In this special bonus episode, our wonderful guest Kelly Foss speaks with The Minimalists' T.K. Coleman to explore the definition of minimalism and how a minimalist lifestyle plays a role in helping us make sense of our own dreams. This is a short, yet powerful snippet from Kelly’s longer discussion with T.K. in episode 151. You will be reminded that minimalism is more than about things. This simple way of life not only challenges us to let go of the excess in our lives (whether internal or external), but it also teaches us to live with greater intention and make room for more of what matters. T.K. says quote, “It’s not about how many things you have or how many things you don’t have... it’s about what are you willing to let go of in order to say yes to the life that you really want.” In this discussion you will be inspired to remove the barriers in your life, such as the excess physical things, time commitments, or mental roadblocks that may be keeping you from living your best life. Be inspired by T.K.’s great insights on the power of simplicity and intentionality and be motivated to pursue what makes you come alive!
In this special bonus episode, our wonderful guest Kelly Foss speaks with The Minimalists' T.K. Coleman to explore the definition of minimalism and how a minimalist lifestyle plays a role in helping us make sense of our own dreams.
This is a short, yet powerful snippet from Kelly’s longer discussion with T.K. in episode 151 of the Millennial Minimalists podcast here.
You will be reminded that minimalism is more than about things. This simple way of life not only challenges us to let go of the excess in our lives (whether internal or external), but it also teaches us to live with greater intention and make room for more of what matters.
T.K. says quote, “It’s not about how many things you have or how many things you don’t have... it’s about what are you willing to let go of in order to say yes to the life that you really want.”
In this discussion you will be inspired to remove the barriers in your life, such as the excess physical things, time commitments, or mental roadblocks that may be keeping you from living your best life.
Be inspired by T.K.’s great insights on the power of simplicity and intentionality and be motivated to pursue what makes you come alive!
Follow the Millennial Minimalists on Instagram & Facebook
Follow @OfficialTKColeman & @The Minimalists
Listen to the full episode:
APPLE: Episode 151. Follow Your Curiosity with The Minimalists’ TK Coleman
SPOTIFY: Episode 151. Follow Your Curiosity with The Minimalists’ TK Coleman
Hosted by Katherin Vasilopoulos. Made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee.
Music by © Chris Zabriskie, published by You've Been a Wonderful Laugh Track (ASCAP).
Songs used in this episode include: "Air Hockey Saloon."
Used under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License
[00:00:05.680] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Hi, Katherin here. Thank you so much for listening to And So, She Left. We've gotten some great feedback on this first handful of episodes, and we're only getting started. There are so many great stories that we've yet to explore from women who've carved out their own professional pathways, and we're eager to share them with you. In the meantime, we wanted to share some bonus content from our latest guest, co host of the Millennial Minimalists podcast, Kelly Foss. Kelly was kind enough to put together a powerful snippet from her conversation with TK Coleman, co host of The Minimalists podcast. Together, they talk about the true value of minimalism, how you can make room in your life for the things that matter, and what it takes to overcome mental roadblocks that are holding you back from embracing your true self.
[00:00:51.210] - Kelly Foss
Hello and welcome to the Millennial Minimalist podcast. I am your host, Kelly Foss. And together with my co host, Lauren Mourley, our mission is to help you simplify your life and live with greater intention. Together, let's live more with less. Hi, everyone. Today I am sharing a short yet powerful snippet from my recent conversation with the Minimalist TK Coleman, where we explore how a minimalist lifestyle plays a role in helping us make sense of our own dreams. You will be reminded that a minimalist lifestyle is more than about things. This simple way of life not only challenges us to let go of excess things, but it also teaches us to live with greater intention. And together we discuss how living with less gives us the space and time back to explore our interests, pursue our goals, and embrace our authentic selves. You'll be inspired to eliminate the barriers in your life such as the excess things, time commitments, or mental roadblocks that may be keeping you from pursuing your ambitions. And if you enjoy this snippet, please be sure to listen to our full conversation in Episode 151, titled Follow Your Curiosity with the Minimalist TK Coleman.
[00:02:00.690] - Kelly Foss
And as always, you can find this link in our show notes. Be inspired by TK's great insights on the power of simplicity and intentionality, and be motivated to pursue what makes you come alive. I'm curious, you are now one of The Minimalists. And I was wondering, what excess did you need to eliminate in your life? And how has a minimalist lifestyle or a minimalist mentality played a positive role in your experiences and in your life today?
[00:02:29.520] - TK Coleman
Okay. So in order to answer that question, I got to take a step back and frame what minimalism is to me. Minimalism is a little bit like success. In a sense, it's something that you have to define for yourself. What success means to me isn't the same as what success means to you. I think it was Nightingale who said that success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. Well, what is a worthy goal? A worthy goal is something that is in accordance with your values, your priorities, your preferences. No matter where we want to go in life, no matter what our dreams are, no matter what our ambitions are, the way to get there is by letting go of the things that hold you back from doing what you already know how to do. It's like, how do you make a balloon float? Oh, the balloon already knows how to do that. It's more about how do we remove the things that hold it down from doing what it naturally does? I think about it in terms of education, there's this question of like, how do we get people to be more curious? That's like the holy grail of education. How do we get people to be more curious? My constant answer to that has always been, you don't. You respect the fact that they already are curious.
[00:03:49.650] - TK Coleman
Then you ask yourself, how can I stay out of the way? If you look at human beings in their most primitive state, you look at children and you find that children are more curious than we could possibly handle. Every little thing that you take for granted, why is that? Why is that? Why are you doing that? Why are you wearing that? Why are you eating that? Why did you trip on the floor? Why did you just look back right now? Why this? Why that? And you don't have enough answers to keep up with them, right? They're almost annoyingly curious. And it's only over time we start to condition them away from being curious. We punish them for it. We tell them that their curiosity matters less than their homework. We tell them, stop asking so many questions. We tell them this, we tell them that. And over time, by the time you get older, you learn to be a lot more quiet about what you're curious about.
[00:04:39.680] - TK Coleman
You learn to take it a little bit less seriously. But the question is not how do you make people curious. It's how do you prevent yourself from killing that curiosity. And I think it's true when it comes to success, when it comes to peace, when it comes to all of the good things in life, no one can tell you how to be you. No one can tell you how to take the brilliance and beauty that is you and let it shine. But what they can help you do is stop the process of getting out of your own way, because that's what culture conditions us to do. It conditions us to get in our own way because we're afraid, well, if I'm honest about that, maybe somebody will laugh at me. Well, if I go after that, maybe I'll fall on my face and embarrass myself and never survive. Or maybe if I ask that question and admit that I don't know what that teacher is talking about, people will think that I'm the stupid kid. We acquire all this baggage. For me, minimalism isn't so much about things. Minimalism is about the baggage we've accumulated over time that gets in the way of us being our true self.
[00:05:51.230] - TK Coleman
And sometimes that baggage can take the form of physical objects, but sometimes that baggage can take the form of philosophical beliefs that are self defeating. It can take the baggage of toxic relationships. It can take the baggage of commitments that we've outgrown. It can take so many other forms. So there's physical clutter, but there's relational clutter, there's emotional clutter. There's calendar clutter, there's all sorts of clutter. And for me, where minimalism has been helpful is that it teaches me to live intentionally, to always approach life in terms of what are the results that matter most to me? What are the experiences and outcomes that matter most to me? And what's getting in my way? What's holding me back? What's holding me back from saying yes to the life that I really want to live? Is it me having too many things? Is it me having too many commitments? Is it me saying yes to too many people? Is it me putting too much pressure on myself to achieve more than I want? Is it me having too many things on my calendar or too many beliefs about how I ought to be. Those are the things that hold us back.
[00:07:04.960] - TK Coleman
I think for me, most of my excess in life has been internal excess. Internal excess like a million and one reasons for why if I follow my dreams, I'm going to permanently embarrass myself and have to just go hide away in a cave and never be able to show my face again. And for me, it was just putting my foot out there one step at a time, trying things in a small way, taking risk to the best of my ability, and then realizing, Oh, once you get over here on the other side of that fear, it's an entirely different story than the myths that you build up in your mind.
[00:07:48.280] - Kelly Foss
I think minimalism fosters great reflection. It challenges you to do the work, figure out why you are the way you are today, think about your past, especially. For my co host and I, I would say that mental clutter has been the area that we've had to work through the most. And it's a continual process. You aren't just a Minimalist one day and you're a Minimalist forever. It's like you have to constantly work on it. In speaking to a therapist and all these things, you realize why you are the way you are today. When you gave the example of putting your hand up, for example, I used to be super shy. I was shy my whole childhood until I hit university. I was so scared to put my hand up because I was scared that I would ask the wrong question and I would look smart. And then I broke through that one day. I asked the question and I was like, Wow, that was easy. My face went bright red. I was like, Okay, I can keep doing this. And then when it came to delivering speeches, it was like, You got to go in front of a class of people.
[00:08:48.450] - Kelly Foss
And I was nervous. And I remember, You know what? Instead of being nervous, I'm going to just announce the class, Hey, everybody, my face is going to turn really, really red. I'm just going to let you know in the beginning it's going to turn really, really red so that they didn't need to point it out every time I went up there because usually people would point it out. So anyways, it's maybe going on a tangent, but in those experiences, I realized, okay, so this was this about me and I was this way. And this is why I think like this sometimes. And I think a lot of people who have this crazy drive have had a moment in their childhood or their lives where they were told maybe they weren't good enough. And I definitely had that. And I believe that I share that with a lot of people who are pursuing their passions. They were told that they couldn't do something, and it's almost like a challenge. Yes, I can. I've been told that I can't, but I've been maybe exploring all my interests and I'm learning in the process and realizing that, yeah, I can pursue this passion.
[00:09:51.370] - Kelly Foss
So that feels really good. And so I'm glad to hear that minimalism has done that for you because I think that's extremely relatable. I think a lot of people, they just think, oh, well, maybe my possessions are overwhelming and that's why I can't do what I want to do in my life. And maybe that's the case. But it's usually a big mental roadblock, a roadblock that we put on ourselves or that maybe a peer has put on to us. Oh, you can't do that. Or maybe it's a parent. Oh, you can't do that. And so this lifestyle allows you to make the time for yourself to dig deep, reflect, and go into each day more mindfully and with greater intention. And I think that it's that space and that clarity that really helps us focus forward.
[00:10:35.820] - TK Coleman
Yeah, that's so good. I like what you said about when you clear the stuff out of the way, you realize, okay, there's still more stuff to clear out, but it's just not the stuff that you can see. It's the stuff on the inside. And I think that's because physical clutter is a manifestation of non physical clutter. It's a manifestation of psychological clutter. But we can't see it because we've created through this physical clutter an escape route, a way to distract ourselves from the inner clutter. It's the same thing with our cell phones. All of these notifications, all of these easy dopamine hits that we get, they provide an easy way for us to escape the ghosts that haunt us when we're alone. But you put the cell phone away and you just close the door and you go alone in a room and stuff that's always been there begins to rise up and you can run from it or you can deal with it. When you deal with it, you find, oh, man, there's so much freedom from being willing to go there. But oftentimes you have to clear away some of the physical stuff in order to notice that again.
[00:11:44.240] - TK Coleman
I'm really glad you said it, and I thought that was really cool. Another thing I'll say, too, is there is a version of minimalism that can be as much of a cop out as spinning your whole day scrolling. It's the version of minimalism that I call mathematical legalism, where you try to come up with some universal formula for the right amount of stuff to have. And you say, well, righteousness is if I have less than 15 things, that makes me a good person. And so I'm going to strive to be this person who fulfills this quantitative standard of righteousness. And that can be just another way of hiding because it's like, well, now you're just being a legalist in the opposite direction. In the same way that you made a God out of consumerism, well, now you're making the God out of the mathematics of minimalism. You're defining integrity by the number of things that you don't own, which can be just as damaging as defining success by the number of things you do own. It's not about how many things you have or how many things you don't have. It's about what are you willing to let go of in order to say yes to the life that you really want.
[00:12:53.070] - Kelly Foss
And for some people, that means boiling it down to 15 things. For some people, that means boiling it down to 30 things. For some people, it might mean one thing. For another person, it might mean 100 things. But it's not about the number. Don't hide behind the numbers. It's about being willing to look within and say, Hey, what makes me come alive? And what am I willing to do in order to get there, in order to live that.
[00:13:17.250] - Kelly Foss
100 %. I always imagine you see all these people out in the world, some people are super, super fancy. Some people aren't as fancy. Some people are more minimalist in their attire. And people judge people by the surface or by their titles or their job titles. But at the end of the day, if we're all in a room, let's put everybody in the same clothes, what's the most interesting thing about each person is how they share their stories, how they talk, what their experiences are. So you want to invest in the growth in yourself. You don't want to invest in all those expensive purchases. That stuff is not meaningful. And at the end of the day, you've done some podcast with The Minimalists about death, and you had a near death experience. And you think about, okay, what are the things that I'm going to leave on this earth? What are people going to remember about me? They're not going to remember the fancy things that I own. They're going to remember how I made them feel when we had a conversation.
[00:14:10.890] - TK Coleman
Yeah. If they do remember you just for the things that you own, how heartbreaking would it be to be able to come back and see that your name only gets brought up when people are fighting over who gets possession of your stuff?
[00:14:23.070] - TK Coleman
That'd. Be pretty heartbreaking.
[00:14:25.600] - Kelly Foss
Exactly. That's why I feel like what I love about this lifestyle is it challenges you to do the work to become your best self. You remove the excess, what's left is you, and you now have the opportunity to pursue everything that you wanted to. And this actually goes well into my next question. You often remind your audiences that discovering our dreams is one thing, but in order to make our dreams become a reality, we have to make intentional decisions. So there's one thing to clear the excess and realize, okay, these are my interests and I can turn one of these into a passion. But there's another thing to actually make quality decisions that get us closer to our goals. But the problem with that is that sometimes we could feel too overwhelmed. We're like, I don't know how we're to start. I don't know what to do. And we feel like sometimes that we have to do it all and we have to work 24 7 in order to achieve our dreams, which often hinders our ability to start. So I'm curious what you think about that and how we can stop putting that pressure on ourselves?
[00:15:26.980] - TK Coleman
Yeah, that's good. So a lot of this starts with why. It's possible to have a dream that doesn't even belong to you. So in psychology, we often talk about projection, which is when somebody takes what's going on inside of them and they project it on to you. So maybe I say, Kelly, I think you're jealous of me when really what's happening is I'm jealous of you, right? But I'm projecting that onto you. I'm taking my internal mess and I'm projecting it onto you. Well, the opposite of that is introjection. Introjection is when I take what's going on with somebody else and I internalize it as my own. So one of the common ways that we might introject is maybe you grow up and maybe someone tells you what they think you'd be good at or what they think that you were born to do. Maybe somebody else has a concept of the good life for you and you really want to impress them or make them proud, and you can internalize somebody else's dream for you when that dream isn't really the thing that makes you come alive. And we live in a culture now where there are so many external forces that are just feeding us these narratives about what will make us happy, what will make us successful.
[00:16:43.020] - TK Coleman
And then we go on social media, and no matter how old you are, there's at least one person that's half your age that's got way better output than you. There's somebody that's half your age that's already published three, four books. They produce four or five movies. They made four or five million, whatever it is you want to do. They've already done that and moved on. And so you look at that and you're like, Oh, man, I really got to get it going. And so by the time we come up with our dreams and our strategy for pursuing it, there's a decent chance that it's been contaminated by so many factors that don't even represent our authentic self. And if you find yourself rushing, feeling like you need to achieve your dream overnight, it may very well be the case that you've got some things going on that have mingled themselves together with your dream that aren't really about the dream. It's about maybe impressing this person, keeping up with this person, feeling like you're behind, and so on. I think really in terms of dealing with that, it's realizing that success isn't about what you have or where you end up.
[00:17:51.610] - TK Coleman
It's also about how you got there. It's also about the uniqueness of your story. This world doesn't just need stories of people who knew that they wanted to play the piano since they were five. That's an awesome story. But thank God that's not the only story, because I like the story of the guy who played in a rock band who decided when he was in his 30s that he wanted to go in the neurology, even though he didn't know anything about that. I like that story, too. I like the story of the priest who used to be an atheist. That's an interesting story. And so we need all of these beautiful stories. And so success isn't just going to be about, oh, I finally wrote a book, I finally made a movie, I finally got this job, or I finally moved to this city. It's also going to be about the particular struggles that you faced along the way, the people that you met along the way. And so if you felt like your life isn't moving as quickly as other people's, I would opt out of that comparison game. And I would say the beauty of my story is what I desire for me for the sake of my aliveness.
[00:18:57.410] - TK Coleman
And it's also about my hero's journey of how I'm going to get there. And that's when you can begin to approach the game of life a little bit more playfully. And you don't have to treat your dreams as something that you got to give yourself a heart attack for working 200 hours a week just to make things happen by the end of the month. You can say, no, this is what makes a beautiful story. Life is a gift that's given to us so that time doesn't happen all at once. And it's a beautiful thing to give your story the chance to breathe, to give your story the chance to make it to unfold because that's what's going to make your story interesting. That's what's going to make it worth telling. If someone were to make a movie about your life, chances are they'll decide to make the movie based on something cool you accomplished. Here's Kelly, and Kelly won an Academy Award for her amazing performance in this movie. All right, okay, cool. We're going to make a movie about Kelly. Well, you know what the movie is not going to be? It's not going to be you winning the Academy Award.
[00:19:58.020] - TK Coleman
If we put that in the movie at all, that's probably going to be two minutes worth. Because that's going to be the most boring part hands down, even if it's the reason why we make the movie. The only thing that's going to make this movie interesting at all is the part where, hey, is there a stage in Kelly's life where she had no idea that she was even good enough to win an academy? Oh, yeah. Let's go spend at least 30 minutes on that. Hey, was there a part of Kelly's life where she was really confused and maybe doubting herself and thinking about giving up? Oh, yeah. We got to put that scene on there. Is there any scene where she was yelling at somebody or crying because she just hated her life? Oh, that's definitely in the movie. Is there any scene where somebody told her that she never achieved anything? That's definitely in the movie. All of the stuff that we're in a rush to get over with that commits us to all of these things like overworking or wearing ourselves out, all of that stuff, that's what's going to make the story worth telling.
[00:20:51.800] - TK Coleman
That's what's going to make the movie worth watching. That's the exciting part. That's the human part. That's the part that other people connect with. The part where you won the Oscars, the part where you got that million dollars check. Yeah, we might put that like, when the movie is over, we might put that in words, like, Kelly went on to win a million dollars and win the Oscar. Or we might end with the picture of you holding your Oscar. But we can't make a movie out of that, even if that's the reason why we make the movie.
[00:21:17.140] - Kelly Foss
It's that process. That's the best part. The process is the best part.
[00:21:21.550] - TK Coleman
The process is the life part. That's what life is.
[00:21:24.580] - Kelly Foss
Yeah. And that's where the story lies.
[00:21:37.520] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Thanks to Kelly and TK for such an insightful discussion. You can listen to Millennial Minimalists and The Minimalists by clicking the links in the episode description. Our music is by Chris Zabriskie, edited for your enjoyment. You can find a list of all the songs you heard here in the Episode Notes. We'll see you on Wednesday for a new episode of And So, She Left. I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos, and thanks for listening.