that. Amanda, thank you so much and best of luck as you take on that CEO character for a while and then really enjoy the time so that you can divide those, compartmentalize all of them, but best of luck. Great to meet you.

Amanda Goetz (31:22)

Thank you so much.

Thank you

so much, Natalie. I appreciate it.