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Holisticism Resources 4 u:
Ruthless Clarity — an 8-week email course designed to help you achieve crystal-clear certainty about your goals, desires, and energy allocation
How to Begin: A Project Planning Class — a 90-m on-demand class that teaches you exactly how to sketch a effervescent project plan that’ll fill you with glee and inspiration and instantly banish procrastination and overwhelm, so your brilliant ideas can finally come to life.
The Subconscious Audit — an 11-day diagnostic framework that helps you identify what’s holding you back and making you *feel* blocked. Because you’re never actually blocked
The New Age Playbook for Spellbinding, Can’t-Stop-Reading Copy — a 35-page downloadable workbook to take your writing from blah to bingeable
There are three elements to expanding your surface area for luck, magic, and synchronicity:
Alter/Altar Space - The world outside you. Your literal physical space, digital space, and how you interact with sacredness and wonder in the enchanted world around you.
Aura - Your energetic and mental hygiene. How you think about yourself and the world. Your unseen impact on yourself, others, and your communities.
Archetypes - And this is where we’re camping out today.
Archetypes never get old for me. They’re endlessly interesting! I’ve talked about archetype embodiment a few times on this podcast before, and I’m never totally satisfied with how those episodes turn out because my perspective on archetypes—why they matter, how to use them—is perhaps less superficial than I sometimes articulate.
These babies have dimension. They have oomph. They contain an enigmatic and unknowable depth that refuses to be flattened into “find your brand archetype” worksheets.
And yes, sure! you can use archetypes to help design your internet branding, or make it easier to write to your ideal customer. Huge fan of that.
But I find archetype work to be an incredibly useful spiritual tool, too. Get you a framework that can do both, you know?
Why Archetypes Work (When Goals Don’t)
I burned out on goals in my early twenties after working at lululemon, where we had to write our five-year, ten-year goals in these five different life areas and post them on the wall for everyone—skeptical customers, fellow team members, wily shoplifters—TO READ.
It was a special kind of torture, and the more I think about it the more convinced I am that the Hague should’ve stepped in. Usually I tried to avert my eyes and pretend my goals didn’t exist, but occasionally I’d get stuck working right next to them and have to read them, in which case I’d wonder if I’d somehow incurred a mysterious head trauma because I didn’t recognize a single “big hairy audacious goal” that I’d (allegedly) thoughtfully inscribed on my goal board.
Trust me, I really did try to make SMART goals work. But every time I sat down to conjure up the goals I really had, I’d draw a blank. There were lots of things that would be nice to have, but did I actually want them with every aching fiber of my being? The whole process left me feeling uninspired and stupid… which was weird, because it wasn’t like I didn’t have desires, drive, or dreeeeeaaaams.
That was the thing—I had aspirations, but they felt foggily conceptual. The minute I tried to pin them down in a SMART goal format, they lost their luster and excitement, which meant I wasn’t very motivated to make them happen without forcing things. (Booo!!!!)
Here’s the workaround that worked for me: Start with an archetype.
Think of someone you deeply admire—someone whose wonderfulness sort of stops you in your tracks and makes you shake your head in disbelief that they even exist. You might not even know why you’re drawn to them, but they just… stun you. In a good way.
Now imagine their values. What matters to them? What have they accomplished? What would be a no-brainer decision for them?
You can work backward to discover the concrete “goal” you can work toward from there.
Say what really matters to you is being healthy, embodied, ~present~—prioritizing your physical/mental/spiritual wellbeing above all else is the current focus. Work backwards from those values to sketch out the type of person who’d live by those principles. Maybe it’s someone who runs the New York Marathon every year. Maybe it’s someone who wakes up and drinks lemon water every morning. Maybe it’s someone who sticks to a vegan, macrobiotic diet. IDK, you’re the one coming up with the values and how they manifest in the world. As you do this, you’ll wade through infinite “it’d be nice if” goals and make your way toward aspirations you’re genuinely inspired to pursue.
And as you do, you set yourself on the path to become this archetype you so admire.
The Social Anxiety Armor
Archetypes can also break the spell of “ingrained” elements of your personality that you don’t really like, but have come to accept as immoveable parts of who you are.
Like literally everyone, I went through a tumultuous period in my mid-to-late twenties. Everything in my entire identity shifted over maybe eighteen months. I’d been a dancer for so long, then I wasn’t. I’d lived in New York forever, then I didn’t. I left all my friends and moved to LA, where I knew exactly two people (who I rarely saw, because !SPOILER! LA is huge and not like New York even a little bit… you will look at a map and say, Oh, Culver City is not that far from Echo Park, it’s like Chinatown to Bushwick, but you are wrong and it is not at all like your bestie living in Chinatown and you living in Bushwick!). I entered a completely new industry at the very bottom rung of the ladder. And around this time I “mysteriously” developed this social anxiety where I was really uncomfortable talking about myself and what I did.
Eventually I found my footing, got more confident, established myself. But I still had this lingering social anxiety that impacted my life significantly: as I started raising money for Holisticism, as I dated, as I tried to make friends. I got so tired of panic attacks and clammy palms and the lingering stench of self-loathing that trailed me after yet another awkward conversation with a stranger.
I started thinking about who doesn’t have social anxiety. I had a person in my mind who was just completely comfortable in any room he walked into. I was like, well, why don’t I just act like him?
I would literally ask: What would he do in this situation?
That is archetype embodiment. It’s asking what your archetype would do, then doing that thing. Extremely simple.
Putting on a character, putting on a role, getting out of my own head—it was so helpful for initially breaking out of that belief that my introversion and social anxiety was just part of my personality.
At first it felt like I was playing a part. But then, with practice, it eventually became instinctual—that way of being became my new baseline. A new element of my personality.
When There’s No Blueprint
Another way archetypes help: sometimes in an era of your life there’s just not an example for you. When you’re growing up, there’s always someone to look up to. You can set idols on pedestals and follow in their footsteps as closely as possible.
But as you meet your heroes, as you become less juvenile and more experienced, you see that even what you idolized isn’t perfect. That can be really destabilizing, because it makes you look around and realize there’s no one person you can blindly follow toward greatness. The blueprint for what you want doesn’t exist—you have to make your own way.
That’s when pulling up an archetype is helpful. Instead of an individual person, think of a bigger archetype, or make an archetype of your future self, or create an amalgamation of a couple people. Use that to reverse engineer the footsteps instead of following someone else’s.
Manifestation (uhhhhhhhgggghhh I knowwww!)
Finally — and I don’t think I’ve said this clearly before — archetype embodiment is almost necessary for spontaneous opportunity creation or spontaneous forward momentum. It’s this almost-out-of-nowhere interaction — with myself, someone else, a material object, or something in the universe — that peels you off the expected paradigmatic trajectory and thrusts you into a much faster, easier, more fun trajectory.
I think archetype embodiment is key to leapfrogging or timeline-collapsing toward that spontaneous outcome. It’s the spontaneous synchronistic occurrence. The positive outcome that appears without tons of work or directed effort.
Archetype embodiment helps us get out of our prescribed way of doing and seeing things. Let’s be honest: if you want something and it’s really obvious how to get it, you would’ve already gotten it.
But manifestation via archetype embodiment challenges us to find new opportunities. It’s a cognitive trick to see the world differently, make a new part of our brain fire. It’s also a more fun way to engage when you really want something but aren’t sure how to get it, or feel like you’re banging your head against the wall.
The Benefits
When you’re playing an archetype—method acting as the highest version of yourself, the future you who already has everything you desire—a couple things happen:
You get bolder. There’s less on the line because you’re playing a character.
You get cognitive expansion. You see from a different perspective, maybe one with more confidence or skills you don’t feel you have yet but know are possible.
You see solutions and opportunities. When you ask “What would future me do?” or “What would someone who has everything I want do?” it clarifies what you actually want. You’re confronted with needing to practice being that person.
You’re thinking about your goals more often. When you follow the winks from the universe, you get more winks. When you act according to “this is the future path I want,” the path begins to clear and get paved.
You become that person as you progress. Instead of “I don’t have a book deal, I’m not an author, who am I to do this?” you’re like, “I’ve already done this before. There’s a version of me with five books published. What advice would future me give current me?” You make inroads. You build confidence. You’re acting as that person, making their decisions. You become them as soon as you make those decisions. You meld with that future version until you become one.
I know this sounds quantum-physics-speculative-timeline weird, but stick with me. There are all these versions of us existing concurrently. If we’re on a prescribed path, we can nudge it closer to another existing life or outcome. We can reroute ourselves so the paths intersect, coalesce, become overlaid with each other.
If you’re super skeptical, forget I said that. Or put a pin in it. Because there’s concrete scientific evidence for things like neuroaesthetics and enclothed cognition.
There are studies that show when you dress up as a doctor (put on a lab coat and stethoscope, wear your Figs scrubs) and take an IQ test, your IQ score is higher than when you wear schlubby sweatpants and take the same test.
What really changed? Nothing. You didn’t take med school classes. You literally just wore a doctor costume. You subconsciously thought of yourself a little differently—not delusionally, you’re not like “now I’m a doctor”—but just… pulled together. Consciously or not, your self-concept as influenced by your attire still helped you think differently.
So even if you’re not into merging timelines, you have to admit: if you put on the clothes of an archetype or person you’d like to be more like, you will probably change the way you think.
And ultimately that’s what we want, because that shift from the “regular” way of doing things expands your surface area for luck, magic, and synchronicity. It makes you more agile, more intuitively flexible. Less rigid.
Any way you slice it, this will work. You might as well try it. What have you got to lose?
The rest of this post — including the specific questions and frameworks for building your archetype, plus how to actually embody them in daily life — is available to paid subscribers.
