I'm Emily P. Freeman and welcome to the next right thing. You're listening to Episode 198.

This is a podcast about making decisions, but also about making a life. If you struggle with

decision fatigue, chronic hesitation, or if you just need a few minutes away from the constant

stream of information information and the sometimes

delightful but also distracting hum of entertainment while you're in the right place for a thoughtful

story, a little prayer, a simple next right step, and sometimes a conversation. Today I'm joined by a writer

who deeply understands what it means to live life on autopilot,

chugging through the day on, in her words, fear and caffeine.

As it turns out, that life is a train to nowhere and Shauna Nequist decided to get off.

Today I'm happy to sit down with her to talk about writing, connection, and her next

right thing.

Listen in.

Shana, I would love to start off our conversation by something that I heard you say at a conference

once because you put something into words for me that I heard you say at a conference once, because you put something into words

for me that I already knew, but had not yet articulated. You said, you can connect or you can

compare, but you cannot do both. And I would love for you to elaborate on that statement for us as we get started.

I love that you remember that. I think for me, what it came, what, where that came from was

the awareness within myself that you could interact with a person and you could be essentially

consumed with yourself, measuring yourself against this person, assessing your body or your intelligence or your professional success or your parenting or whatever, but it's a very inward focused way of being.

You're physically with that person. You're maybe even looking in the eye. You're talking with them. But what you know is that your interior world is consumed by measuring yourself against that person.

And when you're consumed with that, it's impossible to reach across into kind of the heart and spirit and connecting place of another person.

You're totally in your own thing. Or the

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