Aransas: Welcome to the Uplifters Podcast. Today, I am joined by Rachi Goffiid, a career coach for creatives and adults [00:01:00] with ADHD. Rachi, thank you so much for joining me today.
Rahti: My pleasure. And that was perfect. That statement of what I do, career coach for creatives and adults with ADHD.
That's it. Thank you.
Aransas: I love your name, Rati. Oh, thank you. It's really beautiful. What does it mean?
Rahti: It's a Sanskrit name and Rati was the consort of Kama in the Mahabharata, which is You know, Kama was the Indian version of Cupid, which made Rati the goddess of carnal love. Mmm. And it also means springtime, [00:02:00] desire, and intense attachment to the Lord.
And I embrace all of it. I would say my favorite meaning of it is desire. Especially with regard to being a coach because it's all about desire.
Aransas: I love that. And I can't wait to hear more about what you mean by that. Were you born into that name or was it given to you later?
Rahti: It was given to me when I like to say, hide me to a nunnery.
I'm Jewish, so I couldn't join a nunnery, but I could. move into an ashram. At a moment of great disillusionment as a young actress, I moved into this ashram in Pennsylvania where there were many of us hidden Jews, as we liked to call ourselves, and I became initiated. In this particular tradition, it's, you know, it was the early 80s.
It was so long ago. I can't even remember the name of the tradition. Ah, however, when I was initiated, the guru type person at the [00:03:00] time gave me that name and it landed in a way my other name never had. I even tried to go back to my other name for professional reasons because it seemed to make sense, but couldn't.
I had such cognitive dissonance with it. I've just remained Ratty.
Aransas: Sort of like identities in general, isn't it? Yeah. That some we are born with and we grow into them and others come to us in response. Yeah. So tell me your story, Rachi. I'm already so intrigued. My
Rahti: story. Alrighty then. Well, I was, as I mentioned, a theater artist for over 30 years.
And at a certain point I became very disillusioned with the business. And I was also getting myself into all kinds of mischief. You know, when we're young women, we don't always, I was enjoying my power. I could walk into any restaurant, any bar, look at a guy go. I'm going to sleep with him and [00:04:00] do it. Now there may be women who want to kill me because I said that and it's like obnoxious, but no, I really enjoyed it.
I was enjoying my power. Yes. It was also a distraction, a major distraction. And I was not always attracting the highest vibration of a person. And at one point I had to even change the locks on my door, at which point it seemed I needed to dry out, so to speak. And it was also the AIDS epidemic, the beginning of.
I mean, it was 1980, just beginning, right before. So I credit that bit of serendipity with saving my life, quite literally. Moved into the ashram, and lived there for about two and a half years. I thought I was a lifer. As it turned out, I wasn't, and as I like to say, I'm one of the few people to have the distinction of having been kicked out of a cult.
Aransas: What an accomplishment!
Rahti: Yes, I tell you, it took some doing! I had to actually punch a few people and empty a bucket [00:05:00] of zucchinis on some zucchini on someone's head, and that did it. That just about did it.
Aransas: Mischief! Yeah!
Rahti: Yeah! You know, no sex drugs or rock and roll. What are you going to do? I mean, it's got to come out somehow got to come out and You know, I wasn't buying into the guru's vision and if you're gonna live in a community like that You give up your individual dream There's no room for it.
This particular Organization has evolved since then beyond the whole guru disciple paradigm. However back then It was the guru's way or the highway, and I didn't want to cop out of my spiritual growth, which is the message we got if we left. And my energy didn't have anywhere to go, so I started acting out.
Wow. It was a defining experience living at the ashram because I learned that company is stronger than will. I learned skills that I could not. Have cultivated on my own. I had the ability to actually earn a living [00:06:00] because as an actor, you cannot put all the pressure on your career. I worked in the kitchen at the macrobiotic cook, and I got referred and somehow tapped into this vein of gold, which consisted of jazz musicians in New York City.
And I had a whole dossier of jazz musicians I was cooking for. I even remember at one point, Being backstage at the Late Show with David Letterman and Paul Schaeffer saying to me, I really dug that purple thing you cooked when I went over to Will's place to eat. And I was like, I had no idea what he was talking about.
An eggplant? I hope. I don't know. It must have been something with red cabbage that bled. I didn't realize it, but I was already a successful entrepreneur. Look at that. I didn't realize it. I was doing it to get by so I could have an acting career and I didn't love it at all, [00:07:00] but I learned a lot of skills.
And I also, as I said, company's stronger than will. And so if I was going to be an actor. I needed to surround myself with a team. And I started reading Barbara Scherr's Wishcraft and Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. And with those books as structures, I created these groups around me, and we pulled each other up, literally.
We uplifted each other towards our goals. At this point, it was around 1989, I was married, I was a stand up comic, and I met my husband at the Improv in New York City. Now it's a pizza place, but they still have the brick wall and a plaque on it. It was the original Improv. And he said to me, you know, you're good at this.
You should start charging. And I didn't know what this was. I'm good at this. What am I doing? I don't know. Turns out it's called coaching. And I found out that it was actually a profession. [00:08:00] And I realized at a certain point that I wanted more training because I kept hitting walls as a coach. So when I did finally get some training.
In creativity coaching and then a certification in ADHD coaching. I didn't want to be an ADHD coach I didn't want to deal with that talk about herding cats But as it turned out it was where I was meant to be Concurrently my son had just been diagnosed with ADHD And I had my husband do an assessment with a physician, actually, also before I was certified, because he does things like leave the remote control in the freezer and, you know, pots on, burn, you know, he's, he doesn't know how to, what I call complete the gesture, you know, like when you open a jar and get the peanut butter.
Completing the gesture is when you put the lid back on the jar and then put it away. He didn't
Aransas: Uh [00:09:00] huh.
Rahti: And it turns out he had ADHD.
Aransas: Wow.
Rahti: So that training saved my marriage. So that's my story.
Aransas: Yes. And you said early on that coaching is desire. What did you mean by that?
Rahti: Coaching is all about what you want.
Uh huh. To me, uh, it's what do you desire? What do you want? That's the most clarifying coaching question I believe there is and the most wide open. If you know what you want, but you're not doing it, there's some exploration to be done. I would say one of the core issues my clients have when they come to coaching is they cannot disentangle how they feel from what they want.
No, you may want to do something, but what if you don't feel like it?
Aransas:
Rahti: And when you have. A condition like [00:10:00] ADHD, that kind of brain wiring, that can be really difficult. I mean, those of us who are not diagnosed with ADHD, you know, we can do boring stuff. People with an ADHD diagnosis very often can't.
They can't complete the form, you know, it's just such a challenge of interest, neurologically it causes pain. I want to help people get what they want, and sometimes that's the first goal, figuring what that is, and it's very much based in what their real values are.
Aransas: Yeah, because so much of what they think they should want is coming from other sources telling them this is what's wantable, rather than what they really want.
Rahti: Yeah. That's exactly right. And so a big part of the journey is figuring out where you end and somebody else begins. What is your voice?
Aransas: There's a big overlap between people with ADHD and over parenting and people who [00:11:00] feel like they've had other people's perhaps parental desires layered on them as a loving and protective measure.
Rahti: Yeah.
Aransas: But it does create less space to sort of figure it out for yourself.
Rahti: Well, my son won't have it. You know, he won't have it. You know, I couldn't coach him. I mean, he knows what I'm doing. As soon as I ask him a question, he's like, I don't want to be coached. It's payback. Because my mother was a psychotherapist and I used to say to her, don't analyze me.
A shrink to me, you know? So it's, what can I say? It's karma, ,
Aransas: it all comes around. It all comes
Rahti: around.
Aransas: So it's interesting too to me that you really focus on this area of desire, because that is rule number one of being an actor, is understanding what your character desires. And so in essence, you have devoted your entire professional life to understanding the desires of others.
Rahti: That is perfect, a perfect analogy. It makes me wonder, were you an actor at one [00:12:00] point? I was. Ah! Okay, here we are. Good guess. Well, some of us were, I guess, born to be actors. Some of us were born to be actors so that we would evolve into coaches.
Aransas: Yes, yes, yes. Because I can tell you what I don't want to be is an actor anymore.
Yeah. For me, acting was just a way to spend time with words. and humans. And if I had known all the other options that existed in the world for humans and words, because that's all I've ever really loved.
Rahti: Yes.
Aransas: I might not have ever been an actor. I'm glad I was because I learned a lot of really invaluable things, but it was for me just about the human mind.
Rahti: Absolutely. You know, you're putting your finger on all the transferable skills that we have. As theater artists, I was a playwright as well. And there's nothing like helping people shape their narrative. Which is what we do as coaches. Yes. We have people live into the story that they want.
Aransas: And to identify the stories [00:13:00] that they've been telling themselves.
Rahti: To identify that story and change the story.
Aransas: All right. The old tired stories that are just not there controlling their identity. Absolutely. So what about you, Rachi? You're a grown woman with all of this lived history and experience. And yet I imagine, I hope, you still want. So what do you desire these days?
Rahti: I want to be seen more widely. I still want that. I guess, you know, that's the through line from being an actor. Wanting to be seen. Mm
Aransas: hmm.
Rahti: However, I want What makes that a little more tenable is that I have a why now. There's a reason I want to be seen. Yes. Which helps that, which is good because otherwise it's sort of like the push pull of, yeah, I want to be seen.
You know, there's some [00:14:00] shame around wanting to be seen.
Aransas: It's desire with shame.
Rahti: It's desire with shame. However, there's no room for shame if you know why
Aransas: you want something. And if you genuinely believe that, Roy.
Rahti: That's right. And I recently published a
Aransas: book.
Rahti: The Five Emotions That Stop Success. 14:31
Ooh. Which is, has been the culmination of my life's work, I would say. And I'll give you the full title. It's published by Rutledge, which is an academic press, so they feel the need to put every possible keyword in the title. So, the name of the book is actually. The 5 Emotions That Stop Success in Coaches, Clients, and Creatives Overcoming Personal Obstacles of the Mind.
Aransas: How long did it take you to memorize that script?
Rahti: It took me a minute. Yeah. It took me a minute to memorize it. And [00:15:00] so, the five emotions that I've distilled are really categories of emotion because as we know, there's so many colors in the palette, there's so many emotions. But most emotions, if you drill down, there's a core emotion.
And what I've identified those to be are shame, grandiosity, envy, boredom and fear. So if you know What's running you you can separate rather than identify with those feelings
Aransas: And
Rahti: you can't really act from your higher awareness and more developed brain If you're being run by those feelings, which are really very primitive survival mechanisms I would say
Aransas: Tell me about each of these.
Okay. I feel like I understand shame, envy, boredom, and fear. Mm hmm. What is grandiosity?
Rahti: Yeah, shame is, uh, the big [00:16:00] kahuna, I believe. It's kind of like the DOS behind the computer, you know? The shame's at the core of most of these.
Aransas: Yeah.
Rahti: Well, you could say all of them. Grandiosity is the flip side of shame. It is like this big crystalline bubble.
And as soon as the slightest aspersion is cast, it is popped. Uh huh. And the grandiose person goes into a shame spiral. Grandiosity, I think, is confused with ambition many times.
Aransas: Uh huh.
Rahti: I think the grandiose mind says, Nobody would ever understand my greatness. Nobody can ever understand me, and so I can try to put my work into the world and put it down, but there's no way I could do its brilliance [00:17:00] justice in a way that other people would get, so I'm better off not doing it at all.
It's all, a lot of all or nothing thinking. It's a victim mindset. It's a victim mindset. Grandiosity is a victim mindset. Ah, well put. That's a great insight.
Aransas: I keep thinking as you're saying these too that they're Shakespearean. They're tragic emotions too.
Rahti: Yes. Absolutely. So, now Envy. Envy I love. Envy is, I personally believe that I have identified Two forms of envy, you know, there's the garden variety envy where you feel like somebody's living your life How dare you and then there's this other envy I call eroticized envy and you know, I came up with this term because Eroticism is about connection And so a lot of shadow artists engage in eroticized [00:18:00] envy They may represent other artists or they may marry other artists and they don't realize their own creativity.
That's more of a vicarious thing going on. I think you can also be a form of escape. If you've ever gotten obsessed with someone, whether they are famous, whether you know them or not, and you find yourself Googling them, Basically cyberstalking them, thinking about them all the time. That's eroticized envy.
Aransas: Interesting.
Rahti: Because, yeah, to me, what's going on is you recognize something that is perhaps latent in yourself that you don't know how to access. But this other person has.
Aransas: There's been so much conversation around women not feeling enough or feeling a sense of inferiority when stepping into new roles.
Fraud factor? Is that fraud factor? Is that an example [00:19:00] of the eroticized envy? That's
Rahti: fear.
Aransas: Mm
Rahti: hmm. Fear of being misjudged, or judged, or shamed. Aransas: Okay, so the eroticized envy is less about I'm not enough than it is about others are more.
Rahti: That's right. They have more.
What I want, so I think I'll hang around. I will get myself connected to them.
Aransas: As you said, living vicariously.
Rahti: I think, you know, it's a sick, it can be sycophantic.
Aransas: Mm hmm. Hereticized
Rahti: envy, you know, it's
Aransas: And it can lead to grandiosity in the other person, perhaps.
Rahti: Oh, in the other person, for sure.
Aransas: Yes.
Rahti: Or they may already be there, you know.
This is getting messy. Yeah. Oh, it is. Well, yeah. It's
Aransas: messy. Things are, yeah, life's messy. The one that I found kind of most exciting to be included in your list is boredom.
Rahti: Uh huh. Well, that's the [00:20:00] most insidious, the most pernicious of all of them, and especially in my niche of ADHD.
Aransas: Uh huh.
Rahti: My thinking about boredom is that it is a loss.
Of a sense of meaning.
Aransas: Mmhmm.
Rahti: When something becomes uninteresting, it doesn't mean anything anymore. And if it's your own work and you get into the weeds with it, you know, there's that epiphanic moment when you conceive of something as an artist and you start the work and it's exciting, you know, or maybe it's the vomit draft of a novel or at least the first few chapters.
I think of the wonderful movie Nyad. That's where, you know, you're gonna swim across the Atlantic and all of a sudden you're in the middle of the Atlantic, maybe this wasn't such a good idea instead of exhaustion, what you have. is boredom because you're hitting all of the obstacles.
You're in the middle of your [00:21:00] imperfection. You're in the middle of making a mess.
Aransas: And
Rahti: it's very easy at that point to lose that original impulse of why. making this matter.
Aransas: Mm hmm.
Rahti: And so, in a lot of the work I do, I really encourage people to view completion as success. Just finish it. Finish it.
Aransas: Mm hmm.
Rahti: Don't give in to the delusion of boredom. This does matter.
Aransas: Yes, because it's often just fear.
Rahti: Yes, it can be a subset of fear. In the book, there's a whole chart of mask emotions. You know how something can present itself as boredom, but underneath it's actually grandiosity a few degrees over, you know? Yes.
So, yeah, boredom's, uh, you gotta keep it. Or it's avoidance of
Aransas: another emotion.
Rahti: Yes! I guess you could [00:22:00] say that. It's protective.
Aransas: If shame is the root of all of these, is fear the flower of all of these?
Rahti: No, fear is just a survival mechanism, I think. There are certain things it's good to be afraid of. You should be afraid to cross the street with your eyes closed.
Then there are things that you're afraid of. Because you don't want to be pilloried. I don't think it's surprising that, yeah, there are people who I've heard are more afraid of public speaking than death, than dying. It took me 15 years of psychoanalysis to work through my shame enough to have a life,
Aransas: really.
The story of being kicked out of an ashram. That could be a story that comes with shame, but it sounds as though you have worked through that journey to appreciate it and see it as a point of pride. To understand lovingly what your younger self was trying to accomplish in that time, what she [00:23:00] needed, and that her reactions were simply an expression of her needs.
That's right. And now to use that understanding of yourself and pour it into others to help them understand themselves.
Rahti: Yeah. So that's why I want to be seen. I want other people to understand these five emotions and not be run by them. I want people to have agency over their lives by being able to separate from their negative thoughts and emotions.
When I was in psychoanalysis, at a certain point, I had a dream, and the dream was I was up in the mezzanine of a big Broadway theater, you know, all that red velvet velour, you know, and that big crystal chandelier, and the chandelier goes up, and all of a sudden I was watching myself on the stage, experiencing something from my past that was very traumatic.
I told my analyst this dream and he got very excited. He says, that's it. [00:24:00] That's it. What's it? You're the woman in the mezzanine. That's what I had to reclaim who I was. I am the woman in the mezzanine. We're all the person in the mezzanine. And so that became a recurring motif in the book as a way to come into yourself and separate from negative thoughts and emotions and stories that you feel have defined you.
So that you can move past them and move towards what you desire, what you want.
Aransas: And put yourself back on the stage.
Rahti: That's right. Put yourself back on that stage, full circle. I think that's why I'm really wanting to speak as much as I can, because yeah, I want to get back on that stage, especially now that I have something to say.
And you are clothed
Aransas: in yourself. Yes. And not just a costume that's been placed onto you. Yes.
Rahti: You know, I love that. I love doing a character, creating a character. I [00:25:00] loved it. And I think one of the things that undermined me as an actor, though, was I always sensed that I needed to have a purpose. And I wasn't clear what the purpose of being an actor was.
I just knew I was driven to do it.
Aransas: If you're not really grounded in your why, that's what makes it unsustainable. I think for some of us be the confusion of a want with a need.
I wanna be famous. I wanna be, you know, recognized and loved. Aransas: How do you guide people to begin to understand and acknowledge the emotions that might be getting in their way?
Rahti: Well, it starts with the pause. Mm-Hmm. . As a coach, you've heard this. [00:26:00] You ask somebody a question, what do you want?
The first answer is very often, I don't know. And it's very important to keep your mouth shut at that point as a coach, because in that pause, the person is grappling with desires and feelings and thoughts they haven't allowed themselves to engage with before. So really it's in the quiet spaces. If you want to be able to contemplate, you have to be able to do nothing.
You have to be able to waste time and moodle about and just sit back. And it's what happens between the thoughts and the doing. that's where the realizations happen, and that's where you get in touch with your real feelings.
Aransas: That's beautiful.
Rahti: For some people that's terrifying.
Yeah.
Aransas: Last question. You've been taking care of other people For a really, really [00:27:00] long time, how do you take care of you and sustain your good work in the world, Ratty?
Rahti: Oh, thank you. Well, I take care of me with a phrase, leaving myself alone comes to mind. I don't beat myself up anymore for how I feel or what I think.
I let myself sleep late. Because I do better if I do that and I wake up. I don't see clients before 11am. I don't tolerate being treated badly. I do little delightful things. There's a store around the corner called Leroy's Place. Little plug for Leroy's Place! It's an artist collective, and all of the artists are monster artists.
They create monsters out of different Fabrics and medium. I just go in there for the dopamine hits and I wander around Maybe once in a while. I'll buy a little creature or something. That's it. That's what it's about. I'm a big one for taking care of myself. Well, I am
Aransas: so glad to have met you, Rachi, and so grateful for this time together.
I gotcha. Uplifters, let's all give ourselves some permission and love so that we can keep doing our good work in the world. If you're getting a boost from these episodes, Please share them with the uplifters in your life and then join us in conversation over at the uplifters podcast. com head over to Spotify, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast and like follow and rate our show, it'll really help us connect with more uplifters and it'll ensure you never miss one of these beautiful stories.