A Loving Disruption with Elena Kunkel
By Elena Kunkel
A Loving Disruption starts with a claim I can’t leave alone: the opposite of depression isn’t happiness. It’s expression. By expression, I mean having access to all of yourself - your appetite, anger, humor, ideas, desire, taste, conviction - and letting those things have consequences. They change what you make, what you say, what you choose, what you refuse, how you love, and what you contribute. I’m interested in the distance between functioning and feeling fully alive. How can someone be wildly capable and still feel like she’s managing her life from behind glass? What cracks it wide open? Why can making something honest bring you back into your body? Why do we become vague around the things we mean most? And what happens when fear has been holding the pen for so long that we mistake its voice for our own? Each week, I follow those questions with people who have spent their lives approaching them from different directions: artists, founders, neuroscientists, somatic practitioners, coaches, philosophers, astrologers, Human Design people, and others who know something about what brings a person online. And what shuts her down. They have different language for the same strange gap. I want to hear where their answers touch. Where they contradict each other. What each one can see that the others can’t. This is the experiment: externally processing and testing the idea messily here, in my own life and with the sharpest people I can get in the room, until the language becomes specific enough to reach you when you feel far from yourself—and useful enough to help you find your way back.
I went into this conversation a little obsessed with the way Eliza Struthers-Jobin, aka Eliza SJ, makes things. I tend to decide what something is supposed to become and then grip the wheel until I get it there. Eliza makes art almost the opposite way. She creates the conditions. A few rules. Some constraints. A little randomness. Then she lets the thing show her what it wants to be. I called her a gardener. You can’t pry open a flower and tell it how to bloom. Somewhere along the way, though...
There are some people who don’t give you answers so much as ask you a question you can’t quite go back to sleep after. Jean-Marie Jobs is one of those people for me. I met Jean-Marie through GAP Community years ago, after more than a decade of working in marketing and messaging. I remember sitting in my first training, watching the way she asked questions, and wanting to learn how to do that. Eventually, I went through GAP’s Coaching Academy and became certified in transformational coaching m...
Interrupting our irregularly scheduled programming because I made something I’m very jazzed about as the kids never say. The Messaging Pop-Up is two hours of high collaboration, low commitment for creative maniacs who are tired of sitting alone at their dining room table trying to think their way through their own work. Bring the thing that’s bugging ya. The offer you can’t quite articulate or do justice. The half-baked idea. The positioning knot. The project you’re secretly wonderi...
My six-year-old daughter looked at me and asked, “Mom, what can I do where I can win a trophy?” It was wildly convicting because I could hear my own relationship with work inside that question. How often have I made the prize, the proof, or the outcome the whole point? So I went down a rabbit hole to find out what science says actually happens when we make success our business. Turns out, it can make us less creative before we even begin, interfere with skills we already know how to use, and ...
Which one is it for you? The opposite of depression isn't happiness. It's expression. This is the first episode of A Loving Disruption, and I'm starting with the question that rearranged my life. It was 2021, my daughter was one, and I walked into a 96 hour conference I did not want to attend, feeling stuck on a cellular level. A psychological sniper Jean Marie Jobs walked up to me and asked why I was there. I said I was stuck. She said stuckness is usually a symptom of two things, arrogance ...