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Episode Transcript:

James Beshara 00:00:00  What’s the thing that you would do? Where the only reward is that you got to do more of it. No financial reward, no validation, no fame status. Your only reward is that you’ve got to do more of it. What is that thing?

Chris Forbes 00:00:21  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. In this episode, Eric and James Bishara explore a fundamental inattention that shapes nearly every decision we make.

Chris Forbes 00:01:13  The pull between what we want right now and what we want. Most drawing from the ancient philosophy of Vedanta, James shares a powerful framework for understanding this inner battle, describing how we each have a body, a mind and intellect, and how real growth comes from strengthening the part of us that can see beyond immediate desires and short term rewards. Eric and James discuss how this tension shows up in everyday life, from habits and work to purpose and identity, and why so much of lasting change comes down to learning how to pause, reflect, and choose differently in those moments. They also explore the role of daily practices like reflection and repetition. The importance of aligning with your natural tendencies and why meaningful growth doesn’t have to come from escaping life’s challenges, but from engaging with them more fully. If you’ve ever felt caught between competing impulses or struggled to follow through on what matters most, this conversation offers both timeless wisdom and practical insight you can begin applying right away. This is the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:17  Hi James, welcome to the show.

James Beshara 00:02:19  Eric, thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  I’m excited to talk with you about a bunch of things. You’re a philosopher, really into, Vedanta. We’re going to talk a lot about that. You’re a very successful investor, businessman. You own a company called Magic Mind. So we’re going to get into all of that. But we will start first, like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two roles inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

James Beshara 00:03:18  Well, Eric, it’s such a beautiful parable, and I’ve heard you say it in, in episodes before, and, and obviously it’s the theme of, of your podcast. So when our friend Pete Holmes put us in touch, I was delighted to have the chance to chat with you, because I knew the topics and the surface area that you and I could cover. It’s going to be different than most podcasts that that I do. And as we noted just before hitting record, it’s it really is the subject matter I think about most much more than business. But the parable as I’m hearing it, almost with fresh ears for the first time today. It reminds me distinctly of within Advaita Vedanta, which goes back to the four oldest philosophical textbooks on the planet the, the Vedas and Vedantas, the end of the Vedas mean Vedanta means end of the Vedas. So it’s the Upanishads. And if there was a branding agency back then, they’d say, hey, you guys have so many names for the same thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:21  The Vedas

James Beshara 00:04:22  Vedas, Sanatana Dharma which means eternal principles. But perhaps the most, I’d say the most practical. The central practical contribution of this philosophy is that we have three equipments to navigate the world, and I had never heard this explicitly before, but the two wolves is such a beautiful metaphor for this, and that you have these three equipments. You have the body which everybody is not going to. That’s not going to blow anybody away. They’re going to be like, yeah, I’ve got a body, I understand that. Then you have a mind also not. Not groundbreaking. People will be like yes, that sounds familiar. Mind and a body. But Vedanta introduces this, this unique concept of an equipment that’s even more subtle than the mind, which is the intellect. So you have these three equipments the intellect, the mind and the body. The mind is the emotions, our seat of our feelings. It’s the ego. It’s the seat of what I feel, what I desire, what I prefer.

James Beshara 00:05:20  It’s my thoughts and the intellect is this subtle equipment right above it. In the same way the mind is right above and guides the body, the intellect can guide the mind. And what is the right decision? In the midst of all of these preferences, you might prefer to laze on the couch, but is that the right decision? Or the capacity to discern is another way of describing the intellect that might feel great for a few minutes, maybe a few hours, but that’s not the right decision. Perhaps to feel great this week or feel great tomorrow. So I’m going to get up and and I’m going to go walk around or get up and do that project I’ve been putting off. And the way it’s talked about in Vedanta is it’s like a muscle and you either develop it or atrophies the same way that you develop the body or it atrophies or you develop the mind or it atrophies. And so I think about the mind and the intellect and the constant dialogue that they have within us, that now modern psychology is kind of scratching out of, oh, it’s not just one linear line of thoughts. There seems to be a dialogue within us. They call it system one, system two thinking.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:20  Yeah.

James Beshara 00:06:20  And so I think about that. Which one do you feed. Do you feed the preferences for the here now or or do you? My favorite definition of wisdom comes from Vedanta of the capacity to see the end in the beginning. And do we feed that capacity to see the end of the beginning? Do we look beyond these preferences or feelings that we might be feeling right now? And do we feed that side of ourselves, the intellect? I’ve never made that connection until you’re talking today. I was like, oh yeah, feeding the intellect is feeding the wolf that you want to win.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:52  There’s so many directions we could go off of what you just said. I had a conversation with someone yesterday. she wrote a book called Little Addictions, and it’s about the ideas that, you know, everybody is wrestling with something. Mainly this thing, you know, our phone. But she talks about that.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:08  In essence, what you’re talking about is about this is an oversimplification and a battle between sort of the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. When you’re trying to decide what the way I like to say it is, decide what you want most versus what you want now. But one of the things we were talking about is how in addicts, it’s very clear, you see, that that physical equipment in the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is not as syntactically dense in people who have addiction issues, literally the very equipment that allows it. Maybe it is the intellect to a certain degree isn’t there as much. And I think that’s what makes addiction such a challenging thing. I also love that “See the end in the beginning.” That’s a great, great phrase. I want to dig a little deeper on this idea though, which is there is a way of being in which we do see the end in the beginning. Or to use your words, the intellect is kind of guiding where we go. I call it my wiser, truer self, right? My wiser, truer self.  Is is much better than the self that shows up at 9 a.m., both a bad night’s sleep and hungry.

James Beshara 00:08:18  And for the wisest of us, we discover this equipment and we we have so many different names for it. I mean, our modern society talks about things like mindset or frame of mind, and we think about it in terms of a high. Or we say things like higher self, lower self. And what I love about this Vedantic, this philosophical contribution is giving you an explicit name and, and says like, well, what is setting the mind? If you’re thinking about mindset, what are you doing? What are you using to set your mind and. And that is the intellect or and your and your phrase that that wiser self. And it’s there for all of us. But it is it is as undeveloped as any muscle that we don’t give attention to. So for for really all of us, it’s quite undeveloped until we extremely, explicitly and deliberately say, you know what? I’m going to develop this capacity to see the end of the beginning, or this capacity to discern or this higher self.  I love your articulation of that. That does what I really want versus what I want right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:25  Yeah. So what does Vedanta tell us about how to train that capacity, how to make that muscle stronger?

James Beshara 00:09:34  Great question. It’s and it’s so simple. In the oldest Veda it’s called the Rigveda. There is this famous quote of truth is one sage is called by many names, and we we touched on that as just before we hit record. When you were talking about Zen in so many parallels. And Vedanta are often called crypto Buddhists, and Buddhists are often called Crypto Vedantans because it is so. They’re so similar. So I think a lot of this will will resonate with you. But the three daily practices within Vedanta are really, really simple. One is question everything. Two is don’t take anything for granted, and three is study and reflect daily. And if you’d allow me 30s, I’ll say why it’s it’s in this order question. Everything is a bit self-evident. It’s the unexamined life is not worth living. we have these concepts in the West, and but it calls it out as the number one, the first daily practice. Because all of the things that we think are good for us. The Bhagavad Gita, a canonical text within Vedanta in the 18th chapter, has a great principle where it says that that which is like nectar in the beginning is like poison in the end. That which is like poison in the beginning is like nectar in the end. And I see you kind of nodding. An addict knows that really, really well.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:52  I mean, that is basically a very ancient description of the process of addiction.

James Beshara 00:10:57  And all of us have addictions. It might not be a substance that you can put in a bag or in a bottle, but I know my addiction was 6 to 7 cups of coffee a day, stimulants and and luckily I went. I would take Adderall in my 20s. It would give me such bad headaches, but had that not give me headaches, I would have gone off the deep end with that stimulant.

James Beshara 00:11:21  Yeah, I was prescribed it. I had all of like the validation that I could, and it was I’m thankful that my body just didn’t agree with it. But the other addiction that I had was workaholism. And and it’s a really sad one in that our culture, there are very few addictions that we collectively endorse and encourage, but seems to be caffeine and ambition. Society is like, go for it. You get into some of the other substances societies like, but you get into caffeine and it’s like, let’s go get coffee. You get into, ambition, personal egoistic engineering, and your own father might be like, yeah, keep going seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And and it was for me, it was compulsion. It was not disciplined even though thought people thought I was working hard. It was compulsion. And Vedanta is a I think this, these three daily practices question. Everything really helped me say are these. Am I doing this for the right reasons? Why am I doing this? When did it? When did I get started on this entrepreneurial path that, that I’m like talking publicly about being a mission for other people, but really, it’s why am I doing this? And it was a self-discovery of dude.

James Beshara 00:12:38  This is good old fashioned ego engineering. Financial engineering. This is just savvy selfishness. And then the second daily practice is to not take anything for granted. I had three failures in my 20s. It was my 20s. Just filled with failure. Failure after failure to failure. Luckily, I was failing forward. I was gaining some education, but I had a big blow up with my last company, where two years in was worth $400 million and deserves $385 million, and then four years later, we’d sell it in a fire sale to the skin of our teeth to Airbnb. And I couldn’t spin it into like, look what we did. We did something great. It was we didn’t get even anywhere close to all of the dreams, hopes, expectations that people around us, that we ourselves had. And I’m so thankful that I couldn’t spin it into some, hey, look, we sold a company. It was like cover of every tech website. Like what happened? Wheels fell off. And with what the company is called tilt.

James Beshara 00:13:40  And I’m so thankful that there was no hiding or reframing. It was man. We had everything in the palm of our hands, hands and and I really let it slip. I had to take full responsibility. And I’m so, so thankful. Eric, maybe this maps to your experience, but when you see folks that can hide behind, well, we got screwed by some investor or something bad happen in my life or my. My parent did this to us when we were young. And and as a recovering addict, you probably and as a recovering addict myself with my own addictions, I see those stories and I, and I kind of, wince of like, that’s like nectar to hide behind, kind of, this is someone else’s fault. But then the last one is study reflect daily because the virus of attachment, if you go 2 or 3 days, you need a ground. We need a grounding wire. There’s no cure for it. And Vedanta. So I’ve got a daily podcast on this 510 minute episodes called The Daily Vedantic.

James Beshara 00:14:40  I did an episode, a handful of episodes on this, but but recently I did an episode on the fact that the virus of attachment, if we do not inoculate it daily, you’ll just catch it with a coffee with a friend or lunch with a friend. And the friends got like some of the epic going on in their life and you’re like, oh shit, I want that. So we need a daily grounding wire to these timeless truths.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:00  Let’s recap those three, question everything. What’s number two?

James Beshara 00:15:06  Don’t take anything for granted, even if it’s a cancer diagnosis.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:10  Yeah. And three.

James Beshara 00:15:12  Study and reflect daily.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:14  You teed me up for a thousand different directions to go.

James Beshara 00:15:18  I know that was long winded. Apologies.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:20  No no no no. It’s great. So study and reflect. What does that look like for you in your life? Right in in in Zen. The practice is sitting meditation. Yeah, you can study. That’s all good. But the heart of it, the thing that they say is zazen.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:35  Sit down. Sit down and do that. How do you structure your daily practice and reflection? What does that look like?

James Beshara 00:15:41  Yeah. The secret key for Vedantic center reflection, that’s that’s talked about over and over again within the philosophy. And now if you’re familiar with Arthur Brooks, the Harvard scientist around happiness, he talks a lot about this as well. Brahma mortem is what it’s called time of God. And it’s this time before the sun comes up, this quiet stillness. And and I know this is revered in the, the zazen and the Zen tradition as well of this time before the world pulls you out of yourself. When the sun rises, we naturally just feel like, okay, the day is getting away from me. I got to start moving out to get going. But that time before the sun comes up, it is a beautiful stillness where you don’t have to be anywhere. No one expects you to do anything. No one expects you to reply to any texts or emails. You got no meetings.

James Beshara 00:16:33  So I get up at 430 and spend about 90 minutes, 60 minutes of listening to a lecture. Within the Vedantic philosophy, there’s there’s three classical yogas karma yoga, Bhakti yoga and Yana yoga, which just means service for others. Karma yoga is it, you know, fancy Sanskrit words, but it’s really simple. Bhakti devotion, devotion to a practice, devotion to your family, devotion to your work. It’s devotional yoga. Yoga just means reunion. And the West. We think yoga is Hatha yoga, which that’s a very valuable part of a day of the postures and standing on your head downward dog. It’s a valuable maintenance of the body. But classically in in India, that’s, you know, 10% of what people think of in terms of Yoga Yoga’s reunion with the divine. And that is primarily through these three classical yoga’s service karma yoga, bhakti devotion. And then yoga is words of the masters, Guyanese knowledge. It’s where we get enosis. Ignorance is lack of knowledge. So we have this same, shared route in, in Latin and in the west.

James Beshara 00:17:36  But Nana Yoga is studying the words of the masters. So for 60 minutes, it’s typically a lecture from my teacher, who’s now 98, and I can tune in every day to the lectures in the ashram in India that I study with, that people can find on my Instagram. You’ll you can find these resources, but I tune in to a 60 minute lecture. Then from there I’ve got about 30 minutes of stillness. So sit in stillness and reflect on what was being, what was said, which what notes hit me. And and in this philosophy, there’s a phrase that, reflection is 100,000 times more powerful than listening, meaning that if something hits us and you probably know this really well, if something hits you but you don’t reflect on it, you don’t journal on it. You don’t discuss it with, you know, Asanga, a satsang, a community that’s also pursuing these timeless truths. If you don’t reflect on it, then it’s like it never happened. It stops you in your tracks on a Tuesday, and then two days later, it’s like it never happened.

James Beshara 00:18:35  So then it’s 30 minutes of reflection, quiet stillness and reflection and meditation on those those words in the master.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:58  Some days I’ll be like, how much time did I spend today reading something? Substack or a newsletter that I like? I guess Substack and newsletters are close to the same thing. I guess that’s my general way that I get information. I read different newsletters, and then I think to myself, what did I read today? And I’m like, I have no idea. Like, I literally don’t know what that hour and a half went to, right. Because I’m just kind of going and it’s enjoyable. It’s a little bit of a flow state learning for me. But that pause and then going, okay, how does this apply to me? Where would this fit in my life? What would this look like? That’s hard in comparison. It’s easy to just consume. It’s hard to pause, reflect and implement. I talk about it all the time as sort of the knowledge to action gap.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:52  Right. And I have a book coming out in March that really is to a large extent about this very thing. How do we change? How do we change the way we think, for example, like what is a way that we let the intellect, to use your words, run more of the show than the mind? And so, yeah, I think you’re right. That idea of of reflection now in that 30 minutes of stillness, you’re, you’re reflecting. Is there any method to that or do you catch your mind wandering? Like, how do you keep that from being 30 minutes of just your brain repeating its list of grievances and ideas and things to do next?

James Beshara 00:20:31  Well, the mind certainly is doing that. Yeah, it’s doing a hefty amount of that. The mind is so ancient, so ancient, and it is so good at scanning, looking for problems, magnifying issues, creating issues of nothing out of nothing. Anatomy of fear is just you’re going to lose something that you that you want, that you have.

James Beshara 00:20:56  And this desire and attachment is just. The mind is so sticky. Yes. And as the Buddhists say, there’s 10,000 things. There’s 10,000 things on our mind that we want. We think it might be one that Amazon package that’s going to get here in two days, and it’s going to be the last thing. But then we realize like, oh, no, that was kind of just part of the other things that I wanted. I interviewed someone once. I was like, so what do you want in life? That’s one of my favorite interview questions, just to see what. Honestly, it’s just the entertainment in the midst of a lot of interviewing for different roles for Magic Mind. And I interviewed this gentleman once and he said, I want $10 million. I said, well, why do you want $10 million? And he said, well, at $10 million, then I’d be able to make on interest, just on interest enough to do whatever I wanted. And I was like, so you want to be able to do whatever you want to do? What what do you want to do? He said, oh, well, I mean, a lot of things.

James Beshara 00:21:55  And we didn’t I didn’t belabor it. And with him and but it was very clear that what he wanted was the freedom to do what he wanted. But he didn’t know what he wanted. Yeah. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. None of us do. Everything that we’re chasing is just a symbol of what we think we want. And so, so much of the time. And so during that 30 minutes, my mind is definitely doing that. And the intellect is also described kind of like the adult in the room. You invite the intellect in to guide the child like mind. That can sometimes be childish. We’ve got three young girls. Oh wow, three, five and eight. And I love having children in the room. It’s the it is the best that one might bust in here in any moment and it will be a delight. But I would never leave them home alone. That would be extremely irresponsible. The adult in the room is what really gives the long term joy of of having a child around.

James Beshara 00:22:50  So the intellect during those 30 minutes is stepping in, and oftentimes it’s journaling. Oftentimes it is just sitting there still just reflecting on what I just wrote down. Maybe it’s a specific line. And then reflecting on that line over and over and over again. My journal is in the the next room. And and so here’s a perfect example of why reflection is so powerful is I did that this morning for one line for 30 minutes, and now it would actually take me ten or 20s to remember what that line was. I spent 30 minutes on one line. Yeah, I remember it. It is on the fact that attach you gained attach you lose. I’m sorry attach you lose. Detach you gain. Even then, 30 minutes of reflection took me about 10s to remember and then I still misquoted it. This is an exercise for anybody. Spend a few minutes reflecting on something that, let’s say the next time Instagram, an Instagram quote, or TikTok reels stops in your tracks, just mark it down and see if you remember two hours later what it was.

James Beshara 00:23:57  If you could tell somebody, tell your spouse, tell a significant other, tell a coworker or a friend something that, that stopped you in your tracks. And it’s so hard. So reflection in Vedanta has and this this tradition has so many explicit, precise definitions on all of these things you’re asking about, what are the daily practices, what does reflection look like? The rankings of the forms of reflection of Vedanta are. The lowest form is actually to sit in stillness with it. Higher than that is to write about it. Higher than that is to reflect on it with a group which reflection with other people. That’s a in Buddhism called sangha and in Vedanta, satsang and it’s community and truth. Before I had exposure to this philosophy, I would have I would have always thought reflection. Oh, reflection is what you do on like a quiet walk on your own, or you sit in stillness. And that’s the lowest form of reflection within this tradition, because once you have to talk about it and then you realize like, oh shit, I don’t, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

James Beshara 00:25:00  And that was I thought, I kind of really discovered a truth. And then now I’m talking about it with a spouse and fumbling over my words. And and it’s a good thing. So it’s a humbling exercise. And I go through a daily including this one where I misquoted. And it’s a reminder that’s going to require maybe 100,000 times more reflections for that principle to hit.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:21  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one eufy and take the first step towards getting back on track.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:09  I’m sort of promoting my book, so it’s like always on my mind. But so many things you said tie right back into there. I use a quote in there. It’s a it’s an old Chinese quote that read a book a thousand times and you will begin to understand it. And I talk about how when I got sober in 12 step programs, they would read the same thing at the beginning of every meeting. They would read the 12 steps, they would read the 12 promises again and again and again. And I went to a lot of meetings in the beginning. So sometimes 2 or 3 times a day I’m hearing this and, and at that time, and there’s so many cliches in 12 step programs that I just would be like, And then I was reflecting on when I was working with my Zen teacher in a really intense period a few years ago, I spent seven months on 165 page book for my job doing this. It was the book. It was Appreciate Your Life by Izumi Roshi. For this podcast, I cover a lot of ground.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:10  Right. I’ll talk to you today. I mean, I’m interviewing two people a week. I’m getting a lot of stuff, and there’s an enjoyment and there’s a value and a purpose in that. But I also have to have this other part of my life that’s like you’re describing that says like, let me just pick an idea and stay with it. Like, if we were to try and build a virtue, something like, let’s just pick gratitude. It’s an easy one. That is a long process of of building it as a virtue, building it as a state of mind, as a default. This is what you’re talking about. You keep coming back to these ideas again and again and again, because that’s how we actually change. That’s how one mindset gets shifted into another. And I just love that idea of also the group. Right. I got sober in 12 step programs. We run communities here and I agree with you. It’s that discussion with other people that is so, so valuable. So I run this program called Wise Habits.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:17  And one of the things I teach on Sunday, which is arguably the least important part of the program, and we pick a principle and we devote a week to it. But what we do is we divide the big group up into small groups that meet together by themselves on Wednesdays, and that is far more valuable, I think, than the 90 minutes with me.

James Beshara 00:28:37  It’s almost like one is really just the container for the other.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:41  Yeah. So, so many great things in what you said there.

James Beshara 00:28:46  You touched on one idea and, and I remember, Rick Rubin, the famous music producer, he said in an interview 3 or 4 years ago, he said, right now in life, I’m not reading anything that isn’t a thousand years old and finding those those things that are that have lasted longer than any human empire and then adding in those timeless truths and then adding in the repetition. Repetition is power. That reflection is worth. It is 100,000 times more powerful than reading it once listening to it once, hearing it once is is basically nothing if we don’t reflect on it.

James Beshara 00:29:22  And and Charlie Munger, the famous investor, he was Warren Buffett’s partner and second best investor of all time, right behind Warren Buffett. And and he has this great quote on this. He said, take a simple idea and take it seriously.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:34  Yes. Yeah. I mean, my book is called How a Little Becomes a Lot, and the heart of it is a little by little philosophy. And what you just said, it’s a simple idea. We all know it. We all know we’ve got all kinds of phrases. Rome wasn’t built in a day. And you eat an elephant, a bite at a time and all that. But taking it seriously as an approach to the way you solve challenges in your life is an entirely different thing. I like that. Pick one idea and take it seriously. So you do this morning reflection. And then when that’s over, you’re a busy guy. I mean, you run magic mind. You’re an investor in a bunch of other companies. I now know that you have three children, which is a whole other animal to contend with.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:19  You do a daily podcast on Vedanta. How do you keep that stillness that you get in the morning? What are the things that you try to do to keep that as you go throughout your day? That’s a challenging transition. It’s like, we’ve got my morning time. It’s really special. And then the sun comes up, to use your phrase, and I’m off and running. How do you carry some of the morning with you?

James Beshara 00:30:43  It’s a great question. You know, by the way, this is satsang and this is so beautiful because the way that that you’re even thinking is so different than and I think listeners, that’s why they love your podcast is, just the line of questions is from someone that’s pursuing truth themselves. And so asking about the specifics, these are the questions. Like when I was hardcore. All of the content I would ever digest a startup related for the first 15 years of my career. So it was like, give me the specifics. What is a fast growing startup actually look like? What are the numbers? Right.

James Beshara 00:31:19  And and you really want to know the specifics when it’s something that that you truly care about. And so it’s just beautiful that you care about these specifics because like I said, a lot of the podcasts like, yeah, this is all well and good, but how did you raise the series a how did you end? And I wish people asked more about The Roots, because I think if you see a life that, for anybody listening, let’s say you see someone on the cover of a magazine or you see someone that you look up to in the neighborhood, that you want their life, look at their roots, not the fruits. Don’t look at a milestone or an achievement. Look at their roots. What do they do on a daily basis? What are their non-negotiables? What are their boundaries? What are the things that are most important to them that allow these things to stack up. And to your question, I think it’s a reverse. It’s not how do I find the stillness for these things to take place? It’s because of the stillness.

James Beshara 00:32:08  All of these take place that my life is summed up in effortless effort. It feels so effortless. And and it’s because through this stillness, there is this framework that is 5000 plus years old framework on how to live a life in the most beautiful, optimized way. But it’s so individual, so specific to each person. And it’s a discovery of, okay, what is like one principle within Vedanta? And by the way, there’s only about 25, 26 principles in this philosophy that another word for it is sonata and dharma, which means eternal principles. One of the principles is dharma, your nature. And it is better to die into your nature than it is to live in a foreign nature. This also comes from the Bhagavad Gita where it’s it’s saying like, you think you might be a starving artist going, you know, becoming a musician, it is better to do that than to seemingly thrive as an investment banker. What you’re not wired for or doing this other thing that maybe satisfies what your parents want of you, but not what you want of yourself.

James Beshara 00:33:14  And if you did that music thing and some people like you and I, we play music on the side. You can also find outlets where it’s just fun. But if you’re nature, I know my nature is not music all the time there. I meet those musicians and I’m like, yes, yeah, that’s a freak of nature. Thank God for all of us. They dive into that. You think it might be a death of some sort of like, I’m going to become a starving artist, I guess, but you’re going to be so fulfilled by that alignment with your nature and nature itself that not only will but feel effortless, you will thrive. It’s like the surfer that learns to surf, and then after a while, it’s just a few paddles and boom, they’re going down the line traveling 300 yards and the wave is just carrying them. It’s it’s effortless because they know which waves to pick. They, they, they are built to be a surfer. They put in the first three paddles and boom.

James Beshara 00:34:05  It’s a metaphor I talk about quite a bit on on the daily Vedantic is 100 people listening to the podcast. So it’s a small podcast that literally I’m like, I had a startup podcast and I was like, I just, I don’t care if ten people listen. I’m going to just talk about philosophy. I’m switching gears. And, and one metaphor that I use a lot is the, the albatross can go up to 600 miles on a single flap of its wings, and that’s because it it is surrendering into its natures, which is to fly. It understands barometric pressure and understands air pressure. It understands wind patterns, has these massive wingspans. And that isn’t an anomaly. That’s how we all should live, is we find what we’re wired for. It might be music, it might be athletics, it might be business, it might be community building. It might be philosophy. It might be teaching. Find what you’re wired for. And it’s a single flap of the wings. Once you know how to fly, single flap the wings.

James Beshara 00:35:02  And then 600 miles later, you’re just gliding. That same albatross could be in the water saying like, no, no, no, flying is not my thing. I got a paddle. It’s in its wrong nature and it might die before it goes a mile, much less 600 miles. Paddling against a current versus gliding with with the wind. So when you find that Sudama, your nature and a lot of introspection, and one of the best ways to to do it is through reflection where it’s asking yourself a question, what’s the thing that you would do, where the only reward is that you got to do more of it? No financial reward, no validation, no fame status. Your only reward is that you’ve got to do more of it. What is that thing? As you cultivate an idea of what that is, maybe it goes back to what you’re into when you’re five, six, seven, eight years old? When you do that, it is energy generating. It is not energy dissipating its energy generating.

James Beshara 00:36:00  The definition of right action within Vedanta is that which generates energy. The definition of wrong action is that which dissipates energy. So you align your nature with nature itself. You generate energy, and you go into parenting at 5 p.m. when you kind of close the laptop, the work you’re doing, and you’re energized going into the night shift, so to speak, instead of former me would have been just so exhausted. I mean, inform me sent me to the E.R. with a heart condition because I was overworking myself. So much so that stillness in the morning, that’s still point those first 90 minutes. That is the reorientation back to these principles, back to my dharma, back to duty, service, surrender. That then allows me to work for 7 or 8 hours effortlessly, it feels like. And then I’m energized going into the night shift with the three kids, going into the podcast, going into a conversation like this.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:06  Surely there have to be times that it’s hard?

James Beshara 00:37:10  I don’t know. I cannot tell you in the last ten years a day where I have been stressed. There have been moments. So to answer your question, technically, yes, there’s an hour here or there where I’m like, I gotta go on a walk. There was an hour in April of last year where I was like, I got a call from our landlord, three kids, and we had been told for months that we’re going to be able to buy the home that we’re renting. And and he they were going through a divorce and he said, hey, James, he’s a good family friend. He goes, James, I got some bad news. His ex-wife. She wants to buy the house, and you’re not going to be able to buy it. This has been like 16 or 17 months of of, like, oh, next month, once the divorce finalized. What? So that was so unexpected. And, The hallmark of intelligence, by the way, is how infrequently you have unexpected news and how infrequently you’re surprised is tied to our intelligence. So I was surprised. I was just and I was like, I need to close my laptop and I’m going to go for a walk and went for a walk for an hour.

James Beshara 00:38:18  That was, last not last. April was April before last, so about two years ago. So technically answering a question, there are hard moments, but spiritually answering a question, it’s so unrecognizable versus my 20s where I’m almost 40 now. So my 20s, there was a point in time where it was so hard, where I, I had PTSD of just opening up my email inbox so much. Yeah, I just couldn’t handle any more work, any more bad news. And it was bad news all day long, but now there aren’t many hard times.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:49  Well, that’s a testament to do. You say you do two hours of practice every morning or one hour?

James Beshara 00:38:53  An hour and a half

Eric Zimmer 00:38:54  That’s a testament to what an hour and a half of practice will give you is a much greater resilience. I think about this a lot because I think I’m doing what I’m. I don’t love this phrase because it makes it sound like there’s somebody out there designing the way things are.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:10  And I don’t want to get into a question about the divine, but what I meant to do, having these conversations, teaching the things that I teach. And there are moments where I find it challenging. Some of that I think is getting older. My energy isn’t quite what it what it once was, but there are moments that I find it’s hard, and I also find that motives are so mixed. You talk a lot about this. It’s one of the things you say. You say that it’s not what you do. It’s what you do it for. Which is a beautiful idea of intention. And so when I look at just this podcast, let’s just take let’s keep it simple. The producing of this podcast, I know the main motivating thing that I do it for, right? It was because I loved having these conversations. I needed the wisdom. And then over time it became that I know it helps a lot of people. And so that’s the thing, right? And it’s also how I make a living.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:14  It’s also the way. And when it doesn’t go well, that means that that could be challenge. And so what I find is I get these two things wrapped up. Then there’s a third. Then the ego jumps in. Right. There’s the more pure intention. There’s the practical. Like, this is how I make money. This is important. And then the ego jumps in and that’s the one that’s like, you know, how many downloads do I have? Why? You know, why am I not as good as X? You know, why am I not as popular as ex podcast? So all three of those things get wrapped into one bundle of I’m doing the podcast, and I agree with you that the thing that keeps the ship straight the most is going back to what I would call the wiser higher self motives. The more that I do that, the easier it does get indeed.

James Beshara 00:41:07  I know there’s some overlap with Zen on this, so I’d love to to hear from you on this.  Within Vedanta, it’s 97% of the philosophy is action, action, action. I touched on that service. service is just action for the higher. So it’s action for the higher. Constantly. And when in doubt, act. That’s what, that’s what the the Krishna, the charioteer and and the guitar. Gita is the most famous poem on the. On the planet is a 30 minute conversation between super short read, 30 minute conversation between this charioteer and this warrior prints on right before the the beginning of this of the most epic battle of this great civil war. That’s 13 years in the making. And the warrior prince is the most famous warrior prince in the land. He should be so jacked up. And yet he is like, hey, Krishna, take me to the middle of the battlefield because I want to survey both sides. I want to see from a different perspective, strategically how we line up and what we should do. Really, he’s just kind of, like, balking at at the thought of this.

James Beshara 00:42:11  He wants to get some separation from his side. He goes in the middle of battlefield, sees just how just how outnumbered they are. This is kind of this metaphor of righteousness and unrighteousness, just how un outnumbered they are. The the lower wolf, the lower self seems to be so much stronger, so much louder than the higher self. And he goes to the middle of the battlefield and he sees how outnumbered they are. And then he has a complete meltdown. He can’t stand up. He throws his bow on the ground, falls to his knees, and he’s like, Krishna, help me! I can’t fight this battle. We should we shouldn’t even be doing this. And he comes up with this famous spiritual bypass where the first chapter is just him reeling, saying we should go to the forest and and study philosophy. We should not be doing this. This is our kith and kin because that’s a civil war. These are our cousins. His own, his own guru is on the other side, and he’s called to kill his gurus.

James Beshara 00:43:10  Like this isn’t right. And Krishna, who you’d think is Christian, is the symbolic embodiment of of God. And so you’d think God would be like, yes, you’d, you figured it out. Violence isn’t the way we should be practicing philosophy. But, and not so many words. Krishna is like, no, you had your chance to seek peace instead of violence. You chose this battle. Now you got to get the fuck up and fight and you’ve got to kill all of them. And it’s like, whoa. From a spiritual. Textural perspective that’s so unexpected for for us in the West.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:47  Yes.

James Beshara 00:43:48  That it’s like, wait, whoa whoa whoa. What? Like, this is supposed to be the spiritual embodiment. God. And he’s telling this warrior prince that he’s got to get up and kill everybody. And he’s right, like it’s the spiritual bypass to say, you know what? Unrighteousness might win, but I’m gonna go peace out. I’m gonna go to the ashram. I’m gonna go on a ten day, ten day retreat.

James Beshara 00:44:08  I’m going to go meditate. I’m going to go on an infinite walk where I’m kind of shying away from, I’m going to close my laptop, go for a walk instead of an hour. You’re just constantly looking away from the battle at hand instead of, yeah, take your time. Gather yourself. Arjuna, the warrior prince has to gather himself, but then get up and kill everybody. Kill all of the unrighteousness. And what Krishna says to Arjuna is you’re a righteous warrior. This is a gift. You’ve been given a righteous war. This isn’t an unrighteous battle. You’re not seeking to to pillage and plunder for your own aggrandizement. You’ve been given a battle to fight and defeat unrighteousness. And you are equipped to that. Your whole life has been leading up to this, this moment, this challenge. But you’re equipped to. So I think in those moments of challenge where I feel challenged for an hour, it’s a hard conversation or it’s a it’s an investment that’s going poorly and it’s a conversation with a founder on, on maybe shutting it down or fighting on because sometimes it is not Sudama.

James Beshara 00:45:14  This, this thing that I might be working on might not be my nature. And I have to tell myself, you know what? That was a indulgence. And now I need to move over towards my nature, towards generating energy over time. And that was an indulgence for the ego or an indulgence for, I don’t know, whatever reason, status and money and validation. Okay, now I can diagnose with a lot of reflection. That wasn’t for the right reasons. And it’s not what you do, it’s what you do it for that matters. And that I wasn’t doing that for the right reasons. Let me reorient my resources over here and you wind something down or it’s no, I’m doing this for the right reasons. This is my dharma. I would do this even if I have retired a thousand times in my head. I can’t stop myself from doing this. So this is my so Dharma. And it’s a challenging hour, afternoon, day, week, month. But this is the work.

James Beshara 00:46:08  This is the work. And it’s to rise above it and go into it and yet might kill me, but I’m going to do this whether it’s, you know, the a podcast or, or whatnot. But even then it’s a reorientation towards gliding towards like, okay, let me stop thinking about the fruits, the outcomes, the financial, the practical side and only reorient towards the service, the surrender and that that aspect of what am I doing this for? It’s for the two people that might get changed by an episode. And Swami will say that quite often our teacher will say that on the teaching side of things, you show up and and to, let’s say you offer to, to teach for a co-working space. It’s like, hey, James, I really want you to teach this co-working space. Tell them all about Vedanta. Show up. You put five hours into it. When you get into the things you couldn’t do before the commute, over the hour long talk, you know that it might extend into another hour.

James Beshara 00:47:07  So you block off the hour after, then the commute back and it’s five hours and two people show up and Swami will say, our teacher will say, yeah, that’s the work.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:16  Yep.

James Beshara 00:47:17  So it’s a kind of disconnection from any of the trappings that lower self might attach to. And it’s a recognition that all of this work might be to for that one soul that shows up and has nothing to do with the numbers, doesn’t pay the rent, doesn’t support on any egoistic level. And then it’s a reorientation too. Yeah. That is that is the work. And man, by doing that it’s a great healthy elimination of the ego. It’s a great healthy reinforcement of the the wisdom, the path, the the soft song. And I’m continually astounded by the things that I would have never thought were the thing I needed was delivered on a silver platter by that kind of divine logistics, by the one person that shows up not even to or the no people that show up. And I’m like, man, had I made this about a startup, how to raise $100 million for a startup, how to sell a company, how to build a company that I could use all of these superlatives that that magic mind has, it could have filled the room, but it wouldn’t have been my my true Sudama or my service.

James Beshara 00:48:22  And in terms of supplying something that that no one’s really talking about in this corner of Venice, Los Angeles on this Saturday morning.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:30  So what stops you, then from chucking all of the rest of it? Magic. Mind the investments. The time you spend on all that. Forget it. I’m out of here. I’m going to teach Vedanta.

James Beshara 00:48:45  This is the. I love this every.

James Beshara 00:48:48  Single question.

James Beshara 00:48:49  Eric.

James Beshara 00:48:49  You’re asking. I’m like, hell yes. I put my hands up because about three years ago went to the ashram that I studied with. And I never get to tell this story. I probably told this story four times. And I went to, our teacher, Swamiji is kind of the the, nickname. He’s he’s got in. And I said, Swamiji, I’ve just loved the last at this point. It was three years ago. So maybe ten years into this wisdom, I was like, I’ve loved diving into this wisdom. And the first three years was listening to these titans of questioning Alan Watts, Ram Dass.

James Beshara 00:49:26  Terence McKenna. Endlessly on on online. And then discover that the philosophy they were studying each day, like the philosophy Alan Watts was studying each day, was advice to Vedanta. These kind of Sanskrit words I had never heard. So I was like, I want to study. What if that’s what he’s studying? 35 years in, I want to just go to the end of the movie and study that stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:45  It’s like when your favorite musician talks about who their favorite musician is. Exactly. I got to go check that out.

James Beshara 00:49:51  Exactly. It was like, yeah, that’s so it it was like my favorite philosopher’s favorite philosophy. So let me let me check it out for a month or two, and then I’ll probably go back to this beautiful articulation. And then that started, the deep dive strictly into, the, the text of Vedanta was a decade ago, still on that trip. And, and so three years ago, I had digested enough to I was like, I’d spent months, about four months disentangling from all of my worldly endeavors.

James Beshara 00:50:20  I brought on a co-founder and said, hey, you should be the CEO of of Magic Mind After a few months had wound down. All of my angel investing. It’s like I’m not going to start anymore things, and we’ve done financially well enough to where I can. Just enough is as good as a feast, don’t need anymore, and I’m going to devote all of my time to philosophy and do all this and go to the ashram to tell Swamiji that he’s 95 at this time. And I tell him this, and he shakes his head in such an unexpected fashion, shakes his head in disappointment. He says, why would you do that? This is a 95 year old Indian man that says, I loved his use of of this, this language. He’s so unexpected. In addition to the point, he said, why would you do that? You’ve got a good thing going. Keep it rolling. And it’s just such a funny way for such a casual way for a 95 year old Indian person to say, keep doing what you’re doing.

James Beshara 00:51:14  But he said, keep it rolling. And I was like, wait, what? I mean, my head was spinning for two weeks after this. Yeah. But certainly in that moment I was like, I thought I’d get like a pat on the back or some some kudos for this. at least for the the height of my devotion to this philosophy and diving into it even more full on and, and, and what’s so interesting, Eric, is that, like I was saying, like one of the canonical texts of this philosophy, I keep it on my desk every day is the Gita. And if people want a really digestible, 30 minute read, the no nicknames Bhagavad Gita that takes out the 72 nicknames that the two characters give to each other back and forth. It takes out the nicknames because it can be kind of kind of confusing to be like, Who is Maharaj who is.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:04  Old Buddhist texts are the same way. It’s like they repeat the same thing again. And I don’t mean like the same valuable idea.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:11  I mean like the same line. It’s just this weird format that that it’s all in that is very hard for the modern mind.

James Beshara 00:52:19  And all of these nicknames. If you know Sanskrit, you’re like, oh, wow. the, the easy to please like Krishna, the symbolic embodiment of God. One of his nicknames is easy to please. If I knew Sanskrit then I would be like, man, he’s also easy to please. I would they would be like an additional identifier, but because I don’t know Sanskrit. Yeah. Hearing all 72 nicknames that they give each others is quite disorienting. So I so I took my favorite translation of the Sanskrit Gita into English, but then I took out the 72 nicknames and just kept it. Arjuna, Krishna, Arjuna, Krishna. So you can buy that on Amazon for like ten bucks. And and it fits in your pocket. So I keep it on my desk, read it all the time, and it’s a, a continual, just rediscovery of, well, really all of these principles that we’re talking about because it is it’s not like the, the New Testament where you have 27 books and they triangulate with each other and they kind of like tell part of the story.

James Beshara 00:53:14  Every Upanishad, that might be 13 verses or the Gita, that’s 700 verses. It’s all self-contained. The whole philosophy in those 13 verses or 700 verses, just with varying degrees of explicitness. There’s a beauty in reading. Reading it over and over again and rediscovering it. And what’s so funny and what’s so needed tied to this story. Why didn’t I just. Why don’t I just cut all ties with the world and and and go into, I don’t know, go to the Himalayas? Is that when I try to do that? And he said that to me the next two weeks, I, my head was spinning and then it hit me. The canonical text of this philosophy, the Gita, the whole first chapter, as we discussed, is this warrior prince trying to get out of the battle. And I was seeking the ashram for relief. I was not seeking philosophy for. All right. This is going to be the epic dialed up challenge. I’m going to go into more dynamic living. It was man start ups fucking suck a lot of the time.

James Beshara 00:54:15  They’re hard. Yeah, they’re not nearly as peaceful sounding as sitting in an ashram with my family. Bring them over. I’d already looked at homes that we’d rent houses right around the property that you could rent and study each day. It sounded so nice. Yeah. And then I realized, oh, this is the spiritual bypass. I am built for these things. I should go into them even if they kill me. So, yeah, that was the reorientation.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:40  I think there’s something really important in there, because it’s easy to hear this idea of what do you do something for and think, I’ve got to go do something different than what I do, and sometimes that is the right choice. Sometimes you’re like, okay, I am in a situation that I should try and find what’s the right thing for me to do. And a lot of times, like I, there was a time in my life where when I looked, when I added it all up, I was like, okay, a career in software is paying the mortgage.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:13  It’s taking care of the kids and I generally like it. It’s not my deepest passion in life, but I generally like it. It’s good. It’s challenging. It’s interesting. I don’t dread it, you know? And instead of thinking, okay, well, what I really need to be doing is being a guitar player. This idea of not, you know, what am I doing? But what am I doing it for is a really powerful way to really embody our values in what we’re already doing, right? Like, I think about this a lot, this idea we get into this mindset of I have to with a lot of things. Life starts to be one big obligation. I have to, I have to. And the reality is, for most things, we actually don’t have to. You know, I use this example all the time, but it hit me one day when I was complaining about driving two kids to their various practices. I was like, I don’t have to do this.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:04  There’s no law on the books that say, I have to take my kids to soccer practice. And then I went, well, okay, well what? Then? Why? And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, it’s because I think that A, B and C it’s good for them. They like it. It’s important. And now all of a sudden, the very same activity of driving kids to soccer practice is imbued in a different way because I’ve connected it back to go all the way back to your terms, back to my intellect, back to what really matters. And so I think so much of life is that constant reconnection, that constant. How does what I’m already doing in the world, what I’m going to go do today, how do I imbue that with this spirit of effortless effort, with the spirit of service, with the spirit of love, with the spirit of devotion? I’m assuming that’s what when you processed your two weeks with your Swami, after that, you came back and you said, okay, if I’m not going to change all that, how do I continue to take what I’m doing and make it an expression of my deepest values.

James Beshara 00:57:11  The cascade of reorientation was around, and I’ll mention a few of, of the other favorite principles within this philosophy that I love that that it’s it’s almost like 26 golf clubs in the bag of the game of life. And so you got to know which one to hit. What? You can’t just get up on the, the driving range and, and hit the putter and expect, well, this is a golf club. I’m doing the right tool. Using the wrong way becomes the wrong tool. But once you have a recognition of like, oh, this principle applies right here and that principle applies, I’d say if 97% of this philosophy is about action and action action and then 3% is about these, these really higher minded aspects, these higher minded things like 3% of the day, spend it in reflection, 97% of the day. Action, action, action. Not in like I’m going to sit in Lotus position for 15 hours and then I won’t be able to relate to anybody. I actually won’t ever put it to the test.

James Beshara 00:58:05  You know, it’s the adage goes, if you can’t, if you cannot meditate in a boiler room, then you cannot meditate that it’s it’s actually you need to be able to apply this in the midst of the aisle six, with the two year old melting down, screaming for the 35th minute at the grocery store. And can you find stillness there? That’s can you find it in the midst of a five month straight, the company, revenue is going in the wrong direction and people are quitting and leaving and and all of these things. Yeah. This is a this is a a week. It is a day for me to seeing these things happen and, and then feeling like, wow, this isn’t that hard. This is one like I was saying that around expectations setting and a few of these principles that I’ll kind of rattle off, that you can fit together is the root of nearly all frustration is mismanaged expectations. So expect profits and losses. Expect a the the world is defined is as opposites within Vedanta.

James Beshara 00:59:02  The world is opposites. Yep. Good or bad. Pleasure. Pain. Heat. Cold.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:06  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at one you net. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. Oneyoufeed.net/ebook 

Buddhism. They call it the 10,000 Joys and the 10,000 sorrows. And you have all of it at the same time.

James Beshara 00:59:56  Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:58  Yeah.

James Beshara 00:59:58  Expect it. And the, you know, aim to be a realist where you have the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel. The pessimist sees the tunnel, but not the light.

James Beshara 01:00:08  But the realist sees the light and the next tunnel. Be the realist. You will have profits and losses. You will have pleasure and pain. You will have all of these things. And then you don’t suffer. You got the pain, but you expected it. You shit. You went out and saw it. You went out to the gym once, once a day to voluntarily take on some pain so that you don’t have that three years of lower back pain because of bodily neglect for the ten years prior, and that voluntary pain, that expectation of either I take it now or I’m going to get it later. The what is like poison in the beginning is like nectar. In the end, it ends up being like nectar and you’re like, yeah, that daily chewing on a little bit of a little bit of poison and bam, no wonder I don’t have back pain. And and you kind of mix these things together and it’s, it is just a really beautiful harmony where you have all these different notes playing, but they play beautifully.

James Beshara 01:01:07  And in those 26, golf clubs get used in the right way where you’re you’re freaking scratch golfer of life hitting, you know, one under on that par five. That would have been really challenging had you hit the putter off the driving range. Had you had you hit the driver when you were eight feet out and you use the wrong clubs in the wrong way. So to kind of put it in a bow, there are these different principles. You, you, you become aware of them, you reflect on them. You know that none of this might speak to someone. There are as many paths to the divine as there are people on earth, so it might not speak to them. But if these do speak to someone you reflect on, you internalize them, and then they become golf clubs. Then it’s like, oh yeah, that guy said, can’t remember the last time he’d had a hard day. But that’s because every hour I’m like, chewing on what is the poison that I should chew through right now.

James Beshara 01:01:56  That’s going to be like nectar in the end. We know this neuroscientific actually. Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist, he he said this once. I was so powerful. I wrote it down, learned it word for word, and and have said this in various various settings because it’s so I’d say it’s one of the most powerful things that I’ve ever heard in neuroscience. And this is his verbatim words, is one of the most powerful things we’ve learned around the science of motivation is that you can train your neurochemistry to reward you when you do something challenging. One of the most powerful things we’ve learned around the science of motivation is that you can train your neurochemistry to reward you when you do something challenging, and it gives it an example of for six weeks, it might feel like you’re lying to yourself by telling you that I’m going to the gym and it’s going to feel good, I’m going to the gym. It’s going to feel I’m going to go on a run. It’s going to feel good. I’m going to go on a run.

James Beshara 01:02:48  It’s going to feel good. I’m going to do 6 to 10 sprints for 50 yards. It’s one of the most efficient ways to work out. By the way, I’m going to sprint 50 yards six times and it’s going to be awesome. I’m gonna feel amazing, he said. For six weeks, it’ll feel like you’re lying to yourself. Then it starts to reward. It starts to become self-fulfilling that you really do feel it. You feel the reward. You look forward to it like a best friend, and you don’t want to miss it. Not because you’re disciplined, but it’s just nothing feels as good as doing what you ought to do. Feel that reward and you can program that neurochemical reward. That’s this, that’s this, this principle of it feels like poison in the beginning, and then it becomes like nectar in the end, and we know it. Like I said, neuro chemically, it’s very easy to six weeks goes by like that where you start doing these quote unquote hard things. And then ten years in, someone says like, man, isn’t that workout really hard? You know, like, I haven’t thought about it that way for the three hours leading up to it.  I’m like itching to go do it because I love it so much.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:50  Thank you James. That is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. We didn’t even get to talk about what Magic Mind is your company? We’re going to have a brief post-show conversation where we do that. Listeners, if you’d like access to that and all the other goodies you get, go to oneyoufeed.net/join and there will be links in the show notes. Also to all ways to find James, to find magic mined, to find his wonderful daily Vedanta podcast. Thanks, James.

James Beshara 01:04:18  Thank you so much. Eric, thank you for the time and for what you put out into the world.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:22  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a talk show, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Matt Abrahams 00:00:00  Your brain in many senses, is like a computer. It’s not a perfect analogy, but, you know, on your laptop or phone or tablet, when you have lots of windows or apps open, each one of those is behaving less well because the others are open. They’re all sucking that precious CPU bandwidth. Your brain is the same way. You have only so much cognitive bandwidth.

Chris Forbes 00:00:28  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Chris Forbes 00:01:12  In this episode, Eric and Matt Abrahams explore how to think faster and talk smarter when you’re put on the spot. Especially in those moments when pressure rises and your mind doesn’t quite cooperate. They discuss why communication anxiety is so common, where it actually comes from, and how to manage it without trying to eliminate it. Because the goal isn’t to get rid of anxiety, it’s to keep it from getting in the way. Eric and Matt also explore why aiming for good enough can actually make you a more effective communicator, and how the pressure to be perfect often makes things worse, not better. Throughout the conversation, they share practical tools like simple communication structures, ways to ask better questions, and techniques for listening more deeply that can help anyone communicate more clearly, even in high pressure situations. If you’ve ever struggled to find the right words or felt your mind go blank right when it mattered most. This episode offers tools you can start using right away. This is the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:14  Hi Matt, welcome to the show!

Matt Abrahams 00:02:16  Erik thrilled to be here.

Matt Abrahams 00:02:17  I look forward to our conversation.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:19  We’re going to be discussing your book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the spot. And I really love this idea right now because it’s one thing to prepare speeches. We’re all using AI to communicate more in our writing. We can we can refine things, but it’s not there to help us. When someone asks us a question or we’re in small talk or we’re in a meeting. And so there’s so many great skills in here that can be applied in a lot of different situations that I think will give people a lot more confidence when it comes to their ability to respond to impromptu situations.

Matt Abrahams 00:02:59  Absolutely. That’s the intent of the book. If you think about it, most of our communication, both in our personal and professional lives, is spontaneous. You know, it’s not the planned PowerPoint keynote, Google slides, meetings with agenda. Somebody asks you a question. You have to give feedback in the moment. You make a mistake and you have to fix it.

Matt Abrahams 00:03:18  Most of our communication happens in a spontaneous, impromptu way, and yet most of us aren’t ever trained in how to manage that. And that’s really what I’ve spent the last few years of my life helping people to come feel more comfortable and confident when put on the spot.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:33  Excellent. So we’re going to get to all that in a moment. But we have to start in the way that we always start, which is with the parable. And in the parable there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Matt Abrahams 00:04:14  You know, it’s a very powerful parable, and one that I have heard many times and have reflected on often. You know, for me, it’s all about focus. It’s about attention and intention. And where do you put your attention and your intention really matters. And for me, it’s all about helping people and myself to hone and develop our communication skills. At the end of the day. Communication is all about connection. And if we feed that, if we invest effort in working on it. I like to say there are only three ways to get better at communication repetition, reflection, and feedback. And if you give yourself the grace and the time feed that desire, you can actually improve how you communicate with others, which ultimately means how you connect and build relationships.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:00  Wonderful. That’s a great place for us to kick off. You come right out of the gates in the book, talking about one of the things that messes up people in their ability to communicate with others on the spot is anxiety.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:12  Yes, we get very anxious. Tell me a little bit about that idea.

Matt Abrahams 00:05:19  Yeah. So those of us who study anxiety around communication and it is ubiquitous, there’s research that suggests up to 85% of people experience anxiety and high stakes situation, be they planned or spontaneous. It is part of the human condition, at least those of us who study it believe that, and it’s ingrained in us now. That said, we don’t have to fall victim to it. We can actually claim power over it and leverage that anxiety to help us so we can do things about it. It boils down to when we communicate in front of others, we feel it as a threat and it has an evolutionary origin in the small bands of people that our species used to hang out in 10 or 15,000 years ago. Your relative status in that group meant everything. If you had higher status, you got access to resources, food, shelter, reproduction. If you had low status, it was literally life or death. So anything you did that would jeopardize that status would invoke a fear and a threat.

Matt Abrahams 00:06:19  And speaking in front of others in a small group like that could jeopardize everything for you. And so we carry that forward with us. Yet over time, we’ve learned and developed techniques to help us learn to manage that anxiety. And I use manage very carefully. I don’t think we can ever truly overcome it, but we can learn to manage our anxiety so it doesn’t manage us.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:41  You talk about the ABC framework for managing anxiety.

Matt Abrahams 00:06:45  Yeah. So ABC very simple to remember affective. That is emotion B is for behavior and C is for cognition. So any emotion affects us on these three levels. But when it comes to anxiety, we can address each of those levels with different management techniques. So from an affective perspective that’s the emotional perspective. We might feel unworthy or some form of imposter syndrome. I shouldn’t be here doing this. And there’s a lot of research that reframing that as an opportunity, seeing it as value you have to provide can blunt those that negative affect. So a very simple thing people can do is a positive mantra or affirmation.

Matt Abrahams 00:07:27  I use this all the time when I feel as if I’m inadequate in the moment for whatever that speaking moment is, I’ll say simply, I have value to bring. There’s something I know. I was invited here, I have value to bring, and that can cancel out a lot of that negative self-talk. So that’s an example of addressing affective issues behaviorally. Many of us feel our hearts pounding or blushing or sweating. Deep belly breathing is one example of something we can do if you’ve ever done yoga, Tai chi, qigong, meditation, that deep belly breath can calm those nerves and reduce those behavioral symptoms and then cognition. You know, many of us are worried and are speaking about not achieving whatever our goal is. So it’s making us nervous as a potential negative future outcome. So a way to short circuit the anxiety that comes from the fear of not achieving our goal is to become present oriented. Do something physical. Walk around the building. Do like an athlete. Listen to a song or a playlist.

Matt Abrahams 00:08:27  I like to say tongue twisters out loud. That’s a way of warming up my voice and getting me present oriented.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:33  So would you like to hear my warm up tongue?

Matt Abrahams 00:08:36  I would love to hear how you warm up.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:38  I’m going to blow it here on air, but it’s, one hand, two ducks, three squawking geese, four Limerick oysters, five corpulent porpoises, six pairs of down ovaries, tweezers, 7000 Macedonians in full battle array, eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men with on roller skates with a market propensity towards procrastination. Sloth ten lyrical, spherical, diabolical denizens. The deep hole stall around the corner of the core of the key of the quiver, all at the same time.

Matt Abrahams 00:09:04  I love it and I am very well aware of that.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:07  And it’s an old one.

Matt Abrahams 00:09:08  Yeah, the power of that is not only does it help you focus in the moment, but in saying that you say every sound that we have in the English language.

Matt Abrahams 00:09:17  So you are warming up your voice. Every sound we make is in that ten list and I love it. Well done. I don’t have it memorized. I have to read it.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:26  It’s questionable whether if you listen to the unedited version of this podcast, it’s questionable whether it actually helps or not, because I’ll hit a three syllable word and I’m done. But yes, carry on.

Matt Abrahams 00:09:38  I know I love that you do that. So the bottom line is this most people are nervous. We have to recognize that. And then there are things that we can do to help ourselves. Everybody I coach, everybody I teach. I talk about building an anxiety management plan. These are techniques that you can do before and during your communication. Be a planned or spontaneous to help you manage the symptoms and sources of your anxiety. And everybody’s plan will be slightly different because everybody is different. The first book I wrote was called Speaking Up Without Freaking Out 50 Techniques to Manage Anxiety. And not every one of the 50 techniques works for people.

Matt Abrahams 00:10:16  I am thrilled if 3 to 5 techniques work for people. Yeah, and so you have to take the time to think about the anxiety, think about what works for you, and then work on it. Do you have a specific thing you do besides the ten phrase warm up to help you feel comfortable in those moments of anxiety?

Eric Zimmer 00:10:34  I don’t get them often.

Matt Abrahams 00:10:35  Good for you. Is that always been the case?

Eric Zimmer 00:10:38  I think to a certain degree, yeah. I don’t know why. Maybe lying so much as a child.

Matt Abrahams 00:10:45  Well, you know, you told me that you were prepared.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:48  Me? You know. Yeah. Being a musician, I just. You could put me in certain rooms where I would get nervous. Or you could have a certain guest on. That might make me a little nervous, in which case I’d need to work on some of that stuff. But I’m generally pretty comfortable talking, whether it’s in a group, whether it’s in a meeting, improvising, public speaking, doing this podcast.

Matt Abrahams 00:11:09  You seem pretty at ease.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:10  Well, yeah, I mean, that’s a whole lot of work and a whole lot of realms over a lot of years. Right. Yes. Right. But yes.

Matt Abrahams 00:11:18  That’s good. And the reality is, some people feel more comfortable than others. And those who do, I feel, need to role model for those who don’t. How you can get there. So. So the work you do is helping people who might not be as comfortable as you.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:30  Yeah, I love the breaking it down into the ABCs because you’re right. Any situation there is a there’s the effective, there’s the emotion, then there’s the behavior, and then there’s the cognitive or thinking aspects. And being able to intervene in different ways is really helpful. So when you encourage somebody to create anxiety management plan, are you asking them to sort of put 1 or 2 in each of those categories?

Matt Abrahams 00:11:54  Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, what I’ll do to help people and anybody can do this on their own is I ask people to think about a situation that would make them nervous, speaking, being planned or spontaneous and to describe it and what I’m listening for, the words they use to describe their anxiety.

Matt Abrahams 00:12:12  So if somebody spends a lot of time talking about, well, it’s the number of people in the room or the power and status of people in the room, that leads me to think of certain techniques that might help them. So, for example, if you’re really worried about the number of people in the room, then there are techniques to help you connect and make that room feel smaller. Maybe asking a question, taking a poll. And when you get that response, all of a sudden it feels conversational for people who talk about, oh, if I don’t do well, I’m not going to get that raise or I’m not going to get my project supported. That leads me to think, okay, that’s that cognitive goal direction. So a different technique would come in. So by having people speak out or write out their fearful situation, it gives clues as to which technique. And then you begin looking at where is there an effective technique, a behavioral technique and a cognitive technique that could plug in here.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:00  Okay. So let me give you an example. That largely isn’t a problem for me anymore, although it’s still there okay. Which was that when I would go into a meeting with men of a certain age, i.e. my father’s age generally, and they were at all stoic or cold or just non-responsive, not effusive in their way. They look at me. I would start getting nervous. Yeah, I would start to get anxiety. Now I know where it comes from and all that. But still in the moment, I had to work with it. So how would you counsel? Let’s just say me right before I sort of stumbled my way into how to deal with it.

Matt Abrahams 00:13:40  Right? So what I’m hearing is part of what triggered some anxiety for you was where you had power and status differentials. They were older, more experienced, and they were not very responsive, so they weren’t engaging. So part of what I would do from an affective, emotional place is I would work again on a positive affirmation that there’s value you can bring, there’s insight that you can provide, there’s experience that you’ve had that could add value here.

Matt Abrahams 00:14:07  And we would try to name it and figure out what that is. So you could say that as you walk in to cancel out some of that, perhaps self-doubt behaviorally, depending on what would happen, I don’t know if your heart would be faster. I don’t know if you perspire more. Can you reflect on those moments? What would happen in your body?

Eric Zimmer 00:14:25  That’s hard to say. What I noticed is I would suddenly start to alter what I was saying to what I thought they wanted.

Matt Abrahams 00:14:36  Do I see, oh.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:37  Give you an example. I’m on a call. I’m teaching 50 students something. Yes. And I see a guy on the on the zoom who looks like, you know, he’s an older person and he’s just kind of giving me the look. Like, yes. All, all of a sudden think like, what I’m saying is just too touchy feely for him. And so I would notice myself wanting to adjust what I was saying or doing to get rid of that.

Matt Abrahams 00:15:00  So that skill that that metacognition of here’s what’s happening in that moment can be very useful.

Matt Abrahams 00:15:06  It can also be harmful. It can be distracting because now your other focused in a way that that’s pulling you from the message. But in that moment. So you could take a deep breath to calm yourself down because you’re getting spun up a little bit, probably thinking really fast so that deep breath can not only slow down your heart rate, but it slows down your thinking so that a behavioral action would be a good to take a deep breath. And cognitively, I would challenge you in that moment to think about what am I saying? What am I bringing to this communication that has relevance for the people I’m talking to? One of the ways to pull people into engagement is to highlight the relevance. And sometimes you can name it, sometimes you can say, this will help you feel better. You’ll sleep more thoroughly, whatever it is. Other times you can ask people by simply saying, think through what this might mean for you, or imagine what it would be like if you were able to, so you can have them come to the relevance themselves.

Matt Abrahams 00:16:02  But by serving up the relevance one, it validates the value you’re bringing, but also engages them and pulls them forward. So for you, based on that very short description, those would be three techniques I would look to to have you try. And an anxiety management plan is nothing more than a set of hypotheses. It’s an experiment. Yeah. You have to run the experiment and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If two of the three work well for you, we call that a success and we try to add another one.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:12  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this. And I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:52  Download the free guide now at once. And take the first step towards getting back on track. I think what I generally would do because it doesn’t happen in like work meetings anymore to that degree. But if I’m on like a call, teaching a group of students is I just redirect my attention to all the people who are looking positive and enthused and loving what I’m saying. And I just go, okay, let me, you know, for me, if I focus on that, it allows me not to.

Matt Abrahams 00:18:21  Absolutely. It brings you back to the present. And again, that meta awareness that you have is really helpful. And I work with a lot of the people I coach and the students I teach to build that meta awareness. We can be so self-focused that we’re not observing what’s going on, and many of us carry around in communication the goal of just broadcasting information. That’s not the goal of communication. The goal of communication is to have the message connect and resonate with the audience. So you have to have that ability to observe and see what’s going on.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:50  All right. So let’s move on to another idea where you say that when it comes to spontaneous speaking, good enough is great. Yes. So share what you mean by that.

Matt Abrahams 00:19:03  So this is an idea that comes from the world of improvisation. So when I started doing my research into spontaneous speaking, I looked at across multiple fields of academic studies psychology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience. And I also looked into the arts. And in improvisation is a wonderful tool. And in the world of improv, the focus is on what’s happening in the moment. And when we put pressure on ourselves to do whatever is happening in the moment, right or perfect, that gets in the way of us actually doing it. Well, let me explain why this works. Your brain, in many senses, is like a computer. It’s not a perfect analogy, but, you know, on your laptop or phone or tablet, when you have lots of windows or apps open, each one of those is behaving less well because the others are open.

Matt Abrahams 00:19:52  They’re all sucking that precious CPU bandwidth. Your brain is the same way. You have only so much cognitive bandwidth. And if I am constantly judging and evaluating what I’m saying, as I’m saying it, I end up reducing the amount of bandwidth I have to actually connect and communicate effectively. So I have the audacity with my Stanford MBA students on the very first day of class, I tell them that the goal in our class is to maximize their mediocrity and Eric, their jaws drop. These folks have never been told to be mediocre. No, but we talk about why. Because when you just strive to get the job done, not to do it perfect, just to get it done, you actually have more resources to do it really well. So I like to say it’s about connection, not perfection. Strive for mediocrity to achieve communication greatness. When we focus on connection and not saying every single word, right? By the way, there is no right way to communicate. There are only better ways and worse ways.

Matt Abrahams 00:20:51  And when we realize that, it makes a difference. And that’s what really helps unlock for a lot of people when you give yourself that permission, just good enough is great. All of a sudden great things happen, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:21:02  It’s advice that’s given to writers all the time, which is you’ve got to divorce the editing part of your brain from the creating part of your brain. If the editor is there when you’re creating, it’s very, very difficult to create. If you think that what’s going on the page has to be good. Yeah, at least for me, I was in trouble. Like, that doesn’t work. I have to get something down. There’s a stage. There’s a point where I come back and say, all right, now let me think about this. And I think that’s what you’re talking about. There is a way to go back and review our. Oh, Absolutely. To reflect on it, to see what we might have done differently. But in the moment is not the time for that to be happening.

Matt Abrahams 00:21:41  One quick comment. That distinction between the creative writing brain and the editing brain. I physically have to move to a different location. So I write in a different location than I edit, because I need that external reinforcement to help that separation.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:55  A great idea.

Matt Abrahams 00:21:55  But this, this notion of reflection is key. You must reflect, but not in the moment. So I don’t know how familiar you are with with college basketball. But there was a great coach, Mike Krzyzewski, and he used to teach his players this notion of next play. So if you’re a basketball player and you’re going down the court and you make a mistake, you miss a shot, your ball gets stolen from you. Rather in that moment than ruminating, talking bad about yourself. You have to get back on that next play, because if you don’t, your team is one person down. We have to do the same in our communication. If something doesn’t go right in the moment. Next play. Move on. Later. Reflect.

Matt Abrahams 00:22:36  Reflection is critical to improving any kind of any skill, but especially communication. But you don’t do it in the moment.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:43  I love the next play idea in general. Yes, that is such a valuable way of moving forward when something is not gone, right?

Matt Abrahams 00:22:54  Correct.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:55  We can get so stuck in those things, in all domains, in so many domains. And you know, next play is just a very useful framework. That’s easy to think about.

Matt Abrahams 00:23:06  Absolutely.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:07  You say that there’s a surprising power of because. What do you mean by that?

Matt Abrahams 00:23:14  Well, when we look at the why behind the what. It can be very empowering to us. And because gives us an explanation, a reason. Now we have to judge and evaluate that is it? Is it appropriate? Sometimes. Our rationale is it comes from a different place. Many of us, especially in our communication. We’re looking for what to do. What do I do right? What do I do wrong? And instead really focus on the rationale, the reason behind so the why behind the what is very powerful.

Matt Abrahams 00:23:45  I find that the people I teach, the people I coach, really like to to explore the why behind the what, and then it inculcates it. It makes it part of you when you have that understanding. So thinking through the because of what we do is really important at the end of the day. Eric, all I do is try to help people turn habits into choices. Most people have found ways to communicate effectively enough to get by. But there are other options and choices that we could make that might help us do things differently or better in understanding the. Because the why behind the what allows us to ask is this habitual way of doing my communication, serving me as well as it could? Or is there another option? So focusing on that is is important.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:30  I love that idea of habits into choices because we talk a lot about habits. I mean, I ran a program called Wise Habits. Spiritual Habits, right? And we, you know, so there’s this idea that ideally, if you have a choice that is well considered, if you can make it more habitual, the behavior more habitual, that’s good.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:49  That’s a positive use of it. But the exact opposite is true. There’s a Zen teacher I love who who describes us as that habit ridden consciousness. Yes. And when you think about not just what you say, but how we think there’s so much of it just happens unconsciously. And when I was reading your book, I started reflecting on my own communications, and I was like, there is an enormously habitual amount of that. And again, that’s good. If I had to ponder in great detail everything I was going to say to everyone I met, I would be a mess. Correct. And there are ways that we want to become more conscious of what we’re doing. And I love that idea of habit to choice.

Matt Abrahams 00:25:33  Yeah. And you know, in the academic world, we call these heuristics. We just follow certain patterns that have served us well. And we need heuristics. I mean, if you think about the amount of decisions you make on a daily basis, it would be paralyzing if we didn’t have these heuristics.

Matt Abrahams 00:25:48  But at the same time, heuristics lock us in to a certain way of doing things. And so, again, coming back to that notion of meta awareness, metacognition, we have to have that moment of saying, I’m going to turn my heuristic off here because something important is happening. The example I always use is this is a true story. I came out of a meeting with a colleague, and the colleague turned to me and said, how do you think it went? I heuristically heard, oh, feedback, and I went in and itemized all the things we did wrong, could have done better had I really paused and listened and watched the person. So listen not just to what he said, but watch how it was said where it was said he didn’t want feedback at all. He wanted support because he knew the meeting went poorly, and because I just clicked into that heuristic mode of giving feedback, I damaged our relationship. It took me almost six months to repair that relationship because of that one heuristic bias I had.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:40  He thought you were kicking him when he was down.

Matt Abrahams 00:26:42  Exactly. And I just I just was not there in the moment, realizing what he really needed. And that’s the danger of this kind of habitual heuristic thinking. Again, it serves a valid purpose, but it can get us in trouble.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:55  I have a good friend who recently has started. Every time somebody asks him how he’s doing, he says, best day of my life.

Matt Abrahams 00:27:02  I love.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:02  That. And he started doing it not because he is a perpetually optimistic person. He started doing it because he realized what we’re talking about, that all these interactions, they’re just pattern repeats. Yeah. How are you doing? Fine. Like, none of it. When? Anywhere. None of it did anything. And he was like, I’m gonna start. And so I think he came up with a couple of snarky ones and he was like, no, that’s not me. But I’ve seen him do this. Yeah. In restaurants multiple times. Server says how are you doing? He says, best day of my life.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:32  And all of a sudden now there’s an interaction with that server. You pattern interrupted them. They’re used to saying how you do, and you say, fine, then you give me your order. And now this guy is just kind of broken that up. Now I will say, I tried this on my on my sister, who knows me a little too well. She was like, no, it’s not.

Matt Abrahams 00:27:52  But but I bet you you had an interesting conversation or a different conversation that you might have had. No, we absolutely did.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:58  Yes we.

Matt Abrahams 00:27:59  Did. Yeah I love Pattern Disrupts. And this is really leading into what can make small talk so magical. Many people really loathe small talk because they don’t know how to start it. They don’t know how to end it. But what you’re talking about is exactly how you you do something that’s interesting. You demonstrate interest. You, you throw you, you. In the world of improvisation, they call it, you make an offer, you put something forward and somebody can take that offer.

Matt Abrahams 00:28:25  Many of our offers are habitual and ritualized, and when you do something that’s slightly different, all of a sudden there’s a spark there. And if the person is willing to take the bait to to play with you, if you will, then all of a sudden some magic can happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:38  All right. So let’s have you coach me through a conversation. So this happened last night. I’m pulling all kinds of examples out here. Yeah, I got an Equitas.

Matt Abrahams 00:28:48  It’s everywhere.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:49  Yeah, I got it in an Uber. And my tendency is just to sit in the back and go about my business. But every once in a while I have an interesting conversation, and I thought, I’m going to try and do that more often. So I get into the Uber and I ask him, what now? As I’m talking to you, I’m thinking through. I asked him closed questions. Yeah. How long have you been an Uber driver?

Matt Abrahams 00:29:09  Right?

Eric Zimmer 00:29:10  How long have you been in Columbus? And he would he would answer.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:13  I’ve been an Uber driver for five years.

Matt Abrahams 00:29:15  Right. That’s it. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:18  I’ve been in Columbus six years. Yeah. That’s it. And again, it’s possible the guy just doesn’t want to chat, but it’s also very possible that he, like me, can’t figure out how to get the conversation going. And I’ve not given him any kind of good offer at that point. Right.

Matt Abrahams 00:29:35  That’s correct, that’s correct. So part of this has to do with approach and framing. On a podcast I host Think Fast, Talk Smart. I interviewed a woman named Rachel Greenwald. Rachel’s fantastic. She’s an academic and a professional matchmaker. So she she’s in the trenches. And she taught me something that really helped me reframe these. She said the goal of any conversation, especially small talk, is to be interested, not interesting. Many of us put a lot of pressure on ourselves to say something interesting and catchy, and in fact, all we have to do is be interested and then pair with that what you highlighted.

Matt Abrahams 00:30:12  Open questions, not closed questions really can allow something to get started. So instead of saying, how long have you been driving Uber, you could have said, what’s one of the things you like most about driving Uber? and all of a sudden that opens up to a conversation. It signals interest, curiosity instead of, you know, what do you think of Columbus? You could have said, what are 2 or 3 of the the most favorite places you like to go or you’ve dropped people off at? All of a sudden you’re showing interest and giving a pathway to a deeper conversation.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:09  So I have another question for you. Communication related. Because I am maybe too much happy to take the interested role. Maybe it’s just my profession is just asking people questions so I can do it. Maybe it’s just habitual.

Matt Abrahams 00:31:24  You’re good at it.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:25  But one of the things I’ve noticed is that there are some, some people who will never come back around and then ask anything at all about me. And what I can’t tell is, am I just dominating the whole thing with my questions? Or do these people really just only think about themselves? Do you have any theories or thoughts on that? You’ve studied this a lot.

Matt Abrahams 00:31:48  Well, so I’m very familiar with the literature. So there are people who study conversational science. And when they look at conversations, they look at turns. If you think about it, a conversation is nothing more than taking turns sharing control of communication. And there are two fundamental types of turns. There are supportive turns. Turns that support what’s being said. And then there are switching turns that switch focus or topic. And what the research suggests is you want to blend of both, maybe slightly in favor of supporting turns. So you, Eric, are very good at asking questions. Those questions tend to be very supportive and keep the conversation on focused on the other person. A good blend is appropriate. So we as you look at your conversations, and I would challenge everybody to think about a successful conversation you’ve had, I can almost guarantee it involved a balance of supporting through questions and staying on a topic and then switching. So just to make it very clear. Imagine you tell me, hey Matt, I just got back from Hawaii.

Matt Abrahams 00:32:51  A supporting question or conversational turn might be, oh, which island did you go to? A switching turn would be, oh, how cool, I just got back from Costa Rica, so a good conversation blends both of those. If all you do is ask supporting and all you do is push supporting, it looks like you’re trying to deflect and don’t want to be part of the conversation you’re interrogating. And if all you do is switching and make it all about you, you look narcissistic. So we need to balance these. And again it’s an awareness of it. And so having the tools to do the switching to do the supporting open questions help with support. Paraphrasing helps with switching. By developing those skills you can have richer deeper more beneficial conversations.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:38  That’s really helpful. That’s really helpful because I definitely am really good at the supportive. Yeah, I’m generally interested. I ask a question, they say something, I’m like, oh, well, what’s it like to be that person? Or what’s it like to do that job? Or when you’re in that job, how do you solve this problem? Like, I’m genuinely always very interested, but I don’t switch much.

Matt Abrahams 00:33:59  Yeah. And curiosity is fantastic. And people generally like to talk about themselves. They know something about it. But at the same time, if you don’t, if all you do is come at them with support, they can feel, I wouldn’t say.

Speaker 4 00:34:12  Attacked, but definitely over focused on.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:14  All right mindset.

Matt Abrahams 00:34:16  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:17  Let’s talk about the value importance of mindset in communication and give us some that you’ve found that make us better communicators.

Matt Abrahams 00:34:26  Yeah. So in the methodology that I developed around spontaneous speaking, it divides into two major parts. Mindset and messaging. Mindset is critical. We’ve already talked a little bit about anxiety management and that’s part of mindset. Many of us approach our communication, especially spontaneous communication, as a threat, as a challenge, as some kind of crucible we have to make our way through. And in fact, it doesn’t have to be that way. Think of a Q&A situation when most people find out that people are going to ask them questions, they don’t say, great, I’m really excited to do that.

Matt Abrahams 00:35:01  They think, oh no, I have to defend my position. People are going to find holes in what I’ve said, maybe their inadequacies. If we can reframe that, change our mindset to see these situations as opportunities to connect, to expand, to learn. All of a sudden it changes everything. It changes our approach, our demeanor, our answers, our longer, our responses are more cooperative. So I’m not naive, though. There are people who do come at you with heat and spice and challenge. But even in those moments you can find some area of connection. Let’s say you and I are having a conversation and you really challenge me. Your view is opposing completely mine.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:40  Communication is worthless, mat. That’s my view. Yeah. All right.

Matt Abrahams 00:35:44  You couldn’t even say that without a smile on your face. But. But even in that moment, even in that moment, the one thing that we both have in common is we care about this issue. I can find a some way of connecting with you on that.

Matt Abrahams 00:35:55  I might say I disagree. I think communication is absolutely important, but the fact is we both believe that this is an issue we should be discussing, and that gives me a place where we begin to collaborate. So part of the mindset shift is looking for that opportunity. Where can I connect with somebody. And then the other part of the mindset has to do with the wonderful work of Carol Dweck. She’s a colleague at Stanford, really, about growth mindset when it comes to communication, especially spontaneous communication, many of us feel like we either have it or we don’t. You’re either born with the gift of gab or you don’t. And that’s not true. We can all learn it just like an athlete, just like a musician. If you work at it, you can learn to do it and do it better. So Carol’s work on growth mindset, part of that which I really adore, is this notion of not yet. Carol likes to talk about if something doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t mean you’re incapable.

Matt Abrahams 00:36:48  It doesn’t mean it’s not possible. It just means not yet. And then you can begin to think about what can I do to actualize this, to make it happen. So mindset plays a huge role. If you manage anxiety, see it as an opportunity. Realize it’s a skill you can develop. Then you’re set to really help yourself with the in the moment messaging that you do.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:09  So one of the things on mindset that you do is you talk about mistakes.

Matt Abrahams 00:37:13  Yeah. So I have a framing of mistakes. So, you know, many of us get really down about the mistakes we make. And in fact, mistakes as, as we have all heard are the ways we learn. We learn through what doesn’t go the way we expected. So I like to reframe a mistake as a mistake. You know, in film and television they have that clapboard where they say, take one, take two, and each take is where a director is acting, asking the actors and actresses to do the scene slightly differently.

Matt Abrahams 00:37:43  So no one scene is wrong or bad. We’re just looking for a different way of doing it. So when I do something or something doesn’t go the way I expect, instead of saying to myself, oh my goodness, I did it wrong, I’m bad. I should have practiced more. I just say, take two, let’s try it again. And sometimes that means I repeat myself in a different way. Other times it means I catalog it and say, the next time I have to do that or say that, I’m going to look at it a little differently. When we do this, all of a sudden it takes the fangs out of the error or what we didn’t like it actually makes it empowering. Okay, I can do it again. Take two, take three, however many it takes. So I really like looking at those errors as opportunities and by framing it as a mistake, it really helps me get through that.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:32  That makes all the sense in the world, because when we are stuck in the it was a mistake and I’m lousy and I’ll never get good at this or we’re not able to learn, right? Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:43  And that’s what we have to do. You said one of the keys is you got to be able to reflect. So all right I miss that take okay. Pause for a second okay. What would I do. You know. All right. What am I going to do in the next take.

Matt Abrahams 00:38:55  That’s correct. That’s correct. And sometimes it’s appropriate to make the adjustment in the moment. And other times it’s just catalog it. Next time I’ll do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:02  All right. So I want to pivot to we’ve been talking about speaking. But any part of a conversation as we’ve said should be a back and forth thing. Talk to me about listening.

Matt Abrahams 00:39:15  Yeah. Listening is critical and communication. It is so interesting that we teach public speaking, but we don’t teach public listening, and we really should. Listening is critical, and the reality is most of us don’t listen. Well, now I have to come clean with you. Eric. My wife gets really upset with me when I talk about and teach listening skills because she says, I’m still a work in progress and I and I would agree I need to work on it.

Matt Abrahams 00:39:37  Most of us listen just for the top line, not the bottom line. So once I get the gist of what you’re saying, I begin rehearsing, evaluating, judging, planning my response. In fact, we have to listen more deeply. There’s so much subtlety and nuance in what gets communicated that can impact how we respond. So I like to tell people to listen for the bottom line. And the best way to practice, I believe, is listen as if you will paraphrase. Paraphrasing is not where you pair it backward for word. What somebody has said. That’s what a five year old does and it’s annoying. Instead, I’m looking for what’s the key? Bottom line of what you’ve said, what’s the crux of what you’re saying? And as I’m listening, that forces me to listen in a much more detailed, deep way. And sometimes I’ll actually speak the paraphrase to validate. I heard what you said, and you can clarify or to just validate you when when you’re in a conversation and you show that you listen not just by nodding your head and saying but literally saying, here’s what I heard you say in your own words.

Matt Abrahams 00:40:41  It does a wonderful things for relationships. It brings people closer together. It builds trust, builds deeper connection. So when you listen, to paraphrase, you train your brain to listen more deeply so we can practice. You know, any one of your listeners to this show at the end of each episode can just paraphrase what was the central idea, or in any conversation or a meeting where you’re not the one speaking, just paraphrase what what was key with what that person said? When you practice paraphrasing your practicing listening and it is a wonderful skill not only to deepen relationships with. Paraphrasing is a very useful communication tool.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:17  I love that idea. Don’t listen for the top line. Listen for the bottom line because I do that a lot. Someone will start talking, I will get the top line and I’ll be like, all right, I know where this goes. Jenny and I joke. I’m like, why use 20 words when you could use two? And she’s like, why use two words if you could be you? Corny, right? Like, we’re just very different in our style.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:38  What that leads to for me is me sometimes just going, oh, well, all right, I got the gist of it. Now she’s just going. She’s going to go on. Right. But but thinking of the bottom line allows me to stay with it more. And you’re right there more does unfold if I’m paying attention.

Matt Abrahams 00:41:56  That’s right. You did an excellent paraphrase there, by the way. So good. Good on you.

Speaker 4 00:42:00  Good on you.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:01  I’m a good paraphrase. Or I’ll take take the last five minutes of conversation and try and sum it up in like one little thing. Yeah. The three P’s that impede listening. Yes. What makes this hard?

Matt Abrahams 00:42:12  Yeah. So there are a lot of things that conspire to make listening difficult, right? Besides our tendency to listen just to the top line. So the three P’s physical noise. So they all have to do with noise. Noise is the enemy of the. Let me start over. The three P’s represent three different types of noise.

Matt Abrahams 00:42:31  Noise is the enemy of the F word of communication. And it’s not the naughty F word, it’s fidelity. The goal of most communication is fidelity, accuracy and clarity. Noise gets in the way there. Inversely related. As noise goes up, fidelity goes down. So the three major types of noise all start with the letter P physical, psychological and physiological. Physical noise. We have all been in a situation where it’s just loud. It’s hard for me to hear. And the older I get, the more these environments exist. Yeah, Psychological noise is all of my judgment, my evaluation, my desires that filter in as you’re speaking and that gets in the way. So I get caught up on, oh, that was stupid for him to say that or that was silly to do, and then I’m not really present. And then finally physiological noise. If I’m tired, if I’m hungry, if I’m nervous, if I’m hungry, all of that gets in the way of my ability to be present and to listen.

Matt Abrahams 00:43:32  So part of the way we become better listeners is to focus on the bottom line. But the other way is we try to reduce these three P’s. Get yourself into an environment that’s quiet, make sure you’re psychologically focused and able to focus. Make sure you’ve taken care of your just fundamental hygiene. You’re not.

Speaker 4 00:43:52  Hungry or.

Matt Abrahams 00:43:53  Thirsty, etc. and then you’re in a position to listen better.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:57  So you have a framework for listening. Better that you say, okay, space and grace. I love a good rhyme.

Matt Abrahams 00:44:03  Yes, assonance is great.

Speaker 4 00:44:05  So, yes.

Matt Abrahams 00:44:06  So how do we get ourselves into that place to be present? And I learned this from a colleague of mine at Stanford’s business school. His name’s Collins Dobbs, and he applies pace, space, grace to challenging conversations. And as he and I were talking one day, I said, these same principles will help people be better listeners because it forces them or invites them to be more present. So let me walk through each. Many of us are very busy.

Matt Abrahams 00:44:31  Life is hectic. We’ve got lots going on in our minds racing around. If we slow down, physically slow down. Sit down. Not walking, not moving around. Slow the pace down and slow your mind down. You can be more present. So consciously focusing on the pace of the interaction. Second, you have to give yourself space again. Physical space. Put yourself in a place where you can be present, but more importantly, mental space. Clear the decks if you know you’ve got a big stressful meeting coming up next, maybe have the important conversation after the meeting. Give yourself that space. And then finally grace. Grace to know that you may or may not get it right, but you’re going to try. And grace to listen. Not just to what is said, but beyond the words, how it’s said, where it said so. With a little bit of pace, space, grace, you allow yourself to be present and being present. Turns down the volume on all three of those different types of noise and allows you to listen for the bottom line.

Matt Abrahams 00:45:32  So all of those aspects fold together. Pace, space grace puts you in the place where you can be present less noise and listen to the bottom line.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:42  So let’s talk about the psychological noise. Because in any sort of conversation that is charged or important, the psychological may not be the big meeting that’s coming up next, or it may not be my children. I mean, maybe it is right, but it might very well be what that person just said. Yeah. And so one of the things that I’ve observed, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Is that like good listening for me means yes, I’m definitely giving that person a lot of my attention, most of my attention, but I have to keep some of it. Yes. Turned inward. Yes, I have to keep some of it, because otherwise these psychological reactions, the noise is there, but I’m not really aware of it. I’m not focused on it. So it was a paradigm change for me to think like it’s not just only listening to the other person.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:34  I have to listen to myself a little bit to.

Matt Abrahams 00:46:37  There’s an image that that Carol Robin, who is a colleague but also was on my show Think Fast, Talk Smart. She talks about and this really helps me, Eric, I’m a visual person, she said. Whenever we’re listening and communicating, we have two antenna. One is turned towards the person, the other has to be turned towards ourselves. And that balance you’re talking about is so essential. But we have to listen as the internal listening to our internal response as a curious observer rather than getting so, so immersed in what is happening inside ourselves. Not to say that we shouldn’t do that, but at first, in order to really do the other, have the other antenna focused. We have to just be curious. I’m sorry. Oh that’s interesting. When he said that, I noticed I got a little tense. That’s interesting. Versus, oh, he’s pissing me off because he said that. So so we need to to be listening.

Matt Abrahams 00:47:30  Have both antenna working. But when it comes to the internal listening curious observer at first so that we can be more present with the other antenna, listening to what the other person is saying.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:41  Yeah, that’s a great distinction. And it is a little tricky to do that. It’s a little bit I compare it to like doing interviews like this, because a huge part of my focus is on what you’re actually saying. Yes, but some of my focus has to be on where are we going next? That’s right. And what else do we you know, and and ideally that just all happened seamlessly. But there’s a skill to that. And I think there’s the same thing. There’s the skill to be able to hear the person.

Speaker 4 00:48:09  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:10  While having some internal attention in the way you described, because it often seems like I can have 1 or 2 of those antenna working. Right.

Speaker 4 00:48:19  And you can develop that skill.

Matt Abrahams 00:48:20  One, I think you do a great job as a podcast host, but I believe moderating or doing what you’re doing right now, interviewing, I believe that’s the hardest communication skill because you’re having to manage so much simultaneously, and yet it can be learned.

Matt Abrahams 00:48:37  It is a skill. It is a skill that can be learned and it can be practiced. But it is hard. You know, I hosted a show for six years. You’ve done this for a long time. I think you would agree with me. You get better at it the more you do it. Yeah, and you can learn these skills. I am a far better interviewer today than I was when I started. I still have a long way to go, but this repetition, reflection and feedback is how we get better.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:01  People say, you’re so good at that. I’m like. I have been doing it for like 11 years now. If I wasn’t good at it, it would be something wrong with me at this point.

Speaker 4 00:49:10  Yeah, no.

Matt Abrahams 00:49:10  I mean, like anything you have to practice. And, you know, people who are really expert at a skill, one thing I’ve noticed is one, there tends to be a little bit of humility, but also they realize how much more they can improve.

Matt Abrahams 00:49:23  You know, experts will always tell, oh, there’s so much more I can do. And so I think that’s a good sign that you’ve been doing something for a while, and you’re continuing to work to get better at it.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:32  Okay. I’m going to move to the part of the book that was most helpful to me, and it was all about structures. One of my favorite phrases in life that I use a lot is structure liberates. Yeah, now I use it in a different context than you, but put that now into communication.

Speaker 4 00:49:49  Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Abrahams 00:49:49  So many of us, when we have to communicate on the spot or planned, we simply list and itemize information. Here’s everything I’ve got. Blah. And put it out there in front of you. The problem is our brains are not wired to process lists of information. In fact, Eric, when you go to the grocery store, how many items do you need to buy before you have to write it down so you don’t forget it? If you’re like me, it’s three.

Matt Abrahams 00:50:11  Not many.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:12  I was going to say two.

Matt Abrahams 00:50:14  Yeah, exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:15  Every one. Yeah. I get to the garbage. What? What am I? Why am I.

Speaker 5 00:50:19  Here? What am I doing here?

Matt Abrahams 00:50:20  We’re just not good with lists. Yet when many of us communicate, that’s what we provide. Yet we know from neuroscience that our brains process structured information more fluently. A structure is nothing more than a logical collection of ideas a beginning, a middle, and an end. We all know structure. Now, we might not know. We know structure, but we know it. I’ll give you a classic example. If you have ever watched a television advertisement, you have seen a structure. Most TV ads are in the structure of problem, solution, benefit. There’s some issue or challenge in the world. The product or service the company sells helps fix that and you benefit in some way. I don’t care if you’re selling cars. I don’t care if you’re selling medicines, alcohol. Most ads follow this structure.

Matt Abrahams 00:51:05  The structure provides a logical connection. You transition and move from one point to the next. Our brains are wired to learn information through structure. So if you can develop structures that work for you, it helps because in any communication you have two fundamental tasks what to say and how to say it. Structure tells you how to say it. It’s like a recipe. I am a lousy cook. You do not want to eat anything that I cook. I’m a pretty good baker, but not a chef. I am only made better by using a recipe. By following a recipe, it gives you an order. Now, that doesn’t mean everything you say sounds the same. It just means that there’s a direction to it. My favorite structure in the whole world is three simple questions. What? So what now? What? What? So what now what? What is the information you’re conveying? So what is why is it important or relevant to the person you’re speaking to? And now what explains how somebody can use whatever you’ve said in the future? So if I’m giving an update in a meeting, let’s say my boss turns me and says, hey, Matt, give me an update.

Matt Abrahams 00:52:11  I didn’t plan to give an update. I didn’t know I was doing it. I don’t have a slide deck. Haven’t practice. I would just say, here’s what I’ve been doing. Here’s why it’s important to our goals and KPIs, and here’s what we’re going to do next. And some of the contingencies in the way I just answered. What? So what? Now what? And you can use this structure for lots of other communication situations. Answering questions, giving feedback, explaining things. But having a structure not only is like a recipe, it’s a roadmap. It gives you how to get from here and take my audience to there. So structure can be very powerful. I’m curious, you said it was very helpful for you. In what way did thinking about your communication through the lens of structure help you?

Eric Zimmer 00:52:50  I tend to be really comfortable in just improvising. When I’m asked a question like you talk in the book about, some people don’t like the Q&A after the Q&A after, it’s my favorite place.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:03  That’s awesome. Now, some of that is I’ve I’ve learned, like welcome questions that are hard because that shows me where I don’t understand something.

Matt Abrahams 00:53:12  Haha.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:12  Yeah, but I love it and I think I’m naturally really good at it. However, I do think that sometimes I get a little rambly or I circle back on a point that we’ve already hit. And I think structure could allow me to move through it in a clear way. That makes it a little bit more concise, a little briefer, and a little less circuitous.

Matt Abrahams 00:53:37  Yeah. And many people cite all of those reasons as why structure is helpful to them. And again, it comes down to a choice. There are times if I’m having a passionate conversation with a friend and deep thinking top on a deep thinking topic, I might not care if it’s structured package, but there are certain situations where it’s really important. So I liken it to to somebody who goes to the gym and just exercises one set of muscles. Right. You need to exercise everything because otherwise one you’ll be out of proportion and you can actually hurt yourself.

Matt Abrahams 00:54:09  You could be at a disadvantage of some muscles are really strong and others aren’t. So we need to be able to have a free flowing, less structured conversation communication. But we also need to know how to to make it clear, concise and responsive to the needs of the moment. And that’s why training these structures can be really helpful. And they’re myriad structures, you know, a problem solution benefit what so what now what past present, future comparison contrast conclusion. Many many structures. I don’t care which ones you use, just practice and be able to leverage a structure.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:44  All right. We’re going to do a little experiment here because you recommend this in your book. And I’m going to do it to you.

Matt Abrahams 00:54:49  Great.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:50  You recommend going to some Google random question generator.

Matt Abrahams 00:54:54  Yeah or AI. It does the same thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:56  And I’m going to read you the question. I want you to reply and then tell me the structure you used.

Speaker 5 00:55:01  Good.

Matt Abrahams 00:55:02  Absolutely. We’ll do so.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:03  What was your best birthday?

Matt Abrahams 00:55:05  When I was 11, my family took me to.

Matt Abrahams 00:55:10  I live in Northern California. We went to the Winchester Mystery House. Sarah Winchester built this house that she had lots of superstitions and lots of concerns. So the house is. It’s like a maze. Doors that open to nothing. Closets and things. And it was such an adventure and so much fun. And it’s something that I think all of us as that time of our lives when we’re, we’re 11, on the precipice of teenage years, curiosity, exploring a little bit of being devious. It was just absolutely excellent. So I encourage anybody who is planning a birthday for a kid at that age. Think about ways to to give them exploration, curiosity, and ultimately an experience that they can remember. So in that answer, I leveraged a different structure. It’s a structure I teach for, for Q&A skills. It’s called a dee dee answer. Detailed example describe the relevance or value. So I gave the answer Winchester Mystery House I gave detailed example. It was a house built by Sarah Winchester. Had all these doors that opened to nothing.

Matt Abrahams 00:56:21  Lots of exploration so you can almost see it in your minds. And then I explained the relevance. Why is this important? Well, young kids like to I did relevance at two levels. Young kids like to explore. And for parents who are planning birthdays, this is an interesting thing for you to think about. So answer detailed example. Describe the relevance. So if you were to ask me if you were to to pretend you were interviewing me for the job I have I teach at Stanford Business School, you might say, you know, tell me about your experience. I would say I have over 25 years of experience teaching. I’ve taught at the undergraduate graduate level as well as in the corporate world. What that means is I can tailor my material to be very specific to your student’s needs. That’s just another example of ATP that’s a little clearer. So you can take the same structure and answer two very different types of questions. I didn’t know the question you were going to ask me about the birthdays, but I knew how I was going to answer it and that made me feel very comfortable.

Matt Abrahams 00:57:18  Are there other ways I could have answered it? Sure. But in this moment I chose to use that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:23  So did you choose that that structure aid in advance, or do you get asked a question? And I mean, because that was lightning fast. So in that moment you did two things really quickly. One was you picked a structure. Yeah. And two, you have to have reflected on your best birthday, because if you ask me that question, you’re going to get about four minutes of silence while I try and see if I can remember any birthday.

Matt Abrahams 00:57:47  Well.

Speaker 5 00:57:47  So two things there to for that.

Matt Abrahams 00:57:48  So let me answer your question. Let me let me share a little bit more. So in that moment, as soon as you ask the question, I know several different structures and I thought to myself, AD makes a lot of sense here. Instead of thinking about the world of possibilities of my birthdays, and I’ve had some amazing birthdays. The first thing that came into my mind was that partly because I’m looking out of a window, that’s a it’s a nice day here.

Matt Abrahams 00:58:12  And I reminded me of the nice day that that was the weather. When we’re put on the spot, we need to just commit and go forward. The self-doubt, the rumination. Is this really the best birthday? Should I say something closer to my age today? What does it mean when I talk about being 11? You know, so if I do all that, I’m I’m paralyzed. Instead, I just made a commitment. 11 year old Winchester Mystery House ad. And then I can go. If it doesn’t go well, take two. I can share with you my 50th birthday. That was a lot of fun to write. So it’s about making a choice and having the tools at the ready with whatever choice you make.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:51  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:11  It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at once. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. One you feed net book. So if you are going to leave people who are listening to this with one core idea, what would that be?

Speaker 5 00:59:43  I’m going to cheat.

Matt Abrahams 00:59:44  I’m going to give you two one core ideas at the highest level, we can all get better at our communication. Many people feel disempowered from their communication. They’ve had things not go well. They just feel nervous. And they feel like that. I just I’m not a good communicator and I know lots of people like that. I have worked with hundreds, thousands of people by now and helped people improve communication. We can all hone in development, so at the highest level you can always improve your communication. It takes time. It takes effort at a very practical, tactical level.

Matt Abrahams 01:00:16  When you are communicating, remind yourself you are in service of your audience. It is not about you, it is about them. Everything we have talked about have been tools to help you better serve your audience. Managing anxiety makes it less awkward for the person I’m communicating to. Listening. Make sure I am responsive to their needs. Having a structure means I package the message in a way they can better distill and remember it. So being in service of your audience is essential. That’s what communication is all about. So those would be my two. One critical thing to take away.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:51  Wonderful. Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining us on the show. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and I got a lot of benefit out of the book, and I think I’m a pretty good communicator. As you said, there’s always more to learn. Thank you.

Matt Abrahams 01:01:03  Absolutely, Eric, thank you. And thank you for the good work you do, the information you bring in, the way in which you do it is so helpful.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:09  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Vir Das 00:00:00  Early on in your career, or at least in your life. You’re like, what do people want to hear, you know? And can I meander between what people want to hear and ever so slightly pivot into what I want to say? And then you get to this point and you’re like, hey, maybe I’ll just say everything I want to say and find out if people want to hear it. And maybe they won’t, by the way, but can I just say everything that’s inside me for once?

Chris Forbes 00:00:29  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. our actions matter.

Chris Forbes 00:01:01  It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:14  There’s a way of moving through life where we’re always looking at what’s next, the next idea, the next project, the next version of yourself. I know that mode really well. And in this conversation, Veer Dass, comedian and author of The Outsider, talks about how hard it is to actually stop and recognize what you’ve already done. At one point, someone told him he needed to celebrate something he accomplished five years ago because he never did. And that really makes sense to me. We talk about that tension between ambition and appreciation, what it’s like to live with a mind that keeps generating ideas, whether you want it to or not, and how easy it is to miss your own life while you’re building it. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, veer. Welcome to the show.

Vir Das 00:01:59  Hi.

Vir Das 00:02:00  Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:02  Yeah. I’m really excited to talk with you about your book, which is called The Outsider a memoir for misfits. And I also pulled some things from your most recent Netflix special, although you have, I believe, two others that I now get to watch. So thanks for joining us.

Vir Das 00:02:18  I’m very excited to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:20  So we’ll get into the memoir and some of your comedy in a moment, but we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:52  So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Vir Das 00:02:58  I think for me, both wolves definitely exist in my life, and I think the meaning of life is to kind of walk through it with both of those wolves embraced with love and not judging each other, so that hopefully, at the end of a life you can wind up the good wolf. But I think what makes the good wolf the good wolf is to acknowledge the bad wolf, embrace it, and give it love. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:25  Yes. Beautiful. I want to start with where you start the book. In the acknowledgement, you say this book is about someone in the middle of their life with no answers, just more questions. The book is for fellow wanderers, complete vagabonds, utter idiots, committed clowns and lonely people looking to belong. Always looking, never knowing. That is such a great intro that I immediately resonated with. Although my experiences are very different than your experience.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:52  Is that feeling of never quite fitting. Somewhere is been pervasive for me in my life for sure. Talk to me about for you that feeling of never quite fitting for people who don’t know you. Why is it that you feel like you’ve never quite found the place that you belong?

Vir Das 00:04:12  Well, you know, for some reason and much of it am I doing. And much of it my upbringing, which was not my doing, I found myself seeing more of the world and being led into more worlds than anybody I’ve ever met, you know. And I can explain that I was born in India, in a town called Dehradun, but when I was eight months old, I was moved to Lagos, Nigeria. you know, in Africa in the 80s, which is a wild trip of a place to grow up, you know, and grew up essentially in Africa until I was nine years old and then wound up in a preppy boarding school in the north of India, in the hills. And from there I wound up getting kicked out and sent to Delhi Public School, where I was the kid from boarding school and wound up in Delhi University and saw an American movie about American college and kind of said, hey, I want to kind of drink from that fountain.

Vir Das 00:05:06  And wound up from New Delhi, which is one of the most populated places in the world, to Galesburg, Illinois population, you know, 21,000. The Mecca of civilization as we know it. And yeah, yeah, wound up from Galesburg going to Montgomery, Alabama to study Shakespeare, to be an actor, and then wound up being in 14 Bollywood movies from there in, in the bustling metropolis of Mumbai to then kind of crashing and burning in Bollywood a little bit and finding myself on a flight to Los Angeles to do Conan O’Brien and starting in America career. And it’s been this conflict of cultural dissonance where I’ve been able to be in all of these worlds. So for some, somehow I’ve found myself in Hollywood and in Bollywood and in rock music and in comedy and, you know, I’ve been in all of these bubbles, but had to leave all of them before the bubble took too much from me, but also before I could fully settle in the bubble. So I kind of feel like this kid who got invited to the coolest party in the world.

Vir Das 00:06:10  Except it’s nine parties. And the broad feeling when you get invited to the coolest party in the world is, jeez, what am I doing at this party? And how did I get in the door? And am I wearing the right thing? And should I talk to people, should I not? Can they smell the fear inside me? And, I suspect that’s the broader feeling that people share across the world, rather than belonging at the party or feeling like the life of the party. Yeah. And so I wanted to write a book about that feeling.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:36  You mentioned being at all these cool parties. I think you’re still in a pretty cool party, it seems like. Right. You’re a stand up comedian. You’re doing well. you mentioned the fear, right? You end up in these parties and you’re afraid I don’t. I don’t really belong here. What’s that experience like for you today?

Vir Das 00:06:52  It’s still the same. You know, I’m doing five things right now, which are the first things I’ve ever done.

Vir Das 00:06:58  I’m off Broadway for the first time. And so I’m. I’m, you know, at the Lincoln Center Theater. But it’s an audience that has no idea who I am. And watch is Ragtime on Friday and Les Miz on Thursday and now has to, you know, watch this tiny Indian guy tell jokes about Bollywood. You know, are they going to relate? Are they going to embrace it? You know, it’s weird to do a show that tells Americans about India and Indians about America. So it’s terrifying to go there every day. standup is a pretty isolated art form. You know, you’re by yourself. But then suddenly when you enter the Broadway world, you’re you’re collaborating in, there are directors and there are producers and there is there are tastemakers, quote unquote. That’s scary. I’ve never written a book before, you know, and so I have no idea if it’s if it’s shit or if it’s good, you know it’s good. We’ll find it’s good. Thank you. So we’ll find out.

Vir Das 00:07:56  And I just directed my first movie. So it is terrifying to walk into these places when arguably one could rest on a few laurels and and play to one’s crowd. And I think had you had an upbringing of a little more belonging, you’d be like, all right, I’m sad. I know my people, I know where I am, I’m happy where I’m at, and we’ll just do this. You know, in my 40s, this is a comfortable place to do, to, to be. But I’m kind of jumping into various deep ends. And the only thing I know to console myself is, all right, take it or leave it. I know who I am. Hey, this is me. Yeah, and it’s either going to work for you or not work for you, but I don’t know how to do anything else.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:42  When did you start to get that sense? Like, this is me, right? Because one of the things that happens when we, when we jump between lots of different circumstances is to a certain degree.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:52  We’re all mildly chameleons, right? We we adjust a little bit to the place we are. And maybe with age we, we start to do that. But when did you start to feel like, okay, this is me and you know, I’ll be appropriate to the situations, but I’ll still be clearly me. I know who I am.

Vir Das 00:09:13  I think it’s an accumulation not of knowing or some sort of enlightenment. I think it’s an accumulation of the exhaustion of trying to not be you. You know, at some point you’re just like, oh my God, I’m tired of pretending. You know what I mean? I’m 46 and I’m like, this is, you know, I’m not doing this. Do you know how they say about your 40s, where you meet certain people and you’re like, yeah, we’re not going to be friends. and yes, you know, and it is too late for us to, to find common ground, etc., etc.. And I think I’m there. I’m just like, yeah, this.

Vir Das 00:09:48  It looks like I’m this guy for the next 20 years. However long this career has left on it. So I think it’s just the exhaustion of trying to fit into various rooms rather than, oh, I figured out who I am. I think I have more than anything else. I figured out who I’m not. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:03  That’s a great way of saying it. I’ve been marveling at friendship a little bit lately. Like just how how it’s so it’s kind of just unpredictable. Like, you meet people and some people, you just there’s a connection and you connect with, and then there’s other people that you meet that you like that might be fine, but there’s you just know, like, we’re not going to be friends. And then of course, there’s the people that from the minute you meet them, you’re like, well, we’re not going to be friends. I just find it such a mysterious process, this process of who, we sync with on on that level, I.

Vir Das 00:10:39  I’ve a theory of friendships, which is I have to have seen your bedroom.

Vir Das 00:10:44  I have to have had a meal on a on a piece of furniture that you normally sit on, and that’s okay. And I have to have met one of your parents. I think that’s my theory of friendship.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:57  Okay.

Vir Das 00:10:57  Have I met your dad or your mom? You know, have you come over to my house and sat in my couch and on my armchair and I’m like, oh, no, that’s fine. Yeah. You sit there. Yeah. You know. And have we eaten together? You know what I mean? That’s really important. Like, have I seen you, with a mouthful of steak and or, you know, roti trying to make a point animatedly. That’s friendship to me, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:11:25  Yep, yep. That’s a great way to think about how far into your life or someone else’s life you have to go for it to be friendship. And it’s interesting because I’ve studied a lot about how lonely people are today, and the study seemed to show that it just takes a long time for somebody to become a really good friend.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:46  It’s to the point that you’re saying by the time somebody in your house has met your parents and you shared a meal at your house or their house, there’s probably been some amount of interaction getting to that place that that allowed it to develop over time to the point you’re like, okay, next step. It’s similar to dating in a way. You start out at one place and you end up at a very different place.

Vir Das 00:12:09  I mean, I have had zero success at dating. I’m arguably the worst date in the world. I’m fraught with anxiety on a date, but, yeah. And I do think a really good friend has seen you through various versions of you. The post-breakup. Oh, woe is me self-pity. You know, talking about your ex for two years, version of you, the. Hey, I’m doing so. Well, I want to tell you all about this career that you don’t care about. Version or the, you’re much further ahead of me in life, but I’m happy for you version.

Vir Das 00:12:46  And I just want to come over right now because I need to see a face that I know, and I don’t want to take an appointment to see that face version as well. Like, that’s a good friend, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:12:57  Yeah, yeah. You frame the book as a search, not a success story. Now that you’ve documented that search, what do you feel like you’re searching for today? And has the nature of the search itself changed?

Vir Das 00:13:11  Definitely. I think it’s one thing to find a voice, and then it’s another thing to own that voice and scare yourself to see what that voice can accomplish. You know, to me, it’s it’s the equivalent of building a car and building an engine and then getting out on the freeway. Or, you know, you learn opera for a while, and then you want to try and hit the high note. And so to me, the search is, what can I do that scares the ever living daylights out of me on a daily basis? And let’s just do that for a little bit of time.

Vir Das 00:13:43  So being in New York right now is part of it, and testing it on brand new audiences is part of it. But also kind of going, you know, early on in your career or at least in your life, you’re like, what do people want to hear? You know? And can I meander between what people want to hear and ever so slightly pivot into what I want to say? And then you get to this point and you’re like, hey, maybe I’ll just say everything I want to say and find out if people want to hear it. And maybe they won’t, by the way, but can I just say everything that’s inside me for once, you know, and that process is is scary to confront.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:20  Yeah. You say in your recent standup special that freedom is not constantly thinking about whether you can speak. You just speak.

Vir Das 00:14:28  Yeah. You just speak.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:52  Do you have another line that says, don’t think about what you say and it will get you into trouble. And when you are in trouble, do not think about what you say and it will get you out of trouble.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:01  You tell a great story about you sort of not thinking about what to say to an Indian policeman. One day you want to share that story with us.

Vir Das 00:15:11  The context of the story is I did a speech at the Kennedy Center a few years ago, and it was called The Two Indias, and it got 35 million views and offended a lot of people and ended up getting me 14 police cases for everything from defamation to sedition, etc., etc. so for a long period of time, the police were not my friend. And you know, process can end up being punishment a little bit in these situations where you spend your life going to police stations and doing paperwork and fighting these investigations. And somebody sent me a notice for IP repetition. Right. And if you live where I live, you know that that’s not really a notice for IP repetition. It’s something larger. And so you go in and this policeman asks me to surrender my passport. And before I did I actually explained joke structure to the Mumbai police, ended up effectively doing like a half an hour.

Vir Das 00:16:07  One man open mic to a policeman in a Mumbai police station until he finally ended it by going, are you going to do jokes about me? Is this going to be in your routine? And I was like, well, absolutely, if you let me. And then I kind of told him what joke I would do about him, and I’m 95% sure he let me go because he wanted to see how the joke about him would land in the world. so, you know, what I found is policemen have a wonderful sense of humor.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:36  How did it land?

Vir Das 00:16:37  It landed pretty well. It was in the Netflix special. So you know all’s well that ends well. So yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:42  Yes. There’s also an incident of you being on a scooter on acid.

Vir Das 00:16:47  Yeah, yeah. In Delhi I was in.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:50  Delhi, okay.

Vir Das 00:16:51  I think I was 18 years old. And you know, this is the first time I did acid and I saw a gigantic cat, a brown cat with light shooting out of a massive one eye.

Vir Das 00:17:03  It looked like a cyclops at a traffic light. And then when we got closer, the cat morphed into a Delhi policeman. Oh, who got on his motorcycle? Because I meowed at him. Which is not a something I would recommend 18 year olds do at a traffic light to a policeman. And he got on his scooter and followed us for two kilometers and beat the ever loving daylights out of us. Now it is one thing to be beaten by a policeman. That’s par for the course, but to do it on acid, is part traumatic, part pretty magical experience, you know what I mean? Because you’re basically dodging punches and colors at the same time. so, I think it was, you know, more enjoyable for me than it was for him. He looked more exhausted than I did at the end of the meeting.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:47  And then you, found out that the guy driving the scooter only had a learner’s permit.

Vir Das 00:17:53  Permit, and I had a learner’s permit as well. And, I really tried to convince this policeman.

Vir Das 00:17:58  I was like, if we put two learner’s permits together, they become a full license, like Captain Planet. All of a sudden, you know, they combine into a more powerful being. But, you know, he was not buying it. I was on it.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:09  So let’s talk about humor. I’ve always thought of humor as a sort of almost a spiritual virtue. Right. When you when people list off the virtues, I’ve always felt like it should be on the list. And you say early on in the book, laughter has truly saved my life. Give me a couple examples of when you started to realize how important laughter was to you.

Vir Das 00:18:32  Well, you know, I think comedians are never the life of the party where the we’re kind of the the ass in the in the corner judging the life of the party, you know what I mean? And I feel like comedians either end up as the the loser kid in school or the coolest kid in school, and I find that the loser kid in school makes the better comedian, which was definitely me.

Vir Das 00:18:53  But I do remember, you know, in Indian boarding school, sometimes you’d get beaten with hockey sticks. It was just a corporal punishment thing. So you’d go and get like a hockey stick on your on your bum, like a caning kind of a thing, And I remember once just kind of going through the process and, I wouldn’t shut up, you know, and people around me were laughing because I wasn’t the only one being punished. But I keep looking at my prefect going. Does this make you feel better? Are you tired? Do you feel like more of a man? Etc., etc. and my friends were just like, if you just shut up, you’ll get one hockey stick instead of 12. But it was something undeniable. I felt where I’m like, oh, you can beat me as much as you like, but you’ll never win because I have the laugh, you know, that served me pretty well. I think everybody will remember their trauma. They’ll remember their tough times. But you’ll remember a good laugh, you know, for the rest of your life, I do believe.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:44  Yeah. In this special you are talking about. Well, I’m just going to give you the line and you can put it in context. You say happiness watched is greater than happiness lived.

Vir Das 00:19:57  Yeah. You know, the bit is happiness watched is greater than happiness lived. I wish I could put every audience member on stage so that they could see it. Like I see it and feel it like I feel it. Because then you would understand why people like stand up comedy. No one is watching the comedian. They are listening to the audience to laugh, to leave their body because laughter when yelled joy when projected, not protected is hope. People with power understand that the scariest noise to them is not the words that come out of my mouth, it is the noise that comes out of the audience’s mouth. You know, comedians just say words. The audience tells the truth. And this is what I don’t understand. Why is no one arresting the audience? It’s basically their fault. But I do believe that.

Vir Das 00:20:42  I believe that it’s very easy to demonize the audience and to lionize the artist. And if you really look at it in the right perspective, if you’ve ever seen 9000 people send you a laugh and taken the time to look in their eyes, you realize what a powerful thing that is and how much of the pedestal the audience deserves, as opposed to the artist.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:02  And do you think that is the thing that draws you to making jokes? Is it? Is that the thing? The laughter that’s received?

Vir Das 00:21:11  It is a moment in the show where I feel like if I do my job correctly, I can send you home flying on a cloud. You know, there’s a moment where you’ll sit back in the show and go, oh, wow, I’m glad I Uber. I’m glad I got a babysitter. I’m glad I bought these tickets three months in advance. And this was a good decision. And if I can get you to that. Man, that’s magic in that room. You know, that’s a a hell of an expectation to put on yourself.

Vir Das 00:21:42  But it’s also a hell of a promise to put out there in the world saying, I will unapologetically do everything I can to send you home flying on a goddamn cloud, you know? So I think that’s it. That’s when my art forms at its best.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:55  A couple of minutes ago, you mentioned you’re doing a lot of things that are scary, and that that’s kind of a a way you approach things like, how can I find the scariest thing to go do? Yeah, man. What do you think is driving that or what do you think is pushing that or because yeah, you are you are continuing to really do different things when you’ve gotten pretty good at one thing, why do you think you’re pushed in that direction, or is it not feel like a push? Maybe you feel drawn.

Vir Das 00:22:24  Oh no, it definitely feels like a push. But, I mean, who knows? Ego, ambition. Narcissism. and or, a desperate search for belonging. But I do think I. I’ve been raised all over the world.

Vir Das 00:22:41  I’ve seen the entire world three times. It’s a crazy story. Who the hell gets to say that? You know. and so it feels limiting to take this global upbringing and limit it to one place. to say it feels like, a waste of my story to limit it when I’ve. I’ve had been so privileged to have this story, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:03  So are you talking about ambition or ego? Does this mean that you live in a state of being sort of perpetually dissatisfied, one in the next thing or what’s that like? I mean, I’m always curious about that. Sort of like we have a desire to improve, to push forward in a new ground. And then there’s also like, how do I actually appreciate the things that I do have in my life, and I find that an interesting challenge in ambitious people.

Vir Das 00:23:31  I think it’s the biggest challenge of my life is I’m always what’s next? And I’m, you know, I’m in one place thinking about where I’m headed next. And yeah, something I’m trying to work on is, you know, I remember a mental health professional telling me a few years ago, she’s like, you literally need to go back into your last decade and celebrate everything you did.

Vir Das 00:23:52  So I want you to have a piece of cake today because you sold out Carnegie Hall five years ago and didn’t celebrate. You know, and yeah, validate for yourself the things you’ve done in the places you’ve been. And I would love to pretend I’m better that than I am, but I’m not working on it, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:24:12  Yeah. Yeah. I just was talking with a woman about gratefulness and gratitude, and we were talking about this idea of these former versions of ourselves. Would be so thrilled with where we are. Right? That person would be like, oh my God. Like, what if I just had that? I would be happy forever, right? Yeah. And and she had a line that I really loved. I thought about this. And I mean, I don’t think any of us can put this stuff into anything near perfect practice. But she said, imagine an exercise where you wake up tomorrow only with the things that you are grateful for today. And that’s a fascinating sort of way to frame, you know, frame life.

Vir Das 00:24:57  I mean, that is wholly terrifying and inspiring at the same time. Do you know what I mean?

Eric Zimmer 00:25:04  Yes, 100%. 100%. Yeah, yeah.

Vir Das 00:25:07  Yep. I’m not sure what I would do with that if I just woke up with the things that I would. Grateful, was grateful for today. It would be my wife and my two dogs. And I think that would be. That would be enough. I would still wake up with 18 ideas in my head every morning and drive myself insane, because those ideas had nowhere to go. You know. Yeah. So that coping with that, I do not know how I would do, but, those three things. And I think I’d be pretty sorted. Yeah. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:35  Well, and I think that the fact that your brain does that is something to be grateful for also. I mean, at times it feels I mean, it feels crazy making. Have a brain that’s always kind of what’s next, what’s next, what’s out there.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:49  But it’s also kind of great to have a brain that does that, you know, that’s capable of doing that, that is enthused enough about anything to want to do that. That’s a gift.

Vir Das 00:25:59  I think so. And it also makes you empathize with people who have that and don’t have open ears yet. You know, in terms of I think success is the amount of time that passes between you having an idea and somebody opening their ear to that idea. You know, I’ve woken up with 20 ideas in my head every day since I was 18 years old, and it’s taken me till my 40s to get that time down to where people are listening. But if there’s people who are listening to this who are 27 or 28 and having ideas, you know, I empathize. Don’t stop listening to those ideas, because at some point people will start listening to those ideas. Like, hold on to that stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:58  You mentioned dogs, and the most moving chapter in the book for me is, and I imagine you probably heard this from other people, is about your dog Winston at some point.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:11  Watson.

Vir Das 00:27:12  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:12  Yeah. You just wrote so beautifully about the experience of having and loving a dog, and I just would like to read a couple lines, Please, you say if you truly want to get to know me, you have to know Watson. I realize right in an entire chapter devoted to a dog might seem unusual, but this dog is and was the best part of me. If there was one being on earth around whom I felt totally, completely, and utterly myself, this damn dog, was it. Caring for him and losing him is the toughest thing I’ve ever gone through.

Vir Das 00:27:44  Yeah. For sure. And you know, I’ve lost people. You know, I’ve lost people that I loved. But a dog truly does see the best version of you, you know, the most innocent, pure version of you. They don’t understand you for anything but the love that they give you and how you respond. The dog doesn’t know about jokes. It doesn’t know about Carnegie Hall. It doesn’t know about your podcast.

Vir Das 00:28:06  It doesn’t know about your finances or your SUV or anything like that. It just knows that you danced around the room a little bit when you got home, and you made a high pitched noise and you rolled around on the floor, and we are at our most childlike and innocent in the presence of a dog or a cat or, you know, or a pet. I also think what I love about having a dog is you’re in charge of a whole life. Yeah. You don’t get that with anything else. Hopefully, you know, you don’t get that with your child. You will. Your child will outlive you. You don’t get that with your grandparents or your parents. You will outlive them. But here, from the second they breathe into the the second, the last time they breathe out, it’s you. Yeah. You know. And for you. So what a privilege that is. You know, you you will never get that anywhere else in your life.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:54  Yeah, I was reflecting on that.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:56  We lost a dog about four months ago, and it’s it’s for me. It’s the last in a string of dogs. I’m Douglas for the first time in, I don’t know, 20 years, maybe. Oh, wow. Wow. Because I just we just had, like, you know, I had one. Then I had a second, then I had a third. And there was just a lineage of them, which is amazing. And you about every year and a half I’ve lost one. It’s been sort of this ongoing process. So I’m sort of Douglas, but I was reflecting on that exactly what you said, this idea that you kind of have to play God for that dog and it’s really you do it’s really hard. And you mentioned, you know, Watson had health challenges and our dog Lola near the end, same thing you mentioned nebulizer your dog for breathing. I didn’t know anybody else till now that ever did that like we did. We thought we were like were the only people in the world who possibly are nebulizer a dog, but apparently not.

Vir Das 00:29:52  Yeah. No, it’s a thing and it’s a it’s a privilege. You know, if he couldn’t walk by the end, he was, you know, incontinent. By the end, he was, nebulizer three times a day. He had acupressure and, you know, bad limbs and, you know, you you carry him to the bathroom and you put on some nice music, and you give him a warm bath, and you nebulizer him, and it’s really I’m very grateful for that time and the way he he looked at me in that time. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:24  Yeah. Was he your first dog?

Vir Das 00:30:26  He was our first dog. Yes. For sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:27  Yeah. Yeah. I grew up not liking dogs. Oh, really? Probably. Yeah. I’d been bitten by one. I just didn’t like them. I didn’t want to be around them. And then my best friend, who’s also the editor of the show, had a dog, and I said, dude, I’m like, you know, you’re I like your dog.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:42  She’s she’s good, you know? And he called me one day and said, I have something for you. And I came over and I see the twin of that dog sitting right there. He’s like, I got you this. I was like, what? And it changed my life. It changed.

Vir Das 00:30:55  How long was it before you were completely converted? How long was.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:59  That? In a month, probably. Yeah. I mean, it did not take long and it opened me to a dimension of love I just didn’t understand before then, you know? Yeah, I had a child at that point. And I’m not saying I love my dog more than my child. It just was something. It’s different. There’s an uncomplicated nature to animals that I think is part of what makes losing them so painful. Because the grief is just with humans. It’s complicated. It’s always complicated. With a dog, there’s nothing to distract you from just the loss because the relationship had no complication. And I love the way that you talk about grief.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:36  You say the only way I know I can describe grief is an inability to breathe. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to get enough air in your lungs. It’s because there’s less space in there now. It’s because someone or something that used to live outside you now lives in you. That is heart stopping. Beautiful.

Vir Das 00:31:56  Thank you. I it’s how I feel, and I imagine how everybody who’s dealing with some sort of grief feels like, you know, Watson is under my chest bone right now. You know, until I see him again, you know, that’s how I feel.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:10  Yeah, yeah. It’s such a good description of grief because I think that does sort of mirror my experience of it. It does feel kind of hard to breathe. yeah. Also feels like even more than just breathing. But it’s like a crowded space inside. Like when grief or one of my dogs comes up. It’s sort of. It just takes over everything. I guess that is.

Vir Das 00:32:31  It’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:32  That is the nature of grief.

Vir Das 00:32:34  Yeah. Yeah, for sure, for sure. The strange thing I found, though, is, you know, and not in a morbid kind of way. I very much love life, and I intend to live a long life. But I’m no longer afraid of death. Do you know what I mean? I’ll give you an example. I’m. I don’t like turbulence on an airplane. I’m a bad flyer. And when there’s bad turbulence, I’m like, oh, right, this plane is crashing and I’m dying. is, always in my head. And until Watson passed, it was terrifying. And now he’s passed. And if I ever hit turbulence, I’m like, all right, maybe this plane crashes and I’ll go hang with Watson for a bit, you know? so it’s it’s not terrifying anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:14  Yeah. So you have three dogs now? Did you say.

Vir Das 00:33:16  I have two dogs? They’re called stupid.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:18  Dogs. Okay.

Vir Das 00:33:18  So the. Yeah. And the.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:20  Three dogs.

Vir Das 00:33:20  Born into our house? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:22  Yeah. And they’re very different than. Than Watson. You said they’re kind of street dogs. They they know how to take care of themselves.

Vir Das 00:33:28  They’re self resilient. They’re hardy. They’re reliant. But they’re also beautiful in that they they jumped into a house with complete strangers with blind trust, you know, and, to watch them at age five and ten, learn how to play and learn how to sleep in a bed and learn how to. It’s a lovely journey. You know what I mean? Like, Lucy had been abandoned during the pandemic. And, you know, the first time she came to our house, she, you know, was very skittish. And I remember the first time she slept through the night, she slept for four days. Because I think after three years, she finally knew she was safe. I was strangely proud of that. Of course, to watch her sleep for four days. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:13  It’s interesting to see almost the way we domesticated wolves happening on a mini scale in your home, right? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:21  Like, you know, taking these creatures that are that are wild and slowly they become very different. I’m in Lisbon right now. I normally live in Ohio, in the US, but I’m in Lisbon right now, and we’re house and dog sitting. So I am back around dog energy and just am loving it. It’s just so, so good, so good. It is. A lot of the latest special is about you. Six weeks before you were going to do the special Losing Your Voice. Yeah, yeah. And I’d love for you to share a little bit about that. But I also want to hear a little bit about how you’re six weeks from a special. So I’m assuming you think you know what the special is about. Maybe you don’t at that point, but if you did, you suddenly improvised very quickly to make the special to some degree, about what was happening right now. Just walk me through whatever aspect of that process you’d like to.

Vir Das 00:35:16  Well, you know, I do think a comedy special is nothing but a snapshot into who the comedian is at that moment in time.

Vir Das 00:35:23  So it’s got to be authentic to the experience. And I woke up without a voice and vocal nodules, and I was told it would be four months before I could speak properly again. And I had sold 12,000 tickets in a massive arena out. And, you know, immediately you spend six weeks in silence in your head and you will really discover who you are, and it will invalidate a lot of the things that you’ve done so far. You know, so I was like, oh, I’ve been so calculated and so obsessed with the wording of everything. And now that I don’t have the voice, I kind of just want to free talk. And that became the special to say, oh, I can speak again. I’m going to say everything in my head as opposed to obsessing about what not to say. And it was strangely kind of set me free. There’s an energy to this special that none of the other specials have, which is just a guy at some level winging it and, not knowing where he’s going to land.

Vir Das 00:36:21  Yeah. Which I would never have had the courage to do. Had I not lost my voice.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:25  I love this special because it shows you at different levels of success, I guess, for lack of a better word. Right? In Mumbai, huge crowd. London. Pretty good crowd. Us. Yeah, yeah. Not so much, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s just fascinating to see you operate on those different levels. And it’s always so fun for me. There’s a band equivalent of that and it’s when a band is really big somewhere else. Yeah, but not in the States. And you get to see this band that is like super pro, super good in like this small space. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s just amazing when it happens. And it was so great to see that sort of happening with you. to see you operating at these different scales. Do you approach the work any differently? You know, of small scale to to stadium scale?

Vir Das 00:37:21  no, because it would feel authentic, inauthentic.

Vir Das 00:37:25  You know, sometimes I feel like there is a version of me I could become that would, track way better in the States. For instance, you know, if I talked about 5 or 6 palatable Indian things that you knew about Indians, and I kind of gave you the the Indian that you knew that cater to your gaze. But I just don’t want to do that. And if that means that I play a smaller room, that’s worth it to me because I get to be authentic. Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah. I’m not sure I would last very long doing that, playing the, the Indian that Americans see as opposed to the Indian who just showed up from India. Yeah. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:01  I think it’s very hard to succeed at any game that you don’t feel like playing. Yeah, yeah. You know.

Vir Das 00:38:06  For sure. That’s very well put.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:08  It feels lousy. And I don’t think you. I don’t think you do well, because you don’t want to do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:14  And I mean, maybe it works for some people, but I think about that often. The things that, like I’m willing to do and not willing to do.

Vir Das 00:38:22  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:22  For for success in the special, you have a sympathy and an empathy discussion. Walk me through to you kind of what those terms mean and why it felt important for you to talk about them.

Vir Das 00:38:36  Well, you know, I’d gotten into some trouble back home, and I remember talking to a reporter in the States and they were like, oh my God, are you going to get arrested again? And what are the investigations? And can I talk to the police? And I was like, sure, but should we talk about my perspective and my humor a little bit in my culture a little bit. And it felt and I don’t mean this abrasive, but it felt a little bit like they wanted to write an oppression story. Yeah, yeah. To make their readers feel a little bit better about where they lived. Right. And I was like, I don’t think I want to be the poster boy for for eastern oppression.

Vir Das 00:39:10  You know? And they were like, you know, our readers will sympathize. And I’m like, I. But my limited audience will empathize, you know? And the difference between sympathy and empathy is sympathy is a porn video that you watch for your pleasure. Empathy is an orgy that you enjoy with other people. You know what I mean? Like, you just kind of. It’s happening to all of you. So I would much rather get empathy from five people than sympathy from 9000.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:35  So I don’t know all the details about what you said. Was it it the Kennedy Center when it.

Vir Das 00:39:41  Was at the Kennedy Center?

Eric Zimmer 00:39:42  Yes. But I don’t know all the details about what you said, but it pissed off half of India pretty seriously. Did you know it was going to?

Vir Das 00:39:50  Absolutely not. No, I did not. And I don’t think you will. You’ll ever know, by the way, I don’t think you can predict the thing that’s going to go viral and why it’s part of a certain zeitgeist.

Vir Das 00:39:59  And, you know, it’s one of many videos on my YouTube channel that were in that vein, and I don’t know why that one went where it went, but your best bet is to turn it into jokes. I have this beautiful job that turns, you know, bullshit into laughs and laughs, into smiling faces and smiling faces into relationships and, you know, and that into Netflix specials, etc., etc. it’s alchemy, you know? So, would I do it again with a little more editing? Yeah, sure. I would have, I would have made sure it’s a better piece, you know, comedically. Yeah. But yeah, I never saw it coming. I was blindsided completely.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:39  Wow. I mean, it sounds like it was a really big deal. I mean, you were getting death threats. You were, you know, in trouble with the police. I was kind of amazed to see, like. Like you said, that’s like a that’s a career turn you just don’t see coming.

Vir Das 00:40:53  But, you know, it’s the equivalent of. I don’t know if Jimmy Kimmel saw what was going to happen to him coming that, that morning. You know what I mean?

Eric Zimmer 00:41:00  Oh, yeah.

Vir Das 00:41:01  Yeah. Oh, Stephen Colbert, it’s just the world is really changing and you got to kind of roll with it. But I think any other job would have been a much harder comeback than comedy. Comedy really allows you to make light of it really fast and turn it into fun, really fast. You know, a rock star gets canceled. That’s a while before you can you can come back. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:23  Interestingly, you talk a lot about America at different points in the book, and you talk about American comedy, you know, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, but you also talk about Bill Cosby. Yeah, you certainly have a point where many of us who had some relationship with Bill Cosby’s comedy find out like, oh shit, how do you work with that idea of separating the artist from the art? And do you feel like it’s important to do so? Or do you feel like it’s impossible to do so, or.

Vir Das 00:41:55  I don’t know. It varies for me. Like with different artists. I can’t watch Cosby’s stuff anymore because the basis of comedy is authenticity, you know? And so I know that that’s an inauthentic individual. But for some reason, I can listen to Michael Jackson’s early work because it’s music and it’s not comedy, you know? Yeah. and, and perhaps there’s an underlying hypocrisy to that, but I don’t think a blanket rule, I think the art form matters a lot. Like, I, you know, I can’t watch a Woody Allen movie, I can’t watch. I don’t like watching Bill Cosby because I can see the the shitty sausage behind the the hot dog being made. You know what I mean? Yeah, but, man, I can listen to a piece of Beethoven or Mozart, even though I know they were severely problematic individuals. I can look at a Picasso even though I know that was, a horrible man. So, I don’t know, it’s weird. I haven’t quite figured it out yet.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:51  Yeah. As you’re saying that, I’m thinking a little bit about, like, Michael Jackson to me, never felt like he was Talking about things that were really important to Michael Jackson, right? Like, it was just it was all about the entertainment and the music. Whereas a comedian, it’s a much more personal thing. Right. For sure, if a comedian is sharing about their life and I and I think that’s I think that’s the case. I also have found the same thing with artists who mean more to me. It’s harder. Yeah. It is. Yeah, right. It’s harder because their music, I thought, was about something and about a person. And now I find out that that’s not exactly the person. And that feels harder to me, the particularly the closer I am to it.

Vir Das 00:43:37  For sure. And I also think the expectation of a comedian is to put yourself out there so much that I feel better about myself as an audience member. And then when I, when I figure that you haven’t put yourself out there really at all, I feel that now I feel betrayed, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:43:56  Yeah, that makes sense.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:57  I’ve told this story on the show before, but it’s one of the most confusing stories of my life. You mentioned being an escape artist, right? You were always trying to escape school. Well, I wasn’t in boarding school, but my mission, my first two years of high school was to never go. Yeah. And so I was constantly engineering schemes and all that and wasn’t doing well. And I basically got kicked out of my high school and was sent to this small alternative school. And there was a teacher there who turned my my whole way of being around and my whole understanding of myself around. And I mean, so far as I went to spend like a summer with him at his place out in Seattle and comes out 20 years later, some of the kids that spent time with him, he was sexually abusing. Yeah, it wasn’t me. And it’s just so confusing to be like, this guy was an unquestioned good in my life, and an absolute horror ruined these other people’s lives. And I just think that’s so fascinating to be in that space with these questions that just don’t have simple answers.

Vir Das 00:44:58  I mean, isn’t the experience of adulting at some level discovering that two things can be true at the same time and three things can be true at the same time? It’s heartbreaking. You know what I mean?

Eric Zimmer 00:45:07  The yeah.

Vir Das 00:45:08  Yeah to children, one thing is true or not true. And sometimes I wonder if that’s a better way to live life. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:16  It’s simpler.

Vir Das 00:45:17  Yeah, it is. It is for sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:19  And I think if you try and live that way as an adult, it’s probably not like you said, you’re not an adult. If you’re not able to start to see the complexity and the nuance in things. Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s part of the reason great comedy is great comedy is it’s it’s pointing out all those inconsistencies that we all kind of have to wrestle with. And, and it’s just sometimes it’s just good to laugh at them.

Vir Das 00:45:43  I agree. And I also think great comedy, you know, the best kind of comedy makes you reflect three days after you saw it.

Vir Das 00:45:51  It makes you laugh in the moment, but then three days later you’re like, Wow, that was something and I didn’t quite get it then. Like right now, the the right and the left in America are sharing George Carlin clips. That’s insane. Right? But, you know, with the same agenda. But I bet you in the, in the moment people just like this man’s hilarious. And then 20 years later, 30 years later, people are like, he was talking about us. And that’s great comedy, you know? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:19  100%. So one of the things that is in the book a lot is this idea of committing to the bit. Right. Like really just committing to the bit. And I’m curious how you think about and how you know what bits are worth committing to.

Vir Das 00:46:36  That’s a really great question. I do not I commit to all of them and some will work in some world. I have no way to foresee. Honestly, my best bet is to just be like all in all the time on everything and some of it will land and it’ll be great, and some of it won’t, and it’ll be devastating. but, hopefully it doesn’t shake my commitment.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:02  Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. I enjoyed the book a great deal of thanks to the show notes who have links to your Netflix special. It’s been fun to kind of climb into your world for a week, and, I appreciate you spending some time with us.

Vir Das 00:47:14  Enjoy. Lisbon. This was a wonderful chat and I wish you all the best with everything.

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Episode Transcript:

Amy Morin 00:00:00  So we know from the research that a lot of times we have these thoughts that just swirl around our heads. I hate my job. I hate that I have that meeting this afternoon, my boss waste my time. All sorts of negative things can go on up there. One of the best ways to get rid of it is you write it down on a piece of paper, and then you crumple the paper up and you throw it away. And essentially you’re showing your brain in a very physical way. I don’t value this way of thinking.

Chris Forbes 00:00:31  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking.

Chris Forbes 00:01:01  Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:15  In this conversation with Amy Moran, author of The Mental Strength Playbook, she said something that I don’t think I’ve ever heard said this clearly before. Do I need to solve the problem, or do I need to solve how I feel about the problem? And those are not the same thing. We talk about how knowing the difference can change what you do next, because the strategy that helps in one of those does not help in the other. We talk about anxiety, dread, procrastination, and why getting unstuck often isn’t about trying harder, it’s about doing something different. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Amy, welcome to the show.

Amy Morin 00:01:57  Hey, Eric. Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:58  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book called The Mental Strength Playbook 50 Tools to Cope with Stress, Thrive Under pressure, and Gain a competitive Edge in the workplace.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:11  But before we get to that, we will start in the way that we always do, which is with the parable. And in that parable, there’s a grandparent talking to their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Amy Morin 00:02:54  Such a powerful parable. And for me personally, there’s the side of me that is definitely filled with fear. I grew up an incredibly anxious kid who probably would have qualified for a diagnosis of selective mutism. I didn’t talk. I had friends and family that spoke for me and on my behalf.

Amy Morin 00:03:12  And to this day, if I’m somewhere with my friends and family, I’ll be really quick to say, hey, can you ask the waitstaff for this question? And I think it is a constant reminder of, no, I don’t need to feed that side of myself. I can stand up like, hello Amy, you have a podcast. Hello Amy. You do these other things, you can ask for something when you need it, but it takes a conscious effort. And I see it in my therapy office too, from people. When we’re trying to make any kind of change in life, it’s all about those, as you say, those daily choices and the little things that we can do in that moment to say which one of these feelings, which one of these things are we going to put our energy into?

Eric Zimmer 00:03:53  I always find it kind of amazing how much we can grow from the people we once were. And yet, in certain circumstances, or under stress or in default situations, there’s still that old behavior that rises up, right? You have a podcast, you talk all the time, you’re a speaker, you go out and talk to the world, and yet you still in a restaurant would rather not ask the waiter for, you know, a modification to your order.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:22  I’m always fascinated by that. And I think it’s also really valuable to talk about that, because it shows what improvement really looks like. It’s not perfection, it’s that we are able to do the things that really matter to us. And yeah, some of that stuff may still linger. In my case, I think there are certain things that like, I don’t expect it to be going away. I’m like, wow, it’s been around a long time. It probably will be. I know how to work with it skillfully.

Amy Morin 00:04:52  Yeah, I think that’s it. Exactly. So often people will say, well, I’ve changed. I’m not that person anymore. And that means your behavior has changed. But like at the core, a lot of us are personalities are still the same. Those desires, those things are still right there. And even though I can not act on it and I can say I’m going to push myself to talk like I can ask the Uber driver to turn the heat down a smidge if I’m really hot.

Amy Morin 00:05:18  But I’ll have to think to myself, I mean, I did this just recently. I was in a used furniture store and I was like, this chair that I saw last weekend isn’t here anymore. Do I want to ask if they still have one of these chairs in stock? So I show the photo to my husband. He knows what I’m getting at, I’m trying to get him to do it. And in my mind, I’m thinking you gave a Ted talk to 25 million people. You can probably ask the clerk in the store if he has any of these chairs in the back, but it is. It’s that same seven year old that still crops up, even though I have all this evidence that says you can speak. You can do these certain things, but it is deeply ingrained.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:56  Yeah. I think that question of how much we can change is a really fascinating one. I told you before this interview, I will be incapable of not mentioning my own book because it just came out. But but I do for a reason, because I tell two stories in it, and one story is me absolutely unable to not get myself to drive to a dealer to buy drugs.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:17  And then there’s another story where I easily handle drugs without any problem. That is a massive shift. I mean, it’s not even hard for me around addiction anymore. And so I think that shows like how much we can change. And like you, I sometimes have trouble asking people for what I want if I think that they might not want to give it. And, you know, both those things are true.

Amy Morin 00:06:45  Yeah. And I think sometimes we expect to like to be different. Like when I was five, when I imagined what it would like to. To feel like a grown up. Like I thought, when you get to be 45, like, suddenly you have all the answers. I’ll still find myself in a situation where I’m thinking like, gee, somebody should do something about this. And then I’m reminded, look, Amy, you’re 46 years old. You’re probably the one that should take action. But I don’t necessarily, like, feel a lot different, or I don’t feel like I thought that I would at a certain age or that because I’ve changed as a person, it’s not like I just woke up one day and suddenly everything is different.

Amy Morin 00:07:21  But you’re right, there’s things I can do now without thinking about it that 25 years ago I wouldn’t have done be on your podcast, for example, I would have thought, oh, that’s too scary, I can’t possibly do it. And just to recognize sometimes how far we’ve come, like, okay, the things that aren’t aren’t necessarily difficult for you anymore used to be or the things that you’re able to now say, all right, I’m not going to listen to that voice in my head. I’m going to take action Anyway, and you can silence it. You can quiet it if it crops up. And and those are often the changes. And sometimes it’s not necessarily what you see on the outside. It’s well what’s going on internally too. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:59  Very well said. So before we get into your new book, maybe set up for us a little bit your journey to this, right. A number of years ago, you wrote a book that did very well called the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:14  I don’t recall exactly how long ago that was, but I think there were some inciting events that kind of led you to writing that book. Tell us a little bit about that.

Amy Morin 00:08:24  Yeah, it was a therapist in Maine and in a little rural town where pretty much the only other therapist in town was my sister. And we’re we’re going about our business, you know, seeing, seeing people just treating depression, anxiety. And about a year into my work as a therapist, my mom passed away. And it was sudden and unexpected. And it was from a brain aneurysm. She was only 51 at the time, and going through that, I realized a lot of the skills and strategies I learned in college and the things in my textbook aren’t really that helpful when your heart is broken. And I was kind of horrified that, like all of these strategies I’m supposed to be teaching people kind of fell short in my own life. And that was really when I started studying mental strength with a different perspective. I just really wanted to know, how do you go through tough times and come out on the other side? And then when I was 26, it was actually the three year anniversary of the day that my mom died.

Amy Morin 00:09:18  My 26 year old husband died of a heart attack, and I didn’t even know you could have a heart attack. At 26, he didn’t have a history of known heart problems or anything like that. There were no drugs involved, and the doctors were just like, yep, it can happen sometimes. And losing the two people in my life that I was closest to and just really unexpected, sudden ways, did an absolute number on my brain. It was like the two people that were my biggest fans. The people I was closest to had literally just disappeared. And I’m a widow. I don’t have my mom and now I’m down to one income, so I have to go to work as a therapist and my life’s in shambles. But I’m supposed to be helping other people solve their problems. And you would think I would have some ways to describe this time in my life. But honestly, after all these years, I don’t even have the words other than to say it was just a really dark time, and it took years to kind of figure out, what am I going to do next? Wasn’t just that I had lost my husband, but it was.

Amy Morin 00:10:22  I had lost so many of the dreams that I had. We were foster parents. We had therapeutic foster kids. Like, do I still want to do that as a single person? And figuring all that out, like, what’s the next chapter going to look like? And it did take years. Eventually I, I started writing as a side hustle. It was one of the only ways I could keep the lights on in my house was to have something else going on besides being a therapist, and writing became a way to do that. And I didn’t write about anything really related to my grief or anything like that. I just wrote these, like $15 articles that I could pump out on the weekend or something. For the longest time and a few years down the road, I was fortunate. I found love again. I got remarried, I started a new job, life was looking pretty good, and then my father in law was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I just remember thinking, like, I just spent all these years grieving, I can’t possibly lose somebody else.

Amy Morin 00:11:14  And it was probably one of my worst days that I wrote this letter to myself about what mentally strong people don’t do, and I found it helpful. So I thought, well, I’ll just put it on the internet and maybe it will help somebody else. And honestly, I expected like 30 people to read it, but it went viral. Like within days millions of people were reading it and I didn’t tell the backstory. So everybody thought, oh, you’re a therapist. So you’ve mastered all of these things, and pretty soon Forbes picked it up and it got like 10 million views there within a week. It was a bizarre time. I would hit the refresh screen and 10,000 people had read it, and I hit refresh again and 10,000 more people. And I’m thinking, what have I done? CNN in Mexico calls an MTV in Finland, and all these people want to interview me about how awesome it is to have figured out life. And like, literally nobody knew the backstory. And one of the people that emailed me was a literary agent who said, you should write a book.

Amy Morin 00:12:08  And I didn’t even know what a literary agent was, so I didn’t even reply to her email at the time. Thankfully, she followed up and I said, well, I have to tell you, I don’t have these things mastered. I wrote this list because I struggle with all 13. In fact, I do all of these things. And here’s the story of why. And she said, well, you don’t have to tell this story, but if you told the backstory, maybe it would give you even more credibility. And so within a month, we had a book deal with Harpercollins, one of the biggest publishers in the world. Within 13 months of writing that article, my book hit the shelves and it’s been a whirlwind since where I’ve been speaking about mental strength and fortunately found that sharing my story just added to credibility, where for a long time I was mostly concerned it was going to ruin it. Like if people know that I struggle with these things, are they going to take me seriously? Turns out they did.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:55  Well, thank you for sharing all that. What an incredibly challenging period of time. And you describe in the new book a little bit about how hard that is to show up at work, having to help other people when you’re struggling so, so greatly. But I’m happy you made your way through. I’m happy that you gave us that wonderful book. And I now want to talk about this book because this book is instead of things that mentally strong people don’t do, this is what mentally strong people can do, and it’s broken down into, I would call very small things that we can do, which, as you know, we’ve talked before, is right up my alley. You know, little things that we can do. So what I’d like to do is just cherry pick some of these from the book. I want to do one. And then I’m going to ask you another couple meta questions, and then we’ll do the others. Okay, okay. But I want people to have a sense of what one is like.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:53  So chapter one are called confidence catalysts. And you say confidence isn’t a fleeting emotion, it’s a mindset. It’s the quiet belief that you can handle whatever life throws your way. And I absolutely love that idea. And I actually built my sobriety the second time around, around that very idea that, like, there were things I could do that would allow me to handle whatever life brought. So beautiful idea. Let’s talk about play number five. Give yourself a pep talk.

Amy Morin 00:14:24  Yeah. So this is the one where you get the opportunity to basically be your own mental strength coach. And it comes up in those moments where you think, I can’t do this. So two minutes before you’re walking into a meeting where you have to make a sales pitch and you’re thinking, I have no business being here. I’ve forgotten everything I was supposed to say, and you’re filled with that self-doubt. Your anxiety goes up. One of the best things you can do in that moment is you just get Ahold of yourself and you say, no, actually, you can do this.

Amy Morin 00:14:50  And here’s why. And for me, I’ll just remind myself, like, okay, Amy, like you’ve been through tough things before, you can definitely do whatever it is you’re facing now or that pep talk of you gave a TEDx talk to 25 million people. You can ask the clerk a question, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:15:06  Yeah.

Speaker 4 00:15:06  But yeah, I think.

Amy Morin 00:15:08  Any of those moments we know, like an NBA halftime coach has the ability to change the game when they give a speech that makes the team rise to the occasion motivational and inspirational. Their behavior changes. Their performance is different than if the coach yelled at them, pointed out their mistakes and said, you’re doing horrible. If the coach gets really angry and yells at them, performance declines. We don’t always have a coach in our ear, but we can do that for ourselves. How do you give yourself a pep talk? So I always encourage people when you’re filled with self-doubt, just take a minute. Remember who you are and give yourself a two minute pep talk.

Amy Morin 00:15:40  And just inside your mind, give yourself some ideas of why you can do this. Pretend you’re talking to a friend if you have to, to really give some words of encouragement. But when you do that for yourself, you can pep yourself up and give you the confidence and the courage that you need to take that next step.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:55  So you talk about five steps in order to construct a pep talk, and I just love to walk through them real quick. So listeners have something very practical they can do here. And the first is you mentioned find a quiet moment. The second is acknowledge the challenge. Tell me about that one.

Speaker 4 00:16:11  So it’s one thing when we.

Amy Morin 00:16:12  Say, all right, I have to go give a presentation right now. Look, you want to know, like what are you actually facing? And it’s not about exaggerating. Like, oh, I’m going to get made fun of or I’m going to stumble over my words. So the challenge is I have to give a presentation in ten minutes.

Amy Morin 00:16:26  And here’s what I’m looking at. Sometimes we get the problem wrong. We think, oh, we worry about the things we can’t control. Are people going to like me? Are they going to laugh at me? Nope. Just focus on what’s the challenge. I have a presentation in two minutes. The factual words will help.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:42  Okay, then we deliver the pep talk. You say speak to yourself like a coach who believes in you. Use motivational language tailored to you. I love that, right? Because we got to find the right language for ourselves. Because the language that works for me might sound cheesy and dumb to you and vice versa. And so finding our own language is really, really important.

Speaker 4 00:17:05  It is because.

Amy Morin 00:17:06  You know, like an inspirational quote sometimes is great. Or when you hear the words of somebody else that can really inspire us, but to make sure it is something that resonates with you and to have your own language. So, you know, all right. When I’m backed up in a corner, I rise to the occasion.

Amy Morin 00:17:21  That might work for some people, but not everybody. Some people are like a setbacks, a comeback. Again, somebody else says that’s kind of cheesy, but to know like what is it that sparks that fire within you? And you can tell yourself that.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:50  I got to go on. ABC National News last week. And I was nervous because it’s totally different. Right. Right. I’m used to an hour long podcast conversation where we can ramble and chat and have a good time and edit, and this is like four minutes live. Like, you got to nail it. And I’ve never done anything like that before. But I remember I was sitting in the, in the green room giving myself, as you say, a pep talk about, okay, you’re well prepared, you know, be yourself. Connect. Just connect with the person who’s in front of you. You know how to do that. You’ve done that right. I was able to get myself to a place where I wasn’t so nervous.

Amy Morin 00:18:33  And that’s so much more powerful than had you sat there and crammed your notes. You wrote the book. This is about your life. You’ve lived it. But if you just kept thinking, I’m gonna forget everything, I need to read all of these papers I have in front of me. Yeah. And we’re trying to memorize stuff. Your anxiety would have gone up, your confidence would have gone down, and your performance would have been completely different.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:52  Well, what’s interesting about that is there was a period of time where that is what I did, where I realized, like, I don’t know how to say these things right in one minute, sound bites. So I’m going to work on that. I’m going to figure out what those are. I’m going to practice those a little bit. But you’re right. As it got close to time, I had to just say, okay, you’ve prepared well. Set that down. You’re in good shape, right to your point. Had I been up to the last second doing that and everybody’s ratio of that is going to be different.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:24  So for me, it’s always like part of what allows me to give myself a pep talk is when I know I’ve prepared well. Yeah, right when I know I’ve done what? Not perfect. Not as good as I could be, but I. I’m in a good place because I gave myself a good shot for this.

Amy Morin 00:19:38  Yeah. And obviously, if you give yourself a pep talk to give a 30 minute speech that you have never even prepared for at all, we’re all going to struggle with certain things like that. Right? So the preparation beforehand is key, so that you have that foundation so that you believe your pep talk when you say it to. And, and I think that’s another key point. If I said, hey, I want to go out and play a basketball game and I’m going to crush it. And yet I don’t practice basketball and I’m actually quite horrible at it. Like that’s not going to do the difference. And so overconfidence isn’t helpful either. But something that’s more realistic can inspire us to just give it our best at the very end.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:16  All right. So now I want to go back to meta idea about the book real quick, just so people understand what what is in this book. So you have 50 of them, but each one of them has some components to it. In the book, you talk about why it works, when to use it, how to use it. You give an example of somebody doing it in action. You give some pro tips for how to make it really good, pitfalls to avoid, and a game plan for success. So in addition to the basic idea, give yourself a pep talk. There’s all these different elements underneath that really flesh that out. So I’m just trying to give people a picture of what they get in this book. Now we will move on to additional mental strength plays. I want to go to chapter two, Attitude Adjusters, and I want to read something you wrote. You said, think of your attitude as the operating system behind your work day. If it’s outdated and in buggy, even easy tasks take a lot longer.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:11  But when you upgrade it, everything runs smoother and feels more doable. That’s a really great description for what our mindset or attitude does.

Speaker 5 00:21:21  Yeah, it’s always.

Amy Morin 00:21:22  There and it can affect your behavior. But how much like bandwidth it’s taking up. If I walk into the office and I’m like, oh, I hate my job, I hate the people I work with, despise everything I have to do today. The more I’m thinking about those things, the less energy I have to put at the task at hand. But it also brings my mood down. The worse I feel, the harder everything becomes. And when we think about our attitude, most of us think about when you were eight and your mom said you need an attitude adjustment. But really, when I’m talking about this, it’s about just taking control of your own mindset and recognizing if I have to do a task that’s unpleasant. I have a couple options. I can either do it the best I can with the most positive attitude possible, or I can do it with a horrible attitude and let it drag on forever.

Amy Morin 00:22:06  And it just makes my day so much worse.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:09  Yeah, and I always think this is an interesting idea, and I just love to get your your broader perspective on this, right. Because attitude is so important and we don’t want to fake everything. We actually, I don’t think we can very well make ourselves believe things that aren’t true. So how do you think about sorting out like, okay, this is an attitude adjustment that I might need, or there’s a bigger thing here. Let’s just take your job. Right. You could say, I don’t like my job because of X, Y, and Z. And there could be two solutions to that. One might be change the way you think about x, y, and z. Option two might be get a different job. That’s a big question that I’m not asking you to solve, but I’m curious how you think about that for yourself and for your clients.

Amy Morin 00:22:59  Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I don’t think we need to paste on a smile and go through the day pretending as though we love everything.

Amy Morin 00:23:05  In fact, there’s research that shows people who have to work in, say, the hospitality industry, where you have to paste on that smile no matter what’s going on behind it, it can be very stressful. They have less willpower. At the end of the day, they’re more likely to struggle with a lot of things, like an addiction, for example, because they’ve used up every ounce of emotion regulation just to make it through their shift. So we don’t have to do that, but instead knowing that’s part of the job. I don’t care whether you have a job that you love or you’re a solopreneur, that you work from home, there’s going to be tasks that you don’t love to do, and how you get through those is all about the attitude that you choose to approach it with. So it might be you’re doing something with spreadsheets you hate. Spreadsheets takes forever. It’s boring. And you’re struggling with all these numbers. Well, you can say this is horrible and awful and choose to let that task really be the bane of your existence today.

Amy Morin 00:24:01  Or you can just accept, all right, this isn’t fun, but how do I make the best of a task that I don’t love to do? And then, yeah, there is that tipping point where when you think, I hate everything about my job, maybe it’s me, but maybe I need to switch jobs too. And there are other times where you just need to make the change to a new environment, which can make a big difference. But for the most part about getting through the day, just accepting tasks. There’s people that you have to work with who you didn’t choose to. This is really the difference between our personal life and work, and it’s one of the reasons why I wrote a book specifically about the workplace and my personal life. I get to hang out with my friends. I get to put a task off until tomorrow. If I don’t feel like it at work, you don’t really get those choices. Your boss usually picks your deadlines. You have to work with coworkers that you wouldn’t normally want to collaborate on a project with so many things that are out of our control.

Amy Morin 00:24:49  But the one thing you can control is your attitude. So to say, I’m going to walk into this with the best attitude I possibly can can go a long way.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:57  Yeah, and I love that you say that because I think, like you said, even in any job there are things that are unenjoyable to do. I mean, I work for myself, doing work I love, and there are plenty of things that I have to do in any given day, week, month that I don’t actually like doing right, but there’s a way that I can approach those with a little bit more equanimity versus fighting them the whole time. So within Attitude Adjusters, let’s talk about play number seven, taking out the mental trash.

Amy Morin 00:25:31  I love this one because it’s so simple, but it’s gives you immediate relief as well. So we know from the research that a lot of times we have these thoughts that just swirl around our heads. Oh, I hate my job. I hate that I have that meeting this afternoon, my boss waste my time.

Amy Morin 00:25:46  All sorts of negative things can go on up there. One of the best ways to get rid of it is you write it down on a piece of paper, and then you crumple the paper up and you throw it away. And essentially you’re showing your brain in a very physical way. I don’t value this way of thinking, and the research will show that when you do that, you get rid of the thoughts physically. You’re much less likely to think those same things over and over again. A lot of our thoughts are repetitive. So if I think I don’t like my job, I hate this task. 20 minutes later, I’m still thinking I hate my job. I hate this task. But if I take it out of my brain and put it on paper and then throw the paper away, it reduces that I’m much more likely to then be able to go on and think about something else. And obviously, if you’re in an open office setting, crumpling your paper up really loudly isn’t a good option.

Amy Morin 00:26:30  But you can cross it out with a black marker. You could put it on your computer and you throw it away in the recycle bin, but basically you just want a physical way to say I’m I don’t value this way of thinking and then just watch what happens with the way that you start thinking after that. It’s pretty cool.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:46  I suggest wherever you are, you just light it on fire.

Amy Morin 00:26:49  You know, that’s great.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:51  You know, like, I don’t care where you’re at. Light it on fire. It’s going to work better. It’s going to work better if you do that. Yep. let me ask a question about that. So that’s going to reduce the amount of time that we spend on that thought. And yet as you said, thought patterns are are notoriously sticky. So I do that. I get a little bit of relief. I find myself 30 minutes later, it’s all starting back up. Do I do it again? What’s the utility like? How do you think about working with a client like this is one tool in a toolkit, right? Of okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:25  I’m having repetitive thoughts that I don’t want to be having. They’re not useful to me. One option is I do this. Take out the mental trash. What are other things that I can do when I’ve decided? Clearly I don’t want to keep running that thought pattern. What are some other techniques we can use that that help us change that channel and keep it changed?

Amy Morin 00:27:47  Well, and that’s why I wrote the playbook, because what works for me might not work for you. Or maybe that works for me when I’m dealing with a workplace issue. But then maybe when I come home at the end of the day and I’m thinking about that conversation with my coworker that happened at lunchtime, and I can’t stop thinking about that. That play may not work as well. So that’s why it’s important to practice with a lot of these things. And it’s sort of like if I had a knee injury, maybe heat works. Maybe ice works. Maybe I need a pain reliever. Maybe I need to stretch lots of different ways to treat some of these issues.

Amy Morin 00:28:18  So knowing, yeah, which ones work for you and which situations is important, but you actually use the words for one of the other plays, which is change the channel in your brain. So we know that the more I say to myself, just don’t think about that, the more I actually think about it, right? Your brain doesn’t handle that well. When we try to suppress something, it pops up. It just keeps coming back. But if I change the channel, which means I decide, all right, rather than sit here on the couch and keep rehashing that conversation where somebody said something rude, I’m going to get up and I’m going to go clean my bedroom for 20 minutes. I set the timer for 20 minutes, and I decide for the next 20 minutes. My goal is to figure out how much I can get cleaned up, and then when the timer is up, I feel a little bit better. I’ve done something where I’m not just ruminating on the same thing. So even though my brain might go back to that conversation I had with my coworker, I might have a different perspective now because I took a break from it.

Amy Morin 00:29:12  Or I might realize, okay, it’s not the end of the world. And probably most of us have experienced this. When you’re laying in bed at night trying to go to sleep and you’re worried about something, a mistake that you made or something that might happen tomorrow. You can’t stop thinking about it. And then you wake up the next day and you’re like, oh, whatever. It’s not a big deal. And you’re able to move on because your brain got a break from it for a while, and the back of your brain kind of figures things out. You don’t always have to have everything right on the very tip of your brain trying to figure it out. Just give yourself a break. But in order to give yourself a break, you have to be proactive about saying, I’m going to do something like physical for a while, like work in my garden, or I’m going to do the specific task rather than just say, don’t think about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:53  Yeah, I think that’s a really important and nuanced point, right? Because there is an element of saying, I don’t want to keep thinking about this thing, like there’s a decision to do that, right? There’s a decision where we go that’s not helpful anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:08  A lot of times we don’t even get that far. We just let it run. So now that we’ve decided, I don’t want to continue thinking about it now, the question becomes, all right, well, how do I actually make that happen? And as you said, just saying don’t think about it probably doesn’t work. Although sometimes I heard this from somebody, my partner Jenny heard it from her mindfulness instructor. She’s a certified mindfulness teacher. And when she was getting trained, she heard it. And the guy said, I just see Gandalf in my mind, knocking down his big stick and saying, no more. Or you know, you should not pass or I don’t know what it something like that. And that is actually kind of a every want to offer me is a very useful thing where my brain is just like, that’s it. No. Yeah. And then there are other times, like you said, change. The channel is a big one. We often think of distraction as a bad thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:57  And distraction used excessively can be. But my experience is there are times for strategic distraction where it’s like, for whatever reason, this thing’s got enough emotional energy. I can’t turn it off. I can’t avoid it. So you know what? What will make my brain more interested and go do that?

Amy Morin 00:31:17  Absolutely. When our emotions are high, our logic is really low. So if I’m incredibly angry now, it’s not a good time to have a discussion about something. I need to wait till I’m calmed down. One of the best ways to reduce the intensity of that emotion is probably distract myself for a while, right? I go for a walk, I come back, I’m a little calmer, and I can say, all right, let’s have this discussion where I’m not so heated that I say things I later regret. And I like to tell people in those moments we have we have the option. I like to say, let’s use the three P’s. You pause instead of just going with your first reaction and then you pick pick the strategy.

Amy Morin 00:31:51  I’m going to try to go for a walk, or I’m going to take out the mental trash and then you run the play. Go ahead and just take the action and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, you can always use something else. But when we know that a lot of the things that we’re doing in life, it’s not because we’re not strong enough, it’s just because we’re running the wrong play. And when you feel like, okay, I have other options other than the default thing that I’ve always been doing, it empowers us to say, let’s try something different.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:41  The next category you call Insight Igniter. And I just want to read what you said about insight with the right insight. Every challenge becomes an opportunity for innovation or creativity. These plays are designed to break you out of repetitive thought loops. We’re just talking about that and dead end pass so you can see challenges through a fresh lens, whether you’re navigating a personal dilemma or leading a team out of a rut, these strategies help ignite new insight.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:09  So let’s talk about the play in here of question. Your question.

Amy Morin 00:33:16  Oh good I like that one. So sometimes we’re trying to solve the wrong problem. And this is one that I use in the therapy office. Often because a couple might come in and say, oh, we need to stop fighting. How do we stop that? But that might be the wrong question. All right. Let’s say instead of fighting now, the two of you just stay quiet at home. Well, that doesn’t solve the underneath issue, right? The problem might be like, why are you struggling to communicate? Or a different question might be like, why do I raise my voice when you leave your socks in the middle of the floor? But when we get better at figuring out, is this the right question or not, we can solve the problem. Sometimes we’re just trying to solve a symptom of the problem. And in the business realm, people do this all the time to a restaurant might say, well, why don’t we have enough customers? What can we do to bring more people in? Well, is that really the problem? Maybe the problem is you’re just not getting enough revenue from your existing customers and just simply asking yourself, is this the right question? Am I trying to solve the right problem? Or is it more like a symptom? And then we can get to the taking the action that’s actually going to help us feel better.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:21  Are there some questions that are good at revealing the question? I mean, I guess you just had one of them, like, what’s the real problem here? Or what am I trying to really solve?

Amy Morin 00:34:31  Yeah, sometimes it’s just a matter right down the question that you’re trying to solve and then do some brainstorming. Think like, what other ways could I tackle this? How might somebody else approach this same issue? What other problems might there be going on? Is there something at the root of this? Just a little bit of reflection sometimes will help us back up and say, okay, maybe there is something else going on, or if I solve this problem, would that really mean that the underlying problem goes away, or would it just be like putting a Band-Aid on a wound? And I’m not actually addressing the underlying issue.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:05  I like that Band-Aid on an axe wound. All right. We’re going to move into part two of the book, which is plays for Emotional strength. And I’m going to read something you wrote about happiness, because we’re talking about about our jobs here, mainly, although we know that it’s all connected.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:23  Your happiness on the job isn’t just a nice to have, it’s directly tied to your productivity, your performance, and even your long term career success. Neglecting happiness means leaving potential untapped. Say more about that.

Amy Morin 00:35:37  Yeah. A lot of people think, you know, my happiness is reserved for my time outside of the office. The truth is, we spend so much time at work. It would be awful if we decided that the 40 plus hours we work are supposed to be filled with misery, right? And the little things that we do just to boost your happiness at work a little bit better. Not only will you feel better, but then you think differently. When you think differently, you start to do things differently, and it can just shift everything from your relationships to your job satisfaction, to your well-being, even how long you live. There’s so many factors involved in that. And yet we don’t really think about, like, what could I do today to be a little bit happier? Sometimes we just think nothing.

Amy Morin 00:36:16  My boss makes me do these things, or I have all these boring tasks to do, but if we approach it just slightly different, it’s not about saying, I’m going to be ecstatic on a Monday morning every week, but is there a little thing I could do, perhaps just to boost my mood, even if it’s just a little bit? And that can make a big difference.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:34  Speaking of that idea of how much time we spend at work, I’ve had an experience recently where I’ve gone back in my career a little ways, mainly back into my software days to ask a couple people like, hey, I’m delivering some corporate workshops now, can I come deliver one to your team? Or I’m doing more speaking? And it’s been so interesting when I get these people on the phone that I worked with for a long time that I was really close with, I’m stunned by how familiar they are to me even a decade later. Right. It’s because I spent so much time interacting with them that they are, like, still deeply in there.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:10  It was just sort of surprising to me. It just I expected it to feel like, oh, yeah, all right. I’m contacting I haven’t talked to this person in ten years. And immediately upon hearing their voice, I just was like, oh, I know this person.

Amy Morin 00:37:21  And, you know, on the flip side, during Covid, I was hearing from so many people who were suddenly working from home with their spouse, and they’re saying things like, I had no idea I was married to the loud typer. Right. And and or somebody.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:34  The loud typer. My Jenny will tell you that I always have to ask in the afternoon, like, can I sit here on the couch, or would you prefer me to work elsewhere because I’m the loud typer?

Amy Morin 00:37:44  Couples, though, that never worked in the same room where somebody was like, I’m married to the circle back person, you know, who’s always like, I just circling back there like, I had no idea all these years. And to think that, yeah, sometimes our coworkers know things about us that our partners don’t because they don’t see us in a professional setting very often.

Amy Morin 00:38:02  And and to know, okay, my coworkers have a lot of inside baseball about how I handle stress, how I solve problems, how I manage my emotions when I’m in the office. And often we don’t think about that. And it goes back to this idea of, yeah, so to make sure I’m investing in a little bit of happiness at work makes sense because I do spend a lot of time there.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:24  I was doing research on friendship at one point, because I’m very interested in how adults become less lonely, feel more connected. All of that, and the data is really clear that for adults, the vast majority of their friendships come from work, and it’s simply because friendship takes a certain amount of time, and typically the place that you get that amount of time quickly is at work, because you’re with those people 40 hours a week or more and all of a sudden whereas like if I meet a new friend and I have coffee with him every week for an hour, I got to meet him 40 times to spend as much time as I do with the people.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:04  And that’s not to say that there aren’t ways to significantly, I think, shrink that. I think the more intimacy there is, the more vulnerability what you’re talking about all matters. It can shorten that time frame, but there’s still something to that idea. And how do I cultivate the best relationship I can with these people around me? Is, to me, always one of the most important things about work, I guess, still is, even though my relationships with people are slightly different. But the people that work with me, Chris, Nicole, I mean, it’s so important to me that we all really get along. It’s it feels paramount to my mental well-being.

Amy Morin 00:39:45  And the people that you work with are the ones who know what it’s like, right? When I was a therapist in a community mental Health Center was really the only people that were. Therapists that know what it’s like for 40 hours a week. I could tell my friends, I could tell my family, but they know what it’s like to be in that position.

Amy Morin 00:40:01  So no matter what job you have, often it’s the people that you’re working with who really understand a lot of things about you and the work that you do that other people outside might never really get.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:11  Let me ask you a question about that. One of the things I found as I was working on this idea of community and sharing and all that, was a piece of research. I can’t remember the researchers name now. It’s in my book called The Rumination Trap, and it’s this idea that we can get locked into cycles of rumination with other people that are not helpful. So to your point, the people we work with are the ones who know, and it’s really possible that we get locked into cycles of talking about our work with those people that are not helpful.

Amy Morin 00:40:46  Absolutely. And we know that. Yeah. Just hearing your coworkers standing around the water cooler, complaining about how much they hate these new policies coming down the pipeline, or how your boss is a jerk when you start chiming in and you’re all having these venting sessions where we think, oh, venting just gets out my feelings.

Amy Morin 00:41:05  Research shows it’s the opposite. It’s more like adding fuel to the fire. So if you’re always complaining with people. So if your coworkers only get together to talk about how difficult your job is, the worse you’re going to feel about work that can have a huge impact on your happiness.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:19  Yeah. The thing that I found about that study was really interesting because it showed that if two people are engaged in this, it actually will for a little while, bring them closer. Yep. But it does not improve the situation. It often makes the situation worse. So it’s this weird thing where a little bit of that seems to be valuable in allowing you to connect with your coworkers, but too much of it then becomes problem. I mean, deeply problematic in other ways. And so it’s like, I feel like it’s like so many things in life, it’s like, well, what’s the right balance or right amount of commiseration versus, you know, sliding into rumination.

Amy Morin 00:42:01  Yeah. And I think you’re right there is that tipping point because that’s often how we kind of bond with people.

Amy Morin 00:42:06  Yeah, I talk about my struggle. I say, gosh, I have so much paperwork to do. Somebody says, I know I have so much to do too, and it’s so difficult to get it done. And that strikes up a conversation because they can relate to my struggle. However, once we start complaining about yeah, not only is the paperwork bad, but also can you believe X, Y, and Z? And the more we start bringing up all the other things that we dislike about work, suddenly before you know it, all we’re doing is complaining about it. And that’s what gets us stuck in that cycle. Then, of thinking everything about our jobs are horrible and awful.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:37  So let me ask you a question. This is something that I have talked with a few people about in the not too distant past. And it’s it’s this idea Take middle managers at work. As a middle manager, you are often in a very weird place. I was in this place where you’re getting direction from above that you actually think is stupid and wrong, and yet you need to convey it to your team.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:02  How do you think through that? Because I don’t want to be like, well, this is just an idiot policy. And I also don’t want to pretend like, I think this is a great I like their concerns. Their problems are valid and real. How would you think through that?

Amy Morin 00:43:17  Oh, you’re right. And I’ve been in a similar situation where you think, how do I present this as if I’m in agreement with it or on board when I think it’s probably not good? I think you find that balanced approach right? Very few policy changes are going to be 100% great or completely awful. There’s a reason for them and sometimes explaining the reason behind it. Hey, this is the new program we’re going to use. This is the new strategy. This is what’s coming down the pipeline. I know some of you may have concerns about it. Let’s talk about the concerns. Rather than pasting on the smile and saying, and everything’s going to be amazing. People see through that. But if you acknowledge both the pros and the cons, or that there are some potential downsides and you let people talk about their concerns too, sometimes that can help so that we’re seen as more authentic, and we’re not just cheerleading and championing things that aren’t going to work great.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:07  All right. Let’s move on to anxiety alleviation. But I want to ask a question first, because chapter six anxiety alleviates chapter seven dread diffusers. What’s the difference between anxiety and dread in the way that you talk about them?

Amy Morin 00:44:22  So dread is often that anticipation where I start to feel bad, awful because I start to feel awful right now because I imagine I’m going to feel even more awful later. So it might be that meeting coming up this afternoon and I think, oh, the last thing I want to do is go to that meeting. It’s like when you’re picturing a root canal and you’re just imagining the pain is going to be unbearable and you’re doubting your ability to tolerate it. And we know from the research that if somebody gets asked, do you want me to kick you in the shins twice today or once tomorrow? People will often say twice today just to get it over with, because otherwise they’re going to spend the next 24 hours in this state of dread. And most of us find dread to be fairly intolerable, and we’ll do anything we can to escape it, which is often where a lot of the bad decisions come in.

Amy Morin 00:45:09  Anxiety is more about the physiological experience we have. If I’m going to give a speech and I’m imagining, oh, everybody’s going to laugh at me. People aren’t going to like what I say. I’m going to stumble over my words. It might make my heart race. My palms get sweaty. I struggle to think clearly, but it’s not necessarily going to take up 24 hours of just dread where I’m imagining that it’s going to be horrible and awful.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:32  Got it. Yeah. Dread.

Amy Morin 00:45:33  Ooh, right.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:35  Yeah, that’s a real one.

Speaker 6 00:45:37  It is. It’s quite consuming.

Amy Morin 00:45:39  Mentally and emotionally, and it’s really taxing on us.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:42  I’m always struck by I noticed this years ago, and it caused me to start to say, nobody needs a vacation more than the person that just got back from vacation. Because what I noticed is I would start to have dread partway through my vacation. This can still happen to me today, even though I love what I do. But when I’m on vacation, the thought of shifting out of that mode back into the work mode starts to cause me to feel a little bit of dread.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:15  Now I’ve learned how to be more strategic in how I talk to myself, because I just keep reminding myself. It’s not like it’s not going to be like you think it is. It’s not going to feel the way you think it’s going to feel. You’re going to not like it for a few hours, and then you will just shift back in. And within a day, maybe two at the most, you’ll just be back in your old rhythm like you always were. Like, I have to walk myself through that pep talk because the dread otherwise. I mean, it used to ruin the last few days of every vacation of mine.

Speaker 6 00:46:48  I think that’s.

Amy Morin 00:46:49  Common and a lot of people can relate to like the Sunday Skerries too, right? By 3 p.m. on Sunday, you’re thinking, oh my gosh, the weekend is almost over. I got to go to work tomorrow. We know people’s moods are really low on Monday morning. The Monday morning blues come around because you’re dreading all the tasks you have to do this week and it can take a serious toll.

Amy Morin 00:47:08  Impacts your happiness. Impacts your ability to to enjoy the moment because your mind is already in another place where you’re imagining the worst case scenarios.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:16  So give me a couple dread diffusers we can maybe come back to anxiety alleviate. Is there always good? But I just don’t. I don’t get to talk about dread that often, and it’s one of my favorite. It’s not one of my favorite emotions, but I really recognize it. Right? It’s that resistance.

Amy Morin 00:47:33  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:34  It causes so much suffering. So what are a couple dread diffusers?

Amy Morin 00:47:37  So my favorite one is to text a motivation buddy. And this one is for when you’re dreading a task like, oh, I have to make a slides for a presentation. It’s boring. I don’t even know what I’m doing. So I put it off and I put it off tomorrow and I’m procrastinating. The best thing you can do is to find a friend. Might be a coworker. Maybe it’s your grandmother, but somebody that you know, you say to them, follow up with me in an hour that they’re going to follow through, and you send them a text message and you say, hey, I’m working on these slides.

Amy Morin 00:48:08  Check back with me in an hour and see how I’m doing. And the minute you create some a little bit of social pressure for yourself and you’ve given yourself this deadline because it’s easy to say, I’ll work on that next week. But when you’ve given yourself an hour deadline, your brain is going to want to have some progress to report. So suddenly you start getting to work. And once we get started on a dreaded task, it’s usually way easier than we thought it was going to be.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:32  100%. I mean, that’s so much of what I talk about in my book is that idea of like, how do we get ourselves across the starting line? Because that’s often far and away the the most difficult part of it, right?

Amy Morin 00:48:46  And then once you build a little bit of momentum, it’s way easier to keep going.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:50  Yeah, exactly. That’s kind of what another of your dread diffusers is, is the ten minute rule, right? Just tell yourself get started for ten minutes. Sometimes I have to make that though like two minute rule.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:01  But I’m astounded by how much of my life gets done that way. Like, you talk about thinking like we should be better than we are, or we should be more advanced than we are. I’m amazed how often I have to trot that thing out of like, okay, just start two minutes. I did, I do this you mentioned about the cleaning. Like, I’ll do this. I’ll be like five minute cleaning, which oftentimes five minutes gets a lot done. I’m like, wow, okay. But even if not, I’m already then I’m moving, right?

Amy Morin 00:49:30  Otherwise, it’s easy to sit on the couch and think, oh, I should clean the house. And then we feel guilty. We feel bad, we put it off till tomorrow, we feel overwhelmed and then it doesn’t get done. But if you just get started, people say, you know, I should get some exercise. Well, if I just go for a walk when I get to the five minute mark, I’ll decide.

Amy Morin 00:49:49  Do I need to turn around and walk back for five minutes, or can I keep going? And people will say, yeah, once I get started, it’s way easier to keep going and give yourself permission to quit. Like, all right, maybe you do ten minutes and it is awful and horrible. Go ahead and quit. But I guarantee most of the time you’ll keep going.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:05  I think what you said is interesting because you said if you ask people whether they want to be kicked in the shin twice today or once tomorrow, they would say twice today because they don’t like dread. And yet many of us allow dread to linger by continuing to put things off. I have a little bit of a rule. I don’t like having difficult conversations with people I don’t. I just don’t like it. I don’t think I will ever like it, I can do it, but I don’t like it. My brain will always go. It’s just not the right time. It’s just not the right time. It’s not the right time.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:35  And so I have a question for myself, which is like, am I ever going to want to do this? And if the answer is no and honest no, I’m never going to feel like, oh, now’s the right time. Then I try and get myself to do it just as soon as I possibly can, because every minute that I don’t do it is another minute that I allow that awful emotion of dread to stick around. And so that’s become, in an overall spirit of minimize. My own suffering is when I there’s something I don’t want to do, I try and do it just about as soon as I can. Now, I’m not saying I always do that. I’ll procrastinate. It don’t. But but that’s the strategy.

Amy Morin 00:51:17  And I like that idea of saying, yeah, because otherwise there’s a lot of things that we do, these little habits, these little plays that we run to try to delay something and we’ll trick ourselves into being like, well, it’s not the right time to have a difficult conversation, right? So I’m in a good mood today.

Amy Morin 00:51:32  I don’t want to ruin it. So I’ll do that conversation next week. Or the other person’s not in the right frame of mind. And while timing is important, there’s never going to be the time where you feel like this is the absolute perfect time to have this really difficult conversation. So but if you’ve tried to wait for it, or you convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing by waiting, it doesn’t happen. And then you just have more and more dread or guilt about not having the conversation.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:58  Yeah. That’s funny. There are times that are more right than others. I mean, there is a sensitivity to all of it. I just remember this sort of line of thinking in my mind, like you exactly said, like, well, they’re in a good mood. I better not do it today. I don’t want to ruin that or they’re in a bad mood. So I don’t really want to push them when they’re in a bad mood, or I’m in a good mood, or I’m in a bad mood, or they had a bad day at work, or I mean, it just it.

Amy Morin 00:52:22  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:23  It could go on and on. I am very familiar with this one.

Amy Morin 00:52:26  And I think we do that with other things too. Like somebody will say, you know, I kind of wanted to start this little side hustle business, but I needed to do more research. And you could research forever. You could plan forever. And that idea of, I can’t do it until I feel ready. Is often that attempt to to put something off because we’re afraid. We’re afraid of what will happen if we launch this thing, or we’re afraid of the wrath that might come our way if we have this difficult conversation. So we like to put things off right?

Eric Zimmer 00:52:54  And we never feel ready. That’s the other thing that’s worth knowing. It’s like if I wait to have that conversation until I don’t feel afraid to have it, it will literally never happen, right? Because I’m going to feel afraid. It’s just part of the deal with it. Same thing with, you know, launching new things or doing different things is waiting to feel ready is always, in my mind, a recipe for failure.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:19  From big things to even tiny things. Like we mentioned before, when do I feel ready to do my taxes? The answer to that I will tell you, after how many years have I been doing taxes? A lot. The answer is never right. There’s never a time where I look at that on my task list and I’m like, oh, now this would be a great time to to do that, right? Never.

Amy Morin 00:53:40  And that’s why it’s so important to say, okay, I know how to take productive action. I don’t feel like it. My thoughts are all over the place or I’m trying to talk myself out of it. But it’s not the action that you take sometimes in the step forward.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:52  The last chapter in the book are interaction improvers. This is helping us to get along better with the people around us. We talked about this being an important thing to try at work. What is play? Number 48 practice motivational interviewing.

Amy Morin 00:54:07  Oh, this is one of my favorites as a therapist.

Amy Morin 00:54:10  We use motivational interviewing all the time, but it can work on anybody in your personal life or at work, too. And essentially, it’s about deciding that I don’t need to figure out where you are in this continuum of change. If you have a bad habit and I say, Eric, you need to stop doing that. You might then say, actually, no, I like this habit. Maybe it was showing up to work 20 minutes late. You’re like, no, the traffic’s bad. And I come in 20 minutes late because that’s as soon as I can get here. Well, that’s not going to change your behavior that I just lectured you about it. But if I had a conversation with you and said, is there anything about coming into work in the morning that’s getting in the way of it to be here at 8 a.m., or are there any, any reasons why getting getting here late, is it causing any problems for you? And I ask you some open ended questions and then you identify actually, yeah.

Amy Morin 00:54:59  Here’s what’s getting in my way. Or if I could start at 830, that would change my life. Here’s why. And we might be able to problem solve because a therapist, so many people come into my office because they have to be there. The judge said, you have to go to so many counseling sessions, or they’re like, you know, I don’t think I have a problem. But my partner said if I didn’t come to therapy, they were going to leave. So my goal is to keep my partner or my goal is to get off probation. My goal isn’t to change my behavior and I start telling them, no, you have to do this. You can’t do that again. I’m just going to reinforce their position. But if I ask questions, what would it take to get your partner off your back? How might that look? And people come to their own conclusions. They’ll follow their own advice way more than they’ll follow mine. And if you ask the right questions, you can help people discover the strategies that they want to try.

Amy Morin 00:55:47  When they say them out loud, they’re much more likely to follow through.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:51  Well, thank you so much. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation for a couple other things. We’ve still got some productive action plays to cover. Maybe we’ll get an anxiety one in there, but if we want to leave people with one idea around mental strength, what would it be?

Amy Morin 00:56:08  That you don’t have to feel strong to be strong. It’s just all about picking the right play in the moment. We all have options of plays that we can run, and when you run a different play, it changes everything. Just like a good play in a game changes the outcome of the game. For a lot of people, running a different play in your life changes the outcome and it can change everything. But you don’t have to wait until you feel strong to take the action.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:30  Thank you so much, Amy. Like I said, listeners, if you’d like to join the post-show conversation between Amy and I, you get that, you get ad free episodes.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:38  You support the show. We can always, always, always use your support. You can go to one you feed. Thanks so much, Amy.

Amy Morin 00:56:46  Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:47  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Scott Hershovitz 00:00:00  Sometimes being upset, being angry, feeling resentful is a way of defending yourself in the world and respecting yourself. And you know, we could tell a similar story about gratitude as a way of sort of respecting others and recognizing the sacrifices they might make on your behalf.

Chris Forbes 00:00:24  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Scott Herskovitz, the director of Law and Ethics program and professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan.

Chris Forbes 00:01:31  Scott holds degrees from University of Georgia, Yale Law School, and University of Oxford. He also served as a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court. Today, Eric and Scott discuss his new book, nasty, Brutish and Short Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:51  Hi, Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Hershovitz 00:01:52  It’s really Tricia to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:54  Yeah, we are going to be discussing your book called nasty, brutish and short. Adventures in philosophy with my kids. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two souls inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:29  So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life and in the work that you do.

Scott Hershovitz 00:02:34  So it’s a really wonderful story, and it actually hadn’t heard it before, so it’s been fun to think it through a little bit. I want to give you two answers. So in my day job, I’m a philosopher who teaches at a law school, and I think a lot about philosophy, questions about law. I think especially about the rule of law, what it is and how we can sustain it. And one thing I think it’s really crucial to maintaining the rule of law is I think people need a kind of shared moral outlook. They need to agree that we’re going to abide by the decision making procedures that we’ve adopted around here, whether that’s elections or hearing to legislation or following decisions that courts make. And I think one of the things that I find concerning in our country at the moment is the kind of viciousness of our politics and the reluctance of some people, especially right now, you know, people on the right to accept the results of elections, to adhere to the rule of law, and just generally to talk about their opponents in ways that are mean spirited and vicious.

Scott Hershovitz 00:03:36  And so I think that one thing, this parable sort of brought up for me is I think all of us in our political activities need to think about feeding the kindness, even when we’re interacting with people that we disagree with. Right. So it’s one thing to think, hey, I have different policy ideas than you do, and I’m going to vote for my preferred policy preferences, but to demonize people on the other side, to treat them viciously is not going to be a way of sustaining a community over the long term. So that’s sort of like the the work life professional reaction I had to the parable. I also had a very personal reaction to it. You and I were just chatting a moment ago before you hit record. You said, I’m approaching the interesting years of parenthood of a child who’s reaching adolescence. My older son Rex, and we definitely butt heads more than we used to have more conflict than we did when he was little. And I’ve made a kind of intentional effort over the last few months to really try and orient my interactions with him more towards kindness than towards anger, to feed that aspect of our relationship, rather the other one that we so naturally fall into sometimes.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:38  Well, I think that’s a great place to sort of jump off in the book, which is about philosophy and children. I mean, I can only imagine you arguing or debating with your children. You have created some skillful adversaries In the way that you have been raising them all along, which is really to think for themselves and really think about their opinions. The book is really fun because you recount a lot of conversations from the children. You say every kid, every single one is a philosopher. They stop when they grow up. Indeed, it may be that part of what it is to grow up is to stop doing philosophy and start doing something more practical. Talk a little bit more about when you say that. What do you mean by philosophy?

Scott Hershovitz 00:05:27  That’s a really great question, actually, and it’s a question that I’ve struggled with ever since I first took a philosophy class and discovered I really liked this subject. My dad, when I went home from college, you know, said I was going to major in philosophy, asked the sensible question, he said, what’s philosophy? And I realized I just had no way of answering that question.

Scott Hershovitz 00:05:44  I started to stammer, you know, things that didn’t quite sound adequate. And then I thought, well, maybe I can’t tell them what philosophy is. I’ll show him. And I started talking about this idea that maybe we’re all just brains, and that’s kind of like the movie The Matrix. Like somebody removed our brains from our head and they’ll. Hook them up to electrodes, and they’re stimulating us. And so I said to my dad, maybe we think we’re at this restaurant having dinner, but actually, someone’s just deceiving us into thinking so. And he was like, can they do that? And I said, I don’t know. But the question is, how do we know they didn’t? And he said, that’s what you want to study. With a look on his face that was really not encouraging. And so I was kind of flummoxed ever since that moment to explain what philosophy is. And then actually, my older son Rex helped me figure it out in second grade, the first day of second grade, actually, and the teacher asked each kid what they wanted to be when they grew up, and she sent home a list.

Scott Hershovitz 00:06:35  Here are all the things that were firefighters. There were teachers, there were engineers. It wasn’t hard to pick Rex’s entry from the list. He wanted to be a math philosopher. And when he got home, I said, I said, hey, Rex, miss Kean says that you want to be a philosopher of math. What’s Philosophy. And just without even thinking about it, he said to me. Philosophy is the art of thinking. And I think that’s just a really lovely explanation of what. Philosophy is. I think a philosophical problem is one that we make progress on by thinking. Carefully about ourselves, about the world around us, in an effort to understand both of those things better. And so there’s philosophy about really every aspect of our lives, right? Questions that you can ask about us, that require us to think deeply in order to reach a better understanding? That’s what I mean by philosophy.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:23  Yeah. You quote David Hills, who describes philosophy as the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children using methods that come naturally to lawyers.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:35  That’s that’s great.

Scott Hershovitz 00:07:36  Yeah. So that really captures my career. Maybe my humanity in a nutshell, right? Which is to say, part of the pitch of this book is that kids are natural philosophers. They arrive in the world, and they’re confused by lots of things in it, and they don’t know what the standard of explanation of things are, and they’re trying to make sense out of it. So they’re asking really good questions, and they’re thinking really creatively about the answers to the questions that they ask. And then most people kind of leave that behind when they start to understand what the standard answers to things are, or when they start to learn that serious people don’t spend time on some of the questions that interest philosophers like. Am I dreaming my entire life? Or what is time, right? So as people age, they kind of leave those questions behind. A small group of us, the professional philosophers, get stuck in the endeavor, and we kind of use methods that come naturally to lawyers.

Scott Hershovitz 00:08:29  We, you know, make rigorous arguments and separate out our premises and don’t exactly trade briefs like lawyers do. But one person writes an article and another person replies, and on and on. But what I want to communicate is grown ups can get back to doing philosophy. They don’t have to do it like lawyers. They don’t have to do it like professional philosophers. In fact, it’s better if you do it like a kid.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:48  Yeah, I love that. And, you know, I think that there is an academic element of philosophy of which you’re involved in, and then there is very much the everyday aspect of philosophy. And if we really think about this idea of it, where it’s about thinking, you know, it’s about thinking better, we can all think better, think more clearly. And there’s something you say as you’re describing what philosophy is. And I love this line. You say the goal is to get in the habit of treating your own ideas as critically as you treat other peoples, and I really love that.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:23  Just that idea of like, if you bring an idea to me that I don’t like, I can just pick it apart all the time. But my own idea is that I believe and I’m believing them, probably very largely from conditioning and emotional reasons. I don’t bring that same degree of scrutiny to my own ideas. And I love this idea, and it really runs its way through the book Of just getting better at asking questions about things that we might be taking for granted, or assuming and looking just at life a little bit more critically. And when I say critically, I don’t mean it in the negative sense. I mean it very much in the constructive sense. Looking at life a little bit more critically and a little bit more deeply, because one of the things that we explore on this show so much is how when we live our lives on autopilot, they become very shallow, they become very unengaged. They start to feel empty and meaningless to us. Right. It’s when we engage more deeply, we go off autopilot and we really start asking ourselves what matters, what’s important to me.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:29  And those are core philosophical questions, for sure.

Scott Hershovitz 00:10:33  I think there’s really two important things in what you said. The first is like thinking critically about our own ideas. I picked this up from a professor of mine who said, hey, look, when somebody makes an argument and you’ve got an objection to it. I want you to imagine that they already thought of it, and that they thought it was so misguided that it wasn’t even worth mentioning, and try to figure out why they might have thought that. Where did they think that you had gone wrong? And if you get to the end of that endeavor and you can’t figure out where you’ve gone wrong, then it’s time to tell people about your idea. But often, you know, if you put yourself in the other person’s shoes, you can actually figure out, oh, here’s the weakness in this idea that I’ve got. And I try to instantiate that in parenting my kids, right. There’s a line early on in the book where I say, Americans like to say that they’re entitled to their opinion, and that’s not how my house works, right? You articulate an opinion and you should be prepared to defend it.

Scott Hershovitz 00:11:24  I’m going to ask you why. When you give me an explanation, I’m going to question that explanation over and over again. And so you’re right. I have raised kids that are really adept at arguing because they know that they’re going to have to to back up the claims that they make. But one thing I think is important. The second thing I heard in what you were saying, I think it’s important to remember that not all philosophy is adversarial in this way. It’s not just about having arguments with other people, and our lives are shot through with philosophical questions. If you’re trying to decide, how should I spend my life, right? Like, what’s a good life look like? What’s a good life for me look like? Which career is the right path? Or am I obligated to maintain a relationship with someone who’s not treating well, maybe that person’s my parents. Maybe that person’s a friendship. These are all just philosophical questions. So one thing I like to remind people is that you’re doing philosophy all the time.

Scott Hershovitz 00:12:20  You may not think of yourself as doing philosophy, but when you’re wondering how to be in the world, how to act in the world, those are some of the most central philosophical questions. And I do think you’re right that it helps a lot of times to just take a step back and to think about them that way, and to talk to other people about them rather than just move through on autopilot.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:40  Yeah. And, you know, you’ve got another line that I love. And you say you believe our humanity lies partly in our capacity to distinguish what we ought to do from what we want to do. Say more about that. That’s a really powerful idea.

Scott Hershovitz 00:12:54  Yeah. So this comes up in a conversation. There’s chapters about revenge and punishment in the book, since those are some of the kinds of issues that arise early on in parenting. You know, your kids might take revenge at somebody they think is wronging them or, you know, certainly parenting involves kind of pervasive questions about whether one should punish, how one should punish what you’re trying to accomplish.

Scott Hershovitz 00:13:16  When you punish. And it’s in the course of that punishment chapter that I say this line that our humanity lies partly in our ability to distinguish what we want to do from what we ought to do. And there I’m actually particularly interested in, like, what’s the difference between a person and another central character in the book is our dog, Bailey. And Bailey has once and she pursues her once in whatever she thinks is the most effective way. You know, she’s been trained, so she doesn’t just always do immediately what she wants to do. She knows that sometimes sitting and waiting for the treat is the way of getting the treat, not jumping for the treat. But she’s driven by her wants. And I think something that is maybe unique among human beings is that we don’t just have to be driven by our wants. We can see this distinction between what we want to do and what we should do, and we can act on it. Or at least I should say most of us can. I think that’s one of the tasks of parenthood, is to help your kids appreciate this distinction, right? To reflect on what they should do, to recognize that it may not be what they want to do, and to cultivate the habits of mind that will let them, as they get older, act on what they believe they should do rather than to satisfy their immediate ones.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:33  Yeah, I’m going to jump right to the chapter on Bailey. I could go a thousand directions in this book. This has been a difficult one to prepare for, but I can’t resist going here because you do bring up Bailey and you say, what is it like to be Bailey? We spend a lot of time talking about that in our house. You know, Bailey is your dog, and I love this because I do the exact same thing you say. Rex loves to narrate her life, but he doesn’t do it like a sportscaster. It’s not. Bailey is in hot pursuit of Sammy Squirrel. Rather, he talks as if he’s Bailey. You know, and my partner and I do this all the time with one of our dogs, Lola. Like one of our dogs, BNZ. She’s like a bat. I don’t have any idea what it’s like to be BNC. I can’t fathom. She’s so animal. Yeah, but the other dog seems so human in her way. And so, you know, Lola will facilitate conversations between us, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:21  Oh, well, I’d.

Speaker 4 00:15:22  Really like to have, you know, this or.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:24  That. And so that part really struck me. But why I had to jump to this is a I love to talk about dogs, but B, there’s a fact in the book that made me stop and turn to my partner and go, you have got to hear this. And it’s the section where we’re talking about consciousness and we’re saying, what’s it like to be a bat or a dog and how we can’t really fundamentally know. Then you go on to talk about how bats echolocation, they put out sound to create a picture of the world around them. And then you go on to tell a story about a person who can do this. And it blew my mind. You want to share that?

Scott Hershovitz 00:16:01  Yeah. So this is a story about a guy named Daniel Kish who people sometimes call the real life Batman. And Kish is a young child, lost his sight, and he just started to make clicking noises and was clearly using them in something like the way a bat would use them, that they’d reflect off surfaces back to his ears, and he would develop a kind of understanding of what was around him that allowed him to move through the world in really astounding ways so he can, for instance, ride a bike and not just a little bit like, but like ride a bike around town.

Scott Hershovitz 00:16:37  He’s getting so much information through echolocation. And, you know, Kish is an interesting character in his own right because he thinks a lot of times folks that are disabled or held back by other people’s stereotypes about what they’re capable of, he thinks that, you know, many more people who lack sight would be capable of the things that he does if they were encouraged and given the training in an atmosphere that that didn’t take them to be as limited as we often take them to be. So I think Kish is really important to listen to for that reason. But also it connects up with this bigger question in philosophy that you were alluding to earlier that really interests me. It’s a question about the inaccessibility of our minds and the inaccessibility of other people’s minds, of other creatures minds. So one of the most famous essays in 20th century philosophy was by a professor named Thomas Nagel, called What is it Like to be a bat? And he was observing that bats have this ability that most human beings don’t have anything like, and observing the distance between our external understanding.

Scott Hershovitz 00:17:46  We know what a bat can do, but we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat doing it. We know what a dog can do, but we don’t know what it’s like to be a dog and to experience, say, the rich sense of smell that they have. And then what is really interesting for me is I think that’s just actually true of the people I live with, too. It was starker when my kids were younger, but we would look at, you know, our six month old or two year old and think like, what is going on in his head? Yeah, we don’t really know. Actually, I feel sometimes I feel like a better idea of what’s going on with the dog than I do with my children. And they’re older now, so they’re more like me. And I think I have a better guess. But I like to remind myself that there really are limitations to my ability to understand what it’s like to be inside of someone else.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:31  Yeah, I just had to get that fact about a guy who can ride a bike by echolocation because it’s just stunning.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:38  You also say that, like, not only that, but the scans of his brain suggest that he is processing visual information.

Scott Hershovitz 00:18:46  That’s right. So one question is, what’s it like to be Daniel Kish? Echolocation. And he says he’s having a visual experience. And when they put him in MRI machines, it seems like the visual cortex is active, which makes it plausible that his brain renders the information that it’s getting in something like the way that sighted people’s brains are rendering the light that their eyes are gathering still leaves open. The question, what’s it like to be a bat? Right? So like, we have a better idea what it’s like for Daniel Kish to be echolocation, because he can talk to us and tell us about it, and the bats can’t.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:23  Yeah. I often say, if I could have one wish. Maybe this is just thinking too small. I’m like, I would just like to be in my dog’s head for like an hour. I just yeah. Or an octopus’s, you know, like, what is it like to be an octopus? Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:37  I’ve got thousands of suckers that I can independently control, and I can change the color of my skin. And, I mean, yeah. Now, I might say they are not very useful questions. You, as a philosopher would probably say. Actually, they are.

Scott Hershovitz 00:19:51  So I think they’re really interesting questions. Actually, I quote a similar line from a famous developmental psychologist. I think his name is John Flavell, who said that, you know, he would trade all of his degrees and honours to experience just a few minutes inside a two year old, just to have the insider understanding of what it’s like, rather than the outsiders understanding that he’s spent years cultivating. One thing I think is actually really interesting about that is there was this famous British philosopher in the 20th century, A.J. Eyre, who was pondering this question of, you know, what’s it like to be other creatures and thought there’s a way in which it didn’t make sense, in part because he was trying to imagine what it would look like to fulfill your wish that you like to be an octopus, you’d have to give up yourself, right? You don’t want to be yourself inside an octopus.

Scott Hershovitz 00:20:40  Observing. That’s not what it’s like to be an octopus. That’s right. And so I thought, like, there’s actually just a limit. Even if a genie showed up to grant your wish, this is not a wish that really can be realized.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:50  Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense. I will say, back in my addiction days, someone once told my brother and I that if we drank a bottle of Robitussin cough syrup and I don’t know what else it was, we took with it like ten other type of cold medicine pills. They called this the lizard. And I will say it is what I imagine it might be like to be a lizard that I.

Scott Hershovitz 00:21:10  So you  ran this experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:12  I’ve ran this experiment. I don’t recommend it. I don’t recommend it. All right. So I want to go to another area. I’m kind of going into the deep end of the pool here, obviously, but I want to talk a little bit about identity. I explore ideas of identity on this show a lot, and some of them from a pretty basic level, like, you know, can we identify less as, you know, these roles in our lives and all the way down to the really profound experiences I’ve had of sort of the dissolving of self through some of my different spiritual practices.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:41  And you talk about The Ship of Theseus, could you explore that real quick? And then I want to go from there to a really profound thing that I think you said that was really mind opening for me. So let’s start with Theseus.

Scott Hershovitz 00:21:54  The Ship of Theseus is a very famous philosophical puzzle that dates back thousands of years, really. So the original version of the story goes like this Theseus ship has been put into port in Athens, and over years people, you know, people come and they see it and they venerate it. But over the years it starts to fall into disrepair. And so when a board is rotting out, they remove that board, that plank, and they replace it with another one. And then, you know, they do that again and they do that again. And eventually on down the line, you know, maybe decades have gone by. They’ve replaced every single plank on Theseus ship. And then the question that people want to ask about this is, well, is it still Theseus ship if it doesn’t have any of the original wood? And.

well, let me ask you, what do you think? Is that still Theseus ship?

Eric Zimmer 00:22:41  I can’t answer that question without spoiling the payoff that we’re headed towards here. So I’m.

Scott Hershovitz 00:22:45  I’ve already persuaded you of the answer I want to give to this. It sounds like maybe a little bit. A little bit. Okay. Yeah. So. So here’s the thing. If you say yes, that’s not Theseus ship anymore, then. Then the next question is going to be, when did it stop being Theseus ship? When the first plank was replaced? Right. When there was just a slight deviation. That doesn’t seem like it could be true. Like, you know, if the tail light on your car gets knocked out, you get a new tail light, but you don’t think, oh, cool, I got a new car, you know, so you can change a little bit without changing the identity of the ship. Yeah, right. But is it when a majority of the planks were changed, people don’t think that sounds very plausible either, because it suggests that, like, you know, right up until the 49th percent plank, like we had the same ship, then when we tipped 50, we suddenly didn’t.

Scott Hershovitz 00:23:27  That doesn’t seem right. Yeah. So it doesn’t seem like we can identify easily a spot where it stopped being the same ship. And so some people say, well, okay, it’s still the same ship, right? Well, then enter Thomas Hobbes, the famous English philosopher. He added a little bit onto the puzzle. He’s like, well, just imagine that each time they replace one of these planks, somebody carries it away, put it in a storage garage, the original and, you know, stores it in case it ever needs to be used again. And then an industrious shipbuilder comes along, takes all the original planks, and reassembles them in just the way the original ship was built. Right. Well, that sort of sounds like it’s Theseus ship. It’s the original planks in the original pattern. So if that’s Theseus ship over in this storage yard, what’s the ship in the dock? Yeah. So, like, there’s, like, endless iterations of this puzzle, but it raises this question, you know, how much can you change something before you’ve changed its identity?

Eric Zimmer 00:24:25  Yeah. And this gets to very central questions about who we are. You know, what am I. And again these questions can be asked at different levels. And that was the insight that you said that I thought was really, really good. And you said answers to questions about identity, I think depend on the reasons we’re interested in them. Or I would add the context in which we’re asking the question. And people get hung up on this in spiritual circles between like on one hand, there’s a teaching that says, well, there is no self. And yet we know. Absolutely. Eric is sitting here talking to Scott, right. And so the context in which I ask that question has everything to do with the answer. If I’m asking about the ultimate core of life from a Buddhist perspective, perhaps the answer in that light is very different than the answer. When I’m standing at the DMV and they say, who are you?

Scott Hershovitz 00:25:18  Yeah. So let’s just back up one moment and think about, like how we apply this idea to ourselves because nobody actually cares about the Ship of Theseus.

Scott Hershovitz 00:25:25  Yeah, right. But we can ask the same kind of question about our own personal identity. Which is to say, what makes me the same person I was last week or last year? Or I tell stories about my childhood in this book. The same person I was when I was dropped off at kindergarten. And it’s a puzzle because I’m not made out of the same stuff. My planks have changed. Like, pretty much every cell in my body has turned over since I was in kindergarten. And it’s also not arranged the same way. Right. Like, my brain is wired up wholly differently than it was when I was in kindergarten. And I’m bigger. My body is different. So it raises this question like, how do we have continuity across time? Or do we have any sort of continuity across time? And as you say, I’m inclined to think that the answers to these questions are highly purpose dependent. And I like your addition to this highly context dependent. Right. We need to understand, like what’s at stake about our identity.

Scott Hershovitz 00:26:20  Why do we care? In what situation are we asking about it? And ultimately, I’m inclined to think that for some purposes, I’m the same person that my mother dropped off at kindergarten. Like, we kind of share a life story. That little kid in me. Right. For other purposes, I’m a wholly different person than that little kid, right? It wouldn’t make sense to be angry at me for things that five year old had done.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:44  But we do. Right. Like, no, nobody’s probably getting angry at the five year old, but we are getting angry at the person from two weeks ago. Right.

Scott Hershovitz 00:26:51  That’s right. And there’s a really interesting conversation among philosophers who think about punishment. John Locke actually had things to say about this. You know, if I’m punishing you today for something you did last week, last month, ten years ago, right? How can I be confident that I’m punishing the person who deserves it? Yes. Locke thought that when it comes to punishment, what matters is that you remember having done the thing right.

Scott Hershovitz 00:27:15  And I think that may be a necessary condition, actually. Sometimes people remember things they didn’t actually do.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:20  Except as a blackout drunk. There’s huge amounts that I don’t remember that I’m sure I did things that are, morally offensive.

Scott Hershovitz 00:27:29  That’s really excellent, because it suggests it’s not even a necessary condition. And as soon as you said that, I think that’s obviously right. We don’t give people a pass, say, if they commit some serious crime when they were blackout drunk. And the standard story we tell in the criminal law, as so long as the intoxication was voluntary, it was done knowing the risk of of this kind of misbehavior when one was blacked out. So I think that’s good. I’ll give you one more story, actually, which was kind of challenging for me in recent years. There was a kid in elementary school that I thought of as my nemesis. It was like a little bit, a little bit of a bully. And like five years ago, maybe I just got a Facebook message from him.

Scott Hershovitz 00:28:11  Had him been in touch with him since elementary school. And the Facebook message said, hey, you know, I know that I didn’t treat you very well and I feel bad about that. And I want you to know, like, you know, me and the other guys, like, we actually, we liked you, even though we didn’t treat you very nicely. And, you know, I was super appreciative of the message. I thought it was like, really like a courageous and kind thing to do for him to reach out and to say that. But I had kind of complicated feelings about that. One thing I said to him when I wrote back is, hey, I can tell you’re not that guy anymore. Like, I don’t feel like you need to apologize for what you did in elementary school. It’s just obvious that you’ve changed as a person. But the other thing I wanted to say, which I think was maybe a little more challenging, was I don’t need an apology either. Right? Like here.

Scott Hershovitz 00:28:55  My life is going fine. I don’t feel like you owe me an apology, but what I kind of left unsaid was that, you know, there was a person who did need an apology. There was a person who did need better treatment. He’s not around anymore. So I do think that these are really interesting. Like these questions of identity are really interesting. They arise in all sorts of ways. And sometimes the person to whom you owe your apology or your amends isn’t actually around any more to receive it.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:49  Going back to the ship of Theseus, if we assume that childhood being a formative part of our overall development, there is some part of you in some way that, as we’re saying, is still a kid who was bullied and that had some we don’t know what impact. We can’t say we can’t tell which plank was affected. Yeah, but we can say, you know, there’s something in there. And so I love these questions because they do get to the ways in which we define ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:21  Do I define myself as the kid who is bullied in school? And what does that say or mean about me? Do I define myself as a Republican or a Democrat? What comes along with that definition? I mean, all these identities shape who we are. And so I love your formulation, because the thing that I’ve arrived at with identity is it’s a useful tool. The more loosely we can hold it, though, the more flexible we can be with it, applying an identity when it’s useful. So, for example, there’s lots of studies that show someone who says, I’m not a smoker and takes that identity is less likely to smoke again than somebody who says, I’m not smoking right now. Right. Right. So there’s a positive use of an identity there. Yeah, but we know there’s negative uses of identity. I label myself a certain way and I start living into that. And so anytime I can slip the Ship of Theseus into this podcast, I do it. But secondly, I really thought your idea about the reasons that we use them and the context was a really helpful way to think about these ideas.

Scott Hershovitz 00:31:25  So I think that for me, like the really helpful thing in what you just said is this idea that we should be flexible about what we want to incorporate into our identity and think of it as a tool that sometimes appropriate to use and sometimes not. So I think you’re absolutely right. There’s a lot of discussion about this in the philosophical literature that, you know, say, if I see myself as an honest person, right. Like part of what it means to take that on board as a part of my identity is that I’m just going to see myself as set against dishonesty. I’m not going to, on each occasion, right, say, oh, look, is there a good reason to tell a lie here is they’re not like committing that this is how I see myself in the world is a way of structuring or forestalling deliberation that you may not want to get into. Yeah. And that, I think, could be really constructive. But then, as you say, I think that sometimes people often incorporate things into their identity and make themselves too rigid.

Scott Hershovitz 00:32:21  Right. Like, the tool can be overused. Right. So that, like, there might be occasions for making commitments in this way and there might be occasions for maintaining flexibility.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:31  Yep. As much as I want to segue into cleverly disguised donkeys, I’m not. Although I’m teasing that out for listeners, what you just said and what we’re talking about, I think leads really into the idea of us talking about relativism a little bit. Particularly, I want to talk about this idea of I’m not sure I’m going to say this word right. Epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, because I think this gets a little bit to how attached are we to our ideas, which are a form of identity. So let’s talk a little bit about relativism in general. And then epistemic bubbles and echo chambers.

Scott Hershovitz 00:33:07  Yeah. So conversations about relativism started in a really interesting way in my house. They started just after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. And we were sitting around the dinner table and Rex said that Donald Trump is a bad president, sort of thinking about how he’d encouraged the attack.

Scott Hershovitz 00:33:24  And Hank, our younger son, said, well, Donald Trump is a bad president to us, but he’s a good president to the people that like him. And I said, Hank, do you mean that we think he’s a good president and they think he’s a bad president, but that one of us is right and the other is wrong? And he said, no, we think he’s a good president, and they think he’s a bad president. And there’s nothing in the middle that says who’s right, right. This was very much the idea he was articulating was we each get our own truth. Like, here’s a judgment. Is Donald Trump a good president? And he thought for some people’s truth, the answer is yes. And for other people’s truth, the answer is no. And I wanted to see how far I could push this with him. I said, hey, Hank, if I take you outside and I say, it’s raining, and you say it’s not, is one of us wrong? And the other one right.

Scott Hershovitz 00:34:12  And he said, it’s raining for you, but not for me. She thought it was just kind of wild, right? That he was like, I mean, he is. He’s a tough cookie sometime, right? Like he is, he’s willing to stick to his guns. Yeah. And, you know, I think most of us are not relativists about the rain, right? We think it’s either raining or it’s not. And, you know, we usually think there’s a reason somebody is mistaken if they disagree with us, maybe they just haven’t gotten drops or maybe they’re being difficult. Right. But a lot of people, I think, are inclined towards a kind of relativism about evaluative judgments. Like, was that a good or bad movie? Is Donald Trump a good or bad president? You know, is Mozart better than Beethoven? I’m not inclined towards relativism. I think there are truths to the matter about questions like this, or at least many questions like this. And even though the truth can sometimes be hard to find out, we should have some humility about whether we’ve identified the truth, and we should be open minded and listen to arguments.

Scott Hershovitz 00:35:04  And like we were talking about earlier, we should wonder whether we’ve got things wrong. But implicit in the idea of wondering whether you’ve got things wrong and being open minded to the evidence and listening to people that you disagree with you is the possibility of getting it right. Yeah. So the story is in the book report. Some of my attempts to argue Hank back into the idea that some things can just be true. But then one of the questions that I ask in the book is, well, if I’m right about that, if there’s truth of the matter about some of these questions, why is it that we disagree so much? Why do we have so much trouble settling on the truth? And I think especially in the media environment, we have now, two concepts that people find really helpful for thinking about this are epistemic bubbles and echo chambers.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:48  Let’s pause for a second before we jump off this point. I want to go back to a few things you said. And I also, hopefully we remember to work in how you broke Hank.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:56  Okay. But I want to explore this a little bit more because I am someone who probably is somewhat inclined towards relativism, but I’m not sure it’s a well thought out opinion. Okay, so except among our classical music aficionados, let’s take a less charged topic than abortion. Let’s start with is Bach better than Beethoven or Beethoven better than Bach? Yeah. You believe there’s a way to arrive at an answer to that? To me, that seems completely subjective.

Scott Hershovitz 00:36:25  Yeah, I should confess I have limited classical music knowledge. Right? So I’m not prepared to defend the view that Bach is better than Beethoven, or that Beethoven is better than Bach. And I’m not even actually committed to the idea that there’s necessarily an answer. I think one possibility is it’s indeterminate. There are good arguments on both sides, but let’s take arguments that people probably have with their friends all the time. Michael Jordan better than LeBron? Or is LeBron greater than Jordan? Or is Serena Williams the greatest women’s tennis player of all time? Or is it Steffi Graf or is it Martina Navratilova? These are the lifeblood of lots of drinking sessions.

Scott Hershovitz 00:37:03  Yeah, right. The things that people love to get together and argue about. And I think the fact that we have arguments and the fact that the arguments are passionate tells us that we all presuppose that there’s a right answer to this question, even if we right now disagree what it is because we’re treating it very differently, then we treat different kinds of conversations. If you and I go get ice cream, I might be like, hey, what kind of ice cream do you like? And what kind of ice cream do you like?

Eric Zimmer 00:37:30  Well, I like I like all kinds, but if I had to put it into a category, I’d say chocolate.

Scott Hershovitz 00:37:34  Okay, so you like chocolate ice cream? Actually, I like chocolate ice cream too. But I wouldn’t think that you and I are objectively right as against the people who prefer vanilla or the people who prefer salted caramel or whatever it is. I would just think, okay, like this is how taste works. Yeah, there’s the thing that tastes best to me, and there’s the thing that tastes best to you.

Scott Hershovitz 00:37:53  And this is not a disagreement, but when we’re having an argument about Jordan or LeBron or Serena Williams or Steffi Graf or Beethoven versus Bach, we’re not usually treating it that way. We’re not saying, hey, I like Beethoven, and you’re saying, hey, I like back. We’re thinking there’s some criteria of excellence here, whether it’s basketball excellence or tennis excellence or musical excellence. And we’re trying to evaluate these people’s bodies of work against those criteria of excellence. And I think that project assumes that it’s possible. There’s an answer. Here’s an answer. Was Beethoven better than Scott? Yes. Right. Beethoven is a lot better than me. And I suspect that Beethoven was a lot better than a lot of very famous pianists or composers. Was he better than Bach? I don’t know, we’d need somebody with some classical music knowledge to pop in and help us sort that out.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:43  Yeah, well, I think it’s interesting. The word you use there is taste. You know, what’s a matter of taste and what’s a matter of objective fact? And I think the reason that I would take art generally off the table as there being a objective answer.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:59  And this gets to how we define art. To me, art is about making people feel something. And that is extraordinarily subjective. Is Steve Vai a better guitar player than my friend Chris, who’s also the editor of this podcast? The answer to that, if anybody was looking at technical prowess, would be Steve Vai. Hands down. Sure. But I would argue that I would much, rather much rather hear my friend Chris play guitar than Steve Vai because it moves me.

Scott Hershovitz 00:39:25  You’re making Chris’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:26  Day. I am Chris knows I love his guitar playing. So let’s move away from art though. But I think now LeBron James versus Michael Jordan is good. We’re assuming a standard of excellence. So now let’s move into something slightly more emotionally charged, which is like all right, I’m going to I’m going to regret this, but let’s just wander right into the abortion debate that’s here. Because I often when I look at this, I’m like, okay, if I look at this from the perspective of someone who is anti-abortion and if what I believe is that an embryo is a fully formed human being, equal to what a five year old is in whatever my belief structure is.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:05  I’m going to argue fairly vehemently that we should not kill five year olds, right? If you came to me with that and you were like, you know what? Being a parent is a drag. If you know, if you got a five year old and you want to get rid of them, get rid of them, I’d be like, well, hang on. And I think most of us would. On the other hand, there are plenty of great arguments for why we should respect a woman’s right to choose. And it’s her body and there’s all these things. How do we get to right there? That’s where I get stuck. I’m like, well, I know what I believe, I know what my moral framework is, but that’s not everybody’s. And should it be everybody? So tell me how you think about that.

Scott Hershovitz 00:40:46  So I just taught a class here at the University of Michigan called life, death, love in the law. And it was some law students and some philosophy students, and it was really wonderful experience.

Scott Hershovitz 00:40:57  I had students across the political spectrum with differing views about the moral permissibility of abortion. I’m certain, though, you know, people didn’t share their personal stories, that some people in the room probably had personal experiences, you know, with making those choices, whichever way they might have made them. But I set up front that there’s places in the world where, you know, people shout at each other about these issues and they try and drown each other out, and they talk to each other in ways that are really nasty. And that’s not what we’re going to do in this seminar. Right. If you want to be in this seminar, we’re going to listen to each other really carefully. We’re going to share our own thoughts and our ideas, and we’re going to hear what other people have to say about them, or we’re going to display the sort of virtues of inquiry that we talked about earlier. Wondering how we might be wrong, right, and inviting other people to help us think about how we might be wrong.

Scott Hershovitz 00:41:47  And the students really rose to the occasion. We had really deep and insightful conversations about abortion, about euthanasia, about lots of these, sort of like beginning and end of life kinds of questions. And, you know, it’s not the case. I think that we arrive at agreement about what the truth is in the course of those conversations. But I think we all got a much deeper understanding of the issues. We saw that some arguments that we might have thought were good were actually not so good, and some arguments we hadn’t entertained before we felt attracted to. And so I think the question of like, how does one seek truth in these really fraught issues is right through this kind of shared inquiry, through this kind of shared deliberation, to kind of turn the temperature down in a way that our culture makes really hard. Yeah. If you only think about this stuff by watching cable news or by going on Twitter, you’re not going to think it through very carefully. You know, I like to recommend there’s a philosopher named Kate Grizzly who teaches at Oxford, who I think is the most thoughtful person writing about the morality of abortion today.

Scott Hershovitz 00:42:52  She has a book that she co-authored called Arguments About Abortion, which is a kind of accessible introduction. And then also, she was recently on the Ezra Klein podcast is actually a really great place to get her help in thinking through some of these issues. So podcasts actually this one. Others are a really great place to dive deep and think in a slower way than you can. But the point of all the thinking is that we think we might reach the answer, right? So you said, well, look, if you think that an embryo is just the same as a five year old, then of course you’re going to think abortion is impermissible. We don’t kill five year olds. We know that we shouldn’t. And I think that’s right. But then I want to put that view right, that an embryo is the same as a five year old under a microscope. And I want to find out whether you really think it. Right. And I’m going to present you with, you know, scenarios to consider.

Scott Hershovitz 00:43:42  And here’s one. You work in a hospital and there’s embryos that are frozen in the hospital. And there are, you know, five year old children around in the hospital. And the hurricane is on its way. Right. And you realize as you’re about to grab the embryos, that there’s one five year old who can’t walk themselves out. You know, that’s why they’re in the hospital. There’s one five year old that’s still in the hospital that didn’t get evacuated. And now you’ve got a choice. You can carry the five year old out, or you can carry a dozen embryos out. Which one are you going to take?

Eric Zimmer 00:44:17  That’s the trolley question framed up for abortion debate. I mean, I know what I would do. I’d grab the five year old.

Scott Hershovitz 00:44:24  I actually think I sort of first encountered this scenario through Kate Grizzly. And I think it’s a really great way, actually, of revealing to a lot of people that even if you care about the embryo, even if you value the embryo, even if you think God has made an investment in that embryo and we should protect it, most people actually don’t think it’s on a par morally with a five year old.

Scott Hershovitz 00:44:45  Given the choice, they’re probably going to save the five year old rather than than several embryos. And so I think it’s through this kind of reflection that we can start to get a deeper understanding of the issues and our own views about them and work towards views that we think we can defend as truth.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:23  Your whole approach here is really kind of what I wanted to get at, which is this idea of how do we talk to each other more civilly, but also more deeply inquiring, you know, how do we ask good questions of ourselves and of the people we see things differently with? And you’ve got a line I want to read because I love it. You basically said we should talk to people who think differently, and we should be open to revising our views in light of what we learned. But we shouldn’t give up on the idea of truth or the search for it. And I love that idea that again, we could debate which things you could come to objective truths on and what you couldn’t, but the search for it, you know, and the attempt to try and investigate.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:06  I would have loved to have sat through your course, and I wish that we could, you know, have you lead the national debate on all these things? Because more than any policy that I see happening, and there are plenty that concern me, it’s our structure of conversation that is just so disheartening to me these days.

Scott Hershovitz 00:46:22  Yeah. So I think that’s right. It’s the structure of our debates, you know, especially our public debates, you know, like it’s possible in a quiet seminar room to have conversations with goodwill. But we haven’t really created public spaces in which we’re accustomed to having those conversations. It’s actually one of the reasons that I suggest toward the end of the book, like, we should talk to our kids about philosophy at home, but it’s also something we should incorporate into their education that in other parts of the world, grade schools have a philosophy curriculum where high schools have a philosophy curriculum. And I think that those are really terrific ways of getting kids trained to have civil conversations with one another, to get them in the habit of listening to each other.

Scott Hershovitz 00:46:58  Thinking carefully about what other people are saying, hearing their objections, and thinking about where you might have gone wrong, I think that it would be wonderful. That was a more regular part of the way we taught children.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:09  Yeah. So let’s go back to how you broke Hank of his relativism.

Scott Hershovitz 00:47:13  Yeah. So remember, Hank’s relativism was super thoroughgoing. It applied not just to evaluative judgments, right? About which many people are tempted towards relativism, but it applied to, you know, matters of like, you know, is it raining outside? Yeah. So I was putting Hank to bed that night, and as I kissed him goodnight, I said, goodnight. Hank, you’re the sweetest six year old I know. And he said angrily, he’s like, I’m not six. I’m eight. And I said, well, maybe to you, but to me you’re six. And he lost it. He said, I’m eight. Some things are just true. so so even in the end. Right? Once I hit on the thing Hank cared about.

Scott Hershovitz 00:47:55  Right? He. He couldn’t handle my thinking differently about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:59  Yeah. Yeah. I’m trying to think of what I feel that strongly about. Chris versus Stevi. Definitely.

Scott Hershovitz 00:48:05  Excellent.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:05  Let’s pivot to an article that got a lot of press. It was called What Shamu Taught Me about a Happy Marriage by Amy Sutherland. Tell me a little bit about that. I think there’s a lot of great things to unpack underneath that.

Scott Hershovitz 00:48:19  Yeah. So this was an article that was, at the time, the most emailed article ever for The New York Times. Maybe it still is. Wow. It was an article written by Amy Sutherland. She was working on a book about animal trainers. Say, like the trainers at SeaWorld, and how they get these animals to do extraordinary things like balance a ball on their nose. And she’s telling the story in the New York Times. She says that she realized that maybe she could use these animal training techniques on her husband. His name was also Scott. She goes home and, you know, one of his problems, maybe also one of my problems is he leaves his clothes on the floor.

Scott Hershovitz 00:48:52  And so she says, well, I learned from the animal trainers that you don’t give negative feedback. When you get behavior you don’t like, you just ignore it entirely. You act like it didn’t even happen, right? So that’s called least reinforcing syndrome. But then when you get positive behavior, like the least little step in the right direction, you reward that wildly. So she stopped complaining about his clothes on the floor, but if he actually picks him up and put it in the hamper, she would praise him wildly, right? And then, you know, like he liked the praise. He maybe he’d put more clothes in the hamper and she’d praise him wildly again. And she reports that over time, his behavior started to improve, right? Like he was the sea lion balancing the ball on his nose. Right. This caused kind of some tension in our house. I saw the article and I knew that I had a problem, and so I kind of disappeared. Our copy of the paper one night, I thought, oh, wait a minute.

Scott Hershovitz 00:49:39  You know, Julie, my wife is like praising me for something I really ought to be doing anyway. Like putting my dishes in the sink. Did she see that article? And I asked her. I was like, is this about Shamu? And it turned out she had seen the article. She was trying to shampoo me. We made an agreement. We weren’t going to try and use these techniques on each other. And actually, you know, this arises in the book in the context of the chapter on punishment where I say, look, your little kids treat them like animals. Like when they’re two, when they’re three, they really can’t understand yet what they’re doing wrong or why they should be doing better. So all you can do with very little kids is adjust the incentives that they face so that you elicit the kind of behavior that you want. But I think the aspiration is actually to raise a person that you shouldn’t treat that way, to raise a person who’s a person and not an animal.

Scott Hershovitz 00:50:31  And what makes them a person is, as we were talking about earlier, that they can appreciate the difference between what they want to do and what they ought to do, and they can act on what they ought to do. And then it’s appropriate for us to feel grateful when they behave well and angry when they behave poorly. part of what it means to relate to each other as people and not to relate to each other as animals, is to have these kinds of reactive attitudes. Like, I get angry, I’m appreciative, and I think that that’s the way spouse’s friends really ought to be relating to one another. You shouldn’t be trying to train your friend in the way that you would train an animal.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:07  So there’s lots of interesting things in this. You talk about this as seeing a person rather than an object, right? And there’s a philosopher. I don’t remember her exact name or his name, but said, you know, to see a person as an object is to see them as something to be managed or handled or cured or trained.

Scott Hershovitz 00:51:28  Yeah. So this is a philosopher named Peter Strawson, who is a prominent English philosopher in the 20th century. And he distinguished two different ways of looking at human beings. One, he called the objective attitude is what you just described. You just see a person like an object in the world, subject to the laws of cause and effect. You know, if I push over here, this might happen. If I give them this incentive, it might change their behavior in that way. And he wanted to contrast that with what he called the participant attitude. Like you’re a participant in relationships with them, maybe as their spouse, maybe as their friend. Maybe you’re the teacher and somebody else is the student. And they’re right. He thought, we have these attitudes like gratitude and anger and resentment and love. And he thought that like, it’s not that these ways of looking at people, the objective attitude and the participant attitude are absolutely incompatible. We can take both. Right. I can look at my spouse objectively or look at my kids objectively and say, oh, look, you’re tired today.

Scott Hershovitz 00:52:26  I know that you don’t really mean what you say. I’m not going to get mad at you about it. Or I can hear what you’ve said, understand the way it’s insulting and I can get mad about it. Right? And Strawson thought there’s occasions to have both of these attitudes, but he thought it was a serious mistake to try and always look at other people objectively, because you lose touch with their humanity. You lose touch with the kinds of relationships that we really value in our lives. If you only treated other people like they were objects or animals.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:56  This is a really fascinating topic because my primary, I would say, both philosophical, psychological and spiritual orientation has largely been a lot of Buddhist thought. And Buddhist thought is very much about being non-reactive. Right? It praises a certain degree of objectivity. It praises a certain degree of seeing that what you’re doing is not necessarily personal, that it has its causes in the world and all that. And so it’s easy to see the benefits of that, right? But I love that you’re making a point that sometimes anger or gratitude is a better response than trying to think about, how could I get that person to behave in a way that doesn’t make me angry.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:47  Say a little bit more about that, because that’s a pretty fundamental.

Scott Hershovitz 00:53:50  Yeah, so I think anger is an emotion that needs some defenders. Actually, we don’t need more anger. Actually, there’s plenty of anger in the world, but the culture is constantly telling us to let it go, to not be angry. And I think it’s important to see that anger serves some important purposes. In particular, my getting angry is sometimes important to my respecting myself. So, you know, here’s a person who’s mistreated me, right? And they’ve done something, you know, like maybe they’ve exploited me. They’ve used me. Right. If I don’t react in any way right, then I’m in a way acquiescing in my own mistreatment. Right. You know, signaling to that person and others that it’s okay to treat me this way and maybe most disturbingly of all, possibly accepting for myself that it’s okay to treat me that way. And so I think anger can be justified as a kind of protest. It says, hey, look, it’s not okay for you to treat me that way.

Scott Hershovitz 00:54:49  I want you to know it. I want you to know that I know it right now. It’s important not to be consumed by one’s anger and for anger not to be the only thing that that one feels right. So I think that, like, the thing that people often have right is people take their anger too far. And so it’s important to be able to let your anger go and not let it take over your life. And I think, like the Buddhist kind of Buddhist practice that you’re talking about can be an incredible aid toward that. I just want to make a pitch for sometimes being upset, being angry, feeling resentful is a way of defending yourself in the world and respecting yourself. And you know, we could tell a similar story about gratitude as a way of sort of respecting others and recognizing the sacrifices they might make on your behalf.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:35  Yeah. Now, the line between shampooing somebody and being grateful is very thin, right? Because if I want you to pick up your clothes and put them in the basket, and you do, I could praise you because I’m like, I want more of that behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:52  I could also say to you, thank you. I’m really happy that you did that. Yeah. Which they’re very close to each other. But you’re saying it’s the spirit?

Scott Hershovitz 00:56:01  Yeah, exactly. So may involve the same sentence that would be said either way. But we all know the difference between maybe we can always tell, but we all appreciate there’s a difference between the thank you that’s offered sincerely and the thank you that’s offered strategically. And actually, my wife wouldn’t thank me sincerely for putting my clothes in the laundry hamper. Right. Because it’s not it’s not like a situation where I’ve gone above and beyond. It’s like like I did the minimum. I did what I should do on that occasion. Right. Like, chances are that thank you is strategic. And if Sutherland’s husband had thought about it, he may have recognized that actually, she’s not as appreciative as she seems to be. She seems to be in the moment, but I guess I want to make a pitch for not feeling these emotions or expressing these emotions strategically, though sometimes.

Scott Hershovitz 00:56:48  Perhaps that’s helpful, but for being the kind of person and having the kinds of relationships where you feel and express these emotions sincerely without letting them take control of your life when they’re not constructive.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:03  Yeah, and I really love how you said that. We’re all going to do a little of both of these. Right? Context. We’re back to this idea of there being context. But I really love this line where you said she stopped reasoning with him. This is talking about the animal trainer and her husband. She stopped reasoning with him and started shaping him. And I love that distinction, right? That if I’m always trying to shape you into being somebody else, I am treating you more as an object versus reasoning with you. Now, I might be diving off the deep end again, but we’re talking about the belief that people are capable of reason. We talked about how you should shape a three year old because a three year old isn’t fully capable. I’m just going to do it. Seems like a terrible idea, but I’m just going to do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:49  Sure. Is there a case that says certain people aren’t intelligent enough to know, to figure out what’s right, to figure out, to reason, through to the right thing? What’s your response to that?

Scott Hershovitz 00:58:03  You know, I think I’m a little resistant in putting it in terms of intelligence, because I think it’s more complicated than that. But there’s a kind of question that is confronted constantly within the criminal justice system about who’s responsible for what they do and who’s not. Yeah, right. Because we think that many most people are responsible for the choices that they make and are appropriate objects of the condemnation that’s associated with punishment. But we also think that there are people in the world that are suffering from various sorts of disabilities that may inhibit their ability to understand the choices that they’re making or to control the choices that they’re making. And we have some doubt that these people are appropriate objects of punishment, in part because we have some doubt that they’re appropriate objects of of condemnation. We don’t think that we’re in a position to have demanded better than they did.

Scott Hershovitz 00:59:01  I’ll tell you a little bit about one of my favorite papers in philosophy I love to read with my students is by a philosopher named Gary Watson. He writes about one of the most heinous murders that you’ll ever read about, just tells the story of somebody who murders two teenagers in a way that’s shockingly callous. And you read this story and you have, like, as harsh a judgment of a human being who would do this as you would have of anybody. And so Watson kind of meditates on that reaction for a little bit, and then he says, well, let me tell you the story of this guy’s upbringing. And then he describes what his childhood was like. Yeah. And I shudder every time I think of it. You know, I won’t describe it here, but it’s the most abusive childhood I’ve ever heard described. Yeah. His mother kind of resented his existence, and his parents deeply mistreated him, physically and emotionally. And, you know, Watson gets to the end of that, and he says, well, well, now I think, of course, now I understand.

Scott Hershovitz 01:00:03  Right. Yeah. I don’t think how could it have been otherwise? Because I know some people survived that abuse and didn’t do these things. But I do think but I see why you had so little regard for other people, because the world showed you so little regard. Yeah. And what Watson ends up saying is something I feel very deeply he says at the end of these. It’s not like I can choose one or the other perspective. He says my anger at the man this person is now just sits alongside my empathy for the child that he was. I find it very hard to form an overall view of this human being, and to understand how I should react to them and how I should treat them in the world. And I think this is actually one of the deepest questions for the criminal justice system. As we learn more about causes of behavior and limitations that the people in different circumstances face. It’s to sort of straddle these two perspectives, the engage perspective of we’re really angry about what you did.

Scott Hershovitz 01:00:58  We expected better from you is tempered by this other perspective, where we think the world hasn’t treated you so well, and we understand maybe why you weren’t capable of better. Yeah. I don’t have full answers for you for how to reconcile this.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:11  Yeah, and I could go down this for hours and we have minutes left. But I do think that this is a really interesting topic. I think it’s going to become more interesting in the criminal justice system, as you say, as we begin to understand more about the effects of trauma on people’s responses. You know, a question I ask as a recovering Heroin addict and alcoholic is how much choice do people have? When it comes to these substances, right? And we do know that the data seems unequivocal that the more trauma you’ve suffered, the much higher incidences of substance abuse you have with substance abuse, I think it’s a little bit easier to be like, well, let’s not penalize an addiction, you know? But we do things as addicts that probably do need punishing.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:59  This gets very complicated. And I look at my own life and I think back to the degree of choice I feel today around these substances. And I feel like I have as much choice as anybody who’s never had a problem, more or less. Right. I probably have to do some things to maintain that, but more or less. But there was a day where the amount of choice I felt I had was just a hair’s breadth. You know, it’s interesting to have felt both those things in the same human being around the same thing at really different times. You know, I was transporting opiates for my mother recently with no problem, but I would have robbed you at gunpoint for those once upon a time. And so I think, you know, I agree with you. I don’t think there are easy answers to these questions because there is a compassion element of it. But there is also a fairness to the victims element of it. There’s also a protecting our society elements of it. And I think these things are really, really complicated.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:55  And I would love to spend like four hours with you talking about these things because I think they’re fascinating. But we are out of time. And we didn’t even get to cleverly disguised donkeys. But my question for you is, do you have a few minutes for a post-show conversation?

Scott Hershovitz 01:03:11  Absolutely I do.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:12  And listeners, if you would like access to the post-show conversation and the joy of giving a gift to this podcast and its listeners, go to oneyoufeed.net/join. Again, Scott, thank you so much. The book is a true joy to read. It’s funny, it’s engaging, it’s deep. The notes I have on it are countless, so I encourage listeners to check it out. And again, thank you.

Scott Hershovitz 01:03:33  This was so much fun. Thanks for having me on.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:48  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:00:00  When we go in with an expectation that change is easy, that it immediately results in us feeling a new way. I will always be the one to speak on the reality of why change is hard to begin with, how much it already adds to an already stressed system, making us more likely then to return to old habits. Which is why change right needs to happen, and we benefit more greatly from not trying to change the most difficult habit to break to begin with.

Chris Forbes 00:00:35  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit? But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:19  There are ways we learn to survive early in life that work really well. They help us stay safe. They help us belong. And over time they start to feel like who we are. But eventually, something starts to go wrong. In this conversation, Doctor Nikola Pera and I talk about what it actually means to parent yourself, the real process of understanding the patterns your nervous system picked up in childhood, and how often they’re still running the show today. We get into why so much of what we call personality is really just adaptation, and why real change doesn’t come from inside alone. It comes from small, repeated actions that slowly build trust with yourself. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Nicole. Welcome back.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:02:07  Thank you for having me back. Honored to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:09  I don’t know how many times this is I think it’s it’s certainly the third, if not the fourth.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:15  I was asking you beforehand how many books you’ve had out. And this is your third full book with a workbook also in there. So I don’t know anybody curious enough to look. They can go find out. But this book is called Parenting the Inner Child The New Science of Our Oldest Wounds and How to Heal Them, and I’m looking forward to getting into it. But before that, we’ll start, like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:03:14  I think that power will very beautifully summarizes my own individual journey. And of course, this now work that I am speaking to, which is the wolf that wins, is the wolf that we’ve been feeding. Sometimes outside of our conscious awareness, many of us for a lifetime dating back into childhood. Because even right, the bad wolf, so to speak, that has all of these negative characteristics or qualities, some of which think that they mean or they reflect who we are truly, in my opinion at least, all of those are beautifully crafted, survival based adaptations that, again, many of us have been feeding outside of our awareness is our nervous system is try to find safety and security in moments where we didn’t have that and they became then our life force, our reliance for some of us, our identity. But again, my hope is to give listeners of any version of my work and understanding of the Wolf that they might be feeding outside of their awareness, and, of course, to give them some new tools to begin to better, to feed a more aligned wolf, so to speak.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:21  Excellent. So the title of the new book is the sort of thing that when I first got into recovery, this is a long time ago, and I started doing a therapy work, this phrase inner child caused me to cringe. I hated it, and even now, all these years later, all these podcasts, there’s still some part of me that’s like, so talk to me about why that’s the phrase that you use.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:04:53  So I think you’re having a very common experience or reaction, I should say, to. To this concept, which I think for a lot of us has felt to be a bit abstract or even felt to be a bit cringeworthy, right? This idea of I don’t want to, why do I have to? What role does my childhood even play in my current struggles? And so for me, truly understanding what the inner child was beyond right, this woo woo type abstract idea that maybe we can journal aloud to. I really began to map on conceptually what inner child is in terms of psychology.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:05:30  And the reality is, is that even if you do kind of feel very cringe or know that we don’t want to revisit a past because it was very painful or maybe even decades ago. And maybe you’re much like myself. We can’t recall much of it. The reality of it is, is that all of us carry this part with us. It was a part that formed very early in life where we learned how to cope, how to handle unpredictability, how to handle conflict, how to navigate unmet need. And so to really nail down what inner child is in psychological terms, it’s actually these memories. It’s these sensory based, reflex driven word. For it is implicit emotional memories that become stored in our body and then come alive somewhere later in life, in our relationships, in our daily life. And those are the moments where we are compelled right into a reaction, or maybe a daily habit, or again, an identity that doesn’t necessarily feel grounded in who we are. That might be disproportionate, right? We’re having huge reactions to maybe things that aren’t that big of a deal.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:06:35  And those are, I think, the daily moments where many of us, even if we don’t necessarily want to look back, we are clear that something else is driving those patterns at that time. And again, from a psychological perspective, it is it’s learning that is wired into us. that is becoming reactive again. Anytime a current moment resembles something from our past that we’ve experienced.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:58  Did you say implicit emotional memory?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:07:01  Implicit emotional memory? Implicit meaning, right. Actions without words, often defying logic. Again wired in, often relived in big emotional reactions or even limited right where we’re not reacting in moments where we do need to assert or to defend ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:19  The way you describe that is similar to what my therapist told me all these years ago with Inner Child, and I believed her enough to really go into that work, and I did it. I did it a long time ago. And I mean, it’s hard to say when you’ve been in recovery and on sort of like a journey of healing or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:40  It’s very hard to unwind it and be like, well, it was this that did that, and then I did this and it helped with that. All I can say is it was a part of becoming the person that I am today, which I’m truly grateful for. And I’ve I do think that the work I did in that space was really valuable, and the work I continue to do in that space is really valuable.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:08:02  Absolutely. And I just want to be clear and speak to two, perhaps categories of listeners. So one of which is, well, what happens if, like me, I can’t recall much of what happened to me. And so the response to that is, of course, there’s usually a stress based or trauma based reason when life becomes overwhelming. I can even talk about the science of, you know, kind of impact it has on the area of our brain, the hippocampus, that helps create the ability to recall later in life. But for whatever reason, right. If we don’t remember, we can still, right, begin exactly where we’re at.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:08:36  And also, the other category I want to speak to is we don’t necessarily have to even trace back the timeline to say, well, this happened then, and this is what I did in response to that we really can look more from a bird’s eye view, right. And understand more global patterns. So for instance right. If in childhood staying quiet right helped us to stay out of conflict. Right. Something as general, as consistent as that habit in childhood, often then right translates to an adult habit of maybe shutting down, even in conversations or arguments or conflicts with someone who is interested now in understanding our perspective. Or we can understand a more general pattern, right, of hypervigilance. So if in childhood life was unpredictable or chaotic, right? By bracing ourselves, by always waiting for that other shoe to drop, or by controlling what could be controlled, can become a very beneficial pattern, which then translates into adulthood. Looking like social anxiety, overthinking interactions, feeling responsible for everyone else’s emotions. Continuing to try to grip tightly to plans over prepare struggling to delegate.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:09:48  So again, we don’t necessarily need to know because it isn’t just necessarily one moment in time. It’s consistent moments when we need it to shift or change ourselves, to create safety or belonging that then become the consistent patterns. And again, we don’t even have to go back to understand the story. We can start right now. Where am I stuck? Right? Where am I having a reaction that feels disproportionate or just misaligned to how I would responsibly want to show up in those moments? And that is then the place where we start, of course, to create change by beginning to make new choices or new actions again, ground it in our bodies.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:28  I think that what you’re talking about is really important, which is the inability to remember. I have almost zero memories from before about the age of 18. I seem to have a brain that does not hold on to memory. Well, I think I just think some of that is the way I am. But I was able to know general things, right? Like, I know that my father, rest in peace was very angry and very critical.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:56  My mom would tell me that both my brother and sister would tell me that his second wife would. Right. It was it was clear. And then I can see the ways in which I responded to that. And and I think sometimes the narrative is a little too tidy, like to say, like I get anxious because my dad was angry is a little like there’s there’s some truth in it and there’s probably a lot more in there than that. But that was enough for me to start to unravel different things. And I think the biggest thing for me was just this recognition that what happened back then had an impact on me, in the same way that if I was in a car accident today, it would impact me tomorrow. And we do know that children seem to be more imprinted. Than people my age are.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:11:46  And these moments of great adaptive learning are evolutionarily beneficial to us, right? And these moments of learning even predate us. What I mean when I say that is the learning that is now we understand epigenetics passed through generations, not necessarily changing our DNA, but changing how certain genes are expressed based on what earliest environments.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:12:12  So this learning. Right. If you just think about it from an adaptive standpoint makes sense, right. If you are assumedly going to be brought up in the same environment, which when we think about our ancestors, it wasn’t until recently where we could fly through the sky and end up geographically in a completely different place. So chances were right your lineage was more or less growing up in those same environments. So when there was a food scarcity, as there’s a ton of nanoscience that will show all of the different epigenetic changes that happen to. Again, I’m really going to simplify this, but to hold on to calories and fat storage to prepare for the next moment of food inconsistency or outright shortage, then that is a very beneficial adaptation for us to, quote unquote, make right and then passing those on, assuming that those same children are going to grow up in the same environment where food may or may not be present. Now, those offspring are more kind of biologically likely to survive the next food shortage.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:13:16  Shortage. So this is the circumstances that all of us humans, no matter how close geographically or not, or how much even awareness we have of what our ancestors past looked like, these are still changes that we’re carrying with us. And again, because biologically, those changes made sense. Those adaptations were protective at one time in one space. Though what has changed categorically for the large majority of us is our circumstances have changed, our relationships have changed. We have grown into a bigger body with more possible options. Yet in these moments, biologically, we’re not going to take the risk of trying to do something new in a moment. That’s stressful. We’re going to rely on exactly what worked. And according to our biology, what worked isn’t what created a healthy, emotionally grounded, you know, value driven response. What worked was the quickest way to ease discomfort, which for some of us means squashing it down, suppressing it, or ignoring it entirely. And for some of us, we can do so in a way that society praises.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:14:26  For me, it looked like overachieving and excelling and never giving myself a moment to rest. Because why in rest is where I felt the most uncomfortable. So when we understand right that I think the biology that again has been passed through generations, even if we don’t have the information. Like I don’t as well. A large part of my life, even until recently, is I can’t call it to mind, but I relive it right in those daily habits and patterns, in those moments, and even the identities and roles that I could sit here and say, I understand I’m worth so much more than how I perform. Yet there’s still an inner child inside of me that struggles to be seen in sharing my thoughts and ideas, and definitely struggles to hear anything that could possibly land, even if it’s not meant to be of negative feedback. Right. As possible negative feedback. Because. Right. Excelling to earn praise in childhood gave me attention. It gave me connection. It felt like love in my family. But now it’s kind of driven me on this endless, exhausting roller coaster.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:15:30  So again, even things that are societally celebrated often were grounded in our best opportunity or the best choice we could have made at one time, but then we keep relying on those same habits because they have become habitual reactions. And then we struggle to create change, even when we’ve become really clear that those habits don’t serve us anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:17  Just for fun, let’s pretend. And this is not the case. But let’s just pretend that I said to you, Nicole, I’ve read a lot of books. This one’s really not very good. You have the insight that, you know, like, okay, I don’t handle that well. How would you work with yourself in that moment if it triggered you. Like, walk us through. Like what? Today and today may be different than somebody who’s newer in the journey, but today, what would you do?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:16:44  Well, what I would do would begin, maybe even before I put myself in a position and or asked for feedback. Right. So me taking a moment to of course, we can always, you know, we might might see someone on the street and they might come up to me and say, your book sucked, right? So I can’t control maybe that because I put myself in public and I don’t want to say anything.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:17:05  Probably. But I’m meaning when I say this because some of us. Right. We feel like, oh, well, this just this negative feedback fell into my lap when really I went scrolling on reviews and found it. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:17  So I mean, bad practice, right? You’re telling me don’t do it.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:17:21  So those are things to consider. Right. Is that we could know, right? Or even just asking, hey, you know, if you want, even from a loved one. Hey, what did you think of my new book? Right. I’m kind of laboring on this because some of us don’t even, like, hit that pause and say, can I handle? Yeah. If what you think of my new book isn’t going to be positive. Am I going to be okay to then do whatever I might now describe can come next? But emphasizing that first point, because there are a lot of moments where I don’t have the bandwidth to be able to do what could come next, and without that bandwidth, because again, I would be doing something new, which isn’t completely breaking down and determining that I’m never going to do the thing again.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:18:03  That elicited the negative feedback, which is what my inner child wants to do, right? Run away and say, okay, well, wasn’t good. I’m never going to put myself into a position where you could tell me anything I do isn’t good ever again. So we get very black and white, very extreme. And now. So I determine I’m never going to put out write a piece of work. That’s the way my solution is going to to avoid negative feedback. I won’t give you anything to give me feedback on. Right. So yeah, that is typically behind the scenes what would be happening. But making sure that I’m resourced enough that if you were to say, for whatever reason, you don’t like the book, that I would then be able to write. Pause. Kind of. Maybe here that cycle of negative criticism where my kind of internal critic is already saying, yes, exactly. Nicole, this is why I told you not to put yourself out there, because it’s safer back here when no one knows what you think to give you feedback on.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:18:54  Right. So all of that will still happen in those moments. There’s not a magical wand. That awareness kind of removes all of this wiring, all of even that voice is wired into us again, because keeping myself safe meant not saying anything. Because if I don’t say anything, then there’s nothing for you to give me negative feedback around. So the voice is there, intending to keep me safe by not putting myself out. There will still be there. In this moment of negative feedback, I get to determine, though, how much attention that I want to give to. Right. One possible version of what comes next, which is I stop putting my work out there, right? Or I could pause. I could acknowledge the role that this protective voice is played, which is to keep me safe, right? I could remind myself of a couple of things. What my intention is, right? Why do I put up put out work? What is the bigger, you know, kind of value for me in doing this? For me, it’s very much a passion of purpose.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:19:49  I want to impart people with something that helped me on my journey, to help them on their journey. And there could even be a pause where I hear what the negative feedback is saying, right? Because sometimes negative feedback can be very helpful. Right. It can point out a perspective or a reaction that I wasn’t anticipating that could actually be valuable for a future draft, my future work, whatever it is. But without pausing to make sure I’m resource, make sure I’m grounded, right? Not letting my body’s reaction where my heart will start to race, right? I’ll start to get sweaty. All of that fear of are you rejecting me because you’re saying something about my work, right? So much of that is tied to my identity. Right. If you give me negative feedback. That’s why it feels so intense. Because it doesn’t feel like you’re saying, hey, Nicole. Like, you know, this works pretty good, but you could have maybe, you know, worded it differently or covered some different topics.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:20:45  I’m hearing it as you are a horrible person, right? So all of that then makes us understand why the reaction feels so big, why I want to run away and say, well, okay, well, I won’t show you any of me anymore. But it’s in those moments of pause, right? Of maybe slowing down my breath, maybe kind of reorienting me to I am an adult in a room. I can hear feedback. I’m safe, maybe even reminding myself, right. You’re just you’re giving me feedback about my book, not about me. And then giving myself the opportunity to determine if I want to take the feedback or leave it. But again, all of that happens behind the scene, and often right after that most pivotal choice, which is sometimes we throw ourselves into situations that were not resourced for. And then we feel even more shameful when I spiral down the pit of despair and decide I’m going to quit the job entirely, when really I should have maybe paused on asking for the feedback or not.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:21:43  Right? On a bad day, gone into a negative comment section and spent too much time there.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:49  Not that I could be worried about anything like this happening in my own life, and I have to be explicit. That was an example. I had to don’t take any meaning the negativity bias or say like he did. He mean it? He did not mean it. He did not mean it. All right. Onward. So let’s talk about something you’ve created called the Individual Development model. And I’d love to just move through these five spheres relatively quickly, but tell me what the individual development model is. And then let’s kind of walk through the spheres.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:22:23  So individual development model I had been thinking about childhood development for a very long time. Likely when I was in school and we were presented with different theorist ideas about how development happens and more so what impacts the development of an individual being? And so I was very fascinated by that I love learning. You know, if there’s a way to, you know, see a pattern or an archetype in something or something developmentally that we can kind of track on that captures more people than not? I think those can be very helpful to learn from.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:22:58  So I dove right into a lot of them and continue to find that none of them seem to deal with two things that I was becoming aware was incredibly important in our development. The first thing being not just us, our relationships. And we now know from all of the extensive research and attachment theory and that relate and even biology and nervous system development, we understand that humans, while we are a being, right, a one entity, and you need an individual, so to speak. We need relationship. So the large majority of developmental models, we’re leaving out the fact that we are greatly impacted our development based on how others around us or how safe we feel relating to those around us. And another big piece that most developmental models left out is the body. Or how those environments, including our relationships, impact the wiring in our body, which then of course, impact our development. So for me, I wanted to think about right, is there kind of an easy way? Because I think this is a difficult question.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:24:01  We don’t even really know what development entails, what is needed, right. How much of it is natural and it just happens. Right? We have this idea to some extent that parenting and things like that just happen and think some others, right, are becoming, myself included, of the belief that, wait a minute, these things. Yeah, some things naturally have biological sequences. But again, they are then greatly impacted by the happenings around them like the people and the environment. So for that reason, I’m I put out again a model that I hope can allow the readers to generally understand what impacted, again, their earliest development. That might still be habits that are impacting them now, but also then as we enter the parenting stage of the book, mapping those really general spheres, as I call them, onto practices, to then begin to develop new habits for ourselves so quickly, speaking foundationally, without safety and security in our body, a nervous system that can become stressed when we need to accurately determine when to become stressed and then quickly be able to calm down.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:25:08  That would be the most foundational first fear. Of course, it happens in infancy. Hopefully, if we have an attuned caregiver who shows up when we’re upset, distressed, meets our need, calms us down over time. Our body then learns to do that with or without support of someone else. So on that then foundation, right now we get to begin to develop a little more uniquely who we are. With safety in a home base to return to, we can now explore boundaries, edges, discipline, right? The discipline to keep going in a certain direction or to come back when we need support. This is another huge area where few of us were parented with the boundaries and the discipline that we needed to keep ourselves, because this is another version of safety, I want to be able to venture out into the world where it might be unsafe, but to do that confidently, I have to know that I can return back to a safe home base, right? A person, a space where I can calm down, get support when I then need it right then following development along the lines once I’ve separated a bit with boundaries, with discipline.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:26:11  Right now, I’m starting to relate to other people, and now we can enter the world of very complicated emotions, right? And now we can start to develop tools to understand our emotions, regulate our emotions, attune to other individuals and their emotions from a safe distance. But understanding that there’s connective space there where intimacy right is born. So this is kind of sphere three is the language of emotions, which happened to be the language of relating. Then we can shift into, right, what I call authenticity, right? Really learning and discovering our unique voice, our unique purpose. Like what is it? How am I in the world? And what impact can I make on those around me? And then that expands us into the fifth sphere, which I call transcendence, or essentially connecting with the greater picture where we get to access or re access joy and playfulness and all of those emotional states that so many of us have again been closed up off to, because somewhere along our development, right, we’ve created habits that have kept us Disconnect it from those kind of foundational areas of development.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:24  So I’d like to move into some of this process of reprinting. Is there a way you could sort of present the broad strokes of what this looks like? You know, we’re going to start here. We’re going to do some of this, then we’re going to do some of that. And, you know, help me see the journey as a whole before we drill down into particular parts of it.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:27:45  So from the bird’s eye perspective, what parenting is, is learning how to show up as a safe, nurturing, connected, compassionate caregiver. Right. It’s to show up for our own selves in certain ways, right. That will help us. So the most foundational practices of any parenting journey, right, are going back to that first sphere, which really have everything to do with creating safety and security in our body, right. Being able for some of us to even reconnect with the fact that we are living in a physical human body. Saying this as someone who spent the large majority of my life away on my spaceship, kind of zoomed out in a disconnected or dissociated state so often, right? Those habits of distracting from a body of being disconnected or dissociate it are born out of the lack of safety and security in the body to begin with.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:28:41  So parenting looks like, again moments throughout the day where we’re just kind of tuning into assessing, right. Our the biggest, the three main areas that shift and change when our body is having either a stressful or an emotional reaction or our muscle tension, our breath and our heart rate. So those are great markers even throughout the day. Setting an alarm on our phone for a time or two, right? Taking a moment to pause, right. To refocus our attention on our body, away from our distracting thoughts, or away from the care that we’re given to someone else. Because that’s the role that we’ve learned and really just tuning into our selves, right. And creating safety. Slowing our breath if it’s starting to be quickened or if we’re holding our breath. Releasing some tension in our muscles right over time, helping our body downshift into that very grounded, connected state of our parasympathetic nervous system. And then on top of those habits, right, we can begin. If you’re someone who struggles with boundaries, right.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:29:43  The parenting journey will mean on a daily practice of reconnecting with our own boundaries in terms of physical space, emotional space, mental space, and then, of course, learning some emotional regulation tools. what do I do when I’m upset or overwhelmed? Right. Teaching ourselves some new habits. Because what parenting allows us to do through new daily choices is instead of just coping right in the way that we’ve learned how to cope with our discomfort, which many of us have gotten very savvy at it. Right. Some of us have become identified with how we cope, right? We become the caregiver because we’re always attuned to someone else or like me, the overachiever, because I’m always worried about how I’m being perceived by someone else. So that’s coping. We’ve all gotten very good at coping with our earliest circumstances in our continued distress, but parenting allows us to truly heal. Which means in those moments, right? Not just falling back into old reactive spaces or continuing to play old, outdated roles that no longer fit or allow me to feel fulfilled, it’s actually changing how we’re experiencing the current moment, experiencing it in a more grounded way, right where we can be more responsive in our choices, not just reactive.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:30:59  Doing what we always do in that moment and then feeling shameful after the fact, actually intentionally showing up. So parenting, in my opinion, is the most transformative journey that we can go on, because that’s quite literally what we’re doing. Those older habits aren’t working. I mean, they’re working to the extent that they’re sustaining life, right? That many of us are barely hanging on. We’re in survival mode, but they’re not changing, right. How we’re experiencing the current moment. So the next time, right, that you don’t get a text back as quickly as you want it. And to you, space or silence means rejection or abandonment. So you start spiraling and firing off text or, you know, rethinking everything you said and convincing yourself that they’re upset with you and probably leaving you. Right. The difference that parenting allows you to do is to pause in that moment, understand, not invalidate that part of you that is spiraling because that’s a part of you that again lived that experience before, probably where distance or silence did mean rejection or abandonment.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:32:02  So even if again, we don’t want to believe the inner child is alive and well and we don’t want to look back, that is the moment where we want to show up differently by not shaming, by not doing the things we always have done right, which is pursued close the distance by harassing your way to getting a response, or maybe doing the other end of the spectrum, which I often do. Oh, you’re not going to respond to me. Well, you don’t have a relationship to come home to you because I’ve left you already, right? So now we’re running away instead in the moment, right? Being with our self, all of our parts. The part that’s scared and convinced you’re being left right. Slowing our breath. Reminding ourselves that distance or silence right doesn’t mean rejection or abandonment as it once did, and maybe giving yourself the opportunity to hear back from that person and actually live that new experience where on the other end and reconnection, they’re not mad, right? Something probably very logical has happened with why they have not responded to you in a timely manner.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:33:00  But if we would have spiraled right and not allowed ourselves to show up differently, then we wouldn’t have been able to literally lay down a new experience, which is what we need to do to create the change that we want to.

Chris Forbes 00:33:28  Do.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:36  So that process is difficult. And part of what I think is most difficult about it is that the first time we often do it, we don’t feel necessarily that much better, right? Like and this is just from personal experience. But if I get into a hyper activated state and I try and it’s going to slow my breath down, I’m going to relax. I’m going to think maybe there’s probably a good reason, you know, that I might feel 5% better. How do I believe in the process enough to keep kind of doing that, because I think that’s what ends up happening in a lot of cases. Certainly was the case with me at different points in my life. I’m like, well, this isn’t really doing anything like, okay, it’s a great idea.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:23  But she says, I do it and I’ll suddenly feel connected and grounded and I don’t feel connected and grounded.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:34:30  What you’re describing is the lived experience of change, right? If we just think about kind of categorically or even amount quantitatively, I think is maybe the word I want quantitatively, how many moments have led to you feeling, generally speaking, that bad? Right. Whatever bad is for you in that moment? How many moments have led to that depth or degree or bigness of the feeling? So many moments that we can’t even remember. Even if we could recall them, we physically would not be able to. So just in terms of sheer quantity. Understandably, of course, we want to waive the mind while and do something new and categorically feel different in the next moment. Of course we want to, especially if how bad we’re feeling or the bigness of our suffering is that great. So I don’t want to kind of shame that very understandable, hopeful part that is so desperately wanting it to be different, though it is really important that you and I are both speaking very honestly here and going as far to say right, so many of us wait to change anything in general until we feel inspired in the new feeling state already, and that just simply isn’t the way change happens.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:35:51  Change happens right through the moments that you’re describing, where even when we just think about change in the most general sense, doing something new, making a new choice, however it is, you define change. We are already activating our nervous system Because the unknown. That’s why we prefer these habits and patterns, even the dysfunctional ones, because they’re predictable and our nervous system finds nothing safer than that which is predictable. Again, even if what is predicted is the negative outcome that we know is on the other side of every time this happens, this happens. We know. And so that already cuts down on the uncertainty. So the courageous ness and bravery that it takes to make one new choice is quite literally challenging. What for many of us is already an overtaxed, overwhelmed nervous system that doesn’t actually know how to write return to calm. So then we pour more fire, right? And more frustration, and even more shame on a system that’s already overwhelmed. When we go in with an expectation that change is easy, that it immediately results in us feeling a new way, I will always be the one to speak on the reality of why change is hard to begin with, how much it already adds to an already stressed system, making us more likely than to return to old habits.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:37:11  Which is why change right needs to happen, and we benefit more greatly from not trying to change the most difficult habit to break. To begin with, right? To create a little momentum and even rebuild a little trust in ourselves to even be able to create change in kind of like periphery type moments. Knowing, of course, that this is the really the area where I want to see impact happen eventually. But if I start to just create a little momentum, right, making new choices that are not fully pushing me into extreme stress, right? Because again, most of our hardest wired habits, for lack of a better way to describe them, are the ones that are protecting the greatest vulnerability within us. Right? So to then expect us to completely show up newly in this moment and feel so great about doing it and feel so differently, right? That’s just very unrealistic. But what happens when we change in other areas? Right. Creating momentum. We’re rebuilding trust, right? We’re showing ourselves that we can do slightly difficult things.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:38:18  Maybe not the hardest thing ever just yet, but once we show ourselves that we can work through resistance, right? All of our mind and body screaming and yelling and telling us no, not to do this thing right. Maybe not fully feeling differently, but showing us alignment and intention, right? That’s where we’re building trust in ourself and also capacity, because we’re doing hard things and we’re not falling back on old habits. And then the more we kind of sequence and consistently create change in other areas, right now, we have a confidence and also a greater bandwidth to begin to dive into the deeper, more kind of stuck habits. so but I think it’s important to have these conversations and speak to the honesty of it, because nothing stops a transformation journey right then in high expectation, then waiting to feel inspired or feel differently. And I share this often. If I wait it to be comfortable speaking publicly on these topics, there would be no books, there would be no holistic psychologist. Because even now, to this day, I have an inner child who, while I think I have some things that I might want to share with people, I’m convinced right then, unless I say it in the most polished, perfect way, right that you don’t want to hear from me.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:39:36  So being public and speaking right? If I wait it to be comfortable in doing all of this again, nothing. That is now what I feel like a guiding light, a passion, a purpose of my why that will continue with me well into the future. If not until I’m done here on this earthly journey. I would not be living into any of that if I was waiting for it to be easy, for me to be comfortable, for me to have confidence. But what I was building again behind the scenes is I was rebuilding a trust in myself that said, you can do something hard, you can do it publicly, you can hear people’s opinions. I have moments where, like, we’re both joking about, I do spiral. I do know where to find all of the things that right kind of validate, not the way I want to be seen or how I who I believe myself to be. All of that exist, but I am right able to navigate it a bit differently. And when I’m falling back into old habits, which I still do right, I have an awareness that I can grab on to.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:40:36  I have a reminder of how much, maybe better, I feel with, say, like boundaries and distance and and then I’m able to kind of return to habits that help me feel and operate and do the things that are important to me to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:49  So. One of the things I think a lot about is in our culture that has become very psychological. I think about where are we sort of pathologies using normal human emotion or how we actually are. So I want to give a couple of examples to lay out my point. So the first is in your book, you describe being a young person who was filled with energy. Just always go, go, go go go. And you filled up your schedule and you are always bouncing and jumping around. And there’s a way to view that as well. That was a response to something happening in your environment where you didn’t feel safe enough to sit still. There’s also a way of framing that, like that’s part of your essence a little bit to or to take a later example, you just mentioned showing yourself in public, putting it out there.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:43  I think most everybody is going to be somewhat nervous about taking something personal and putting it out to the world and saying, hey, what do you think about this now? Again, that’s a normal human one, but it may be Amplified by certain things that happened to us in the past. How do you think about that question?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:42:03  I’m kind of shaking my head because I think what I’m hearing is a version of the chicken or the egg nature nurture type, right? Is there an intrinsic essence that an absence of out there environment, something that’s not me right expresses itself undeniably and or right? Is all of the influence coming from out there right to then impact or influence how one is expressed and right? I think we can kind of spin our wheels to date and kind of find our way back to what is the original state right out there in here. And I kind of believe it’s both. I’ve, I’ve come to believe based on, you know, science and research and what I’ve observed in my own self and other people’s patterns.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:42:53  Is that an epigenetics even. Right, which is the science of that connection, right. How individual genetics, so to speak, change based on environmental impact. So my response is that it’s a bit of both, right. We each have our own kind of if we want to talk in terms of energy or footprint or, you know, fingerprints like our unique signature. I of of the belief as science kind of affirms. Right. We live in an energetic universe. So the signature I’m always kind of landing on in my head is I’m a certain vibration and energy, right. That would impact the environment, the physical environment in a different way, though I am in interaction with that physical environment. So I do think and what confuses this question for a lot of us, meaning we see the patterns passed through our families, the cycles that many of us are now determined to break. We see a similarity that can confuse for inherent intrinsic right? Genetic. Because we see the same patterns in our family, we have the same personality characteristics, we have the same energetic expression.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:44:05  So it can seem on the surface, oh well, that’s because right, intrinsically we share the same percentage of genetics. So this is that genetics in expression. But as I’ve been hopefully kind of communicating and describing all along is we now understand that even that right familial energy that very much looks like the cycles that are genetically passed on were impacted again, epigenetics by the environment. So I think it’s we’re both we’re a walking interaction expression, whether we’re interacting with other human beings or whether we’re interacting with just the natural world around us. I do think that, right, we have kind of the things that make us us that have also been in connection or operation with the environments that have been unique to us or our families or even our cultures. Really.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:50  Right. I don’t think there’s any way to unwind it. I don’t think there’s any I mean, it’s that’s why I said earlier like tidy narratives of like, well, I’m this way because my dad was that way. I’m like, well, okay, hang on.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:59  There’s about a thousand other factors woven in there. I think what I’m pointing to more is how I choose to frame something says a lot about how I view it. So if I view my fear of public speaking as, you know what, everybody feels a little bit afraid. By public speaking, I’m like everybody else versus I say, oh, I am kind of effed up from this thing in the past. And now that’s why this is really hard for me. And again, I don’t think I’m not asking for clear answers here. I’m just asking for how you think about when it’s helpful to take on these ideas of what happened, impacted us, and when is it helpful to go? Well, that’s being human.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:45:41  That’s an interesting kind of lever. It’s kind of how I’m thinking, right? When is it that challenging and pushing our edge and growing into or seeing an opportunity is evolving or growing, versus when is it maybe pushing us into stress or miss misalignment? And I think that it’s kind of individual for for each of us, kind of determining how then am I experiencing the thing in which I’m doing what is driving it right? If it’s something that’s important, right? Like, so what’s driving, you know, me to continue to public speak or putting myself in an environment that’s slightly uncomfortable is what’s driving it for me, is the value of wanting to impart information to someone else that they could then gain benefit from it.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:46:27  Right. That’s not to say, though, and it’s not to say that I don’t do, which I do. I can try to right, manipulate and make an environment where I’m speaking publicly more comfortable. Right. So presentations with slides or conversations with another human versus keynote speaking. Right. Less less comfortable. So we can then curate our space. Not to say that there’s not some level of discomfort, but I can modify right what I’m doing individually, so I can do it in a way where the stress isn’t overwhelming or taking away, right or misaligned with me. Now, with the action I want to take or with the role I want to take. So I think it’s like the process of finding where our edge is, determining how comfortable we are with tolerating the discomfort of getting to our edge or stepping over our edge, and then getting really clear on what is compelling us into that, into starting or maintaining that action at all. You heard me right. It was. It was me. It was my desires.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:47:24  Right? What’s important to me? The right. I wasn’t saying, oh, well, I’m doing this for someone else or for prestige or for, you know, a perception how someone might view me and I think those then that is giving me the permission to say, okay, well, this is important enough to continue to push that edge. I’m not kind of putting a round peg in a square hole or square peg, round hole, whatever the statement is. But I think it’s our own kind of journey of reconnecting with ourselves, our values, our edges, resourcing ourselves so that if something is a bit uncomfortable for us now, but we want to grow into that space. So and similarly, I’m having the same thing, right? Because I can maybe speak publicly like what kind of speaking do I want to do? Is it important for me to push myself into the edge of learning how to do a keynote, or is that maybe just not me? Right in my energy is going to be expressed in in conversation or in more teaching moments.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:48:19  So it’s interesting you bring this question because I’m kind of feeling my way into. Right, or is that just a cop out? And really that’s who I am. And I’m kind of feeling like, no, I think what we’re talking about here is exactly what I’m feeling into, which is something about my energy. Love’s a what I’m calling a co-create, or what I experience as a co-creation, right where I’m teaching concepts or I’m communicating with someone else. And the thing takes on a life of its own because I’ve interacted with the ideas and the slides. Are you talking? Different then. So funny I’m living into. I think this decision. I’m kind of talking my way through, I guess, how I’m making it. Because it might come right where it’s like. That’s not. That’s just not an uncomfortable edge for me. That maybe isn’t how I am best expressed. And so that might not be then an edge you see me push into while I still could push into right the edges that come along with this version of public life.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:14  I love that whole description because it describes the fact that we just it’s hard to figure out, right? Like, you know, we do our best to try and go, all right. I think it’s it’s just not clear. And I love the fact that you’re, you’re honest about how it’s not that clear because it’s just very helpful for everyone to know that none of us really have it all figured out. Right? I’m a far more emotionally and mentally healthy person than I used to be. Far more. And life just keeps presenting new challenges. As soon as you’re like, okay, something else shows up. So I want to move on to something else here, which is shame. Shame is one of those things that I have seen in certain cases, be one of the most intractable, non-responsive. Like it? It seems like for some people it moves and I see other people where it just feels like it just still has them in their grip. And I’m curious what you think are some of the biggest things in helping us move forward with shame.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:27  And then I’d love to talk specifically about a practice you have in the book about stopping this shame cycle.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:50:33  So for me, shame was one of those immovable pieces because I simply was not fully aware of how baked in shame was to the identity. Me who I came to know I was right, I was not someone let me word it this way. Maybe it’s a bit clearer. I’m not someone who kind of like on the daily or weekly even was aware of traditionally. I think those shameful moments right where we feel embarrassed or we feel like, you know, left out or like shamed by someone or ashamed of ourselves when learning and hearing right about what shame is and could be. I didn’t relate to very many if, if, if any of those moments. So for a very long time, right. I would have never been like, oh gosh, shame is so foundational to who I am as I’ve come to discover that it is because for me, right? Shame, like I said, became baked.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:51:26  I got so good at determining, as we all do, right based on direct or indirect things that are said to us, ways that we were treated or not treated in childhood. We become very attuned to how others are experiencing us. And shame is a natural human emotion evolutionarily that we will all feel when we are getting sent signals that we are being rejected or excluded or abandoned or pushed out simply if we want to talk in evolutionary terms of the group. Right. So shame is a socially binding emotion and understanding that all of us humans, especially us in infants and in childhood, we need to be a part of the group. We are safest. Even adults are safest in a group of individuals. So shame, right? In those moments where we’re not feeling belonged or connected and we, you know, maybe we have kind of the somatic experience of our cheeks blush and we kind of like try to divert our eyes and kind of hide. Sometimes we make ourselves actually physically smaller because we feel ashamed. We want to, like, shrink back into the wall behind us.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:52:30  Right. Those moments are very valuable because they teach us right what we need to do more or less of to avoid being excluded or avoid or to keep ourselves connected with safety. And so, as we will all do, we’re very attuned in childhood. We learn. And some of us, like myself, I got so good at so quickly determining what granted me attention and validation from my parents and childhood, and I got very quickly clear on what did it right, things that they just weren’t traditionally interested in, you know, celebrating things that maybe I was interested in but didn’t map on to a more traditional version of success. Right. So that shame. And then I got very savvy. I only presented myself in the way that would maintain the accolades, the validation. So shame for a lot of us isn’t the moments where we’re like, oh, I feel ashamed sometimes. Shame was such a part of the construction of all of the parts that we hide or don’t show, even the emotions that are natural in human.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:53:34  But again, if in childhood any emotional displays or sadness were told not to be dramatic or anger is dangerous and, you know, so for all these reasons, we can become very shameful about natural aspects of our human experience. Because what shame does and the message that shame is sending, unlike guilt, which is I feel badly about something I’ve done. Shame gets attached to our identity. I feel badly about who I am. And again, shame forms in our childhood environment for most of us, because when a parent, for whatever reason, wasn’t physically present or emotionally, wasn’t able to be attuned when they weren’t able to show up to meet our needs. The only way that developmentally, our nervous system and our mind. Right? We couldn’t zoom out, understand all of the complexities about being an adult and all of the reasons why they weren’t able our parents to care for us in the way that we need it. We didn’t have the developmental understanding, and also in a childhood where we literally can’t pack a bag and leave and go to a new home, it is of great benefit to land on an explanation that involves us, meaning we become the cause of our unmet needs, meaning we begin to assign whatever it is us being.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:54:52  Too much or too little of whatever it was right becomes then the cause of our parents inability to meet our needs. So we become unworthy, unlovable, right? Whatever it is, we are the cause of the lack of connection, the lack of safety, the lack of support that we need. And then we write. We develop all of these based in the lived experience, real theories of why? Oh well, because I was too much showing emotions. Or for me, I didn’t get a straight A and then we try to hide all these shameful parts. Yet for many of us, they drive our identity. They drive our reactions. Shame keeps us disconnected from our self. It’s quite literally an emotional, a nervous system driven state of shut down where we become less and less connected to our body, to ourselves, to the energy that allows us to express ourselves or defend ourselves when we need it. So the consequences then of shame become very long lasting and pervasive. But again, oftentimes it grows in a childhood where there are unmet needs, where we didn’t have the ability to separate out the fact that we were never the cause of someone else’s actions.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:56:04  And again, for some of us, it’s so baked into just how we show up that we’re not even aware that for a lot of us, it’s shame that’s driving those habits.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:13  So how do we begin to unwind it?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:56:17  So beginning right to unwind. Shame is beginning to acknowledge the moments where shame could be driving our actions right where we most often. Right where we become shameful of ourselves. Right where we begin to speak to our self in shaming ways to treat ourselves in shaming ways to shrink back in action as opposed to speak out. So all change will happen when first we see ourself in action of that old shame driven habit, right? So in real time, where I’m starting to spiral, shaming myself in my mind or right, I find myself wanting to speak up and say something, but I’m thinking about all the reasons, right? Why they’re going, I’m gonna be rejected or shamed if I, you know, share my feelings or share my real thought. And then pausing in action in those moments.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:57:10  Right. If our body is beginning to kind of spiral into shame as well, our heart is beginning to race, right? Maybe we’re starting to actually feel shut down. Feel numb. Right. We might want to shake some energy back into our system. And then we want to show up right in, in action. We want to express ourself, right. Do the thing that shame is essentially telling us to avoid doing. And then all of this though, happens when we become. Oftentimes outside of those acute moments. Right. Clear. Right. What is it that I have learned was bad, was unworthy not to express for some of us, right. It’s all feeling, certain feelings, some aspects of right. My self-expression when I’m too loud or when I’m, you know, so we can understand, I think, outside of those acute moments. And then in those moments, we really do want to tune in first to what’s happening in our body. Because if we go too far, right.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:58:07  Too stressed out, too overwhelmed, we’re going to rely back on those old shameful habits which end up only compounding then the shame we’re feeling.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:15  So how do we stop a shame cycle?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:58:18  So the shame cycle is again, knowing the points of the cycle, right? Knowing those markers, those moments that activate our shame, the spiraling thoughts, the racing heart’s right, the desire to run away, kind of. All of those distancing things that often we will do when we are feeling shameful. Beginning to see right the pattern. Is it feedback? Is it even just self-expression? Sometimes it’s not even absence of someone saying anything to us. It’s a moment where we feel shameful about having a need, wanting to express a need, having an emotion, having an opinion. So right. Getting clear. Noticing in those moments where we’re becoming reactive. When the shame spiral begins. So that we can note. Right. If we’re going into a moment where feedback or self-expression is part of what we want to see happening, so we feel armed and ready that we could begin the spiral, then knowing again that the spiral will involve somatic actions, our body will begin to become stressed.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:59:16  The quickening of our heart and the tension in our muscles and the quickening of our breath. We want to slow down, right? If we’re at the last stop, though, of shame and we’re not necessarily feeling a quickness, we’re feeling numb. We’re holding our breath. We don’t have any energy right then, as opposed to slowing movement, we want to begin to safely kind of re initiate or reengage movement so slowly, maybe doing some circles with our wrist or our feet. slow walking, slow stretching, kind of we need to get our body moving again safely so that for those of us right, who when we are shameful, we shut down. We don’t speak up when we need to say something in defense of ourself, or when we need to remove ourself. Right? To do that, we need to stimulate, safely stimulate the energy to do that. So again, when energy is moving quickly and tension is amplified, a great way to remind ourselves as we want to slow movement, slow energy, release tension.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:00:22  If we’re on the other end again, we’re feeling cold, numb, detached out of body right then we want to. As opposed to slowing. We want to begin to slowly stimulate. Add action back. Right. Stop holding our breath. Begin to allow our our body to breathe. Right beginning to allow again movement and energy to safely activate. So that then, if what we need to do to interrupt the shame cycle is to say or do something in action, right? We have energy, but it begins with noticing the cycle in real time, then noticing when it’s starting to go into that shame spiral portion, pausing, slowing, or moving depending on what we need to have access to, and then showing up again in not shameful way.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:09  You end the book talking about resilience, and you say that resilience is not toughness, not the capacity to soldier through, not the absence of pain. It is our capacity to stay present in our emotions so we can adapt to our changing circumstances. Leave us with a couple of words about resilience.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:01:30  Again, I think resilience is one of those words that thankfully it’s being talked a lot about. However, I think sometimes that there’s a little bit of misconception, perhaps hopeful, hopeful idea of what resilience really looks like and feels like, because sometimes I have the idea that some of us hopefully wish for resilience to mean life becomes easy breezy, never really having our feathers ruffled or having right emotional moments. And the reality is, resilience is actually expanding our capacity to feel more emotion, to feel more types of emotion. Right? Not cutting ourselves off and determining that some emotions just, you know, are too uncomfortable or too inappropriate to feel really allowing in the whole spectrum of human emotion, and also living in the reality that human emotions will always be a part of our lived experience. We need them to be there. What gives us life there? What sends us sometimes very important information about how we’re experiencing our current environment. So understanding first again what the expectation is, right? What is the point of doing all of this work? If you believe the point is to get to a place right where you’re never upset or bothered again, or where you only feel calm or okay, then that’s not going to be exactly where this journey takes you to.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:03:01  The journey will take you to again, a life that still is uncomfortable, still has moments of conflict or disagreement. However, it has life in it, right? It has all of the different human emotions. It has the ability to process difficult human emotions, to hold space for different opinions, different emotions around a certain experience, to learn how to truly connect and collaborate and feel intimately close to other people. So that’s what resilience. And again, if that is not if it is not yet clear. Resilience isn’t something that we just wish for in our mind or affirm our way to resilience is quite literally all of the actions that we’ve been speaking about over the duration of this podcast. And of course, you’ll read about in the new book, as and or in all of the work that I talk about is the daily action of showing up in new ways, right? Not relying on those old ways that we’ve learned to cope, the quickest way to ease the discomfort as fast as possible, but to expand our capacity to be present to to discomfort because discomfort, the hormones, the energy, right.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:04:11  Whatever it is that really makes up all of these emotional experiences, thankfully, it goes away. Our body always wants to go back into what we say homeostasis or balance. It wants to Stabilize neurochemicals and hormones, right? A nervous system that’s activated once to become deactivated and calmed down. Right. So we do. Eventually, our body always wants us to kind of be balanced and even. And we need to. Right. See what’s gotten in our way. What’s keeping us stuck, what’s keeping us not kind of completing our stress cycle cycle, or not being present to any of our emotions because we haven’t learned how or we feel that, or have been taught that emotions are to be avoided and to actually change our relationship with our whole body. Our emotions include it so that we can be more and more present, more and more able over time, more and more responsive again to emotions that will always be a part of our human experience.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:14  I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. You and I are going to continue talking in the post-show conversation, where you’re going to lead us through a practice and imaginative practice where of of connecting to the inner child.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:28  Listeners, if you’d like access to that practice, you’d like ad free episodes. If you’d like to support the show, which is very important, you can get all of that by going to one you feed net. Nicole, thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to have you on.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:05:44  It’s always a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me back again, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:48  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.