This week’s #WCW is Glennon Doyle. Glennon is an activist, thought leader, and author. She wrote the extremely popular Untamed which was released in 2020 and a New York Times Bestseller. Her other New York Times Bestsellers include: Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior. People absolutely love what Glennon has to say and her ability to lay it all out for us. Her books are all memoirs and allow us to peer into the depths of her life and take out some lessons for ourselves. Glennon’s vulnerability allows us to sit with her in some of her most trying times and see the light at the end of the tunnel for our own trials.
Glennon’s most recent book, Untamed, details her life after she decides to make it her own. I have read a million stories about people learning to ‘live for themselves,’ but none felt as authentic as Doyle’s. In Untamed, she doesn’t just discuss letting a person or two down or breaking a couple of barriers. Doyle details the large ways that patriarchy, religious institutions, family ideals, racism, and homophobia have impacted her on her walk through life and what it meant to begin shedding the things that she never chose to pick up.
At the beginning of Doyle’s Untamed, she discusses seeing a cheetah who was born into captivity and has never lived in the wild. At this zoo, she sees the cheetah looking off into the distance and wonders if this cheetah is longing for something she has never had. The cheetah may feel a desire for something larger—something more beautiful. Perhaps she has a desire to run and frolic in endless amounts of space but has never known it as a possibility and therefore thinks that maybe it isn’t an option.
Glennon allows us all to resonate with this cheetah and asks us to imagine what a perfect life for us could look like. Perhaps the truth isn’t in what we see or what our society offers us as a reasonable or available plan, but instead the truth is inside of us. Glennon calls this internal truth our Knowing and it is how she has come to relate to God later in life. She believes that this Knowing inside of us will always move us into the direction which we should go if we just allow ourselves to listen and go for it—no matter how impossible it seems.
A few years ago, Glennon was at a conference when she saw a woman walk in and felt a voice inside of her say There She Is. She connected with this feeling and internal voice for the first time and chased after it. From this day forward, she promised herself to always be true to who she is and go within her to discover what is true instead of a place outside of her. Since then, Glennon has married Olympic gold medalist and soccer player Abby Wambach and they raise their three kids together with Glennon’s ex-husband, Craig. She believes this to be the most true and beautiful version of life for herself. She gets told often that she is ‘lucky’ for the love that she has to which she says that she gets luckier each time she gets braver.
Not only does Doyle write relatable and best-selling books, but she also runs the Together Rising foundation which “Transforms collective heartbreak into effective action.” Together Rising believes that we belong to one another in the world and organizes “Love Flash Mobs” which last for a limited time when thousands of strangers give to a cause with a maximum donation of $25 and meet a particular need in a matter of hours. This is Glennon’s way of showing that we do not have to do anything monumental on our own to change someone’s life to help make the world a better place. When we all do our little part, we can rise together and contribute to help one another’s needs.
Glennon’s work to break down barriers and change her own life as well as others is monumental in all that she does. If you haven’t bought yourself a copy of Untamed yet, what are you waiting for? Just in case you need a little more inspiration, here are a couple of my favorite quotes from the book:
“The opposite of sensitive is not brave. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive and that’s no badge of honor.”
“Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”