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Episode Transcript:

Edith Eger 00:00:00  We got to think about our thinking and pay attention what we’re paying attention to, because any behavior you pay attention to, you reinforce that behavior.

Chris Forbes 00:00:18  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 00:01:03  I think most of us believe that if our circumstances were different, we’d feel more free. But what Edith Eger makes clear in this conversation is that freedom doesn’t work that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:13  Edith, who passed away recently, survived Auschwitz and like fellow concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl, she arrived at the conclusion that even when everything is taken from you, there’s still one place where you have a say and that’s your inner world. In this conversation, we talk about the prisons we build in our own minds victimhood, guilt, judgment, secrets, and how easy it is to live inside them without realizing it. And we also talk about how to begin to step out. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hello, doctor Eger, welcome to the show.

Edith Eger 00:01:48  Hello.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:49  I am really honored to have you on today, and it is such a treat to get a chance to talk with you. Thank you. In a moment we’re going to talk about your book called The Gift. But before we do that, there’s a parable we read at the beginning of the show, and I’d like to ask you for your thoughts on it. In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:09  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 wolf that wins is the one that we feed. 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.

Edith Eger 00:02:30  The work I do is practical psychology. And those two are really fitting me beautifully, because what we think we create and what we want to recognize, that what we pay attention to, we have to be careful and study our thinking and what we’re paying attention to because when we have a goal, we want to be sure that what we focus on and pay attention to will be in alignment to get us closer to the goal. So I like to call it the arrow that I follow, and to find always the way I think and find a gift in everything. But then I also look at things in terms of is it rational or irrational? Is this going to empower me for five minutes and then I pay a whole price for it all my life? Like if I go cheat on my wife.

Edith Eger 00:03:45  Okay. Because it’s not the sex it’s I’m dishonoring my wife. So I think we got to think about our thinking and pay attention what we’re paying attention to, because any behavior you pay attention to, you reinforce that behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:04  Yeah.

Edith Eger 00:04:04  So it’s a wonderful, wonderful way for us to start. It’s a beautiful way to start. And it’s very important to think about your thinking before you say anything and possibly ask yourself, is it kind? Is it very important that 93 I’m very, very much thinking before I open my mouth and I want to say something, hopefully that is kind and it is necessary.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:37  Thank you. That’s a beautiful way to start. So I think in order to frame up your life and your work, we need to sort of go back to your origin story, which is not a very pleasant one. Right? You are a Holocaust survivor, and whatever amount of that you feel like you want to share, that would be useful for the audience. I don’t want to spend a ton of time there, because I really want to focus on the amazing work you’ve done in creating your approach that you’re calling practical psychology.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:07  I want to spend a lot of time there, but I do feel like it’s important to give listeners a little backstory. So I’ll leave it to you how much you want to talk about there, and then we’ll move into your work and your psychology.

Edith Eger 00:05:18  Good. That’s good. What I am talking to you about is that you told me I’m a Holocaust survivor, and I’m going to tell you that it’s not my identity. I am a human being who went through an experience. I refuse to be a victim. It’s not who I am is what was done to me. And I think that’s a big difference, because in some ways in history, we are all victims of victims. So that’s why when I ask a child, why do you do that? A child would say, because I feel like it. Children don’t care about consequences, right? As an adult, I still feel like it, but I don’t act upon it unless it is in my best interest. So, you know, you are brilliantly putting that wolf story beautifully.

Edith Eger 00:06:20  So important because it’s not. What happens is the way we look at it. When I go to church, who is the little Jewish boy, I talk about Jesus. Jesus and Jesus told us three things that I relate to. Love thy neighbor as thyself. What that prophet is telling us that you cannot give what you don’t have. If you don’t love you, you know, how can you love others? Everything. You start with you. You’re born alone. You die alone. There is something between birth and death. Called life. Do you live a lifestyle or a that style? If I live a lifestyle, I feed myself. Give it good things. All right. I’m not going to have a donut for breakfast with Coke. And so that’s why I asked people to be good parents to themselves. I think you’re saving the world with your world. You may not think it, but you want to teach from me that if you wait for someone else to make you happy, you’re never going to be happy.

Edith Eger 00:07:32  And in Auschwitz, nothing was coming from the outside. So it was an opportunity for discovering the inner strength that I could put me in a gas chamber any minute. Just like now. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s a very hard place to be in a the limbo. But then I am also very much aware as to short term hedonism or long term hedonism. So when you ask, as I told you as a child, the child doesn’t care. Even if I have diabetes, it doesn’t matter if I like the Hungarian chocolate cake, I’m going to eat. And that voice is in me on my life because it’s called temptation. And God gave us temptation. Why? So I can practice the freedom of choice. As an adult, I still feel like it, but it’s up to me whether I act upon it or not. See, I had a woman calling me 5:00 in the morning, a southern girl. She called herself a southern beauty and she’s crying. Eddie, I am in this guy’s bed.

Edith Eger 00:08:51  I went to the bar And I picked up this guy, and, I mean, it’s bad. You know, it wasn’t me. I very quietly said, who was it? You know, the devil got into me, she tells me in a southern accent. So freedom comes with responsibility. Freedom without responsibilities. Anarchy. And that’s why I beg. Don’t spoil your children. Because they were the first one to die. It’s very important for you to listen to your self dialogue early in the morning. So when I go to church, I listen to that. The secondly, what I really admire that he was able to meet people where they are. And that’s why I never ask people, how are you? Those are social noises and people lie. If you ask a question, How are you? Fine. I was just saying in my formal interview that I was teaching. I was professor of psychology, and my student said that in America, people are hearing, but they’re not listening. And I said, okay, let’s test it.

Edith Eger 00:10:10  Tomorrow morning when you pick up your book, someone is going to say hi to you. And very quietly, you see, my mother died this morning. Sure enough, he comes back, said, I did what you told me, and I told him to say my mother died this morning and he said, great, I’ll see you this afternoon. People are hearing, but they’re not listening. I think it’s very important for you to listen to that voice. But most of all, I think what is most important that Jesus said, turn the other cheek. And he didn’t say, go back and do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. You know, which is the definition of insanity by Einstein. Thank God that little Jew came to America and changed World War two. So I think when he said turn the other cheek, he said, look at the same thing from a different perspective. See, you and I are good ophthalmologists. We look at everything for an opportunity for discovery, not recovery.

Edith Eger 00:11:32  And that’s how I talk about Auschwitz and the discovery of my inner resources, and not to allow anybody to get my soul. They could throw me in a gas chamber any minute. I didn’t know whether I take a shower, whether water or gas is going to come out, I don’t know, 4:00 in the morning when I stood in line, they were counting and I didn’t know where I end up in a gas chamber or not. And this is where we are now with the Covid. We don’t know. We know that. We don’t know really. We don’t have any guarantee. We don’t have any certainty. I think we have probability. Yeah. Which one I feed because all people who come to me are hungry. They either have something what they don’t want or they want something what they don’t have. People are hungry. That’s why diagnosis hungry for affection, hungry for attention, hungry for approval. You got to give up your need for approval of others. If you want to be free, you got to give up the need to please anyone all the time.

Edith Eger 00:12:48  And most of all, you give up being a perfectionist. When you are a perfectionist. You procrastinate.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:59  So let’s talk a little bit about your book, The Gift. In it you talk about a bunch of different prisons. So you’re using the analogy obviously of you said it earlier, the Nazis could put you in prison, but they couldn’t take away your freedom. And you talk about a lot of the prisons that we put ourselves in. I thought maybe we’d just go through and explore a few of the different ones that you have. And I thought we’d start with the first one. You sort of touched on it a little bit, but you call it the prison of victimhood. And you say suffering is universal, but victimhood is optional. And then you also have a question that is so good. You say, ask what now? Instead of why me?

Edith Eger 00:13:42  That’s right. And unfortunately, I talk about the prison in our own minds And it reminds me that I graduated cum laude, and I was told to pick up my cap and gown and meet the people at this and this and this place.

Edith Eger 00:14:02  And I never showed up for my graduation because I told myself I don’t deserve because they are dead. That’s the prison that I created in my own mind and didn’t even give myself permission. That’s a good word to really go and celebrate that I worked so hard. You know, I never finished high school. I begged the university to take me in on probation in January, and I made the deals list, and I forgot about me. And I worked so hard because I didn’t speak English where? And I put things down in Hungarian a lot of the times, and the basketball players who were taught also came to me because I sat in the first row, so I can see the professors through it. They wanted my notes and I told them, it’s Hungarian. You see. You have to want to badly enough. You have to want to be a survivor. You have to want to recognize that life is difficult. There is no guarantee. There is no certainty of any kind. Marriage is the hardest thing you enter into to empower each other with your differences.

Edith Eger 00:15:37  Rather than waiting with an empty cup. Somebody to fill my cup and make me happy. It’s not working that way. Self-love is self-care. It’s not narcissistic. It takes adults to get married. I beg young people to stay at school and don’t mess with your brain. Don’t smoke pot because it interferes with the natural growth of your brain. That takes 25 years. So don’t kill your wonderful brain cells and become a good parent to you. So I preach a little bit because, you know, I’m 93 years old. I’ve been there, done that. And it’s very important to revisit the places where we’ve been. And that’s the work I do. I hold your precious hand and we go, go back to your bedroom. When you were a little boy, and I remember I had a nine year old boy who had a dog, and the dog died, and the boy died. With that, just about emotionally. Didn’t know what to do. So he cried and he cried. And father came in and yelled at the boy, we don’t cry in this family, and grabbed the boy and took him to a pet shop and bought a new puppy.

Edith Eger 00:17:10  And he said to me, Doctor Eger, I’m 56 years old and I have yet to shed a tear since I’m nine years old. See, what comes out to our body doesn’t make us ill. Crying is good. It’s healthy. When you have a broken heart, you grieve. You cry. But in many families, especially the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family, you have to control yourself. You’re so controlled, you’re splitting at the seams. Be a little hungry and scream it out. You got to have rage before you move into forgiveness.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:22  You say that the opposite of depression is expression.

Edith Eger 00:18:26  That’s your name. So share your secret. Share your secret. What comes out of your body doesn’t make you ill. You either vent anger, suppress anger. I like you to dissolve the anger.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:41  Talk to me about how you dissolve the anger without venting the anger.

Edith Eger 00:18:45  And Recognizing that anger is not a primary emotion. That is very, very, very true because I studied that. When I’m angry, I give my power away.

Edith Eger 00:19:00  I ask people to reclaim your powers. You’re angry because you expected more and you’re getting less. It’s really very important what you’re expecting. So what I’m really talking about a lot of the times is the name rejection. So somebody maybe like you, I come to you and I tell you, I would like you to get to know me. Me, Eddie, not doctor Ego. And you tell me that it’s a very nice offer. And thank you. I’m not interested. So the best four letter word is risk. And I asked you and I didn’t get it what I want, but I was not rejected because rejection is just the English word that people make up to express a feeling when you don’t get what you want. So give up the drama. One time a young person told me he rejected me. No. No one can reject you. So get rid of that word for sure. No one has any power to reject you. But you just wanted something and you didn’t get it. And that’s what life is suffering.

Edith Eger 00:20:25  And when you suffer. Take it from me. You become stronger. So who do you feed?

Eric Zimmer 00:20:32  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 oneyoufeed.net/ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. 

Another of the prisons that you talk about. We touched on this just a little bit here, but I want to hit it, which is the prison of secrets. I love this and hungry. We have an expression. If you sit with one butt on two chairs, you become half ass.

Edith Eger 00:21:35  That’s Hungarian singing in Hungarian. It’s sounds funny. If you’re Jewish, you say you can’t go to two weddings with one behind. You know, and you cannot dance within two weddings. Many, many ways. How do you split yourself? How do I split myself? That I’m working, loving and playing while I’m talking to you? I’m cooking a Hungarian dinner for tonight. My children are here. It’s called the sacred goulash. It’s about me, then. Sauerkraut and sour cream. A lot of caraway is a lot of paprika. And you said we don’t mashed potatoes. So I am dividing myself. And you know what? I will never retire. I’m better now than I was years ago. If I don’t know anything, I tell you. And maybe we can look it up together. But I want to be the true me, not the image of me. And that’s what we call the ego. the false self.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:44  You say that honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself.

Edith Eger 00:22:49  You look in the mirror in the morning and just say I’m one of a kind. Look at Gandhi. Took one person to bring down the whole British Empire without ever shedding a blood. I lectured in that museum of Gandhi in Johannesburg, South Africa. I felt so, so wonderful to talk to people. These people were called the white people. The Young Presidents organization, they have a lot of money, and they spend it on building all kinds of schools for the children, building homes for families. They are really, truly my heroes. The young president organization. I was so beautifully, beautifully treated. You see, they don’t give you money for what you do, but they treat you so that I traveled with an airline called Virgin Airlines. Have you ever been on Virgin Airlines first class?

Eric Zimmer 00:24:05  I have not been on it. I know what it is.

Edith Eger 00:24:08  They give you pajamas. They put you to bed in San Diego. And then I woke up in London. Fabulous, fabulous fabulous treatment. I was treated beautifully. And I was able to travel practically all over the world. And even today, I am hoping that I can guide people to transcend their ego needs and I recognized that Auschwitz was an opportunity to discover that life is from inside out and not to wait.

Edith Eger 00:24:51  People who were waiting for someone to come and liberate them, they didn’t make it. All we had was each other then, and all we have is each other now. So when I danced for Doctor Mengele, I closed my eyes and I imagined that the music was Tchaikovsky. And I was dancing to Romeo and Juliet at the Budapest Opera. And today, when a woman tells me I was sexually touched. And I don’t know how to tell you either, because you were in Auschwitz and I said you were more in prison than I was because I knew the enemy. So if you have a secret. Share it. If you come to see me, you’re going to have to go to the 12 step because there were two drunk going to Carl Jung in Switzerland. And Carl Jung said alcoholism is a spiritual issue, not psychotherapy. So I sent people to the 12 step so they could be grown ups so they could live a life of an adult. That freedom comes with responsibility.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:10  Yeah, well, it saved my life.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:11  And one of the things we used to say in 12 step programs all the time is you’re only as sick as your secrets.

Edith Eger 00:26:17  And you’re stinking thinking. Yes. Lovely, lovely words that I like to use about how you go to a meeting and recognize that all you have to do is sit there, and then they trigger things in you that you ran away from because you medicated your feelings. Your medicated, your grieve. You don’t drink when you’re happy. You think you are happy. You want to be happy. But then you become a false you. You tell them that you are some kind of a king’s son. And then you get sober. And then you think, oh my God, I. I feel so little. They call it a shame attack. Yeah, I feel it. And you fluctuate from helplessness to grandiosity.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:15  Yes. Yes. That does appear to be a big part of it.

Edith Eger 00:27:19  You became now the one who does his calling. This is your calling. And the alcoholism, the gift that you were able to turn tragedy into this kind of an opportunity.

Edith Eger 00:27:36  Now that you can tell people this is not the best you can do.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:09  Let’s talk about another of your prisons. You talk about the prison of guilt and shame. I’d like to talk about what is the way out of that prison.

Edith Eger 00:28:20  I can only tell you what I lived. Anything I tell you, I lived it. First of all, my parents wanted a son after two girls and I came along. So I came into a very talented family. My sister and Magda played the piano. My sister Klara played the violin. And many people didn’t even know I existed. I would say I’m Clara’s sister. I didn’t know I didn’t have my identity, but my mother looked at me one day and said, I’m glad you have brains because you have no looks. I think it’s very important for the people to see what you carry in you. It’s kind of like Shakespeare. They put you somewhere and then you give a game and they. What happens? That I took care of a military family and I just came back from Germany.

Edith Eger 00:29:23  And so they had these little dolls in the living room. And so when I came in, the mother introduced me to the children. This is the shy one. This is my giggly one. This is my son, the doctor. And so we sit down to share the giggles, giggling and I tell the shy one because I was painfully shy. I said, you have such a beautiful profile. And mother kicked me under the table and said, don’t tell her that she’ll be conceited. So you know right away in this family you don’t get positive reinforcement. And that’s why, you know, many times your mother may tell you you’re a very handsome boy, but you’re fat and but you’re pimply and you forget about before the what’s happened. So I tell people, give me the bottle and I give you an end. Yes and yes. And so the little two year old was nagging on mother, and she was washing dishes, and she was telling the little boy that she’s busy, but the little boy is two years old.

Edith Eger 00:30:40  I want and I want it now. That’s what children want wanted easy and want it now. And so the little boy stopped. I watched that little boy thinking, clicking the clicker. They click and goes to the living room and just about touching one of those dolls, and mother comes in, grabs the boy, picks up the boy and said, didn’t I tell you not to touch them? You see, what do you pay attention to? Just like which one? Which will. And you know, yeah, he got picked up one way or another. And that’s what children do. They go to a most elegant restaurant and you may sell to your mother. If you don’t give me this now, then I’m going to say the effort. You immediately don’t want to be seen as some kind of a bad parent. So we look at the firstborn child. Usually are the responsible ones. Most of our Nobel Prize winners are either only children or first born children. Middle children are like peacemakers. Like Kissinger, they want everybody to get along.

Edith Eger 00:32:06  I guess that’s what you are very good at. But young people in a family we call charming manipulators. And I was one of those charming manipulators. If I wanted money, I asked money from my father when he was playing billiards, and he wanted to look very generous in front of him. I couldn’t do that with my mother. Very different It is fancy. So which one are you teaching people to be a survivor and not a victim of anything or anyone? No one can put you down but you. No one can reject you but you. You have as much power over other people as you give them permission. Allow them. And that’s why I ask people to reclaim their innocence. And for that, I had to go back to Auschwitz and go back to that lion’s den and go back and look at that lion in her face and go back there and reclaim my innocence and begin to forgive myself that I survived. That’s the hardest thing to forgive you. And that’s why I didn’t show up for my graduation when I graduated with honors.

Edith Eger 00:33:34  So you see, we can be our own worst enemies. And hopefully you can recognize that children don’t do what we say. They do what they see. So the best thing, again, for children is a happy marriage. I hope you are in a happy marriage.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:55  I am with a partner and I am very happy. Yes. She and I are very happy.

Edith Eger 00:34:00  I’m very happy that you’re a good role, mother. Also to others. The way you treat your children. Want to know how you treat their mother? Yeah. And you are a good role model to the children.

Speaker 4 00:34:15  Let’s talk about.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:16  The prison of judgment. You tell a pretty powerful story in the book about in the early 80s, you’re doing court appointed therapy and a 14 year old boy comes to you. Do you want to tell that story?

Edith Eger 00:34:30  I think what comes up for me is the 14 year old young boy who was part of the white supremacy group. He was part of a group called David Koresh in Texas. He ended up being bombed by the government, but he came to my office and he told me he’s a good boy in Texas.

Edith Eger 00:34:55  And I acknowledged his boots even though I know nothing about boots. And then he got up and he’d put his elbow on my desk and said, hey, doc, it’s time for America to be white again, and I’m going to kill all the Jews and order using the N-word and all the chinks and all the Mexicans. Now there is a difference between reacting or responding. If I would have reacted, I would have dragged that boy the corner, I would have stepped on him and I would say, who do you think you’re talking to? I was in Auschwitz. My parents died in a gas chamber, but I. I live by the idea that somehow I was in Auschwitz. And here is this young boy coming to me. And I operate on the idea that people don’t come to me. They’re sent to me like you are. So I went to God, as I did in Auschwitz, and I said to God all that. And God said to me, find the bigot in you. And I told God, no, no, no, no, no, I am not a bigot at all.

Edith Eger 00:36:25  I came to America in 1949 and I worked in a factory. it’s called the sweatshop. I got $0.07 per dozen cutting of boxer shorts, and I became the breadwinner because my late husband ended up in a TB hospital. He died of TB, too. Came back. But when I went to the bathroom, I saw a sign colored. Imagine after Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. I come to America to find democracy. So love is not what you feel, it’s what you do. I gather the women of color. I ask them to take me to a meeting. And guess what? In 1963, you may find myself among all those people with Martin Luther King singing We Shall Overcome. You’re too young to understand that, right? 1963. June or July, I don’t know, but I know it was summer. It was very hot. So. So when someone is not going as well as you want to. I ask people to say to themselves, I don’t like it. It’s inconvenient and it’s temporary and I can survive it.

Edith Eger 00:37:59  Don’t say what? Say. And because everything is temporary. I’m going to be very happy in my death. But I know, I know because I live life to the fullest every day. I finish everything on my plate. Take me out to lunch and believe me, I’m going to eat up everything on that plate. And if you leave something on your plate, I’m going to either eat it or take it home with me. It pains me to throw away. So Auschwitz was an opportunity to really discover that inner strength that I could throw me in a gas chamber any minute. I had no power over that. They would beat me, torture me, and never, ever touch my spirit. So that’s what I bring to you. That spiritual freedom that no matter what you tell me in the English language, when you’re angry, I’m gonna hear the word you. You are stupid. You know that’s what bullies do in school. You are whatever they call you. And all you say to yourself. The longer they talk, the more relaxed I become.

Edith Eger 00:39:22  You take the negative stimuli, immediately turn it into positive, and you say, I’m Practicing my low frustration tolerance level. That’s a 50 cent word from psychology that I cannot change the stimulus, but I’m sure not allowing to murder my spirit ever. So you don’t make me angry when you hear somebody tell you, all you have to do is just change it to I. I make me angry because your behavior is unacceptable. Miami. So I went went back to that boy. And I created the environment that you create, that people can feel any feeling without the fear of being judged. And I looked at him as lovingly as I could. You know, I can kill you with my eyes and I can love you with my eyes. And I said three words. Tell me more. Please tell me more. He never knew a thing about my past, and that’s my experience that I was remembering when I saw at the capital the people who were the white supremacist and wearing a shirt. 6 million was not enough.

Edith Eger 00:40:47  How do you think I feel? But I don’t let fear rule my life. But, you know, people trigger things in you. I watched the movie the other night. It’s called The Miracle Worker. It’s the life of Helen Keller. She’s deaf, blind. And then one time when they have dinner, after months and months and working with this child, Helen Keller was taking a picture and going out with the teacher. And as she was getting the water the first time. She began to talk and she said, water. It took like ten minutes at least. Water. And what triggered in me that when I was liberated, I didn’t know how to write. And I remembered practicing a capital G for hours and hours. C when we were liberated, people would go through the gate, but then they would come back and sit down. Talks about the positive psychology. We were free, what we didn’t know. And he called it learned helplessness. And that’s very, very true. I did not know how to write, especially the capital G.

Edith Eger 00:42:13  So you were guiding people now that maybe something is going to trigger that you have not finished. And you go got to go back and relive that experience and you go through the valley of the shadow of death. Don’t get stuck in there. Because when you’re constipated, you concentrate on a movement. So that’s why my daughter called it Eddie ism. Are you reviving or are you evolving? So be like a butterfly and shed that chrysalis so you can fly freely like a butterfly.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:53  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.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:27  At once you book. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. When you feed net book. I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. Thank you so, so much for coming on and sharing so much of your wisdom and kindness and love with us. It’s been a real honor for me.

Edith Eger 00:43:49  God bless.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:50  God bless. 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:

Emotional Strength Training 101: How to Process Trauma Without Getting Stuck in the Past with Nikki Eisenhauer

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:00:00  If we can all start from. I need to take care of myself. How do we save the world? One person at a time, starting with myself. And that means you prioritize your nervous system, knowing that the second you start to leave three, four, and five on a scale of 0 to 10, whatever problem is at hand, it’s not worth running your body through all of those surges of emotions and chemicals.

Chris Forbes 00:00:32  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 00:01:16  There’s something a meditation teacher once said that comes back to me again and again. Practice now for the times. You can’t. And I don’t think I fully understood that at first, but the longer I’ve been at it, the more I see it. Because when life really hits us hard, we don’t suddenly rise to the occasion. We often tend to fall back on what we’ve practiced. And in this conversation, Nikki Eisenhauer and I talk about emotional strength training, the small ways that we build capacity day by day so that when the difficult moments come, we’re just a little more able to meet them. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Nikki, welcome to the show.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:01:56  Thank you for having me. It’s great to be back.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:58  Yeah, I guess I should say. Welcome back to the show. It’s lovely to have you on a second time. You and I will just be discussing your work in general with the Emotional Badass podcast and everything that you do around it.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:11  But before we get into that, 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 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. 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.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:02:50  I love that parable. I remember finding it many, many years ago, probably close to 20 years ago, in the way that I can’t believe I’m saying that. That I’m not old. But yes, 20 years ago. And I remember it teaching me that there really were different parts to myself and that choosing, like the power of choice is what the parable says to me, that I better make damn sure that I am choosing to feed my good wolf, and I want to starve out that bad wolf.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:03:20  I don’t want to accidentally feed him. And I think that’s where my emotional badass work comes in, as I think often we’re accidentally feeding the bad wolf and we don’t even know it. And so if we don’t even know it, how can we change it? So being able to understand that since reading that many years ago, it’s really guided me to stop and go, wait, what am I doing in this moment? What do I want to feed? What do I want to starve out? Because that that is always what’s going to boil down to my personal power. No matter what I’m going through, no matter what struggle I’m having, what part of me do I want to feed right now? And I think it’s the most powerful choice we can make.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:59  Yeah, obviously, two wolves is a vast understatement of what all swirls around inside of us. Let me ask you a question about that, because a lot of your work is about recognizing past trauma, past difficulty, unpleasant emotions, and being with and learning from those things.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:21  So in your mind, like, what’s the difference between when we’re doing that in a constructive way and when we’re feeding those things in a less than constructive way?

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:04:32  Ooh, that’s a great question because also I’m pretty critical of mental health as a field. Okay. And I do believe that most therapists don’t understand the difference and will just walk somebody through history, history, history history to know end. So when I’m looking at history or old patterns or old emotions or hard memories from way back when. I don’t want to just look like not for me, not for my clients. I want to be able to look and really understand how is that moment impacting me right now, and what do I need to do about that? If I’m being impacted right now, in this moment, by something from my past, what is my actual task right now in the present moment and with that old unfinished business? So I think we have to know the difference between processing in a way. If you could see me right now, I don’t know if this this is going to go out as audio or video, but if you can see me, it’s like I’m doing a swirl on top of my head, and we can go round and round and round and round, especially as sensitive people, especially as deep people.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:05:40  We don’t want to just circle just for the sake of circling. That’s part of what wears us out psychically, energetically, emotionally. We want to really be able to look back and go, okay, what is happening to me in this moment and connect it to that past. Then we’re looking back towards freeing ourselves, whatever is getting us stuck. Is that answering your question?

Eric Zimmer 00:06:03  It does. It does. I mean, I think a lot of what I think about is this question of how do we allow ourselves to be human and have emotions and let that be without getting lost and stuck in them? And a question that I use in a lot of different contexts, and I think it’s something that you’ll relate to a lot, is basically is this useful?

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:06:31  If we’re connecting it to our current behavior or our current state, I think it is if we’re just rehashing to rehash and we’re using our past to go pour me woe is me, I can say objectively that’s the wrong way to go. That’s not going to get you to any peace, any integration, if we’ve had a lot of struggle in our history.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:06:53  It’s like I grew up in an incredibly toxic household. My father abandoned me before I was ten. I thought he was going to kidnap me and leave me for dead in the country. He spoke the language of in Italy. I had to watch out for being kidnapped as a kid. I mean, I was basically taught to have post-traumatic stress, to be hyper vigilant. That energy doesn’t leave your body. That patterning of watching and watching and checking and checking doesn’t just leave because it’s like, oh, I’m a grown up now. I’m not a powerless little kid, so I don’t need that anymore. We really are psychological beings. So when something keeps coming up, when there’s a tension, let’s say a tension and anxiety, a frustration, a mistake you keep making, like somebody who really pushes your buttons and you keep falling for it, taking the bait. Every time we want to really look back and go, okay, why am I here again? Because if I am here again in this, if this is a pattern for me, it’s probably historical.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:07:55  So let me look back at my history and understand what did I learn about this present moment in my life? I’ve had to face things like I didn’t see anyone do apology the right way or repair the right way ever, ever. So I’d catch myself as a younger woman in moments of conflict, feeling so ashamed and knowing there was something I needed to do if I had an argument with someone, but not knowing how to do it, and then shaming myself. I’m a smart person. I should know how to apologize. Until I sat with myself and looked back and said, why is this happening to me? Why don’t I know what to do in one of these tense moments or after an argument? Why is it so tender and raw and vulnerable for me to approach somebody after an argument and asking that question and looking back, it gave me my answer. And when we get an answer, I think we have a feeling in us like click ding. It like clicks together. Something dings. And I felt that sort of ding ding.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:09:04  I felt a voice, some different part of me that just said to me one day, well, you’ve never seen a proper apology. And at first my conscious adult self, I was in my 20s thought, well, that can’t be true. And then I sat back and thought, no, no. My family swept things under the rug. It was just over because the intensity was now over and we decided it was over. That is a total lack of skills and what to do, what to do with myself, how to talk to myself in that moment, how to talk to anyone else. So once I process that and that came together, it clicked. It made sense to me. I connected the dot of the present moment of I don’t know how to do repair. I feel incredibly awkward and insecure and incapable of knowing what to do in this moment. And it’s not because all the judgments, right? It’s not because I’m a moron. It’s not because I’m a dumbass. It’s not because I don’t care.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:10:04  If anything, I cared way too much. But caring didn’t magically make how to do it fall out of the sky. Yep. And I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck. Like, I know you’ve got sobriety under your belt. Like addiction. In your history, I think a lot of us, addiction or not addiction, just didn’t know what to do and would reach for some kind of substance, some kind of distraction in those moments because we’re just so desperately not knowing what we don’t know. Yeah. So to me, processing and looking back and it not just being frankly, a circle jerk of looking back is is looking back through that question of usefulness to go. All right. Why is why is this coming up for me? Why do I keep seeing this moment and then connecting the dots? And I find that especially for deep people, I’m certainly deep that once we connect the dots, then we can figure out more of ourselves. And the truth is, I couldn’t have figured that part out.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:11:00  I just pulled apology and repair out of the sky today, but I could not have figured that out any earlier than I figured it out. You know, we really are psychological creatures, and I think we kind of know that as a collective, but we also don’t understand what that means. Yeah, as a collective, it means we have this very strong part of our psychology that learns completely disconnected from our conscious self. So we’re processing our history not just to get lost in history and pay therapists thousands of dollars. We’re looking at our history to really ask what is useful for right now. Something about this informed this moment. I’m not just doing this present moment, frankly pulling it out of my ass. It’s coming from somewhere and it’s coming from a culmination of every moment of my life, because that subconscious, it’s a program. It’s every experience we’ve ever had, every look another adult has given us, whether they looked at us and lit up and went, hello, you precious little boy. It’s so amazing to spend time with you.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:12:05  And then we had some worth instilled in us. Or if someone looked at us like my mother would often look at me and kind of roll her eyes. She didn’t want to deal with me. She didn’t want to be a mother. And that programmed me. So today, if someone rolls their eyes at me, I very much connected by looking at my history. Instead of just feeling triggered and wanting to defend myself and fight to the death and to have somebody understand. No. Why are you rolling your eyes at me? Don’t do that and fighting it. I want to look back and understand about myself as an act of self-love and go know that random person rolling their eyes at you today. It kicks off that old program of your mother doing that, and it makes you feel desperate to count as a human being. If we don’t understand that and we get very upset in a moment, it’s very easy to have friends, even well-meaning friends, look at us and go, why are you upset that some random guy at the gas station roll their eyes at you? And because it’s from my subconscious.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:13:06  In that moment, we get deer in the headlights and we go, yeah, I don’t know, because the wise woman part of me, the mature part of me, the grounded, centered part of me. Intellectually, I don’t care at all who rolls their eyes at me. So why does that hit my nervous system that way? So I think we need to connect those dots to then be able to release ourselves from the power of that old programming. So today, if someone rolls their eyes at me, okay, I might feel a slight hitch in the giddy up of my nervous system, if you will. But I’ve cultivated this relationship with myself where my wise woman automatically goes, oh, that’s okay, that person must be having a bad day. Let’s give them grace and release it. And in that moment, I’m giving my inner child the part of me that in the the moment of my mother, the person I’m supposed to get nurture and safety from, who couldn’t provide that for me, wouldn’t provide that for me in that moment.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:14:08  That’s repair, that’s therapy, that’s therapeutic. I’m becoming my own mother to basically take my hand and go, oh, sweet girl. Oh, honey, all you have to do is give this person grace and release them, because that’s just a human in their humanity. And we just we just hit into that like bumper cars. And it doesn’t mean anything about your personhood. You’re worth your value. I’m sorry mom did that to you, but we don’t have to feel this way anymore about random grown ups rolling their eyes at us. And then that becomes safe until that becomes almost neutral. And because it was my primary caregiver, I might not be able to get it to 100% neutral in this lifetime. But boy, has it been an improvement to get myself 90% there. And boy, if I can spend these next years getting close to 97 98% there, what a clearing for my life. What an act of actually, we say self-love a lot, but it’s self-respect. We get self-respect, right? The love will come. But that’s a way to respect what has been difficult in my history. The programming my subconscious picked up.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:47  So let’s walk through that example. I think it’s a great example. And you’ve shown us what it looks like to be 90% when we start. Let’s say we’re at 10%. So let’s talk about at that point, is it still essentially what you just said, which is I have a vague, oh, boy, this ties back to this thing or I’m being triggered. It has something to do with this. I say something to myself to try and make myself feel safe and supported. And 10% of me is understanding and 90% of me is all roiled up. How do we go from that to 8020 to 7030 over time?

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:16:26  Okay. Two things. One is, and I like to say that I have had more therapy than anyone in the world. So I’ve been on both sides of the chair. We would have to like some wrestle over this. Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:37  Oh no, you win because I’ve only. I’ve only been on one side of the chair.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:16:41  Oh, well, there we go. I’ve been on both sides. You’ve been right. So what? I think a lot of therapists miss and the field misses. And what I would say to anybody who’s having a real hard time in any way, just life is just. It kicks our ass sometimes, right? But if you can accept and I don’t care about being right, there are lots of ways to to get to anywhere. But this is just my way. That has worked for myself and for people I’ve worked with. If you can accept that the a number one thing all the time, and I can say that about very few things is for you to respect your own nervous system. It clarifies so much. And I think what happens is we go back into our histories looking at old memories, things that absolutely activate us when we haven’t started strength training. Nobody does a marathon without exercising and training for the marathon, right? Yet we go into therapy, going into the marathon of our histories.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:17:41  It’s like, what is the pre-training for that? It’s not just let me tell you about my memories and the worst things that ever happened to me and fix me. Therapist. It’s not that. It’s we need to do better as a field teaching people. Hey, nervous system first. I can see you starting to get activated. It really doesn’t matter what is activating you. That can be dealt with later, but the fact that you are getting activated no matter what your history is, no matter what you’ve lived through, I can say with great confidence, out of self respect, I think your body has felt that activation enough and whatever is happening right now, unless you are bleeding or on fire, there are a few things that need panic mode that need full fight or flight. Unless you are ready to fight somebody for your life, or run and haul ass to save yourself. We’re not built to sit still and have a conversation with ourselves or anybody else when our system is getting triggered to fight or flight.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:18:41  So I believe that if we can just instill in ourselves and as a field in people who feel 10%, you know, who feel very raw, very messy, very lost, very unwise in how they’re moving through the world. Let’s start with ground your nervous system, because I want you to know, and my God, with what? The way politics pulls on emotional strings these days. I want you to know that whatever is happening in your world, whatever it is, your nervous system gets to be the priority. And if you’re not going to make your nervous system the priority, and I suspect you’re really in some codependency, you’re really in some people pleasing. It’s selfish. Right? It’s like, if I can’t be ish about myself and prioritize me and fill my own cup, how am I supposed to give from an empty, well, an empty place if we can all start from. I need to take care of myself. How do we save the world? One person at a time, starting with myself.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:19:42  And that means you prioritize your nervous system, knowing that the second you start to leave three, four, and five on a scale of 0 to 10, whatever problem is at hand, it’s not worth running your body through all of those surges of emotions and chemicals. It’s not right.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:00  So how do we stop that from happening? Because when we’re when we’re pretty raw, right. It doesn’t seem like I’m at zero, then I’m at three, then I’m at four, I’m at five. It feels like I’m at zero and then I’m at nine.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:20:12  So we have to cultivate a strong relationship with the practice of patience. And I know it can be practicing cultivated because when I started I had absolutely none at all. So patience is such a huge factor and it doesn’t get named. Nobody really walks into a healer’s office. It’s like, help me with patients. Right. But patients is underlies everything. So we have to slow down internally because you might sit in one spot and nobody really knows you’re moving at 100,000 miles an hour.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:20:46  But when you start to get activated, you know everything in your body, everything in your mind, 100,000 miles an hour, right? So I want you to notice in an incremental level, and maybe the first ten times you try this, it does seem like it goes from 0 to 10 and you’re like, Nikki, all of a sudden I blink and I’m at ten and I’m like, yep. And we’re gonna keep implanting this idea in your subconscious that that can be slowed down because you are not in danger. Your life does not depend on it. You might not like something you might hate, something you might be really pissed off. But your life doesn’t depend on it. It’s uncomfortable, it’s unfair, it’s frustrating, and that we need to teach our bodies and our minds, our hearts, our guts. But that’s not dangerous. It’s Uncomfortable. And so we have to slow down these ideas and we have to be willing to grab our bodies. It’s like a grab. So way back when, when I would go 0 to 10 or 0 to 100, even on a skeleton, what I had to do was I had to fully get away from the stimuli.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:21:53  And there’s a lot of therapists, there’s a lot of people out there talking about trauma that don’t understand this. My body, whatever perceived threat, even if it was wrong coming from my childhood, my body’s ready to fight or run. That’s not a time when we’re meant to think, if you’re running at me with a hammer, and I stop and think, why is Eric running at me with a hammer? By the time I process that thought, you’ve conked me in the head.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:17  I would never do such a thing.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:22:18  I know you would never.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:20  I prefer axe.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:22:22  So. Right. So if I stop and think of you running at me with the axe, I’m knocked out. Or you’ve chopped my head off with the axe. Right? So by design our nervous systems in a subconscious process, they take over quickly like that so that I fight you or I run. Because if I stop and think that’s it. So that’s not a problem. That’s a feature of a human being. That’s a feature.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:22:50  We’re supposed to be wired that way. So there’s some acceptance. And so many of us when we’re very depleted we’re so down on ourselves. We’re we’re so like thinking we’re the problem and we suck and we’re awful and we’re terrible and we’re just down on ourselves in every way. So it’s very easy to get stuck in this trap of seeing yourself explode. So I had to get very real with myself about how raw my nervous system really was, because it didn’t make sense to me. You know, especially 20 years ago, most of the PTSD stuff was about soldiers, and I would just use that to shame myself. I feel like really, I grew up in a house where my hair was brushed all the time. I always had clothing, I always had food, and I have PTSD like a soldier. Come on, that is bullshit. Like, I just would not accept that. It took me years to soften with myself and start understanding that I did have those very severe, triggering symptoms, because I grew up in a house where I didn’t get safety and security.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:23:52  So that made me raw and it just made me raw. Then when I had abuses happen, it was like I was doubly raw, a triple raw. It’s kind of like the idea of, you know, if you get knocked down by a wave when you’re standing at the beach, you know, you get knocked down that first time, you know, you kind of get up, you know, you get your bearings, you get your feet under you. But my life had really been. Wave after wave after wave. Like getting hit in the face. And then here comes another wave. And the truth of that for all of us is we don’t keep trying to stand up. We hit a point where we say, F it. I don’t want you to have to bleep things where we say F fit and we just give up and we lay there like, I can’t withstand this. I’m really big into stoicism because I think we have to resist, like laying down and giving up. But it’s easy to be down on ourselves and confused and lost.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:24:44  This is going to take patience, and it’s going to take a real act of faith with oneself. I don’t mean that in any kind of religious way, but it’s a faith where I said choose. When you said the parable of the wolves, our power is in choosing that I can get into my psyche. I can get in between me and that 0 to 10 or 0 to 100, and I have to slow it down. So I had to get it very long before I got it very right. This is not the kind of thing you hear me say one time and you’re like, cool, I’m going to be able to catch myself next time. Nikki. You may have to try to catch yourself and know that that is working on your subconscious, the back of your mind. It’s working on that, even though it doesn’t feel like it. And that’s part of why I started Emotional Badass. I wanted to be able to show myself to people in real time and be able to say, hey, you can learn my history, I’ll be an open book, and if you just read my history on paper, frankly, I should be a dead hooker in the street.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:25:45  That’s the story we have about people who have my background. I was a runaway teen. The fact that I got out of high school and got into college is an absolute miracle. So we have to understand. I put myself out there to show you you can do it. But the truth is, you will feel like you can’t. You will feel that that is an automatic process, that you are just screwed. And it’s going to be 0 to 10 like that forever. So I think we’re social creatures. I don’t believe in gurus I teach you or your own authority figure. I am not the authority figure, but I also think we are wired to be social creatures. We’re not supposed to learn how to heal because we read a book. We’re not supposed to learn how to heal. Because you listen to me and you talk. This is about incorporating wisdom from people you see. We’re all supposed to be able to look to our parents and learn coping strategies and how to be with ourselves. If you didn’t get that, like, I didn’t get it.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:26:41  Then where the hell else are we going to get that? We can’t speak a language we haven’t heard, so we have to surround ourselves with people who will believe in us when we can’t even believe in us. So in that 0 to 10, when you feel like, oh my gosh, I’m just I’m such a screw up and I keep losing my cool. I keep blowing up, I can’t catch myself. I am here to say I will believe it for you, even if I never meet you until you can believe it yourself. Because someone did that for me. And you don’t have to buy into what I’m saying. You can still be skeptical, but what if you have the ability to just start to go? What if I can catch it next time, just a little bit sooner? What if, as I’m amping up, I can still cultivate this dual awareness, this other part of me that can see me starting to get worked up and just say, whoa. Take a deep breath. And in that moment, what a win.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:27:31  And that can be the building block until you can get from that 0%. Like I started to 10% to 20%. And it will build for you. And when you cannot believe that for yourself, look at other people who have gone further in healing than you have and trust that if they did it, if I did it, you can do it too.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:49  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 oneyoufeed.net/ebook, and take the first step towards getting back on track.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:37  I think that’s such a really key piece because earlier you said you’ve got to kind of have a kind of faith in yourself, and I think that’s really hard to do. Early on, I think back to myself in early recovery, and I didn’t have any faith that I could get sober because every time I had tried. Up until then, I had failed at it. And that’s what I got out of 12 step meetings, is I could look at those people and go, I believe they’ve been where I am. The way they talk about it, they understand it, and now they’re saying they’re somewhere different. And so maybe I can believe that, you know, I’m going to borrow their belief for a little while and borrow their hope.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:29:14  That’s the word. You really can borrow belief and borrow hope. And that’s not like selling your thinking or farming your thinking out to someone else. I believe that’s how we’re supposed to be socially wired with each other, so I can kind of prove it in this little silly way.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:29:32  Anytime anyone has ever thought since the beginning of time that they saw an alien, the very first impulse is to turn around and go. Did anyone else see that? Okay, if someone else saw it, we immediately exhale and we don’t feel crazy, right? That’s the kind of social fabric, you know. If we’re alone and we think we see an alien, yikes. That’s going to be really hard to trust, to believe in, to have anybody else believe. And we look to someone else and when they go, yeah, I saw it too. That’s when we believe it more. That’s not us not being independent enough. That’s not us being codependent. That’s us being social creatures. We need each other. So I have that belief in me today because other people said, I believe in Nikki, even though you can’t find it right now and you can’t feel it. So all you really need is to be open to the possibility that this can change for you, and then just keep walking the path.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:30:33  I very much believe in different parts. Like your parable is about the wolves, right? And I do parts work. You know, I have this inner child part. Sometimes she needs hugs. She needs nurturing, she needs to know, hey, it’s going to be okay. Or sometimes she needs to know it’s okay. When someone doesn’t like you. It’s okay when someone acts out or makes you the scapegoat. We don’t have to let that trigger us anymore. You know? Sometimes she needs me to mother her. I also have a wise woman part that I can tap in from years of cultivating her, I’ve also learned to feel what I call the inner adolescent part. You know, I think we all have that. We have that part. It’s like, no, I don’t want to hear it from you. Or like, I already know better, right? Like, we all have that little attitude part that just wants to roll eyes and kind of like, and just dismiss. And so we want to catch that part.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:31:23  And like I said, I got I rolled out by my mother a lot. So what does that do to my subconscious programming? I had a lot of eye rolling teenage energy. I want to recognize that in my conscious mind and not bring that forward as a practice. So we get to emotionally strength training for so much. And I promise anyone listening, if you just intend and give a generous willingness dose to yourself to start to slow down your own reactivity and infuse patience into that moment, maybe the first moment is just I’m going to take a breath before I say anything. You will find a spaciousness in you and in relating to other people that you cannot imagine in this moment, and it’s waiting for you. It’s available. Same with sobriety, right? Yeah. It’s like anybody who’s ever struggled with any process addiction or chemical addiction feels like you just cannot live without that thing. Like, how are you ever even going to do it? And yet it’s the simplest thing in the world to go. Yeah, you can’t have that one substance.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:32:25  You can’t do that one thing. You can do everything else. You can’t do that one thing. And there’s there’s a process in letting your mind, your conscious mind, your subconscious mind, your heart, your gut, you growing up around these ideas and letting you become these ideas that once were foreign.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:05  I think that patience, peace is really, really important because we have a tendency to A, we want and B, we get promised that something or intervention is going to like, dramatically change us. And when it doesn’t, we assume that that thing or that intervention isn’t valid. Right. I mean, the equivalent would be if I walked into a 12-step meeting and left and went, I still want to use heroin. So this doesn’t work. Well of course I still wanted to. Right. It was going to be a while before I didn’t want to. Now, today it’s a non-issue. I mean, a true non-issue. I mean, they have it has no emotional hook to me. But that happened over time.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:58  And I think that’s the patience piece. It’s like, oh, someone told me that if I ground myself in my senses, it will help me regulate my nervous system. So I ground myself in my senses once, and it doesn’t really do anything because it’s one time. I mean, obviously my book is sort of pointing in that direction, little by little. It’s, it’s but it’s the, the belief and the patience to say, okay, I’m going to trust this process long enough to actually work.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:34:27  I think that’s the act of faith in yourself that it’s possible and that if it’s possible for someone else to be able to see that as it’s possible for me to, because I’m just a human and they’re just a human, too. There’s good news. Like to the book that you’re putting on. I can’t wait to read it. There’s good news, too. We can cultivate such things. It’s why, in my work, I talk about emotional strength training. It makes perfect sense to people that you would physically train.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:34:54  You know, you lift weights, you get stronger, you get bigger muscles. But emotionally, I see so many people intellectualizing. They’re like, I read this book, Nicky, why am I not better? I listen to your show. I process it through my ears. Why am I not better? Imagine if I was trying to get bigger muscles and I told you. Yeah, I read this book about getting bigger muscles. And look at my muscles. Can you believe they’re the same size? Yeah, so we understand it about the physical. We don’t understand it so much about the emotional. I also think we are all brainwashed at least 20, 25 years into this internet, into instantaneous quick fixes. We wait for almost nothing. Now that’s bad. That means we’re not getting natural practice with waiting. Not you don’t even wait when you’re in line anymore, because you pick your phone up and you scroll in your phone, which is distraction. Distraction. We’re practicing distraction constantly. That’s why everyone can walk into a psychiatrist office today, get evaluated for A.D.D. positively.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:36:00  You want A.D.D. meds, you can go get them. Easy peasy, easy peasy. We have a device in our pockets that creates constant distraction, and then we practice it. Oh, I’m in a line. So if you want to practice being able to catch yourself when you start to get triggered. Don’t wait till the moment you’re triggered. I want people to practice easy. You don’t go to the gym and lift 100 pounds. First day you lift 1 pound weights, 5 pound weights. So what are those weights in this experience? Next time you’re at the DMV, next time you’re at the grocery during a holiday and the lines are crazy. Give yourself a challenge. Stand there. Breathe. Leave that phone in your pocket. Cultivate an openness about waiting in line. And that’s going to stretch you. It actually stretches who you are. You create that spaciousness of it’s okay for me to not distract myself. That’s presence people. We’re losing presence. And if you can’t be present in a calm on triggering moment, the chance that you’re going to be present during a triggering moment. Not much of a shot.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:10  I had a meditation teacher that used to say practice now for the times that you can’t. And I just always thought that was really wise. Like, you know, I’m practicing now for I mean, not to be overdramatic, but you and I both have friends that have cancer. I’m practicing now for the cancer diagnosis. Right. Because that’s going to be a little bit late to suddenly hope that I’ve got the skills right. I’m I’m trying to do that now. So let’s talk about what that 1pound, 5 pound emotional training looks like. So you mentioned I could stand in line. I could practice being presence. What are some other emotional strength training exercises that I could start or listeners could start doing.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:37:51  Oh yeah, I can list some out. So in general, you want to understand putting your phone down and just being wherever you are, stop looking down and leaving the world to go into that phone. Okay? That’s going to make you more present. It’s going to make you more grounded.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:38:08  It’s when I do that, what I’m actually doing psychologically is I’m showing my inner child, this is okay. We can wait and breathe, and that creates some spaciousness. So use your life. When I work with somebody one on one, I don’t give a lot of specific homework assignments in terms of extra things to do. We’re all busy enough. I want you to use your actual life. So let yourself look at life through. Where can I practice patience? Where can I practice letting go? Okay, where can I practice giving myself and other people tolerance and grace, especially for the things I really don’t like? What is that process? So you have to get curious. That’s an emotional strength training I did to get curious because if you stop, go. Wait. Why is my heart starting to beat faster? You just practice patience. Curiosity over judgment every single time. What’s wrong with me that I’m feeling? This is. There’s nothing useful about that. You’re actually adding shame that you have to then sort out as you live through life.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:39:21  Get curious. Curiosity is very neutral as opposed to shameful. So we want to practice neutrality. Those of you who are big into political activism, here’s my challenge and you’re not going to like hearing it for me. Is that really good for you right now? Is there any other way for you to help in a way that doesn’t activate your nervous system? Another way you can do very practical exercise is go outside and sit and blow some bubbles for a few minutes and just notice where your thoughts want to go. And if they go to problem, doom, awfulness, fear, historical ways you’ve been wronged, that person that’s getting you realize what you’re practicing, realize what you’re practicing, and then make the conscious choice to stop feeding that wolf and feed presents. I’m allowed to sit without entertaining the doom scroll and blow bubbles, because there’s no real reason to blow bubbles except I’m alive and they’re delightful. It’s a way to practice an emotional strength train that you’re allowed to have moments of joy. You know, we live in a problem focused society that wants you to believe that the world is constantly on fire.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:40:45  We have old hardware in our brains and our bodies. Think about how weird video is for our old, ancient brains and bodies that we can see. Everything that’s horrible flashed before our eyes. We’re not meant for that. We’re not built for that. So practice letting your world be more. The little world around you. We’re really meant for you and I. To walk next to each other. And if you trip and fall and drop what you’re holding. But I can give you a hand, an actual hand, and help you up and then help you pick everything up. That’s what feels right and good to your soul. To my soul. We’re not built to watch someone shot on video, to watch a starving kid on video and not do something about it that is creating an angst and anxiety, a stress, a focus on a problem that you can’t do much about. If you want to go give ten bucks to feeding kids, you can go do that, and then you’re exercising what you can actually do as opposed to just witnessing powerlessness everywhere.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:41:57  So I think there’s a lot pushing against us right now. I think for you and I being the age that we are more of our history in terms of what we need to work on as individuals was more our personal lives. And I think today we have a lot of stressors that are put on the population. I think we have a lot of messages that we are supposed to be in perpetual upset. Patience is not valued even in our progress. The truth is, as a people, we are more progressive than we’ve ever been. People have more rights and more freedoms than ever before in human history, and we’re not allowed to say that. We’re not allowed to feel that, or we’re accused of all kinds of nasty, negative things. So we’re we’re having the world really try to make us hypervigilant constantly. So not only do we have to heal at the level and strength, train whatever our personal childhoods put us through and then what we put ourselves through in our youth, we’re also pushing against, I think, everything that I’ve ever used for the last 20 years to help people find peace, I think, is being used against them in terms of algorithms, news feeds, politics, and I think we have to get into some radical acceptance of these forces not being healthy for us, not individually, not collectively.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:43:16  And we have to really reject as a radical act of rebellion this invitation to be constantly spun up. And if you were healing from a difficult childhood, my God, I double and triple down on everything I just said.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:30  Yeah, I struggle a lot with everything you just said because on one hand, I absolutely agree with it and I see it like we are not equipped to handle all of the awfulness that is amplified to us, right? We just simply aren’t. I love that idea of like, if someone’s walking next to me and they fall down, I have a natural inclination to pick them up, and so being able to then pick them up is a good is a good thing, and then not being able to do it. And so I’m always thinking about how do I make sure that the work I’m doing on myself doesn’t just keep perpetually being inward looking when I feel like part of the answer to, at least for me, part of the answer to my emotional mental challenges has been to turn energy out, to help others.  And so I’m in this moment of wrestling with like, I think the world has always and will always have, for all intents and purposes, an infinite amount of suffering compared to what we can do.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:44:40  I agree, I think it’s awesome.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:41  I don’t think that ever goes as light.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:44:43  Yes, absolutely.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:44  And so if it’s essentially infinite meaning, I can’t process it all, I can’t I can’t do it all. What is my moral. And I use that word not in an external way, but I mean my conscience, my heart. What is it calling me to do? And you know, for me, I’m always I’m just really trying to balance that, like selfishness versus versus outside. And it’s not a binary. Right. It’s not binary. Because to your point, I have to have some degree of self-care and self-love and healing for me to be at all effective in doing anything. So I just I just feel like I think a lot of people feel like pulled by the moment and, and what do we do? And for me, I generally this is just what I do right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:31  And I don’t know, again, I wrestle with it. I don’t I don’t feel set or certain. I feel like I have a lane. My lane is that like I help people who are suffering emotionally and mentally to suffer less. Like I feel like that’s my lane and I feel like I do good work in that lane and I can do good work in that lane. And that’s where I sort of choose to focus, versus a lot of other lanes where the equal amount of help is needed that don’t play to my strengths or my my abilities. But I sometimes wonder, am I just justifying a, looking away from something that needs looked at.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:46:12  So if you were asking me those privately, I’d tell you let yourself have some peace. I think that’s the message of the day is that whatever your lane is, it’s not enough. So I’ve helped people all these years heal from narcissistic abuse and what I see in the culture. And again, some of you are not going to like this, and I’m not saying it to piss you off, I promise you.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:46:36  I’m saying it from a place of trying to help. Okay, so give me some grace if I hit your buttons. There’s something about this activism push that it feels very narcissistic to me, because it seems to come with the message of nothing’s ever good enough. And that is a very classic narcissistic message. If you’ve ever been in relationship with someone with those traits, kind of no matter what you do, I should have done other and better and more. And so when you’re in recovery and you’re trying to be enough and then we have this culture, like I had somebody come at me very aggressively about why I wasn’t doing more, and I was like, I don’t have any more bandwidth. I help people through this microphone. I have helped traumatized people for decades. I don’t have more to give. Right now, I’m at my limit of what I can give. And why is that not enough? So I think we have to very much understand that it is enough. We are all beholden to umpteen billion different details in our personal life.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:47:39  You know, we have to find enough. And I think you’re talking about what I call the dance, that is going to be the dance all the days of our lives. And I think we have to radically accept that dance and that I call perfectionism the sneaky bastard. There is a sneaky bastard of perfectionism that doesn’t show up and tell you directly that it’s perfectionism in disguise. But we are being tasked to basically perfectly advocate. We can’t. We have to find good enough. We have to evaluate day to day, season to season, sometimes hour to hour. How much can I give outwardly? How much do I need to pull back? And I think that’s the dance I agree. And it’s always going to be. And there are always going to be people who look at us and go, well, I think you have more dancing in you and I think you should dance over here. That’s why we have to get so strong in our resolve to not be people pleasers. We’re always going to like pleasing people.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:48:38  I love pleasing people. It’s not about making pleasing people wrong or bad. It’s about I can’t do that to my detriment. I cannot do that to my detriment. And this world doesn’t seem to have a limit to what it will ask of you. So we have to be aware that I am a human. I’m not a robot. I’m not a machine. I cannot give a part of my 24 hours to everything that my eyeballs or my ears catch. That if you ask me, do you care about this? Yeah, I care about everyone having goodness in their lives and safety and security and being well-fed. But I cannot take those things on. And so I think those of us who are doing this work, we have to see each other. We have to encourage each other. We have to look at each other and give more messages of, hey, you’re in your lane and that’s enough. Someone else will come visit, your lane will grow from what you’re doing, and then they’re going to hop lanes and help that lane.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:49:38  In that way you are helping all those lanes, Eric, and there has to be a semblance of an enoughness, or we are operating from a constant sense of lack and then it starts to affect our worth. Then it starts to make us spin, then it starts to exhaust us and it’s just a crappy slippery slope. What do you think?

Eric Zimmer 00:49:57  I do think it is a crappy, slippery slope, but I feel like the dance that you’re describing is an important dance, and it is the dance of continuing to say, am I the person I want to be? Right. In all aspects, in all areas of my life. Not from a place of perfectionism, but from a place of like, I want my life to matter. I want it to reflect what’s deeply true and valuable to me. And I agree with you that that is a dance that I think happens. I think good people are the ones who are consistently sort of saying like, all right, let me just check in. You know, am I doing what’s important? Am I spending my time in the places that matter? Because like you said, it changes day to day, season to season, month to month.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:39  What I do believe really strongly though, and I agree with you 100% on and I see this happening a lot, which is people who are hooked into a cycle of outrage.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:50:51  Yeah. Drama addiction. I mean, you’re a recovering addict. Its drama addiction on steroids out there.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:57  Yeah. And that is not translating into any sort of positive action. It’s translating into exhaustion, burnout, hopelessness. And and in that way is when to me that’s like, okay, that’s not helpful to you or anyone else. And so I think finding that balance, right, finding that balance of like, okay, how do I calibrate this so that I’m still effective? I mean, one of my favorite ideas is the Serenity prayer. Right. You accept what you can’t, change what you can. Now knowing the wisdom, the difference between those two is where the you know, that’s the million dollar question. But Stephen Covey said so eloquently in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he drew two circles. You might know this, but you know the big circle is your circle of concern.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:47  It’s everything you care about. And there’s a little circle inside of it. And I’ve told this on the podcast 50 times because I think it’s so critical that smaller one is your circle of influence. We all know that. We get that. But what he said that was so important was the more time you spend outside your circle of influence, in your circle of concern, that circle of influence shrinks. And the more time you spend in the circle of influence, the more it grows. And I think for wherever you fall on how much of your life you want to dedicate to what thing, your influence is what matters. And we all need to be doing what we can to grow that influence, because that’s how the world gets better. And I just see that’s not what a lot of people are doing there in their circle of concern. And of course, I mean, it’s there’s so much heartbreak, but it’s not increasing. It’s shrinking their circle of influence.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:52:42  Yeah, I think we really are like, I know this is a buzzword, but I think we really are in echo chambers.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:52:48  And I think people are they do get into little circles of comfort. You asked the question earlier, like is processing useful? Like, is this useful? One of the questions I’ve been asking, and I think if people are really willing to grow, they’ll be curious about this. I think if you get offended when I ask this, it’s probably more true than not. Are you performing for anyone? Are you performing for anyone? I had someone I was working with on Codependence many years ago. It finally clicked together for her and she drew me a picture and sent it. She was an artist and she. She drew her superhero cape because I used to say, up you get in your superhero cape on, you’re about to fly around and save everybody. Like, you want to evaluate this, so you want to just go fly. And she finally drew me a picture of hanging up her superhero cape on a hook and saying, I get it, Nikki. I don’t have to put on my superhero cape anymore.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:53:50  So I think modern politics, modern opera has really encouraged people to do this, like performative, like fly around and you’re the most righteous, righteous and the best advocacy person and anyone else who’s not doing as much as you. Shame on them. That doesn’t inspire anybody to listen and to really be with each other to expand. You know, change is a slow process. It doesn’t happen because we we scream at people or because we’re we’re saying the most right thing, the loudest. It’s really nuanced. And it’s like it’s like nuances being lost. I think from advocacy. Here’s a thought. I have a lot and I never hear any modern person say this, but I hear my old German grandmother say this to me. And as a kid, I didn’t get it because I was the eldest. She put a lot of pressure on me to always be doing the right thing, and so I’d have a younger sibling or a cousin. Like hit me the way kids used to do. And if I had him back, she’d say, no, Nikki, two wrongs don’t make a right.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:54:57  And I remember as a kid trying to make that make sense. And it couldn’t she wouldn’t explain it to me. More than that, you know, of you’re the eldest. Like she wouldn’t tell me. You’re the eldest, and they’re hitting you to try to get you upset, to try to bring you down at their level and hit back. That’s not who you want to be like. I wish she could have explained it that way to me, because for years I just didn’t understand it. I thought, no, she hits me and I hit her back and that’s right. Like, that’s right. And I couldn’t get it until I was much older. And when I look around today, that’s what I see. And I think, oh, they weren’t raised with a grandmother that taught them two wrongs don’t make a right. And I want to react to something in that work that I’ve done to slow that down so I can actually think. When I feel my system start to get hijacked, I sit back and I go, All right. I could definitely handle this the wrong way. I mean, that’s easy and cheap, right? We can all handle things the wrong way. That’s weirdly available, isn’t it?

Eric Zimmer 00:55:56  And our ways of making things worse. So we are super good at it.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:56:00  Oh, my God, are we good at that? As human beings, like, animals aren’t good at making things worse the way we are, right? Yeah. Our consciousness and our ability to think. And yet we can also make things so much worse. So I often sit back and I think this is what maturity and getting older helps us cultivate. If we use our time on this planet to cultivate it, that I can sit back and really sit with myself and go, I don’t want to respond in this wrong, low vibe, negative way, I could and I could justify it right. But I know better. And it’s the Maya Angelou quote when we know better, we do better. And so I handle things with more breathing, More saying, I don’t know.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:56:48  I’m gonna have to get back to you. Or I can see you’re very upset, and I just don’t want to give this conversation that much energy. Maybe we can put a pin in it and come back to it, you know? And maybe the other person gives me the finger and never comes back around to have that conversation with me. I can’t control that. So I release myself, you know, but I have a strong moral compass in I want to keep evolving. And once I realize just meeting that energy with a tit for tat energy, I can be just as nasty as you and think we’re going to someplace positive. That’s child’s play. And I want to hold myself to a more mature standard. And I do believe, as corny as it sounds like, really imagine if all of us did that, if all of us held ourselves to a higher standard. I think a lot like, you know, 12 steps. You know, my beef with 12 steps is everybody needs 12 steps, not just when you hit rock bottom.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:57:46  And then you need 12 steps. 12 steps are how to live as a person. Because I didn’t have like a classical addiction. Even in my my early counseling years, I didn’t think like I was allowed to pull from the wisdom of the 12 steps. The 12 steps are just how to live, y’all. And one of those rules and principles is about not taking other people’s agenda. And look out there at the world today, the culture. In some ways, I would make the argument that the the culture is what is right is I will take everybody else’s agenda, and then we wonder why that backfires, because all that is, is ego screaming at another ego. We have to be able to rise above that. And if we look out at the world, this internet, these algorithms, a lot of people are not going to rise above that in this life. So talk about a choice. Are you going to rise above that base response where you just want to mouth off and pop off because you think you have righteousness in your pocket, and you think that’s going to inspire somebody to vote your way? Come on.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:58:47  Come on. We have to be wise, or we have to integrate the wisdom we’re picking up. If we’re not integrating the little wisdom nuggets that we pick up, what are we doing? What we’re just reading books to tell people. I read that book. Yeah, I know that wisdom point. If you’re not living from it, what is the point? I think it’s a performance. If you’re not living from it, you’re performing. That’s not honest. It’s not authentic. It’s not true. So let’s rise above. Let’s rise above. And the truth is, I probably piss more people off. The older I get less because I’m trying to. My younger self would maybe try to, but just by being calm and speaking my simple truth for me, and when people are dysregulated, they often can’t handle that. Now, some who are ready to heal understand what I’m offering and we’ll come back and go, wow, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t stay calm like you could. How did you do that? And then we learn and grow together.

Nikki Eisenhauer 00:59:43  So there, there is so much when you dig into your deeper self and who you are, how you’ve been programmed. And then when you grab that power, you have so much power to reprogram yourself. So surround yourself with people that you can really learn from and evolve from. And that’s going to be people that frankly challenge you. I think that’s part of what’s happening with culture now, too. You know, ten years ago, 20 years ago, when I challenged somebody and it was just a hard moment. They wouldn’t quit. They wouldn’t run. We have had such a gentle parenting culture of everything is supposed to be soft and that’s not real. It’s not real. And I think it’s really encouraged people to run, to absolutely run in the face of conflict, as opposed to learn how to do mature conflict. And we can’t do that alone. We have to do that with each other. So when you find somebody that will do that, don’t just let your ego get all bent out of shape and run from the opportunity to learn and to grow and to really rise above.

Nikki Eisenhauer 01:00:45  I think that’s what this moment in time is asking for. Those of us that have sobered up, that try to live our morals and our principles for real, like for real, and that’s hard to do. That’s not easy. It’s hard. It takes diligence. It takes self-forgiveness. When you screw up, it takes coming back to center again and again takes dealing with things in the light of day. I will be working on all the stuff, all the days of my life. It’s like the gym, you know, you don’t just learn it and then go, all right, enough therapy for me. Got it. It’s like life is going to challenge us. And it is about suffering. Like you mentioned earlier, to be alive is a certain amount of suffering, and we can work with that. And we can get stronger moment to moment to moment to moment to moment.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:30  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 oneyoufeed.net/ebook. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today.oneyoufeed.net/ebook, 

I think that’s a beautiful place to wrap up. We can get stronger and stronger moment by moment. Nikki, thank you so much for coming on. You and I are going to continue because one of the things I really wanted to talk about that we did not get to is a really emotional episode you did recently about a friend of yours who has cancer and all the emotions of powerlessness and grief that you were wrestling with and really, you know, displaying and I want to talk about that. listeners, we’re going to do that in the post-show conversation. And you can get access to that other post-show conversations, ad free episodes, and you can support the show, which is very, very important by going to oneyoufeed.net/join.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:57  Nikki, thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure again.

Nikki Eisenhauer 01:03:00  You’re welcome. Thanks for having me on to chat more.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:03  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:

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.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:19  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.