In the q two, I had this profound
experience
of self forgiveness and self compassion,
and
it makes me emotional even thinking about it
right now.
But I literally,
in that moment, felt a physical weight
coming off of me.
I realized at that moment that I had
a choice
at that point forward whether I wanted to
put that weight back on or whether I
wanted to let it go.
Hello, and welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a
podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute.
My name is Sadie Hanna. And in this
podcast, you'll hear real conversations and stories with
graduates about their courageous journey inward, and how
their love and light are living in the
world around them. Love's Everyday Radius.
Thank you for being here and welcome.
Hey everyone. Welcome. I'm Sadie Gardere and I'm
here today with Alison Kaylor, who is a
Hoffman grad. Alison, welcome. Thanks for having me,
Sadie.
Yeah, I'm so happy to have this conversation.
And
I often begin by saying, tell us a
bit about who you are and
wherever you'd like to begin is good for
me.
It's a great question to start, and it's
one that the answer has changed pretty significantly
over the past couple of years. So
I would have led very much with my
professional identity
in the past. So I would have introduced
myself as a partner at a consulting firm
living in Chicago,
and then I probably would have followed up
with the personal news about being married but
with no kids.
Today, as we sit here,
I would say I'm
Allison Kaler. I'm based in Santa Monica, California.
I'm
divorced and self employed. I
spend my time now as an executive coach
and leadership advisor,
and I'm the host of a new podcast
called The Details.
So, yeah, wonderful to be here today. So
exciting. And I wanna hear more about that.
We were speaking before about
the beautiful
way that the timing has happened to unfold.
I first met you in a Q2.
So for those who are listening, a Q2
is a graduate program that you can take
after you've taken the full seven day process.
There are many grads that want to either
refresh
to deepen or to navigate a particular
challenge in life. And they'll come back for
a three day program. I heard wonderful things
mainly about your realness
and your authenticity.
And I was really intrigued
to have this conversation because of that.
Well, thank you for saying that.
It means a lot because those have been
truly
some of the biggest outputs that have come
out of my time at the process.
I did the process in July
2024,
and it came at a real inflection
point in my life.
I had
gotten divorced six years previously
and
moved from Chicago
to
Santa Monica a year prior.
And
a month before showing up at the process,
I
had resigned from the only company that I
had ever worked for and spent almost two
decades at.
So it's not that the process triggered a
bunch of these changes, but
the process was
something that really helped me to integrate
these changes
and
something that really allowed me to step into
this next chapter of my life in a
way that felt
really aligned and authentic and not driven by
the external
validation
and the shoulds in life that had really
driven a lot of my earlier life decisions.
And
happy to share more about my experience at
the process, but on the q two, which
I did
a little over a year after the process,
it felt really important for me
to come back to some of the things
that I hadn't fully
addressed
in the process. And that was mainly around
my divorce and some of the things I
was still
questioning,
wrestling with, reflecting on, and healing from. So
to me, the q two that we wrapped
up last September was really
just this full circle moment of feeling like,
okay. I now feel like
I have addressed a lot of the big
things. It's still very much a work in
process, but
it was a really profound experience for me
both attending the process and the q two.
Yeah. So going
before the process, it sounds like change was
already afoot
and you were already aware of something catalyzing
change in your life.
What was that? If you could speak to
it, where did your journey begin?
I think going back to childhood and growing
up, I grew up in a really loving
household.
I
had one younger sister and my parents. I
grew up Catholic. I grew up in this
sort of idyllic
Western suburb of Chicago and sort of had
what would be on paper
a perfect childhood.
But I grew up very achievement oriented,
very driven by
a sense of approval,
definitely from my parents, but also from
teachers and sports coaches and all these things.
And, you know, for whatever reason, picked up
the message of
I never feel good enough, that I have
to prove my worth through
achievement, through the report cards and,
you know, the different sports accomplishments and things.
And all of that carried forward into
college and my early career
where it was no longer the sort of
external pressures of being good enough, but really
these voices that just got ingrained in my
head. And even if everybody else was giving
me positive feedback, I was telling myself that
I was never good enough. It was never
good enough.
And so I just got in this cycle
of trying to achieve, achieve, achieve, and work
became
pretty much the number one focus in my
life. So I started at that company that
I worked at when I was at in
the summer between my junior and senior year
of college, and I spent, you know, almost
two decades there. And it was always about
when's the next promotion, what can I do,
how can I get the best rating or,
you know, performance review?
And all the while,
there were elements of the job that I
really enjoyed,
but it felt like at times I was
force fitting things that it just something wasn't
a right fit.
I always say it wasn't like it was
like a square peg in a round hole,
but it was like a square peg in,
like, a slightly, like, tilted, like, maybe a
rectangular hole. And so it was like, I
could kinda force fit it and make it
fit.
But I started to have this realization on
the career side that the path that I
was on was just staying at this same
job in the same role for the rest
of my life. And did I truly want
that?
And then I had to
really wrestle with the question of like, oh,
I'm allowed to want things? Like, I'm allowed
to have
preferences and desires and things, and
to actually listen to those and honor those?
That was really foreign for me. People used
to say, well, what does your gut say?
What does your inner voice say?
And I'd be like, I don't know.
I really I was just so disconnected from
that piece. And so I think for, call
it, the last several years, there was this
kind of like simmering
in the background of just knowing
there's gotta be something more. Right? Like, this
just can't be it.
There's not one thing you might point to
in childhood. Some people have a very clear
reason
for the suffering that they feel,
but many of us have this experience of
like, somehow
I just picked up that message
that I'm not enough. And that's a really
confusing place to be because you don't quite
know. And that almost fit, but not quite
in the tension that's there of trying anyway,
that alluring place of, well, just
a little longer, just keep trying a little
harder.
I just think that's really relevant and a
lot of people have that experience.
Yeah. And I think what that also triggered
for me was just this tremendous sense of
guilt.
And some of this may be
from the Catholic upbringing or other things, but
it was just like, what do you have
to complain about?
You grew up in the perfect childhood.
You have two parents who are still together
and love each other. You
didn't want for anything financially growing up. I
had no big t trauma growing up. And
so who am I to complain? It feels
self indulgent to be even
doing any of this reflection work. Just be
grateful for what you have. Look at everything
that you have.
And so I really wrestled with not only
the questioning of how I was feeling, but
feeling really bad about it too.
Yeah. So here you are with the sense
that there must be something more, but also
not feeling a real clear
gut feeling towards what that was.
It sounds like a realization. Oh, I might
want something. I might get to have a
dream
for something. Tell us what happened next.
When I really started to get in touch
with, like, what do I want?
Like, I can point back to a time
in 2017.
I
was really struggling with my marriage
at that point. I think it was right
around the time that I
had spoken with my now ex husband about
thinking that I wanted a separation or that
we really started going into couples therapy.
And I was coming off of my most
challenging
project at work, and I decided to take
a two month sabbatical.
And
I went for part of the time, not
the whole time, but I went to France
for a month by myself.
I had traveled a decent amount in my
life. I'd been really fortunate in that way,
but I did not speak French.
And
I showed up for, you know, a month
and
really had to wrestle with each day.
What do I want to do today? There's
nobody here that I'm traveling with that I
have to make decisions with.
It's not like I'm only here for four
or five days and I need to jam
everything in. I have so much time and
spaciousness.
And so that sense of waking up and
saying, what do I feel like doing today?
Maybe I'll go to a museum.
Maybe I will just sit at a cafe
with a glass of rose and just people
watch.
Maybe I will go to a park and
read.
But, actually,
it was one of the first times that
I started to get in touch with that
inner knowing or that gut sensation that people
had talked about
and really tuning into that. And I was
like, oh, I can start to hear that
little voice somewhere. It wasn't loud. It was
still
sort of a bit of a whisper at
that point, but I would say over the
years from that point in 2017,
it just got
louder and louder.
Was that scary that the demands fall away
and there's just this quiet space?
What was that like? I think it was
so many feelings. It was
definitely
enlivening and energizing
to just be like, I can do what
I want. Wow. What a thought.
At the same time, it was really confusing.
I didn't trust myself in some ways. Right?
I would find myself second guessing my decisions.
So I think after letting external approval drive
so much of my decision making in the
past, not having someone there made me say,
okay. I think I wanna do this, but
but is that the right decision? Should I
well well, should I do this instead? Oh,
maybe I can do that tomorrow. And so
I think it was really
this time of, like, testing and trying something.
It's almost like like when a kid little
kid starts to walk for the first time
and they're, like, teetering and they feel
unbalanced. It was like, okay. Like, that kinda
went well. Let's try that again. So it
was a whole mix of emotions, but slowly
started to
step more into the, okay, this feels right,
this feels authentic, and let's move forward from
here. And it sounds like slowly and surely
a recognition of something
trustworthy
emerging.
Yeah. I've been an increasing believer, I would
say, over the past couple of the years
of, you know, the universe giving signs of
things and just different things that have come
up that when I make certain decisions,
it feels like, oh, this feels like it's
the right decision. This feels like it's the
right
path. Also, this sense of
I
overanalyze things.
So for so many years, right, in my
work world, I spent 99.9%
of the time in my head, in my
intellect, analyzing everything.
Part of what I did from a personal
development perspective was
journal a lot.
And I think there was this moment of
realization
when I would read back through my journal
entries of, like,
I am saying
the
same things.
I have been saying the same things
for
years,
and that was true of journaling about my
marriage. That was true about journaling about my
job.
And I started to see patterns
of just a lack of action
around things even though
there was this intellectual,
emotional knowing that something needed to change.
And so I think as I started to
make some changes, probably the first one with
my divorce, the second with moving cross country,
and then, you know, the third and most
recent one of leaving my job, I've just
started to tap into that trusting a little
bit faster over time
Because I see that when I make these
decisions that feel aligned with what I want
and I believe is right for me, that
on the other side, I haven't regretted one
of those decisions.
And I think that fear of regret is
probably the number one thing
that
slowed down the decision making or held me
back for so long. I was so afraid
of regretting things.
I love the way you speak about that,
especially
the journaling.
When you look back, when you take the
time and reflect,
oh my gosh, it's right there. And it's
clear.
It's been there all along,
both in some of the patterns,
not taking action,
but also
something more.
Yeah. Yeah. It becomes super clear and you've
got this, like, timeline of, like, okay. I
can look back when I first started writing
these things down, and it's not been weeks.
It's not been months. It has been years
of thinking this and feeling it.
And I think coming back to what we
were talking about earlier, part of what makes
it so hard
to
make those decisions is
whether it was my marriage or whether it
was
my job or whether it was my life
in Chicago, none of these were bad,
terrible, awful things. Right?
It was just the sense of,
I think there's something
greater and more aligned for me right now.
And not in a way that's, like, overly
chasing something better and better and the grass
is always greener, but just the sense of
knowing
that this is not it for me and
there's something else.
But choosing what that something else is when
you're not totally sure what you're choosing between
felt incredibly hard.
It felt like giving up something that was
good or pretty good for something
that could be great,
but was totally unknown and uncertain.
That could be a harder decision
because you're not forced. You actually have to
say,
I really trust this quiet voice.
Yeah.
It was
so hard. And
I think I didn't have that full self
trust. And I would say, you know, to
be honest, I'm still growing and developing that.
A lot of the
tools and practices
that we've learned at the process
are some of these things that have really
helped me.
And now having almost, like, demonstrated proof points
and, you know, I look back and see
results of, like, okay. When I've made these
changes,
look at what it's done for my life
and look at how I feel now. Okay.
Now I have a little bit of a
stronger trust muscle to make choices from this
place now.
You know, one of the things that stuck
with me
I think we learned it at the process,
but it probably didn't stick with me until
I heard it again for the q from
the q two, which is why it was
so powerful to do both, but was this
concept
of moving from do, have, be to
be, do, have.
And so what that was like was, like,
in the past, it was like, okay. Let
me do everything I need to do. Like,
let me work super hard. Let me get
the good grades. Let me get the good
job. Let me get the husband, all the
things so that I can, you know, have
the big title, have the money, have the
recognition,
have societal approval, whatever, and then I can
be happy.
And I wasn't
at least not as happy as I thought
I could or deserved to be. And there
was always something to keep chasing. Right? There's
there's always the next promotion. I got promoted
to partner, and somebody was talking to me
about how happy I should be. And I
was like, well, there's still another promotion to
senior partner. Like, it was just never enough.
And so this concept now of
moving from a place of
what are the qualities of being of my
spiritual self
and doing from that place,
I'm trusting that I will have whatever is
meant for me on the other side of
that.
And so what that looks like nowadays is,
like,
not having a lot of certainty or clarity
about what the future is going to hold
and
still getting comfortable with that if I'm being
honest, but trusting that when I do operate
from this place of being that
it has only resulted in positive things in
my life.
The trusting and the not knowing
it's a bit of having to release the
control.
Oh, for sure. That control is one of
my biggest patterns or, like, the need for
control, the need for certainty. And I think
in the past, I had associated control with
safety.
I was like, well, I have to be
safe. And in order to be safe, I
have to control the situation.
And
the concept of surrender
and how it's not,
oh, I'm just gonna be super passive and
let things happen to me. But I think
learning to lean into that, to say, I'm
still making active choices in my life, but
I'm letting go of the need for certainty
on what happens on the other side.
Yeah.
Beautifully said.
As long as things are predictable, I'm okay.
So long as things are x y z,
I'll be okay.
You shifted that too,
is I will be okay. Come what may.
And when you said if I what's authentic
to my spiritual self,
is that that quiet
voice,
Is that how you feel your spiritual self
or hear your spiritual self?
Yeah.
I think that is now and the quadrinity
check ins that we do through Hoffman are
one of the practices that I've leaned into
the most so that I can actually get
in touch with what that inner voice is.
And so,
you know, when I was referencing earlier, the
lack of an inner voice or that gut
feeling, I associate that now with my spiritual
self. And I think getting to know my
spiritual self, getting to know my emotional self,
getting in touch with my body and just,
like, what I'm feeling physically
is all still relatively new to me because
I operated so much from my intellect.
And frankly,
it wasn't even as much from my intellect
as it was operating from my patterns.
It was like I had just associated those
to be one in the same.
And so learning to trust myself is stepping
into and saying, okay.
Let me just get really quiet. Let me
pause and sort of see what emerges
through those reflections
and say, you know, from this place of
authenticity,
presence,
warmth,
vibrancy,
these qualities that I've started to identify what
feels truly right to me, when I make
choices from that place, I trust them more.
In your process,
take us to a moment there that felt
like a shift or a turning point for
you.
There's a few. One that I think is
just sort of funny to start.
On day one, when I showed up,
I was like, I'm super excited. I'm into
all this personal and professional growth stuff. Let's
let's do this.
And during one of the visualizations
that we did, I fell asleep.
And
coming out of that, when I realized I
had fallen asleep,
I started bawling.
I was so upset.
I went and spoke with my teacher,
Kevin, who is wonderful.
And I was like, I've already failed the
process.
You know, it's day one, and I've already
failed. Right? And so you can imagine all
of the patterns that that that came up,
but I did not feel the process.
And, you know, I think one of the
biggest moments or impacts actually
started in the process and then completed in
q two, which actually you were a big
part of it. So
during the process, I really got in touch
with the amount of self vindictiveness
that I had towards myself,
the shame that I felt, and
how hard I was speaking to myself.
It's pretty horrible when I reflect back and
think about the things that I said to
myself
and how easy it was to do it.
I was reflecting on it, and it was
like, it's as easy for me to say
these things as it is to say that
I have brown hair. They just felt like
statement of fact.
It was things like,
you're selfish.
No wonder you got divorced. You would have
been a horrible mother.
You'll never be good enough.
All of these things that just, you know,
playing them back, it's like, oh my god.
Like, how could I talk to myself that
way? And yet it felt so natural.
I did some work during the process on
self compassion and forgiveness,
but I can't say that I left the
process
totally
having forgiven myself or gone through the healing
from that space.
And so in the q two, I had
this
profound
experience
of self forgiveness and self compassion, and
it makes me emotional even thinking about it
right now.
But I literally,
in that moment, felt a physical weight
coming off of me.
I realized at that moment that I had
a choice
at that point forward whether I wanted to
put that weight back on
or whether I wanted to let it go.
The combination of the process and the q
two and the healing that I have done
and the self compassion that I can now
give myself
has been
just one of the greatest gifts that I
could have ever had.
That is such an important part of self
compassion
is letting yourself
feel
the hurt of how horrible it's been in
there.
And for you to see that
and to recognize
this doesn't give me more reason to beat
myself up, this actually becomes a choice.
I can be here
or I can
put this weight back on.
I know some things changed for you after
the q two. Will you share a bit
more about that?
Yeah.
I came into the q two
really focused on
what did I need to move forward and
step into
what I feel like now is part of
my purpose and part of my calling in
life.
And that's really to
support other people who are going through what
I went through through divorce.
And
I had been thinking about doing something in
this space for
a while,
but it felt
really foreign to me. I was like, I
am not a therapist. I am not a
divorce lawyer. Like, what is my role in
this? What what can I possibly have to
offer in this space other than
my own story?
As I thought about it, I realized what
I really needed at the time when I
was going through divorce at 33 was hearing
more stories of people like me who
were going through that experience
so that I wouldn't feel so alone, so
ashamed, and have all of these, you know,
horrible things that I just said about myself.
And I had the idea to start a
podcast to share some of these stories.
The idea came for this over
a year ago, maybe two years ago, and
I just hadn't done anything with it. And
so I came in the q two really
wanting to say, what is the thing that
I'm gonna need to do to move forward
and actually
put this into the world?
And so I'm excited to say that
that podcast launched yesterday.
So the timing here is really because
I've now
recorded, I think, 10
episodes.
And
I'm sitting across from these people that are
sharing their stories in a really raw and
vulnerable way.
And I'm talking to experts in the space
that are giving
answers to questions that I had
ten years ago when I was going through
this process and, frankly, answers to questions that
I still have now as I continue to
improve myself.
A Q two was really the catalyst for
me moving from
thinking and planning and journaling into
action and doing the thing that I said
that I wanted to do for so long.
In a word, did you think self forgiveness
was
part of that?
I don't think it was part of it.
I think it was everything.
I think it was the thing that I
needed to be able to do this
because I didn't feel like I could
interview people, sit across from people, and hold
space for these conversations
until I had really forgiven myself.
As you say that, it feels really
genuine.
And you're building a community.
You are offering
people who are having an experience that can
be so isolating
a sense of you are not alone.
Yeah.
It boggles my mind that for something
that impacts
forty to fifty percent of people that get
married, that the experience feels so lonely. Like,
it's just there's such a disconnect for me
there.
I still don't know. This is part of
that be, do, have,
but the being is
being authentic
and courageous
and
brave to
try and create this space, even though I
have no background in podcast hosting or content
creation or anything like that.
But to do the work that feels aligned
to hold space for these individuals to share
their stories and then just trust
that it will connect with people and that
it will be a useful resource.
And that, as you said, that there'll be
a community that gets created so that we
can support each other through this because we
shouldn't have to do this alone.
How happy are you in doing that and
taking that risk?
It feels really scary,
but also
I have never felt more fulfilled in my
entire life.
I'm curious, your consulting
background
is part of your
skill there
recognizing
patterns
because the way you described looking at your
journals and you're like, there's that pattern of
inaction.
There's that whisper of spirit.
And then the patterns around
people in divorce feeling alone, but look how
many of us there are
also sounds like in some ways it's really
been there for you in a, in a
wonderful way.
Yeah. There's this
Steve Jobs quote that is
you can't connect the dots looking forward. You
can only connect the dots looking backwards.
What I'm learning is that everything in my
life has led me to this point,
the good, the bad, and having compassion for
all the pieces in between,
but feeling like
it's all sort of coming together in a
way that really fits. So I do bring
a lot of
strategic thinking,
analysis.
I'm a self proclaimed data nerd. Like so
I'm like, I've done a lot of work
on understanding divorce statistics. Right?
And so I bring a lot of that
into the work that I do. And then
because
right now, I'm I'm in the being and
the doing and not the having. I'm not,
like, generating income from this podcast right now.
So I do have another role that I
play, which is I do work as an
executive coach.
And so the executive coach training and certification
that I did also really helped me in
this space because
it trains you how to ask powerful questions
and how to hold space for emotions without
needing to fix it, to not come in
and save somebody else. And so,
again, it just sort of feels like all
these different things I've used professionally in the
past and still currently are, you know, hopefully
serving me well to live into this new
mission and sense of purpose that I have.
Yeah. And I can also really see how
self forgiveness
lets me put this in the past.
Yeah.
You know, as I think about the relationship
that I have with my parents, I had
a conversation with them really recently
about this podcast and putting myself out there
in a public way.
And it's not just about
forgiving the past, but it's also saying,
I can't
live my life afraid of making mistakes in
the future or
afraid
of doing the wrong thing.
What I need to trust
beyond myself is to trust
the relationships that I've built with the people
that are important to me. And knowing that
if I do say something on the podcast
that's gonna hurt family
or rub someone the wrong way, that I
have trust in the relationships that we have,
that we can repair that on the other
side. I'm just profoundly grateful for the trust
that I have in myself and the trust
that I have in the relationships with the
people that are important to me now.
It sounds like a wonderful
thing to acknowledge that you have, and real
strength and resilience could come from it.
Yeah. I feel like with
the love and support of my family and
my friends and the space that I'm operating
in, like, the possibilities are sort of limitless.
And so I don't need to have everything
totally planned out. I can sort of let
things unfold
that may be
even more beautiful than what I could have
planned.
I am so grateful
that you joined me today, that we're having
this conversation.
I look forward to hearing and continuing to
know you. Thank you for having me, Sadie.
Thank you for the conversation.
Thank you for listening to the Hoffman podcast.
My name is Matt Brannigan. I'm the CEO
of the Hoffman Institute Foundation and a Hoffman
teacher. Our mission is to provide greater access
to the wisdom and power of love within
ourselves,
in our relationships,
and in the world.
To learn more or to support our mission,
we invite you to visit hoffmaninstitute.org.