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Episode Transcript:

Lodro Rinzler 00:00:00  We are really not comfortable having space in our life anymore. If there is a gap, we reach for that phone and we fill it one way or another. A dating app? A television show. Whatever it is, it’s like it’s all right there. It’s crazy. And we don’t have a preference to put that behind you and say, I can just be here.

Chris Forbes 00:00:26  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 00:01:11  Lodro Rinzler carried guilt about a high school breakup for years. He’d ended things badly, he was sure of it. And when he finally tracked her down on Facebook and apologized, she said, I don’t remember it that way at all. It’s a small story, but Lodra uses it to make a point that runs through his whole new book. Most of what we hold against ourselves is either not true or not as big as we’ve made it. The book is called You Are Good Enough. You are Enough. This conversation is about what it actually takes to believe that I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed Lodro. Welcome back.

Lodro Rinzler 00:01:48  Thanks so much for having me back. I was recently reading your book. As I’m sure everyone in the world is currently doing and, I thought it was so sweet that you remembered our early time together on the show. A million years ago, you mentioned it in there. It was very sweet. So thank you for including me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:06  Yeah, I do not have a good memory, but I remember in those early days, if you had a book, you were like a legend to me, right? You know, in this space. And I remember I emailed you because I’d seen your book. I can’t remember which one it was, but it was one of your early books, I think. And you said. Yes. And I remember telling my friend Chris, we got this guy Load Row Rinzler on this show. I was so I was so excited. So I appreciate.

Lodro Rinzler 00:02:29  Any of you. He said, I have no idea who that is.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:31  Which, of course he did. Of course he did. He still does. And you’ve been on, like four times. No, I don’t know how long you’ve been on. I’m kidding. But, yeah, those early guests were really meaningful to me, and you were one of them, so. Thank you.

Lodro Rinzler 00:02:43  Oh, I was so happy to do it. Yeah. And I am also happy to be here now and to celebrate you and and this incredible run that you’ve had on this show, but also this new book. And as we were talking about before we started recording, it’s just, you know, really cool to see how much is shifted and changed for you and how much you’re helping people.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:01  Well thank you. It has shifted and changed a lot, and I am so grateful for this podcast and all that’s meant in my life and all the people who support it. You and I are going to continue to talk here in a moment about your book, which is called You Are Good. You are enough. Free yourself from the trap of doubt and return to basic goodness. But before we do that, we will start in the way that we always have. And I will read you a parable that you’ve heard before and ask you what you think about it. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life there are two worlds 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. 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 and your life, and in the work that you do.

Lodro Rinzler 00:04:02  Yeah, I was so tempted to go back and hear what my earlier answer was, and maybe I’ll do it after we spent some time together today, because I think it’s also like an interesting marker for how has my mind in life changed that I would come on. So the answer that’s coming up for me today is, you know, I feel like one of the things I am personally struggling with as a meditation teacher is talking to people about their mind and the fact that we can make choices with our mind that like, no one gets to decide which wolf we feed but us. Because I think a lot of people maybe since the pandemic, I think I’ve seen more of an uptick since then. They really identify with their anxiety or their fear or their anger or whatever it is, and they’re like, that’s just who I am. I am an anxious person. I’m a, you know, angry person.

Lodro Rinzler 00:04:55  I’ve just always been prone to anger. And they they don’t realize that that’s a wolf that they have been feeding. Yeah. As opposed to just who they are. Right. So I think that this is the big uphill battle that I find myself facing when I sit down and I teach people meditation online, in person, wherever I am. That the fact that we can actually choose which wolf to feed, you know. And obviously those are two choices there. But I always think about, like, every time we feed into the anxious story that comes up over the course of the day, we are feeding an anxious wolf, right? Like we are just refining those patterns. And every time we acknowledge, oh, I don’t have to do that, I can just be present in this moment. I don’t have to chase that story. We come back, we are feeding that wolf. And that’s all meditation is, frankly. And it doesn’t have to be anxiety specifically, but it’s everything. Yeah. It’s always it’s just us constantly making choices.

Lodro Rinzler 00:05:45  And meditation helps us learn to drop some of the stories that keep us locked in pain long enough to make the better choice.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:51  Do you think that’s changed? You’ve been teaching meditation a long time now. Do you see people more identified with emotional states as identity than they used to?

Lodro Rinzler 00:06:02  Yeah, I do. I was listening to a recent interview. Pema Chodron sat down at the New York Times and was interviewed by Ezra Klein. I shared it online the other day. And in the world that we live in. Of course, you know, I posted to Facebook. Two comments immediately popped up. One said, I love Pema Chodron. They said, f Ezra Klein. It’s like it’s like just two polar opposite ends of the spectrum. I was like, well, in conversation, maybe there’s some middle ground here. So I was listening to this and I never heard someone say it so bluntly, but he he brought up the fact. He said, do you see people being more distracted than they see? And she said, yes.

Lodro Rinzler 00:06:40  And he says, why? And she says, I just think that there is more detraction. There’s more that we can do. And he gave the example of when we used to be on the subway. If we forgot our magazine, we would just sit on the subway and we would see who’s on the subway. Right? Like we were just present. And that was actually a practice that he was engaging in, that he would just be present on the subway when he was on his way to pick up his kids from school. And now we have everything in the world at our fingertips. We can read, we can listen to things. We can, you know, scroll on social media, we can do any number of of things to distract ourselves. So we are so prone to distraction in a way that we weren’t. I would go so far as to say, 12 years ago, you know, when I first started putting out books 14 years ago, definitely like social media wasn’t even a big thing back then, which is crazy.

Lodro Rinzler 00:07:29  It’s been such a meteoric rise. But alongside is this meteoric rise in distraction that we are really not comfortable having space in our life anymore. If there is a gap, we reach for that phone and we fill it one way or another a dating app, a television show, whatever it is, it’s like it’s all right there. It’s crazy. And we don’t have a preference to put that behind you and say, I can just be here. So yes, I do find that, you know, because we are more willing to be distracted, we are more willing to just let our thoughts take over, and we’re less likely to just be present to what’s currently occurring. So again, as I said earlier, it’s like an uphill battle for me as a meditation teacher. I’d be like, hey, let’s all slow down and just I don’t want to say detox from our technology, but, you know, that could be a practice. But I think a lot of the practice is just learning to be present with whatever we’re doing, you know? And we’re with the dog.

Lodro Rinzler 00:08:20  We’re with the dog. When we are taking a walk, we do put that phone away and we just sort of enjoy whatever is on our walk. When we go grocery shopping. We’re not just mentally lost in what needs to happen after. We’re just looking and seeing and being there in this weird little community called a grocery store. You know, if we transform our view around these things and obviously this is sort of a good lead in that book, you are good. You are enough. Because I have a whole chapter, whole section really on society and like the way that we’re constantly co-creating society and influencing society with our choices of how we show up and whether we show up.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:57  Yeah. One of the things that I have seen happen over the time that I’ve been doing this, which is 12 years, is a big shift in the the mental health debate out there. And I’ve seen it go from being still relatively stigmatized as a thing to very largely de-stigmatized today. And almost in certain circles, I see people identifying with a diagnosis as part as part of who they are almost willingly.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:29  And I think it’s interesting now, I have a parallel in my life. When I first got sober, I was very highly identified as a recovering person, and that was really, really valuable for a period of time until it wasn’t. But I do think the more we identify with a way of being mentally. The more we lock ourselves into being that way, and I think it’s always really tricky. I think a lot about this. Like, well, when is the label or identity valuable and when is it limited? And I think it’s different for every person. I don’t think anybody can make that. But I do think it’s always worth in our own lives, asking like, is there a aspect of myself I’m over identifying with? Or I’m saying that’s just the way I am, when indeed it’s more just a pattern of of conditioning and habits.

Lodro Rinzler 00:10:17  Beautifully put. And I’m I’m with you 100%. And I remember early on in my career I was touring for my first book, The Buddha Walks Into a Bar, which, you know, wildly provocative title. And I sat down with a Buddhist group that had a lot of people in recovery in it. It’s a community that really emphasizes that aspect of bringing the two together, and they were actually incredibly, kind of incredibly open. But there was one person who was just like. I don’t think you understand that. This is just who I am. I’m an addict now. Like, that’s just it. And it’s like, I don’t know if that’s it. That is absolutely something that is happening. And that’s absolutely. If it’s helpful for you to hold that label, then that is good. But at a certain point you may find that if that is the only label you hold and the only identity you hold, it can be very limiting for you. And I would like to think that that person took that to heart because, you know, it’s been similar to what you just said about, you know, 12, 14 years since then. And it’s just one of many versions that I have seen. I just had dinner the other night with a dear friend who, because of the pandemic, isolated and fell into pretty abusive drug patterns and has now gotten sober, is in recovery housing and is doing quite well.

Lodro Rinzler 00:11:35  And we had dinner for the first time like I’d been in touch with him throughout all of this, but I hadn’t been. he was in LA. I’m in New York. So he finally came to New York and we had dinner and he was sharing that exact story, which is that there was a time where it was really helpful for him to identify in a certain way and really hold certain disciplines very close. And at this point, he realized he needed to just not necessarily get rid of that. Right. Like, it’s like he’s throwing the disciplines out the window. But he said I needed more than just that. I love that idea of like, we can expand our identity, we can expand our understanding of who we are. And, you know, obviously, as the Buddhist teacher, I have to point out, like, all of these identities are completely ephemeral and impermanent and always changing, and we don’t have to cling to any of them too tightly. If I never wrote a book again, I wouldn’t go around telling my, you know, new people at a party that I’m an author.

Lodro Rinzler 00:12:28  I would I would just, you know, come up with something else. Like, that’s it’s things are always changing with us, and that’s okay. You know, there was a time that I wasn’t an author. There might be a time that I’m not an author. That’s fine too. But, you know, in the meantime, if it’s helpful for me to identify as that and talk to people about books, and ideally they get benefit from those books, then I’ll go ahead and do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:29  Ultimately, I think what happened with me and addiction was that there was a lot of I had a lot of ideas about what it meant to be an addict Under that heading, there were a lot of things, right? And in my case, the number of things under that list has come down to about one, which is I should not use mind altering substances. Sure. Right. Like that doesn’t go well for me. Yes. All the other things are just human things that are transient. They come, they go.  I’m impulsive. No, maybe I’m not. I’m. I’m this way, I’m that way. All of that I’ve seen is a lot more, as you say, transient.

Lodro Rinzler 00:14:07  Yeah. And obviously, you know, I read your book and I know your relationship to another thing that comes up for many people who struggle in these regards is guilt and shame. And though I have not gone through a recovery program, you know, I have guilt and shame about things as well. And I write pretty explicitly in this new book about it, you know, like what the process of making mistakes could be, how we hold guilt and shame against us, how that’s not necessarily helpful once we’ve learned the lessons from our mistakes and how we can move forward. And I think it’s just a really potent time right now where I don’t think it’s like I did something wrong and now I’m horrible. I’m like a non-being, right? Like, we sort of say, okay, I have to learn, and I, I grow as a result of this.

Lodro Rinzler 00:14:47  I always think of this moment serving on the board of a organization that helps unhoused youth. And I was teaching a meditation class there, and there was this kid who came up to me after something must have sparked this quote for him. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember what he said. He said, you know what you said reminded me of an old saying my grandmother always told me, which is 100 of the same mistakes is regressive, 100 different mistakes is progressive. I was like, oh, that’s cool. And obviously it stayed with me for a million years. Now that we just keep doing the same thing over and over again, that’s very regressive. But if we learn and grow as human beings, it’s just who we are. That’s just a human being thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:29  I love that quote. I love that whole section. So I guess we’re going to go into the book and then maybe come back around to the top of the book, because you tell a story in there about guilt and shame that I really love, and it’s about how you were feeling guilt towards a previous partner of yours. Can you tell that story?

Lodro Rinzler 00:15:46  Oh, sure. The one in high school.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:48  The one where you thought you’d wronged her. You carried that guilt for all those years?

Lodro Rinzler 00:15:53  Yeah. So I was in high school, and I dated someone for, you know, it felt like forever, but maybe it was 4 or 5 months. Right. I was it was high school, and I broke it off, and I went on this meditation retreat. It’s my first, like, a very long meditation retreat. I was 17 years old. It was monastic. I shaved my head. I took the robes, the whole nine yards. And I had the meditation, which is like, you don’t like even when you’re doing other things than meditating, you still are basically just left alone with your own mind. There are no distractions. I got in trouble for reading a book for school, like a fiction book, which, you know, was considered a no no.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:33  That’s a no.

Lodro Rinzler 00:16:33  No, no, no.

Lodro Rinzler 00:16:34  So you could see, like there’s not a lot else to do. So somewhere around 2 or 3 weeks into this meditation retreat, I get in my head. I go, I was such a jerk to that poor woman who I broke up with, and I really went in on that, and I just wallowed in the guilt and the shame and the mistake and beat myself up. And honestly, I, I say this in the book as well. There’s no one who can say anything that I have not said worse to myself. Like I can beat myself up if I really want to. And I went to dark places. And finally, about three days into the self-flagellation thing, I said to myself, listen, when you get out of here, you’re going to go back home and you are going to formally apologize, and you’re going to make this right to the best of your ability. And I, with that understanding, started to let it go. I emerged from the meditation retreat, I went home, she had moved.

Lodro Rinzler 00:17:25  Her father had gotten a new job. They moved elsewhere. This is pre, you know, social media and all that. Like this is not I couldn’t find her and that was it. Years later I’m in college and I get a ping on Facebook, which is like early days of Facebook, and it’s her and I immediately accept. And I still carried this like I still care. I never said I’m sorry, so I just held it to some form for a very long time, and we chatted for a little bit on that platform until I finally said, hey, by the way, I need to share that I feel really bad about what happened and I was an absolute jerk. And I’m sorry, and you don’t have to forgive me, but you know, I just wanted to say it. And after at that point, years and years and years of me holding this, she goes, oh, I don’t remember it like that at all. Yeah, it wasn’t a big deal. So, you know, like that’s that’s pretty common.

Lodro Rinzler 00:18:18  I think, you know, we can go to any number of versions of the thing I said last night at that party. Everyone’s talking, they don’t remember. They’re thinking about the thing they said. But like, yeah, there’s always some version that we can hold over our head about ourselves. And as that story illustrates, nine times out of ten. It’s pretty useless. It’s not actually helping us grow as a person.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:37  Yeah, I’m going to stay with guilt and shame a little bit and mistakes in the past, because you tell a story in the book about somebody who, during one you’re not best periods in life you caused some harm to, and that you’ve tried to make it right, and that that person still feels very aggrieved. That person has gone out and told the world that they are aggrieved. I think you and I had a conversation about this. I don’t know when this was five years ago, four years ago, three years ago.

Lodro Rinzler 00:19:05  Eight years ago. But yeah. Who’s counting?

Eric Zimmer 00:19:07  Was it really?

Lodro Rinzler 00:19:08  Yeah.

Lodro Rinzler 00:19:09  Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:09  Anyway, you gotta be kidding. No, no. Anyway. All right. Eight years ago. That’s amazing to me. You talk about your friend and remembering things differently. Yeah, I’m counting down 3 to 6 months ago. You’re like, no, 35 years ago. I’m. Oh, okay. that’s kind of how time feels anymore. I don’t know if it does for you anyway. Share about as much about that as you’re comfortable sharing.

Lodro Rinzler 00:19:30  Yeah, sure. So as you noted, I had this period of time. I sparked this book on heartbreak called Love Hurts Buddhist Advice for the heartbroken. But there’s this period of time where everything was sort of pulled out from under me. My fiancé broke up with me and moved overseas. I suffered a job loss, sort of a big egoic identity, death as well. With that. And then my best friend passed away. And then shortly thereafter, my father passed away. And this was sort of bip bam boom just left me in a devastated spot, and I was drinking more than I should.

Lodro Rinzler 00:20:03  Period. You know, I had a lot of suicidal ideation. I was at the lowest in this lifetime so far, and I don’t think that there’s anyone who should have come down from on high and saved me. But I do wish that someone had said, hey, maybe don’t like, keep touring and traveling for your book like that came out during this. Like it’s just I should have just like laid low and taken care of myself, but I did. Yeah. And as you said, I inadvertently caused harm. And I carry that shame and guilt to some extent today, right? I still hold, as I said earlier, like anything that anyone says against me. You know, I can do ten times worse. So I, you know, and I work with that. I work with that as a practice. And I went through a whole process where it’s sort of like when you make a mistake, what do you do? For me, I immediately said, hey, I am 100% sorry.

Lodro Rinzler 00:20:53  And I spent a day with this person sort of unpacking it. There’s just a lot of trauma from this person who I didn’t know that up front, and I sort of inadvertently stepped on some big issues that I had not been aware of. So, you know, I apologize. I spent a lot of time trying to unpack this with this person, sought mediation with this person, did whatever I could within the confines of working with this person to try and heal. And then it becomes, you know, at a certain point you have to say, like, then I have to heal on my own to if this person doesn’t want to talk to me or be with me, like, you have to sort of do your own healing work around it through therapy, working with mentors, meditation, all of these things, and then you sort of turn over every rock. You can learn every lesson you can. And you say, well, I’m not that person. I’m not in that devastated, traumatized state.

Lodro Rinzler 00:21:38  I am. You know, I have learned a lot from it. And then you sort of come out the other end and you don’t have to say like, that’s a neat, happy ending, right? As you said, there can still be people in your past. You say like, oh, that was that was a shitty time for you. And like, you were not the best person. And you can acknowledge that. I acknowledge that and be like, that’s also not who I am. So it’s that sense of like identity that we’re talking about earlier. Like that’s we continue to grow, you know, I think like, you know, there might be a cartoon villain version of a Lodro in at least one person’s mind. you know, like the worst exaggerated features in deeds, but that’s actually not who I am. And it took me a while to realize, like, that’s a caricature. That’s not who I am. Yeah. You know, it’s I, I, I had an interview, not so long ago where I literally came to tears because I was like, at the end of the day, it’s like I’m the one of the identities I hold is someone who’s just really trying to help people, and I do make mistakes along the way.

Lodro Rinzler 00:22:31  And I’m very open about being a very human human, a very messy human. And I also believe that we are all inherently basically good. And that’s obviously the topic of this new book. Like, we are all inherently, fundamentally, innately good, whole, complete as is now. Can we hold both of those things in mind? Can we say Eric is basically good and he went through his struggles and made mistakes? Lodro was basically good. He, you know, went through struggles, made mistakes that they’ve learned and that they can also be embodied with that basic goodness. Today, that’s a big question. And I think that’s something that we don’t often give people a lot of grace and ability to do is sort of like, oh, I hear something bad about a person, and that’s just who they are. And I cling to that as their identity as opposed to that is one small piece of who they are.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:19  Yeah. It is so tricky. You know, as our society has begun to have more conversations About harm and things that traditionally have been hidden away.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:29  Come out into the open. And I think there’s a more nuanced version of every public conversation that we have. I don’t think there’s a single one that we couldn’t use a more nuanced version of. I think about this with, you know, with prison and I mean, any sort of thing like that, when, you know, at what point are you not, like you said, not that person or even that one thing being a very small aspect of the whole person. And I just don’t think we’re very good at holding those things. We like good, bad. Yes. Like that. We just like it’s just simpler, right? And that’s what a lot of us want, particularly when we’re thinking about it. Just people in sort of passing, you know, are they good or are they bad? Make it easy for me. And totally I think if you pay any more attention than that, you have to conclude at least I do like. Both. right?

Lodro Rinzler 00:24:24  I talk about this in the book a little bit because my wife had a great question. She just turned to me when she said, at what point do we allow people to change? And it was not about this. It was just a great question. Yeah. And it just stayed with me. At what point do we allow people to change? Like, I’m not the same version of a Lodro that existed a dozen years ago, or, you know, back when all of this happened that was, you know, 2013. So 13 years ago or whatever is I’m not the same person I was 24 years ago. I’m not going to be the same person I am, you know, five years from now. So we just do what we can to make up for any negative actions. None of them means that we’re not basically good. We can be basically good. We could be grieving and having a hard time and acting out of confusion. And can we hold both truths in our mind? That’s the question. And I think that’s, you know, there’s chapters in here just about how we villains people, because it’s not like we’re making it very personal, you and me.

Lodro Rinzler 00:25:13  More often we look at other people and we say that person’s bad because of something, and we start to build a case around it. And yeah, again, my wife is incredibly wise. she is she is she brought up this point that she had I think she didn’t come up with. I think she heard it somewhere, but she shared it with me that there’s sort of two lenses through which we engage with the world. One could be as a lawyer or one as a scientist. A lawyer says, I see something, and I now make a case for why that person is, for example, bad and why they’re always going to be bad. And anything that comes in contradiction with it, they’re giving all their time to charity or whatever it is. We say that’s that’s because they want people to think nicely of them. They’re actually bad and we disregard it. Right. And then a scientist says, I’m going to look at all of the points of data here, and I’m going to make an informed decision. I think that’s such a better way for us to live, because if we just keep making cases against everyone in our mind, good, bad or ugly, we’re going to end up in a pretty divided world. And we already are, which is sort of how we got here, actually.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:42  I talk a lot about the fundamental attribution error, which is this idea that when you do something, it’s a character flaw. But when I do it, or my favorite politician does it, or someone close to me, it’s there’s there were mitigating circumstances, you know, they did it because X, Y and Z. But for you it’s a character issue. And that that that attribution error is a really big problem. yeah. So okay, let’s come back now all the way around because you kind of let us there to the idea of the book that everyone is born with basic goodness. So there are three versions of this story that I think are out there, and there’s probably permutations on them, but version one is a more Christian version, which is that you are fundamentally flawed and born into sin.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:35  You are. You’re bad to start with. You need redeemed. There’s the Buddhist version, which is you are fundamentally good, right? You’re born good. And everything that happens is sort of covering over that beautiful diamond. And then there’s the view that I think I land on, probably, but I don’t know for sure, which is we have the seeds of all of it inside of us. So talk to me about your belief in the second of those that we are fundamentally good.

Lodro Rinzler 00:28:07  Oh, I’m happy to talk about all three. So I, I’m looking over our fence here. My neighbor is a Christian pastor. Sometimes he’ll come over for dinner and we’ll break bread and he’ll look at me and say, so, you Buddhists, you really believe that everyone’s born basically good? That they have the potential for for awakening, for enlightenment. All these things I see. Yeah. Those are usually just teachers have it so easy because, you know, it’s like a different come from than what? Where he starts.

Lodro Rinzler 00:28:36  Totally. Yeah. You know, like. Yeah. So there’s Original sin and we’ve got a tone and all of that. And I understand that a large swath of this nation gets behind that idea and grapples with it is just fundamentally different from how I was raised. It’s so interesting because I was raised Buddhist. You know, it’s not something I just sort of stumbled upon. I had a household where my parents taught me this concept very early, this experience that underneath the stories and things, we are basically good. And I started meditating when I was young, and I don’t know if I necessarily am changed. I’m sure the meditation, it’s just like I’ve been doing it so long, I don’t know how it’s changed me. It’s sort of like, what’s that versus growing up and being an adult. But I do know that this view of basic goodness changed me, that when I was a kid and something went wrong. And it does. I have a three year old daughter now, you know, and I caught myself.

Lodro Rinzler 00:29:27  She was screaming, my poor mother, you know, 85, severe dementia. We took her out for her birthday. My wife was on a meditation retreat. I brought my three year old. I was like, this will be fine. And it was not fine. I know you’re laughing. What an idiot. So, you know, take her out for her birthday dinner. And the kids screaming, oh, it’s the perfect storm is not to throw my again very wise wife under the bus. But she called while we were over on the way there. And so my daughter got like a hint of mom and like was missing mom. And then like, we’d go into the dinner and she’s like, I don’t want grandma, I want mom. And I’m like, we can’t say I don’t want grandma. And I’m just I’m in this point where I’m like, I’m not going to burst into tears, but I’m, I’m I’m so like at wit’s end. And I am like, I’m going to take my daughter outside.

Lodro Rinzler 00:30:13  I’m going to take her for a walk. And I noticed that there’s this tendency, and I’ve seen so many people, friends who are like, you’re being bad. And I was like, nope. It almost came out of my mouth. And I was like, hey, you’re not being very nice to grandma. Yeah. It’s such a slight reframe, but it’s not. You’re bad and wrong. It’s you’re basically good and you’re not being nice to the person. We’re having dinner. Like, it’s such a slight distinction, but it’s. It’s what was imparted to me as a kid. You’re basically good. You’re good. And this isn’t how we behave, right? Like we don’t Skype with grandma and say, I don’t want you, right? Like it’s just. Anyway, this was fundamental to my being. The third thing that you offered, I think, is, is very much in line with Buddhism, though. It’s not. Okay. You’re basically good now. Everything’s fine. It’s we need to continue to develop a relationship to that thing that we have lost along the way, through stories of shame and guilt, through stories of why we’re not enough and we’re not good enough, and all the things we get in society.

Lodro Rinzler 00:31:08  I don’t think I put this one in the book, but there’s these subway ads and they’re often very tasteless. I look at them like, oh, whatever. I forget sometimes how easily influenced we are as children. My wife was riding the subway with and there’s this kiddo, probably six years old woman, a girl, and she was with her dad. And there was this, breast augmentation ad where there was one woman looking sad holding lemons in that area. Same woman smiling, looking happy, holding cantaloupes. Not necessarily subtle, but, you know, and subtle enough for that six year old, says daddy. Why is she sad there and why is she happy there? And this poor dad thrown under the bus just goes, pivoting goes. I don’t know, maybe she just really likes cantaloupe. What sort of fruit do you like? Let’s talk about fruit. Right? Like, just clearly, I hope to be that good. And that’s so.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:58  Smooth.

Lodro Rinzler 00:31:58  Yes. Yeah. But it’s like, oh, yeah, we are taught look like this, act like this, etc. from such a young age that when we don’t meet whatever societal standards are being sold to us, we think the floor is us.

Lodro Rinzler 00:32:12  We think we’re wrong or bad, and we internalize those stories of I don’t have enough. I am, you know, my family’s poor and I’ll never have enough, whatever it is, all the way into adulthood. And we don’t deal with that. We just hold those stories as if we talked about before. Like those identities are true. So, so much of what we’re talking about and you are good, you are enough is letting go of the stories that aren’t serving us so that we can return to that relationship of goodness that we were born with. I think that’s just a really important thing that, frankly, not enough of us are willing to do right now. We’re not willing to let go of the stories that are holding us in pain.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:48  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it if you’d like extra fuel for the weekend. You also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one UFI newsletter. That’s one you get a newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. 

I certainly think it is a more useful perspective to start from. We are good. And then that gets occluded by the travails of life, then concluding the opposite. When I think about usefulness, because that’s so much of what I’m interested, I mean, certainly truth is important, but truth is a that’s a slippery creature, right? And ultimate truth is you don’t know. So I’m very much into like, well, which of these ways of viewing this is most useful in me being the person that I want to be, you know, to myself, to the people around me, all of that. And I certainly think starting from a place of goodness is a is a much more useful starting frame of reference, I think.

Lodro Rinzler 00:34:27  I don’t know if I’m understanding the third perspective that you offered, that you feel like you connect with more, though.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:32  It’s that we’re neither good nor bad. We have the seeds of both within us.

Lodro Rinzler 00:34:36  We have the seeds of both with us. Yeah, I would say the Buddhist view is just. Yeah, we just that we, we have basic goodness in that. Yeah. We as I mentioned before, we all get confused. We all get confused at times. We all make mistakes from that, acting out of that sense of confusion. But it’s because we’re confused about our goodness, not because we’re bad. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:55  So you have a chapter in the book called The Entire Buddhist Path in two pages. Can you be that succinct in a podcast interview?

Lodro Rinzler 00:35:05  Yeah, that’s a great question. I like that you’re like, by the way. I’ve done this a few times with you right now. Succinct is not in your vocabulary. Let’s see what you can do.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:13  I’m teasing.

Lodro Rinzler 00:35:14  Yes.

Lodro Rinzler 00:35:15  It’s really three steps. Step one is that we make that discovery of basic goodness. And I want to be clear that basic goodness isn’t a concept that we grapple with from a philosophical point of view, it is experience. We meditate, for example, as one way to access it. And we notice there’s this moment, oh, I’m okay as I am sitting here on this cushion. That could be a revelation. Oh, I am basically good in this moment. I am basically good. Once we get a glimpse of basic goodness, we start to see it can be this real source of peace and stability. And that’s where things get juicy. We go to step two, where we deepen that relationship with basic goodness. There’s so many different tools, books, retreats, teachings, things like that, but they’re meant to keep you connected, reconnecting to your innate nature more fully, more frequently. And there are different skillful means that help us train our heart and mind to recognize that goodness within us so that that relationship gets strengthened in the same way that if we made a friend at a barbecue, right, we would just continue to strengthen that relationship over time.

Lodro Rinzler 00:36:15  There’s times where it feels awkward, times where it feels fun. But like over time, we’re just getting to know this person better. Same thing we’re returning, getting to familiar with our basic goodness more and more so that step three we live our life through the lens of basic goodness. So as that relationship grows, it transforms how we approach life. We start to notice our interactions, our decisions, even some of that, like the self-talk that we were just talking about, it starts to shift that we trust in our goodness so much that we start seeking validation from the outside world, and we bring more compassion, kindness to our own relationship with ourselves, with people at work and our family, with friends. We start to see everyone, really everyone as fundamentally good as well. It’s not just I’m basically good. You’re basically just like all beings are basically good, and that’s where it gets really interesting. And then I basically just take that into the three sections of the book. The first section of the book is just discovering your own basic goodness.

Lodro Rinzler 00:37:07  The second one is. Can I start to see it in that person? I don’t like the person I’m villain izing. Whatever it is, the person I do like, the person I love, my child, the people I don’t know that I see all the time. The grocery store example I gave earlier. And then we come to that third section, which is, well, what society, if not the people I like, the people I don’t like, the people I don’t know. And me, that’s everyone. Yeah. Could we realize the basic goodness of society? Not in a Pollyanna way, but in the way that, like, we’re all humans and we can all sort of come at each other from that perspective of there’s basic goodness. And as we talked about, there’s confusion. Sure is. But that’s not fundamentally who we are.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:43  Yeah. And I want to get to each of those. I want to start though, because I love the way you illuminate this through a couple of core Buddhist teachings.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:56  The first is around that all of us, when we encounter any experience, any stimulus. You can say this better than I do. We have either a positive reaction towards we have a negative reaction towards, or we just simply really have a neutral reaction to and that those three things then tie to what are called poisons, which are I’m not sure exactly the words you use in the book, but I would call them greed, aversion and ignorance. And I love the way you then sort of tie that to the way we really relate to others, right? In that some people we relate to, we like, some people we really don’t like and, and most of them we have no opinion about or the background furniture that sometimes gets in the way.

Lodro Rinzler 00:38:45  Yeah, you’re right.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:46  And I say that all fairly well.

Lodro Rinzler 00:38:48  Did you spot on? And it is I it’s funny because I’m actually teaching a course on this exact thing right now, which is that sense of wherever we are, like, right now, I’m here with you and I’m enjoying being with you.

Lodro Rinzler 00:38:59  But then a car went by and I was actively ignoring that car. right? Like it is. I’m just doing it all the time. But I knew it was a car. I didn’t look, I just heard the sound. I know I’m on the road. There’s some sense of always projecting out and trying to fill in these gaps because we can’t deal with uncertainty. So I said, okay, that’s a car, and it’s going by, and I hope it’s not so loud that it shows up in the record like it’s just. And then I don’t like that. I don’t like that there’s this car now that I’m turning my attention to it, because I don’t want that noise to be on the recording. And, you know, there’s always something. My dog, June, is being very sweet and just sort of laying out on the floor with me. she’s gotten in the habit of coming to work with me, and, you know, like that I see her. I like that, right.

Lodro Rinzler 00:39:37  So there’s I’m. But I’m vacillating wildly between wherever my eyes are. Her ears are all of my sense perceptions are making contact with the phenomenal world around me. I’m constantly saying I like, I dislike, I ignore, and then the question is, how far do I go with that? Do I just let that be? Car comes and goes and that’s it because it’s over? Or do I get really mad? I just I can’t work here. I need to get a formal office, and I need to do that. And I need it to be somewhere where there’s never any cars. And, you know, every time a car goes by it, just realize how horrible the situation is, right? Like, it could just be that I could make this my day if I wanted it to. And people do. We do. We get so hooked by something that we just spiral and let that be the day. And that’s the choice thing that we’re talking about with the tools at the top of our time together.

Lodro Rinzler 00:40:23  Do I want to make that choice and continue to feed in that case, the angry, frustrated version. You know, you said, what? Greed, hatred and delusion? Is that what you used?

Eric Zimmer 00:40:34  I think I said greed, aversion and ignorance, but greed, hatred and delusion.

Lodro Rinzler 00:40:38  Yeah. These are good, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:39  Wanting, not wanting. And, yeah.

Lodro Rinzler 00:40:43  These are all good words for it. So but we’re constantly vacillating. And again, meditation is us saying, okay, I’m going to have reactions if a car goes by I’m fine. But it’s up to me whether I acknowledge it and come back to this present moment or whether I just continue to go and go and go. So how far does that rubber band go before it snaps back? That’s up to us. And the more we train the mind, the more we’re able to let rise and fall. We’d say, oh, you know, for example. Oh, I hope I didn’t say something stupid on that podcast, right.

Lodro Rinzler 00:41:12  Like, I could dwell on that for the rest. After this, I’m going to go take my kid to her music class. I could be totally checked out. Not with my kid trying to do this little teacher that she says she’s going to know it, too. She’s gonna immediately call me out like she will see it in a second if I’m not fully there. Or I can be like, yeah, you know, if I did, it’s okay. And if I hopefully I didn’t and that’s that’s it. And like, I just let it arise, dissolve. And then I’m playing with these silly shakers and pretending to be on a choo choo train, like it’s just that’s that’s fine. Right? Like, now I’m here for that. So I think it just allows us to enjoy our life more. It seems simplistic, but going back to the Ezra Klein Pema Chodron thing, he was like, what’s the grand thing that you’ve actually achieved out of any of this? And she said, contentment. And I was like, oh, blessed, because that’s what I always say, too. It’s just the sense of just that we can be present to what’s currently occurring and find a sense of joy. Happiness. Contentment within that. That’s actually a great way to live a life. In my experience.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:08  It’s the whole thing that drew me to the Buddhist and spiritual path and still does. Is that ability to be okay in the midst of whatever’s occurring. And I find those two teachings that you sort of use and then tie into how we relate to others so valuable that that no matter what I do, there’s an immediate I like it, I don’t like it, it doesn’t mean anything to me, like it just arises. I’ve never been able to circumvent that process. It is so instant in me. The process I can circumvent is what’s next, which is the I want more of that. I want less of that. You know, that that pushing and pulling or that leaning really strongly in the direction of those things. But I think those those two teachings are very central to the way I often think about the world, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:56  What am I wanting? What am I not wanting? And to what degree of ignorance am I in about how that shapes the the contents of my life?

Lodro Rinzler 00:43:06  Yeah. It’s beautiful. And you know, sometimes the term ignorance is even translated as prejudice because there’s almost like a really like I don’t want to look at it. I like, I’m actively. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:18  Delusion.

Lodro Rinzler 00:43:19  Yeah. Yeah. which, you know, I think we all almost have our own proclivities for these things, right? You know, and these things can get their hooks in us. There’s this Tibetan term cliché where we basically just get yanked around once. It’s like a fish on a line, you know, it’s just once anger has its hooks in your aggression or hatred or how you want to translate like it once it’s there, once we’re hooked, we can get pulled around going back a gazillion books. You know, I use the example of The Incredible Hulk in The Buddha Walks Into a Bar, because that’s such a like when mild mannered Bruce Banner gets hooked by anger.

Lodro Rinzler 00:43:55  He transforms physically into this giant monster that causes destruction wherever he goes. I was like, that’s anger right there. What a beautiful metaphor, actually. It’s like, if he can acknowledge and come back, he would be fine, but he can’t. He has to keep going. And then it’s just the more he angry he gets, the more destructive he is.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:11  And I think what you just said, there’s a very subtle and important point though, which is we are not saying that having an experience of anger is a problem or having an experience of wanting or not wanting or aversion or greed. That’s not the problem. The problem is what occurs after.

Lodro Rinzler 00:44:30  Yeah. That’s it. It’s that rubber band thing. It’s like, how quickly do we acknowledge it come back? Or how far does that band go before it snaps and we’re going to have reactions? I’m going to go with the previous example. The ice cream truck came by as if it knew we were talking just now. The noises coming on the recordings.

Lodro Rinzler 00:44:47  Yeah, just a moment ago, you know, doing the jingle. And he always goes by it 50 miles an hour down this road. You know, like, you know, he does it twice. He’ll be back in probably five more minutes. He does a loop. And, it’s every day. And I could really, you know, continue to spiral if I wanted to, but it’s like, no, there’s no point in that because it’s not helping me. The Buddha once said that holding on to anger is like holding on to a hot coal. It’s only burning ourselves. We’re only causing our self harm. And the same can be said with a lot of the other things when we get so fixated. I remember, you know, a million years ago when I was actively dating that, you know, I would be like, why isn’t this person texting me back? And I was just like, oh my God, what’s going on? What’s going on? And like, you know, do they reach out to me? Do they want to be with me? Do they? And then they’d be like, oh, sorry, I was at a movie or something.

Lodro Rinzler 00:45:35  Right. Like and it would be, it would pop. But I was like, man, that was a lot of wasted energy of wanting, right? And so we do this to ourselves all the time. We’re just constantly doing it. And in terms of these choices, it’s the old thing of like when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you invite the meditation teacher on, he’s just going to talk about meditation, that this is the thing. Meditation literally rewires the brains that we notice. Oh, I’m sitting here. I’m with the body breathing. A story comes up of why haven’t they texted me back? Or why is this ice cream truck doing this loop and never stop? I acknowledge it, I come back to the breath. Same thought can come up again. Again, as you said, it’s not that we’re not having reactions or that these thoughts aren’t coming. I acknowledge it though, and I come back to what’s happening right now. The breath. The more I do that in meditation, the stronger I get at being able to do that in my post Meditation Life.

Lodro Rinzler 00:46:26  So sometimes people say I can’t meditate because I have so many thoughts. Honestly, I started to reframe this for meditation students I work with, which is when we drift off and we come back a hundred times in a ten minute meditation. That’s like lifting a hundred reps of a weight, you know, it’s like it’s that’s giving us the workout. If we only went to the gym and lifted that dumbbell once, that’s not much of a workout. We don’t grow from that. Our muscles stay the same. But if we did it 100 times. My God, yeah. You’re gonna. It might feel uncomfortable to do that. It definitely would. Whatever you’re lifting. But that’s when the muscle tears grows back stronger. That’s how we get stronger. So same thing. We are literally rewiring the brain every time we say, I’m acknowledging the thought, I’m coming back. You do that a hundred times in a meditation. You’re really rewiring the brain in a positive way for the rest of your life.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:17  Yeah, I was having a conversation with somebody today about my book, and we were talking about meditation, and I was saying there were a couple of big switches for me that allowed meditation to become sort of a thing I did regularly.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:30  And and one of them was that exactly that I just flipped it from like, oh, it’s a problem that my mind keeps wandering to, oh, it’s great news that I keep finding it and treating that it as a, as a victory. And I’ve often said, I think what, what meditation gives me more than anything else is what Viktor Frankl talked about, that space between stimulus and response. I feel like meditation increases that space for me. It just gives me more room in there for me to then do what the best version of me thinks is worth doing.

Lodro Rinzler 00:48:06  Yeah. Beautifully put. You should write a book.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:08  Maybe so. Yeah. Maybe so.

Lodro Rinzler 00:48:11  I loved your book. I’m sorry. I’m gonna take us off topic. I really did. I think you have such a knack for synthesizing so many different things from different traditions, different modalities. You brought it all under one roof, and you could be like, hey, here’s, like ten different ways of looking at something like shame and guilt, right? Like, you know, it’s just I thought it was very cool.

Lodro Rinzler 00:48:29  I was impressed by your ability to do that. So yes, I love that Viktor Frankl quote. I love the idea that you’re talking about because that’s that’s the thing we can expand upon. And it is a life changing thing to not to have that gap before we send that aggressive text message or whatever we do as a reaction, right? Like, I don’t have to do it. I was funny because I actually caught myself similar. I was going back to the story of this perfect storm I built for myself, of taking my mother out to dinner with the toddler who had just seen, you know, FaceTime with my wife for two minutes. And I had this tendency to be I wanted to, like, be like Adriana. Like you threw me under the bus by calling right then. Like I wish you would. Just stayed, like, called us after, like we had agreed to. And I just I saw myself texting. I just was like, she misses you, that’s all. That’s actually what’s being communicated right now.

Lodro Rinzler 00:49:18  She misses you. Don’t feel any guilt about that. But, like, you know, I just want you to know it was one of those. But it was it was like, oh, watch me, watch me in this, like moment that I’m at, like my breaking point of like this screaming. Everyone’s looking at us in the restaurant. She wants to run outside. She’s banging on the door. She’s never done this, by the way. She’s not that like not nothing against anyone who’s going to do this regularly. But like, I was shocked, I was unprepared and and Yeah, I just was at that breaking point and I noticed. Look at me wanting to say you’re bad. Look at me. Wanting to blame someone to text them something. And I was like, man, if I hadn’t, if I didn’t have a practice, I’d probably give in to both of those tendencies. And I’m so glad I did that. I could just say, actually, it’s more about like, being nice to grandma.

Lodro Rinzler 00:50:03  Actually, it’s more about, you know, your daughter misses you and, you know, she’s having a bit of a hard time. But don’t feel bad. She’s going to be fine, you know, like that sort of thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:11  Yeah. I love that example for, a whole bunch of reasons. A it sounds like a setup to a joke. I’m half tempted to go try and craft the punchline. yeah, exactly. But what I love about it, and I’ve always admired about you as a teacher, is you don’t pretend that that doesn’t rattle you or that that isn’t hard. What you do, and I think, you know, listeners hear me say this often is that I think so much of the practice is not making things worse. What you didn’t do is you did not make it worse. You could have made it worse by shaming your daughter. You could have made it worse by guilting your wife. You could have taken what was a difficult situation and made it worse. But you didn’t.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:52  You just had the situation, which didn’t make it fun or easy. Right? But that’s a big deal because I am always amazed by our infinite capacity to make things worse. Yes. You know, not that we don’t have basic goodness. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that. No, I.

Lodro Rinzler 00:51:14  Know exactly what you’re saying, that we just. We are all so good at that. Yeah. Of pushing that button when we know it’s not going to feel good for us or the other person. We for saying that thing that cuts someone down at work, whatever. Like we’re just why did we get so good at that? Yeah. And we know outside of whatever temporary satisfaction like I told them. Like, it just makes us feel shitty long term. And it absolutely hurt the other person. Like, why? Why do we do that? I think that if there’s something that I’ve learned over my years of practice, it is to cause less harm.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:48  Yeah.

Lodro Rinzler 00:51:49  And yes, that’s that’s really it. Like it’s, you know, as I said earlier, ultimately the goal is, oh, I want to help people. And I think the skillful means is through doing as little harm as possible. When I lead meditation teacher trainings and I always tell them, like, listen, you’re going to say the wrong thing. Like, everyone wants to be the perfect meditation teacher coming out of the gate. And I’m like, I get that. And I was there. I remember at one point just, you know, giving a talk and making reference, like making a joke about SoulCycle, you know. And then I looked down and the person in the front row had these massive SoulCycle socks on, and I was like, well, I just offended that person. You know, like, it’s just that you’re always going to say or do something. It’s going to be a thing. You just can’t know, , we can’t know, we’re human beings. We’re like the Korean Zen master. Seung San equated community to dumping a bunch of potatoes into a barrel of water and banging them against each other until the dirt fell off.

Lodro Rinzler 00:52:45  And I was like, that’s it. That’s what we do as humans. You know, the idea is that we just, you know, try to be as skillful and as a hopeful and ideally caused the least harm as possible. But you’re right. It’s like we’re not. I think the idea at some point we transcend and become someone else, or that we transcend and we no longer have difficulties is a fallacy. It’s more about how do we work with our modern world, with all of its myriad distractions, all of its ways of causing us heartbreak and seeing, you know, we’re so exposed to the suffering of the world around us that it’s so heartbreaking right now, and we’re expected to go around and operate like do nine to fives and and get groceries and like, live like normal people in the midst of this crazy time. It’s rough. It is rough. We have to acknowledge that it’s rough. And that doesn’t mean that we aren’t basically good, and it doesn’t mean that we can’t strive to be as helpful and to cause as much as least harm as we can.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:38  Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed  your good wolf at oneyoufeed.net/newsletter.  Again oneyoufeed.net/newsletter. 

I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation, and I want to talk about the role children play in our lives. Similar to the potato banging thing that you just gave. So listeners, if you’d like access to post-show conversations, ad free episodes, and supporting this show, you can go to one you feed net loader. Thank you so much. It’s been, as always, a pleasure.

Lodro Rinzler 00:54:38  Thank you for having me, I will continue. This was the eighth book. You are good.

Lodro Rinzler 00:54:43  You are enough. And I. Every time I have a book, I will say, hey, let’s get together. Because it’s just a fun thing to do. When I, when I was asked, I said, hey, you should go promote this book. I said, I’m happy to do it. I just want to sit down with the people I really admire and really enjoy their company. And you were top of that list as I wrote you. So I’m so glad that we can continue to do this. And thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:02  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:

Suleika Jaouad 00:00:00  Physical pain is not something that we always have control over. Suffering is something we do have agency over to some extent.

Chris Forbes 00:00:16  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 00:01:01  There’s an old saying when one door closes, another opens. And I believe that’s mostly true. But what often gets left out is the dark hallway between them, the part where the first store is shut and the next door hasn’t opened, and you don’t know how long you’ll be standing in it. Suleika Jaouad calls that the place between no longer and not yet, and she has spent a lot of her life there through leukemia, relapse and a life she couldn’t plan. Her memoir is called Between Two Kingdoms, and it’s outstanding. This conversation is about learning to make a home in that hallway instead of rushing through it. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Suleika, welcome to the show.

Suleika Jaouad 00:01:44  Hi. I’m so happy to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:46  Yes, I’m very happy that you are here. Ginny is also with me.

Ginny Gay 00:01:50  Hello, Suleika,Hello, everybody.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:53  We are in person in New York City. And as you all know, I love doing these interviews in person. Suleika has written an exceptional book called “Between Two Kingdoms, a Memoir of a Life Interrupted”, which we will talk about here in a moment. But we’ll start like we always do, with the parable. 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:18  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. Look up at their grandparents, 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.

Suleika Jaouad 00:02:42  I love that parable so much. Feels especially resonant in the context of the last year of my life, which I’ll get into a little bit more later. So as someone who has an overanxious mind, I’m constantly struggling to figure out how to swim in the ocean of uncertainty. And I’ve heard anxiety defined as fear of some future unknown or threat, and the belief that you can’t handle it if it comes to pass. And so that has been my constant work my whole life. It’s been my work in a more heightened way as of late.

Suleika Jaouad 00:03:25  But I would say that, you know, for me, the bad wolf, so to speak, is the temptation to feel like I can troubleshoot or solve for the uncertain. And of course, you know, the forever acceptance that I’m trying to practice, which is that I can’t. None of us can. We instead have to figure out how to live with fear, to coexist with pain without trying to dodge it or numb it, or in my case, fix it.

Ginny Gay 00:04:00  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I think we should start by giving listeners a chance to know your story a bit. I mean, Eric and I have read your absolutely gut wrenching and gorgeous memoir of your story, so I want listeners to know a bit about what you have been through and what has brought you to where you are in terms of today. So in your book, you say it all began with an itch. Can you take it from there.

Suleika Jaouad 00:04:28  Yes. So it was a literal itch, not a metaphorical itch or, you know, a quarter life crisis.

Suleika Jaouad 00:04:35  When I was 22 years old and my final semester of college, I began having these mysterious symptoms. First the itch and then this sort of bone deep fatigue. But youth and health are supposed to go hand in hand, so I didn’t really think anything of it. I felt, you know, this deeper fear that maybe I somehow wasn’t cut out for the adult world. But as the months progressed and I found myself and my first job as a paralegal out of college, those symptoms began to morph and change. And ultimately, I was given a diagnosis of a very aggressive form of leukemia called acute myeloid leukemia. And up until that point, I had been someone who was, I think, first and foremost, a big dreamer. I had my one year plan and my five year plan and my ten year plan, and I had these aspirations of becoming a foreign correspondent or a war correspondent. And with that diagnosis, it was really a cleaving moment for me. There was my life before and everything that came after.

Suleika Jaouad 00:05:48  And overnight I lost my job. I moved from Paris, where I’d been working back into my childhood bedroom in upstate New York, with its embarrassing pink walls and dusty boy band posters, and I prepared to undergo what would ultimately be four years in the kingdom of the sick. And, you know, the one thing that’s in the contract is that we will all at some point have to contend with our mortality. And yet somehow the threat of death always feels like a plot twist. And I think that was especially true for me. At 22, I had this sense of time, you know, time to figure out who I was, time to get my act together, time to find a vocation that not only paid the bills, but hopefully nourished me in other ways. And suddenly it was this very abrupt realization that I didn’t have time. I had about a 35% chance of long term survival. And within those first couple of months in the hospital, I learned that none of the standard chemotherapy treatments were working for me, and that my only shot at the cure was going to be experimental clinical trials.

Suleika Jaouad 00:07:05  And if I was very lucky, a bone marrow transplant. And so that was my life from age 22 until about 27. But I think what was surprising to me was that more frightening than the fear of death, more unsettling than the illness and the pain that came with it, was the sense that I hadn’t done what I wanted to do in my life that I had spent my entire adult life. You know, all you know, whatever. It was four years of it at that point, preparing to be a person I had, you know, spent all nighters so I could get a scholarship to go to college. I had worked really hard to be able to set myself up for some form of independence, and suddenly I found myself in the very opposite place. Then I’d planned in those, you know, first one and five year plans. I found myself back in my childhood bedroom, living between there and hospital rooms and as dependent on others as I’d ever been since infancy. And so it was this rude awakening and realization of my finitude, of our finitude.  And more than that, I think it was a quest for me to figure out what this experience meant for me, and how I could define some sense of selfhood within it.

Ginny Gay 00:08:38  Yeah, yeah. Oh gosh. So much of what you say just really strikes deep chords within me as just so difficult and so true. And I think a universal point of connection there is that like for me, the first lesson of adulthood was like, well, life does not go as planned. You know, we can make these plans, we can have these visions. And inevitably and at some point, you know, sooner or later there’s going to be a plot twist and things are going to be very different from that dream. You sort of held for yourself for that plan that you had. As I read the pages that described the months that you sat in the hospital in isolation because of the bone marrow transplant or receiving the kind of therapy you received in chemotherapy, and then the pain that was associated with that, the physical pain and the mental pain.

Ginny Gay 00:09:21  I just remarked it how you made it through those days, passing the time when there wasn’t an end in sight. I mean, that just to me sounded like those moments could be really anguish inducing. What did you find that sustained you through that?

Suleika Jaouad 00:09:33  So that first summer that I spent in the hospital, I especially when I found out that chemotherapy was not working for me, I me felt so angry. I remember waking up one morning and closing the blinds in my hospital room, and I was very lucky to have a hospital room that happened to face Central Park, which as far as hospital rooms went, was kind of a coveted hospital room to have that I’d found myself in. But I couldn’t stand the sight of seeing, you know, all these tiny little hustlers and their suits going to work, young mothers, you know, wheeling newborns around in prams, people my age who were having fun and, you know, getting ready to have a picnic in the park because it felt like this reminder of what my life could have been and likely was never going to be.

Suleika Jaouad 00:10:22  And more than that, I think it pointed to this yearning I had to participate in the world, and the deep sense of isolation and inability that I felt was my reality. And so all these plans, you know, these aspirations, say, of becoming a war correspondent, felt entirely foreclosed to me. I wasn’t doing any of the normal young people things that I saw my friends doing on Instagram. I wasn’t going to parties, I wasn’t traveling, I wasn’t beginning a career. I was stuck in bed. And it’s around that time that a friend of mine suggested that we do something called 100 Day Project, and the concept was really simple. We were each going to anchor our days around one creative act, and it was something we were going to do together. And my mom, who’s a painter, decided to paint one small ceramic tile every day that she later assembled into a shield and hung above my bed and told me I had protective powers. And my dad, who up until that point had been, you know, a very private man, decided to write 100 childhood memories about growing up in rural Tunisia.

Suleika Jaouad 00:11:34  And he later compiled those memories into a little booklet and gave them to me, and my brother and I really struggled to figure out what my project could be. I could barely, you know, walk around my room, let alone do some big, ambitious thing. And so I decided to return to the thing I’d done from the time I was a child and to journal every day. And I made a couple of rules for myself. One was that I couldn’t go back and read it because I didn’t want to be concerned about how good the writing was, and that it didn’t matter how long or short my entry was. And often it was one sentence, and occasionally it was one word, frequently the F word.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:14  I was just about to say, I think I might know what that word would be exactly.

Suleika Jaouad 00:12:21  but something interesting began to happen in the process of keeping that journal, and I started to use it almost as a reporter’s pad. And rather than feeling, you know, mired and helpless in this situation, I began to observe the hospital world around me.

Suleika Jaouad 00:12:41  I started recording these overheard snippets of conversation by the nurses station. I started writing about the new friends and fellow patients that I was encountering, and a young man a couple doors down from me who was trying to incite a hospital food strike because our meals kept arriving so frozen from the cafeteria. And I began to realize that while this wasn’t necessarily the circumstance I would have chosen for myself, there was a whole world of humanity unfolding right there that I could write about. And little by little, in keeping that journal, although I had no expectations of doing anything with it, I began to find a voice. And I think for me, it was my first indication that while I would never have chosen this new reality for myself. And while I had to cede a lot of control to my doctors, to my caregivers, to the ever changing treatment protocols, to my body, ultimately I did have some agency and that was that. I could make meaning of this experience on my own terms, in my own words.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:59  Yeah, there’s certainly an idea you reference in your book, Post-traumatic Growth, about growing from suffering. And one of the key indicators of the ability to do that is to begin to create a narrative and a meaning out of what’s happening. The other thing I think so instructional in what you said there, and you referenced this a bunch of different times in different ways. But there is a tendency, whether it’s extreme, like you like I have leukemia and the thought becomes, when I get better, then I will X or in our own lives. As you said, there was even some of that before. When I get out of college, I will. Then when I get promoted, we all do it. Then I’ll be a happy and b then I’ll do what I want to do. Then I’ll do what’s important to me. And I think so much of what you learn, and you say so eloquently in the book, is that strategy doesn’t work. There’s a line somewhere where you say, around illness.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:56  I had to learn not to move away from illness, but to move forward with it. Yeah, yeah. You know, and I think that’s just a really powerful idea.

Suleika Jaouad 00:15:07  Absolutely. And I do think, you know, we often feel like we need to check certain boxes or climb certain rungs in order to give ourselves permission to do something that we actually want to do. And I think, you know, one of the things that was most interesting to me in that first year of illness was how quickly my priorities reshuffled themselves. I had very limited energy. I was on a ton of medications. I maybe had about an hour or 2 or 3 on a very good day of usable energy. And what that meant was that I had to get very specific about who I wanted to spend that time with and what I wanted to do during that time. And like I said earlier, you know, especially when you’re young. But I think for most of us, we have this sense of endless time.

Suleika Jaouad 00:15:58  That we can get to it later and overnight. You know, my relationship to time abruptly changed, and I understood that there wasn’t endless time. In fact, in my case, there was likely a very finite amount of time for me to do the things that I wanted to do. And, you know, it’s interesting because I’m very interested in post-traumatic growth now. But at the time, had you told me you can learn something from this, I probably would have punched you in the face as well.

Speaker 5 00:16:28  I’m not a sure. That person. Yeah.

Suleika Jaouad 00:16:30  You know, so I really struggled in that first year. I would seek out illness narratives, and I’d read about someone who had gone on to run an ultramarathon or to start some foundation or to write, you know, a bestselling book. And I hated those stories because they made me feel like there was a right and a wrong way to suffer. And at that time, I wasn’t ready yet to figure out what I might learn from this experience, how it might enhance my life.

Suleika Jaouad 00:16:59  And so what I started doing instead was researching this long lineage of bedridden artists and writers that we have who, you know, wrote or created from the trenches. Frida Kahlo was someone I was very drawn to because she didn’t find herself on the other side of her physical pain. She was in an automobile accident when she was 18 years old and ended up living from bed or from a wheelchair for large chunks of her life. And so what she did, you know, instead of waiting until she was better, was she began painting the self-portraits from bed and the portraits of what it meant to live in a broken body and a pain body, and she engaged with her reality. And so that was, you know, very inspiring to me. And it made me realize, maybe there is a way for me to creatively engage with my circumstances without being Pollyanna ish about it, without putting pressure on myself to find some kind of silver lining or some sort of wisdom. But maybe I can just explore this. You know, the image of a kaleidoscope is what comes to mind, where you sort of twist the cylinder and you see things in a different light.

Suleika Jaouad 00:18:18  And so that’s what I started to do in the journals. But to your other point about waiting for permission. In the lead up to my bone marrow transplant, I realized I had about two months before I entered the hospital, and I knew my chances of surviving that procedure were not very high. And I began to rethink this idea of being a journalist. And of course, there was no way for me to be a word correspondent or to travel to some place. I couldn’t even leave my hospital room. But I began to think about what I could report on from the front lines of my hospital bed. And just that thought experiment alone opened up my entire world.

Ginny Gay 00:19:01  I love that, and I love that you write about the power of story. You talk about how it helps from reducing our life to just inevitability, you know, or something to that effect. The other thing I hear when you talk about this is that you weren’t looking for meaning, you were making meaning, like there’s agency in you having a perspective on what was happening and beginning to connect with that and beginning to own that and write about it.  The meaning was yours to make. Like you were able to show up with what was happening in a way that felt healing and engaging to you, and that that was powerful. And that was it. It wasn’t like you had to go find some meaning or find some purpose, or it wasn’t a passive thing. It was very active.

Suleika Jaouad 00:19:39  Absolutely. And you spent enough time in hospitals, and you very quickly learned that you are not the only one suffering, even though it can feel that way, even though it can feel impossible to think that anything else is happening in the world when you’re sick yourself, or when you’re sitting next to the bedside of a loved one who’s ill. And, you know, I think ultimately that’s what drew me to writing first as a reader and then later as a writer myself. It’s that, you know, when we dare to tell the unvarnished truth, be it in a memoir or in a work of fiction, we learn again and again that we’re more alike than we are different.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:23  There’s an idea in a lot of spiritual circles where a distinction is made between pain and suffering. I’ll just sort of lay it out. But I would really love to hear your opinion on it. And the idea is essentially that there is pain in life. We’re all going to have it. Right. You had an enormous amount of it, you know, an amount of pain that scares me, frankly. Right. But that there is an additional layer that goes on top of that pain that some people would call suffering. And it’s the mental things that we layer on top of it. And so some of it would be the fear, some of it would be the jealousy of other people. Some of it would be the ways we resist it, and that there is a way to, while still being in pain and acknowledging that that pain is extraordinarily real, also lessen the total amount of suffering that goes into that experience. And I’m just curious, does that ring true or resonate with you?

Suleika Jaouad 00:21:22  Absolutely. I think that’s been a core part of how I’ve endured these different experiences. You know, physical pain is not something that we always have control over. Suffering is something we do have agency over to some extent. You know how we suffer. Maybe the question isn’t whether we suffer or whether we don’t, but how we engage with that suffering. And so for me, you know, creativity has always been my way of suffering on my terms and in a way that instead of feeling like I’m prisoner by my suffering, unlocks not only the suffering for me, but often the world around me.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:08  We were talking yesterday with your agent, Richard Pine, and. Well, I’ll let you take this one. Yeah, okay. Actually, I think it’s better. Better to come from you.

Ginny Gay 00:22:17  Well, I just thought he posed such an interesting question because I mentioned to him I was like, so like his bravery, her courage and her bravery. And he said, you know, I wonder if she would describe herself that way. He said, like, I feel like people that have had to endure a lot of pain and inevitable suffering, maybe just don’t see that there was a choice to show up or not. And in how you show up. Or maybe there’s just a desire to be normal, you know, and not be labeled as something like brave. And so it just really got me thinking about a lot of different aspects of that. And it did make me curious to know, like when I say like, gosh, you strike me as so brave. Like, how does that land on you? And how do you consider yourself?

Suleika Jaouad 00:22:55  My answer to that now is very different than it would have been ten years ago. But I think, you know, in general, we often conflate the hero’s journey with the survivor’s journey survivor of an illness or some other kind of heartbreak or difficulty that brings us to the floor. And so when I first got sick, I really resisted the idea of anyone calling me brave or inspiring, because I felt like this is not a circumstance that I had chosen, and I didn’t feel brave or strong or inspiring. I felt like I was in the belly of the beast, and I was really struggling, and I couldn’t really see a way forward for myself.

Suleika Jaouad 00:23:38  What I do feel proud of, and where I will accept that word bravery is not, you know, the mere fact of having been sick or having endured some kind of pain. It’s, you know, where I see that strength is in our response to the inciting event. So I felt brave when I began writing in the hospital. I felt strong when I turned it into this column that I later went on to write. I felt not like a hero. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like a hero. And I’d be very suspicious of anyone who does think of themselves as a hero.

Suleika Jaouad 00:24:20  Yeah, but I felt courageous when, in the aftermath of my illness, when I was really trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life, I made a choice to take things into my own hands and to embark on a very long, slightly inadvisable road trip that I went on, because in those moments, I was choosing something. I was not the passive agent and an experience I wouldn’t have opted for.  I was active, I was engaging, I was making decisions.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:13  One of the things I’m always interested in is what is it that causes some people? When faced with enormous difficulty to. In some way, I want to be careful with my words here, but they’re able to make something generative out of it, and other people, when faced with extraordinary difficulty, are crushed by it. It’s a variation on a question I’ve always had as a recovering addict, like, why are some of us getting sober? Why are some of us not? There are some things we can certainly point to. The level of support that you have, the access to, the care that you have, the quality of the care. We can point those out and see those, and yet we can find examples on both sides of the coin of people who had all that and still, you know, were sort of emotionally, mentally crushed by. And on the other hand, people who had none of that. I’m just curious, did you see that in the world that you were in, and was there anything in seeing that any pattern you saw in the people that were.  Again, I like your distinction between surviving and a hero’s journey. And maybe let’s step it back from hero’s journey, right? We don’t need to be that ambitious with the word, but more than just surviving.

Suleika Jaouad 00:26:20  So I became obsessed with this very question when I found myself, you know, on paper, finally cancer free, but off paper, more lost than I’d ever been. And I was really struggling with reentry, which is a word that we use in the context of veterans returning from war. But we don’t use it as much in the context of surviving a traumatic experience like a long illness. And I expected to feel grateful for that. I expected to feel stronger for it, and it was the very opposite of that. I had never been more lost in my life. I knew that I couldn’t go back to the person I’d been pre illness, and I was no longer a patient, but I had no idea who I was. I had no idea how to live my life or what that would look like, and I began to take a great interest in people who had figured out how to move forward without staying crystallized.

Suleika Jaouad 00:27:23  And in that trauma, because we all know people, and I was one of them for a very long time, who stay in that survival mode. And for a very long time, I was more comfortable in survival mode than I was dealing with, you know, everyday life. But I knew intuitively that the key for me was going to be to figure out how to shift out of surviving and into some form of living. I just didn’t know how to do that yet. And so what that looked like for me was going on this road trip and interviewing different people who had experienced all kinds of life interruptions. I interviewed a man on death row in Texas who, at the time that I met him, had spent more than half of his life in solitary confinement and was facing the death penalty and had no expectation of ever, you know, getting out. And something that struck me about him was the way that he talked about community. One of the very first questions he asked me was, how did you spend all that time in the hospital? And I said, I played a lot of Scrabble.

Suleika Jaouad 00:28:29  And he responded, me too, and explained to me that he and his neighboring cellmates would make boards out of scraps of paper and call their plays out to each other through, you know, the meal slots and their cells. And that made a lot of sense to me, because I think that community, whether it’s a pre-existing community or one that you have to construct for yourself in the aftermath of an experience, is crucial to figuring out how to move forward, because of course, you can’t really move on from a trauma. Like we said, you have to learn to carry that forward with you. And so for me. You know, aside from my wonderful friends and family, finding people who had been where I’d been, who were where I was, was really important, and being able to have frank conversations about what that experience was like, where I didn’t feel the self-imposed pressure to say, I’m alive. I’m so grateful. Which, of course, on some level I was, but was glossing over all the complexity and the day to day challenges of really figuring out what it meant to take my place among the living.

Suleika Jaouad 00:29:38  The second thing I’d say is that when you’ve endured a trauma, the impulse can be to stay in a very small, safe place. Because when you’ve had the ceiling cave in on you, you no longer assume structural stability. And that can make the world a scary place to be. It can make opening your heart up a very scary act, because it’s only natural to want to protect yourself against new loss when you’ve endured a loss. And so for me, it was really a process of learning not to do what was my impulse, which was to dodge any sort of discomfort, to numb myself against it, to paper over it. But you really allow myself the time to engage with that grief. But those losses with that trauma, and to find a sort of container where I could explore that distance between no longer and not yet, and to learn to embrace existing in that messy middle where I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know what my life was going to be and ultimately To come to think of discomfort not as a bad thing, but as a necessary passage. When you’re in transition.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:08  Did you say between no longer and not yet? Yeah, that’s a beautiful phrase. I sometimes talk about that, you know, cliché. Like when one door closes, another one opens, which I do believe generally to be true. But I often say what is missed is there’s a there’s often a long, dark hallway between them, like the one door is closed, the other is not open yet, and it’s just scary in there.

Suleika Jaouad 00:31:30  Absolutely. You know, and the title of the book is Between Two Kingdoms, because ultimately, I believe most of us live large chunks of our lives in the in-between, in transition, in that space between no longer and not yet. And once we can learn to get comfortable with that discomfort, with that sense of uncertainty, there’s a lot of richness to be gained from looking around when you’re in that liminal space and really, you know, boring into the unknown. And as someone who, you know, when we opened this conversation about the two wolves copped to having a great degree of anxiety about uncertainty. My impulse is to rush through those transitions. I don’t want to be in that space between no longer and not yet. I want to know exactly what I’m doing and where I’m going, and what my day is going to look like. And my work, for whatever reason, for the last decade, has been being forced to not rush through those transitional moments and and really learning to make a life for myself and a home for myself and the messy middle.

Ginny Gay 00:32:45  Yeah. You say to learn to swim in the ocean of not knowing. This is my constant work. So when you find yourself running up against that edge of like wanting to rush through it, but knowing that being present with it is the way to some freedom and richness for yourself. Like, are there practices or their ideas you orient towards? Like, how do you sort of remind yourself at a at a cellular level to be here and to open to that uncertainty? How do you do that?

Suleika Jaouad 00:33:13  Well, I think the first thing is rooted in historical understanding of my maladaptive coping mechanisms, which is that when I tried to resist grief, when I tried to resist discomfort, I end up injuring myself more.

Ginny Gay 00:33:33  Yeah.

Suleika Jaouad 00:33:33  So that is my bedrock knowledge that I’ve gained by not using tools that serve me and savoring that transition. Journaling has been a huge part of how on a, you know, day to day, I take a little time for myself to tap into the subconscious, to write in stream of consciousness and to allow. You know, whatever pressure valve needs to be released to have a little respite. And I love the journal. I know journaling gets a bad rap as this sort of infantile thing that children do with a diary and a little locket, but to me, the journal feels like a rare space in today’s world where we really get to show up as our most unexamined, unedited, unvarnished selves and where we get to just write. And so I find that all the messiness for me happens in the journal. And that’s the whole point of it. It’s not for anybody else’s eyes. It’s not for public consumption. There’s no, you know, end goal to it. It’s just pure exploration. And so for me, it’s journaling. Sometimes it’s walking or being in nature. But I need to have those Daily commitments to the messiness. In order to stay anchored in it.

Ginny Gay 00:34:59  What I hear you say is that, like journaling is a place where you have given yourself permission to let whatever’s here be here and to let it express itself. I can really relate to that. I mean, I have a daily mindfulness meditation practice where that’s kind of my sacred time to just find whatever’s going on inside of me. I try to connect with it in my body so it’s not so abstract, but just to work with not being so hostile towards it and work with just sort of allowing it to be there and express itself. Yeah. I mean, I just think that’s so powerful because I mean, again, in mindfulness, we talk about like turning towards our pain versus away from it. I mean, I’m a recovering addict as well. And I’ve spent a lot of my life just orienting around comfort and trying to avoid pain, thinking that’s a brilliant strategy.  We just dodged the bullet. Guys like in that. Clearly it ran my life into the ground. So now just that daily practice of turning towards whatever is, and I still find myself resisting it. So the daily practice is to try to drop that resistance and to open to it. It seems like a powerful way to relate to your grief and relate to your pain.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:02  You say at one point the idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach. To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have. And I think that speaks to what you were just saying, Ginny, and what you’re saying about being with what is uncomfortable and recognizing like this is what is here. I interviewed the author, Andrew Solomon yesterday, who’s written very eloquently about families and depression, and something stands out as he talks about being in depression and recognizing, like, you can’t wait till it feels like it’s over because time is happening. Your life is always what is right here, right now, even when it’s really unpleasant. That is what we have to work with.

Suleika Jaouad 00:36:50  We don’t get to skip over the hard work of healing and grieving, or to stow away the uncomfortable or painful parts, because, as we know, the more we do that. The more it comes back for blood. Yeah. And so, you know, before we started this conversation, I was sharing with you what I do when I don’t want to write, which is pretty much most days of the week, if I’m being honest, in part because it’s not fun necessarily to sit with that discomfort. Who wants to do that? Sure. You know, it’s much more enjoyable to binge watch whatever newest show is on Netflix. Right. And so what I often do, and this is a practice the poet Marie Howe  does is when I’m in that space of really resisting whatever it is that I have to say or don’t know how to say, I write in my non-dominant hand and I say I don’t want to write about and then I write into that.

Suleika Jaouad 00:37:51  And so there are so many little tools like that that I’ve had to cultivate, not because I’m some peaceful mountaintop guru that has learned to, you know, lovingly coexist with pain. But because I have to work at it every day and because my survival is tied to it.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:27  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to. What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection. That’s exactly why I started Good Wolf reminders short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like you’re kind of thing, head to oneyoyufeed.net/sms and sign up. It’s free. No spam, and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s oneyoufeed.net/sms.  Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. 

Eric Zimmer 00:39:20  I think that’s such a beautiful point,  because I do think we are in a culture that, well, it’s cultural and it’s human to want easy answers, to believe that pain can be banished, to believe that if you just do this practice or that practice like it will, life will be great. Right. And and I just I don’t believe that. You know, and it’s we talk about these things and we talk about difficulties we’ve gone through. And yet being in difficult times is just being in difficult times. Being in pain is just being in pain. There are more there are more and less skillful ways to do it. But even I think it’s back to what we talked about earlier between pain and suffering. Even if you’re skillfully relating the best of your ability to these challenges that we’re talking about, they are still challenges and they are still deeply unpleasant.

Suleika Jaouad 00:40:15  And life keeps unfolding and time keeps unfolding. And with that comes new beginnings and new challenges and new difficulties. Yeah. So, you know, we opened this conversation speaking about the fear of some future threat happening and the belief that you can’t handle it. And so for me, much of the last ten years was waiting for that ceiling to cave back in. Fearing the possibility that one day might leukemia might return. And I had to, you know, do battle with that fear and that anxiety every day. And last year, right, as I had sort of started to trust the structural stability, my most feared thing did happen, I learned that my leukemia had returned. And it’s so interesting because, you know, I’ve been the sickest I’ve ever been in the last year I had a second bone marrow transplant, and while I’m doing okay right now, I also learned that this time there wasn’t going to be an end date in sight. I’m going to be in treatment indefinitely for the rest of my life. And that word indefinite initially was so crushing to me.

Suleika Jaouad 00:41:35  But I was saying this to my husband the other day. There’s a strange freedom that I feel now that my most feared thing has come to pass. Because I just have to learn to live with it now. There is no expectation that I will ever be on the other side of it. And while that was crushing in a lot of ways, I have no choice but to accept it. I have no choice but to coexist with the facts of my mortality. I won’t say that my anxiety has dissipated, but its shape shifted.

Ginny Gay 00:42:13  Can I connect with you about that point? Just about how that has shown up in my life. So for my entire life, the death of my mother was the thing I feared most. I just did not know how I would go on. I had grown to fear it as just this big looming monster that, you know, unless I died first, it was going to happen one day and I didn’t know how I would survive. I couldn’t see the other side of it.

Ginny Gay 00:42:37  And she passed away in in October. And here I am. Yeah. You know, it was and still can be. It’s full of grief and a lot of sadness. The way you write about losing Melissa and like, The Nevers, like, life goes on. But she’ll never experience the things that you’re experiencing or that one should experience in life. You know, I think about that. It’s the finality of her death that just I still can’t wrap my mind and head around. So not to make light of it and not to say that, oh, it was nothing. It was it was awful. And it is awful in moments. And I’m still here. Like there’s a sense of having had it happen. That doesn’t make sense, but you know what I mean? And it didn’t destroy you right now. Like you’re still around to talk about it. It’s like you’re looking around, like, okay, it happens here I am. There is a freedom in that, isn’t there? You live with the awful, but here you are.

Suleika Jaouad 00:43:26  And we adapt.

Ginny Gay 00:43:27  And we adapt.

Suleika Jaouad 00:43:29  You know, the word resilience gets thrown around. But for us to be here in this room, having this Conversation. Our ancestors had to survive so many things. We have resilience and adaptability encoded in our DNA. And so, you know, thank you for sharing that. And I so deeply understand it. And, you know, I at my lowest point last summer when I learned this news, I was back in treatment. I was using a walker, which at 33 is not the thing that you expect that you’ll be doing. And I had this really difficult moment of realizing, you know, this quality of life is not the quality of life that I want for myself, and I don’t know how to go on. And it was this really scary moment, because I had never really reached the limits of what I thought I could endure up until that moment, and I couldn’t do, you know, the things that I loved for a while.

Suleika Jaouad 00:44:28  I was on a medication that caused my vision to double, and so I couldn’t write, I couldn’t journal, and that felt like such a deep loss. And at the time I thought, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do the thing that I love. And yet we adapt. I started using a voice transcription app on my phone. I started painting in the place of writing, which is not something I ever thought I was going to do. And painting has become this hugely important part of my life and now career and a very, very bizarre, unexpected way. And so that’s the thing that I returned to. It’s that, you know, when we lose some part of ourselves that feels integral to who we are. If we can get quiet enough and observant enough to notice what other things start to, you know, appear on the peripheries of that absence. We learned that, well, you know, you can’t go back to the way your life was before. there are new ways of living, new ways of surviving, new ways of interacting with the world around you.

Suleika Jaouad 00:45:40  And so that’s what I’ve been doing this year, is learning to adapt. And on some days it feels incredibly challenging, and on other days it feels thrilling. I feel almost bulletproof because the ceiling has caved in and I’m okay. The other day I was walking my dog and it was a beautiful sunny day and I’m no longer using my walker. And I just had, you know, one of these great New York moments. Someone was playing something on a boombox. And, and I had this moment where I turned to my dog and I said, out loud, I said, I’m outside and I’m living. And it was such a small, thrilling, ordinary moment and it meant everything.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:24  Do you think that coming back to a diagnosis a second time to leukemia returning. Do you think that you are more prepared to handle it than you were? You had leukemia. Then you went on this journey across the country of interviewing these people, and you wrote this memoir, which you’re mining all that for what you learned, what became of you. And now you’re sort of like, all right, I got to do it again. And I assume that there are some ways that you feel more prepared and in some ways, maybe worse.

Suleika Jaouad 00:47:01  All of those things. You know, I think some of it is muscle memory. For example, as soon as I relapsed, you know, my husband and I, within 48 hours, had to pack up our things, leave our home, rehome our dogs, which was the most heartbreaking thing. And I had this feeling of, you know, I’ve been here before. I’ve had this moment of my life imploding overnight, and none of that gets easier. But also, I think this time I went into it without any illusions that I could hold on to the plans that I had, that I could hold on to the person I’d been even 48 hours before. And with that came an openness to everything, to the terror, to the beauty, to maybe even the learnings. And that made it easier.

Suleika Jaouad 00:47:56  The last time I went through this, I was clinging to the person that I’d been. That I was no longer. And I was constantly comparing myself to that person. And this time, you know, I just let it all happen to me. And instead of trying to control or trying to resist, I, you know, tried to flow with it. and that made things a lot easier. the other thing I feel like I learned and I alluded to this earlier from the last time, was how crucial community is. The thing I’m proudest of, my proudest accomplishment in the last decade, is the community that I’ve built of family, of friends, of chosen family, of fellow artists and writers who I learn from, who inspire me every day. And the thing about community is you can’t just create one overnight in a moment of need, and then expect people to be there for you. Right, right. Ideally, your initial way of showing up in a community is one of generosity and one of extending support, long without expectation of ever needing anything in return.

Suleika Jaouad 00:49:08  And so this time around, well, you know, illness, even when you’re surrounded by people, can feel isolating because you alone live in your body and know what’s happening in there. Yeah. I never once felt lonely. I was surrounded by more love than I ever dared dream possible. And ultimately, for me, you know, I feel like love is the crucial, essential ingredient to enduring.

Ginny Gay 00:49:41  You visit on your road trip, Catherine. And she speaks a bit about this going through, you know, something that she thought she could never survive. And yet he or she is surviving. You know, she says you have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love. She told me that’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.

Suleika Jaouad 00:50:07  I love by those words and Catherine has become a dear friend and a teacher to me.

Suleika Jaouad 00:50:13  She lost her 27 year old son to suicide, and then shortly thereafter was diagnosed with a very advanced form of cancer. And long after the book was finished, I actually ultimately went back to California to teach a creative writing course with her for a semester to a group of 16 year old students. And I think to me, she’s an embodiment of leading with love. She has every reason in the world to be someone who feels betrayed by the world, who feels embittered by her losses, who might not even find a reason to get out of bed. And yet she has planted these seeds of love and the students that she teaches, and her children and now grandchildren and the perfect strangers like myself, who she encounters and takes under her wing. And so I try to live my life in such a way where attempt to emulate Catherine and attempt to focus on the love and to cultivate it.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:22  I was going to say we were listening to a song this morning by one of my favorite artists, Jason Isbell, and he’s got a song called I Don’t Know What It’s Called.

Ginny Gay 00:51:30  I can’t believe you’re saying this. I literally was thinking about these lyrics. I think this is what you’re about to say about ten minutes ago.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:36  Yeah, I mean, it’s find something to love.

Ginny Gay 00:51:38  I hope you find something to love. Something to do when you feel like giving up a song to sing a tale to tell something to love. It’ll serve you well.

Suleika Jaouad 00:51:45  I love that so much. And I really love my life. By that. I have a hard time with gratitude journals or gratitude lists just because, especially as a cancer patient, you’re kind of bombarded with messages of gratitude where I have been able to anchor myself as an a practice of seeking out small joys and small loves, because you can always find something to love. The smallest little thing. You know, I mentioned I like to play Scrabble when I was in the bone marrow transplant last year for about five weeks, I befriended one of my nurses, and she would come and play Scrabble with me during her lunch breaks, and we would get fiercely competitive and we would cuss each other out.

Suleika Jaouad 00:52:31  And it was just such a delight and such a joy, and also such an act of love for her to choose to spend her precious, you know, 15 minutes or whatever it was with me when that was her job.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:47  Who wouldn’t want to spend?

Ginny Gay 00:52:51  I completely agree

Suleika Jaouad 00:52:54  Mean, but I believe that you don’t have to find the silver lining. You don’t have to feel grateful for some terrible thing that has happened to you. But we can all find a small thing to love.

Ginny Gay 00:53:05  Yeah, because the beautiful and the terrible coexist. Yeah, right. But how powerful to hear, you know, you talk about it in that way. There’s another connection I want to make. There’s something else just really beautiful and rare. That I took from your book and I take from your story and connected to community, which is, you know, the community that you built in the hospital with the fellow patients that were suffering in their own cancer journeys.

Ginny Gay 00:53:29  But you all seem to connect with one another in the real messy pain of it all, in the most vulnerable and open way, and therefore found a closeness and connection with one another that seemed so sacred and so precious and so supportive to you all. I mean, you were in the hotel room in Vegas. I remember like that scene in your book when you’re talking about all of these things that are like, even at that point you hadn’t shared with one another, but then at that point decided to just how much closer that even brought you to one another. I mean, the way you then travel around the country, opening yourself up to connect your pain with the pain that those you visit have experienced, and then how you found your way forward, how they found their way forward. You know, the community you seem to have built for yourself is built on openness and honesty about your pain. It makes me think about Brene Brown and how she talks about like, you know, fitting in is not about like fitting yourself into some mold. It’s about showing up in who you are. Right. And finding the connection with whom there’s a fit.

Suleika Jaouad 00:54:26  You know, the irony is I’m a deeply guarded person. I’m not comfortable with vulnerability. I have to constantly overcome my own instinct to self protect in order to open myself up to, you know, cultivate relationships that are born of a kind of honest, deep sharing. In part because I know those are really the only kinds of relationships I’m interested in having and that feel worth having. But, you know, this crew of friends who I befriended, there were ten of us. Only three of us are still alive. And, you know, my impulse after that was to never befriend someone who was sick because I couldn’t bear, you know, the thought of losing a beloved again. And yet, you know, my favorite moments in my life have been shared with that group of people. And they really taught me what friendship meant. And I would suffer that loss and that grief and that heartache over and over and over again to just get one day with them.

Suleika Jaouad 00:55:33  But I remember, you know, early on and my friendship with this group of people, they were all in their 20s and early 30s, and we had all been in treatment for quite a long time, to the point that we were going to, you know, chemotherapy by ourselves and trying to do things a little more independently. And we formed a buddy system together. We would accompany each other to radiation. We would answer phone calls in the middle of the night when the panic attack struck. We always showed up when there was bad news, and there was this shared sense of understanding that went beyond the strange twist and fate and malignant cells that had yoked us together. But that was really grounded in something deeper, which was a desire to, like we said earlier, not just survive, but to make as rich and as beautiful and as fun of a life as we could. Even within the fluorescence of the hospital and one of the young women in that group of friends, her name was Anjali and she had no one.

Suleika Jaouad 00:56:34  She was an orphan. Her only sibling she reached out to as a potential bone marrow donor, and he never returned her calls. She was an immigrant. She had had a really hard life and she, unlike me, you know, after her first bone marrow transplant, learned that it hadn’t worked. And she had a few short months to live. And I’ll never forget that last week in the hospice ward at Bellevue Hospital, because she was there and all of us were with her and our varying stages of baldness. And a hospice nurse turned to me and said, I’ve never seen anything like this before. I’ve never seen a patient who is surrounded by fellow patients in their final moments. And to me, you know, that’s what friendship is. It’s, you know, the moment of accountability that all relationships arc toward, which is how we show up in the midst of the hardest things. And they taught me that in spades over and over again, that even when our instinct is to self protect or to shy away from something that might break your heart, it’s always worth it to move through that and to be the person that shows up.

Suleika Jaouad 00:57:51  And it’s an honor to grieve. And I’m not the first person who said this. And it might be a cliche, but I think it’s a true one, which is that grief is a measure of how deeply we’ve loved.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:02  Yeah. And for someone who describes herself as not naturally good at connecting with people. You have done an extraordinary job. If we had more time, I would like to have a whole interview about how you have done it, because it’s remarkable with the cancer patients, with the people across the country, with fellow writers like you really do have a knack of nurturing community. So even though you may not think you’re good at it from an outside perspective, you clearly are. You know, you clearly have figured that out to some degree.

Suleika Jaouad 00:58:35  It’s a muscle I’ve had to exercise.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:38  When you were just describing the group of the cancer patients, it sort of reminded me of my early days in recovery from heroin addiction. There’s a similar camaraderie of people, you know, who are facing not quite as dire a prognosis, but being a homeless heroin addicts, a fairly dire place, let’s say.

Suleika Jaouad 00:58:58    It’s as dire.As the stakes are life or death.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:00  And when they are like that, there is a closeness that emerges. And there are times that I miss those early days of that because there was something so elemental, you know, and just visceral about those connections.

Suleika Jaouad 00:59:15  And I think those moments, you know, you’re brought down to your most savage self. You know, all the varnish has been stripped away. And vulnerability isn’t really a choice when you’re in that place. Yeah, yeah. Whether you want to be or you don’t. That’s what’s happening.

Ginny Gay 00:59:35  Yeah. I love how you talk about the role of ritual when life feels so sort of out of control, and you’re in the messy middle and and the uncertain and the dark hallway that sometimes there is sort of a lifeline we can grab on to, to help pull us to the other side. I don’t know if that’s the right way to language it or not, but you say so. These rites of passage allow us to migrate from one phase of our lives to another. They keep us from getting lost in transit. They show us a way to honor the space between no longer and not yet. But I have no predetermined rituals. These are mine to create. Does the role of rituals still show up in your life, and how so?

Suleika Jaouad 01:00:13  Absolutely. And I have different rituals depending on the week, depending on the month. Ritual is hugely important to me. It creates a sort of sacred container. When you are living in a liminal space. When you are in transition, I mean, we have all kinds of rites of passage in our culture. We have funerals, we have baby showers, we have weddings, and they mark these important transitional moments. And I think the reason that we have so many of them is because, first of all, they invoke community, right? Often these things happen with at least 1 or 2 other humans, if not many more than that. But they also force us to acknowledge the transition, which is what we’ve been talking about.

Suleika Jaouad 01:01:04  To honor what was and to honor what’s to come, even if it’s unclear what that might look like. And so I have all kinds of rituals. I did another 100 day project when I was recovering from my last bone marrow transplant, and this one for me was around painting. I started painting my own kind of Frida inspired, very surreal, fever dream esque self-portraits when I was in the hospital, and I found a kind of language in watercolor that I couldn’t express myself in any other way. And Melissa, my friend, one of my cancer comrades who’s no longer with us, was an incredible watercolor artist, and she used to always say, I love watercolor because it’s messy and you can’t control it like life. And so that has been my ritual. I make watercolors every day. I have no idea if they’re any good and they don’t really care. But that’s the kind of metaphor that I get to embody on a daily basis that helps orient me, that helps me accept what I can’t control, that helps me live in the mess.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:20  As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at oneyoufeed.net/sms No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. 

Eric Zimmer 01:02:55  Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Thank you so much.

 I know it’s a cliche, but you are inspiring.

Ginny Gay 01:02:57  Well, I have just learned so much from you in this last hour or so. I’ve learned so much from reading your book, and it’s inspired in me the intention to be brave when I feel fear or pain within my life, to be intentional about how I want to move forward. And so I just really appreciate it.

Suleika Jaouad 01:03:19   Thank you both. This has been such an honor.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:21  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:

Shane Parrish 00:00:00  Your territory is sort of mental. It’s your perception of yourself. And then your ego kicks in and your emotion kicks in, and then you respond. And when you respond in that moment, you’re responding without reasoning. And the minute you respond without reasoning, you’re no better than an animal. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t.

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

Eric Zimmer 00:01:08  Shane Parrish says he asks his kids a simple question when they start fighting. Are you pouring gasoline on the situation or water? I love that question because it’s a version of my idea of not making things worse. And when we do make things worse, they can escalate really fast. In this conversation, Shane and I talk about clear thinking, emotional reactions, and the ordinary moments that shape the direction of our lives. We talk about how ego gets involved, why we double down when we know we shouldn’t, and how a small pause can sometimes keep a tiny moment from turning into a very big problem. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Parrish 00:01:50  Hey, Eric, thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:51  I’m excited to have you on. I’ve been following your blog, Farnam Street, for a long time, and I was really excited when I heard you had a new book coming out, and I wanted to talk with you about it. It’s called Clear Thinking, Turning Ordinary moments into Extraordinary Results.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:06  But before we go into that, let’s start like we always do with the parable. 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 and they think about it for a second, and 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.

Shane Parrish 00:02:41  I love that parable. I had never actually heard it before until I listened to a couple episodes of this. I think there’s a tension between these two competing factors in us, and we choose which one we feed. But really what we’re doing is we’re telling ourselves the story.

Shane Parrish 00:02:58  That story. I believe that the most powerful story in the world is the one that we tell ourselves. And that story is also a choice. If we tell ourselves that we are a good person and we do good things, and we’re open to love and we’re vulnerable, and we have very little fear about, I think that we’re choosing to live a very different life than if we give up, and we get up and we tell ourselves another story, and those stories just have the power to come true. Right. Not the positive ones, but definitely the negative ones. Like telling yourself a good story doesn’t mean you’re going to get a good result or good outcome, but telling yourself a negative story almost virtually ensures that you’re going to get a bad outcome. Yeah. And so often when I meet people, I find that they’re just stuck in the story. It’s like, you’ve got this song on loop in your head in that story is powerful in terms of determining your behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:47  So one of the things that you are really good at is taking a rational position on things and really working with the best knowledge, having the most clear picture frame of reference.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:01  And I’m curious how that works for you with telling yourself a positive story when you feel like perhaps your fears are drawing on a lot of data that seems to make sense.

Shane Parrish 00:04:15  Well, like we have a book launch coming out right October 3rd. And as we were talking about it, to me, this is fear. This is, you know, there’s a part of me that is I feel like I’m getting naked in front of a million people, and I’m taking off all my clothes, and I’m exposed to the judgments and the criticisms and the tomatoes and all of these negative things. And then there’s another story I can tell myself, which is, you know, I’ve done research for 15 to 20 years on decision making, and I think I come at it in a unique perspective. And if I can come at it in a unique perspective in a way that I haven’t seen other people come at it. Maybe that’s helpful for somebody else like me. And maybe the act of writing that book, which for me was an act of reflection, an amalgamation of all of these thoughts over years.

Shane Parrish 00:05:05  Can I share that with other people? Am I willing to let the work be enough? Am I willing to just put the work out there? I know I’ve done the work. I know I’ve worked hard on this. I know all of the things that I control, I’ve done, and am I willing to be vulnerable and put it out in the world? And I think that that’s the life that I want my kids to live. In a way, they give me strength to do that, right? Because I know they’re watching, and that gives me a little bit more strength to tell myself a better story. And that story can become empowering. And I think in this case, it sort of allows me the courage to put that out in the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:42  Yeah. You know, the thing I often tell myself when it’s getting into these stories is that we don’t know the future, right? And since we don’t know the future. Why not use an empowering story, which is easier to say than do some of the time when when emotion runs really strong? But it certainly, you know, makes more sense if I’m making it up anyway right now because I don’t know, make it up in a way that is supportive of things turning out okay.

Shane Parrish 00:06:11  Yeah, I agree with that.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:13  You mentioned your kids a second ago, and one of the things that you wrote in the book, it was later in the book, but I loved it. And you said there’s two effective questions. I asked my kids to slow down and have them think one. Do you want to put water or gasoline on this situation? And two, is this behavior going to get you what you want? And I mean, those are great questions for us, not just for children but in general. And they seem to sum up a lot of what your book is about, in a way.

Shane Parrish 00:06:38  Yeah, I try to get them to just pause and think. I mean, we’re all animals. So biologically, you know, we share these tendencies with other animals. We’re hierarchical, we’re territorial, we’re self preserving. You know, we’re ritualistic. And so often what happens is we have these ordinary moments that lead to disastrous sort of outcomes. And I see it with my kids, right.

Shane Parrish 00:07:00  They start bickering and then it becomes this slow escalation. They’re about 14 months apart and one person will slight the other. And then before you know it, they’re nearly wrestling on the floor. And I was like, so frustrated with this. And I was like, they don’t know that they’re escalating. If they knew they were escalating. My theory was they would choose not to. And all the energy that they’re spending escalating with each other comes at the expense of things they want to do, whether it’s video games or homework or play with their friends or anything else. So all this energy is just being wasted. It’s this wasted energy and it’s kind of unproductive. And so I learned to start asking them, like, is this behavior going to get you closer or further away from what you want? And that was a really effective question. And then we sort of shortened it to like gas or water. Are you putting gasoline on this situation? Which means I’m escalating it and I’m not judging what they’re doing.

Shane Parrish 00:07:55  I’m just making them pause and reflect. So it’s not about me interjecting and saying, don’t do that. Because I find, you know, as they get older, that method of parenting, you switch to coaching. Yes. So my kids are now 13 and 14. So if I start with that, telling them what to do, that’s not very effective. But if I pause and say, hey, gas or water, then they can think for themselves and they can choose whether to move forward with what they’re doing, but now they’re more aware of the consequences. It’s like somebody I tap them on the shoulder and be like, you’re making a decision right now. Is this what you want to be doing? Yeah. And then they’re like, no, this isn’t what I want to be doing. And they come to that conclusion on their own, which I think is very powerful for them.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:35  You mentioned earlier that you believe you bring something interesting and new to decision making, and it’s one of the things I’ve always thought that there was a lot of content in your world about was decision making, but you make a really important point in this book, which is we’re taught to focus on the big decisions, rather than the moments where we don’t even realize we’re making a choice.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:56  Say more about that.

Shane Parrish 00:08:57  Yeah. So if you know you’re making a decision, we generally get it correct. So most books on decision making, most classes on decision making are all about being more rational, you know. And they’re not very practical. There’s spreadsheets. There’s sort of like decision trees. I’ve never really witnessed anybody fill all this out or do that. But what they’re really doing is they’re taking you out of the moment and they’re getting you to pause and think. But if you know, you should be pausing and thinking, we’re generally pretty good, we’re directionally correct. But a lot of the time, the things that get us into trouble, we don’t know that we’re making a decision. We don’t know the future of that decision. They’re these small tidbits, whether it’s celebrities going to court, battle with each other over statues in their yard. You can imagine being at home with your partner or your spouse. And you know what starts as emptying the dishwasher ends up into not speaking with each other.

Shane Parrish 00:09:52  And that’s that slow escalation again, in these ordinary moments. And what happens in these ordinary moments is we don’t know we’re making a decision. If somebody tops us on the shoulder and says, hey, gas or water, you’re going to pause and be like, no, I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want to derail my weekend because of a dishwasher incident. And all the energy that you’re spending on those moments comes at the expense of enjoying your weekend with your partner, or being on vacation or all of these things. And so my belief is that these ordinary moments actually accumulate into these advantages or disadvantages. And the advantages are, do people want to work with me and I hard to get along with? Do I do the little things right? And if I can do those little things right and I get these little moments right, I can put more of my energy into what matters, and I can spend less time sort of fixing these mistakes. Because if you think about why we’re so busy these days, we’re stressed, full of anxiety, and often what we’re doing is we’re fixing these little ordinary moments, these little lapses that we have in these moments.

Shane Parrish 00:10:54  Right? If you’re at at work and a colleague slights you and says something, you know, slightly derogatory, well, you’re biological, you’re instinctively become territorial. Your territory is not physical like maybe it is with a wolf, but your territory is sort of mental. It’s your perception of yourself. And then your ego kicks in and your emotion kicks in, and then you respond. And when you respond in that moment, you’re responding without reasoning. And the minute you respond without reasoning, you’re no better than an animal. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. But after that meeting, now you got to go make amends. You got to work with this person. But not only do I have to spend time repairing that relationship, I have to repair the relationship with everybody else in the room, because I just demonstrated that I might be difficult to work with, that people have to be careful what they say to me. They’re not going to tell me the truth. And all of these byproducts and those tend to consume so much of our time.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:48  It’s interesting, this idea of these little moments. I’ve shared this on the show before. Part of my backstory is I was a homeless heroin addict at 24, and there’s a moment where I made a decision to go into long term treatment. I was presented with the option to go. I originally said no. I had a moment of clarity and I said yes, and my life changed, right? And I’m always like, if you made the Hollywood version of my life, that would be the key scene, right? But that scene is only relevant because of the thousands and thousands of other decisions I’ve made since then to continue moving in that direction. And so it’s nice to look at these big moments, and there are moments where something significant happens. But as you point out, so much of our life is this slow accumulation of positive or negative.

Shane Parrish 00:12:35  Can we talk about that for a second? Sure, if you’re open to it, because I bet you the first time you did heroin, You didn’t wake up in the morning and go.

Shane Parrish 00:12:43  I’m going to do heroin. You were in an ordinary moment, and you made a choice. And that choice had a huge ramification on you later in life.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:50  Yeah. I mean, addiction was an accumulation, for sure. You know, like anybody else starts out like, I want to hang out with my friends and get high and increment upon increment upon increment that built until it was, you know, quite an edifice.

Shane Parrish 00:13:05  Once those moments accumulate, they’re really hard to undo, right. As you went through.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:09  Really hard to undo. And there’s the other thing that speaks to addiction. And also what you were talking about is that these things amplify each other. So the downward addiction spiral is at a certain juncture. You start to feel bad about yourself for what you’re doing. So you feel bad about yourself for what you’re doing. So you feel terrible. And the only way you know how to deal with feeling terrible is to get high, which then makes you feel worse about yourself for doing it.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:31  And it’s the downward spiral. And I think that in the decisions that you’re talking about, too, I do believe that you’re right, that if people can pause and think, they’ve got a better chance. But how often do we see people double down and double down? You know, they get out of that work meeting and instead of being like, oh, I made the mistake here, it’s like Bob was out of line, right? And they doubled down. On Bob being out of line. And the more they do that, the more they have to do it right. It amplifies it. And I think that’s often, you know, the dishwasher thing is, when a dishwasher leaves to fighting all night is often because there is an amplification of things that have been building.

Shane Parrish 00:14:08  Yeah. We’d rather feel right than be right. I use these little catchphrases with myself just as a reminder to encapsulate these ideas. It’s almost the compression of a big idea, and in this case, one of the things that I use with myself is outcome over ego.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:24  That’s a great.

Shane Parrish 00:14:25  One. Am I working towards the best outcome or am I working towards proving myself being right? And that when I think about proving myself being right, I’m on the wrong side of right? Yeah. And I used to do this all the time. I started at an intelligence agency and I was a programmer, and if I wasn’t, I was a knowledge worker. And if I wasn’t right, then what was I was worthless. Right. Because I’m hired to be right. I’m hired to do this job. I’m hired to know the answer. I’m hired to do all of these things. And I have all this self-worth and all this ego built up in that. And if I’m not right, what am I? And I noticed, you know, when I started working for myself, I was spending so much time trying to prove myself right. I’m looking for esoteric facts that back up my ideas. I’m trying to prove other people wrong. And all of a sudden when I’m working for myself, I’m like, I just really want the best outcome.

Shane Parrish 00:15:13  I don’t care whose idea it is, because all of a sudden I’m invested and my investment is in the outcome and it’s not in me as a person. It’s not in my ego. And I think that that little phrase, that little compression of an idea is very powerful to remind ourselves with.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:29  Yeah, I love that phrase in your book, The Wrong Side of Right. There’s a great phrase, and I heard it and I was like, that is exactly it. Like in recovery, we used a phrase all the time. It’s a corollary. It’s not quite the same thing, but it was. Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy? Yes. You know, you had to look a lot at the time and be like, well, okay, which is it I want to be? Do I want to be right or do I want to be happy? And oftentimes, the desire to insist that I’m right is going to make me unhappy, because it’s going to make someone else be wrong in my life.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:59  And who wants that? You know, and that’s where egos dig in and the battle deepens.

Shane Parrish 00:16:04  When we have these moments, when we dig in, when we entrench, we’re not thinking right. We’re just responding. Yeah. And our emotions are in charge. Our ego is in charge, our biology is in charge. And I think that’s normal and natural, right? We are animals. At the end of the day, we have these animal tendencies, these animal instincts. What separates humans is our ability to push the clutch, to interrupt stimulus and response for just a second and in that moment. Reason instead of react.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:37  How do you think about emotion and reasoning? And this question is going to take a little bit longer to ask than I might like, but I’ll get there, because one of the things that we know from looking at various studies of different people is if you take somebody in you more or less, they lose the emotion in their brain. They become incapable of making decisions. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:58  So emotion is playing a role in decision making, right? And it does tell us something to do about what’s important to us, what matters to us. So how do you avoid getting into sort of a binary where it’s like it can’t be emotional? I have to be rational, right. How do you think about that? Because I agree with you that the ability to pause and look at the emotions and see what they are and then choose a response is incredibly important. Some people do that at the expense of having any emotion, right? They try and squelch their emotion, which has all sorts of other challenges. So how do you think about that?

Shane Parrish 00:17:35  I think it goes back to almost the opening of this episode. Right. Where are your emotions in charge? Were you in charge of your emotions? I’m not advocating an approach where you’re not emotional and you’re robotic. You know, I’m just advocating an approach. Where am I making decisions? Are my emotions making my decisions, or am I making my decisions? Yeah.

Shane Parrish 00:17:56  And if the answer is my emotions, then that’s fine. But that’s probably not going to get me the outcome that I want. And if I’m making decisions fully aware of those emotions, I can feel those emotions, I can have those emotions. But often if you feel emotional and you can opt out for a second in opting out of that second, you can make that decision later. You don’t have to make it when you’re emotional. You can walk away. If you look at athletes. Athletes have to perform. They have a time frame involved in their performance and they get emotional just like the rest of us. So what do they do? They have rituals built into their game. If you watch any NBA player, they bounce the ball the same number of times before they shoot a free throw. If you watch a tennis player, they bounce the ball the same number of times before they serve and what they’re doing in that moment. And I’ve talked to a lot of head coaches about this. What’s happening is whether the last play was the best play of their life, the worst play, whether the ref was totally unfair to them or fair to them doesn’t matter.

Shane Parrish 00:19:00  What matters is this. I’m going to center myself and I’m going to focus, and that’s what we need to do. If we’re forced to make decisions when we’re emotional, we need to take a breath. We need to pause. We need to center ourself. We need to use a powerful method of doing that, which is ritual.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:15  So give me some examples of other types of rituals that might help us manage emotion. I mean, the term that I like is emotional regulation, right? It’s the ability to regulate my emotions and to to your point, not let them be in charge. Let them do what they need to do, and learn what I can learn from them and feel what I feel. But there is a time and a place and a degree to all of this. So what are some things for you when you’re feeling really emotional, that ritual wise, that allow you to take the temperature down a little bit?

Shane Parrish 00:19:48  Well, so one thing I do is like after meetings, I have a ritual where I just sort of compress the meeting into what’s happened, how am I feeling? And it’s that compression that dampens that emotion because it allows me to feel that emotion.

Shane Parrish 00:20:00  And I usually do that when I’m walking to my next meeting or when I’m logging on to the next meeting. So it doesn’t have to be this big ten minute thing, because it just can be this. Okay, I’m feeling this. I should have said this, I should have done that. And I can just sort of compress that meeting into these, these sort of ideas. Another one that I use that is really effective for me personally is just in the mornings taking five, ten minutes, whether I’m sitting in a hot tub or whether I’m going for a walk or whatever I’m doing, and I’m just breathing and I’m focusing on my breath, and I’m centering myself on the day. I’m trying to forget about everything from yesterday. I’m trying to just put myself in the here and now. But I think rituals are very individualistic, and I think it’s important that we come up with our own rituals. I’ve seen powerful rituals around people taking a breath before speaking, and in that pause, that moment, they just sort of ask themselves, how am I feeling? You need a lot of discipline to start the rituals, but once the rituals sort of take hold, rituals become this powerful force where you turn your desired behavior into your default behavior.

Shane Parrish 00:21:04  And I’ve used this with kids and homework. My kids. Right. So every day after school, starting in grade seven, they would come home, they would shower, they would sit down, and they would do their homework. And every day it was a fight for about two months. And then all of a sudden I didn’t have to say anything. And they still do it. Now, two years later, they come home, the shower, they sit down, they do their homework, and they start working on the stuff they need to do because that becomes their ritual around getting home. But it’s also very grounding for them, because I’ve noticed on days where we don’t do that, where we have an errand to run or an appointment, they’re sort of like out of sorts, right? It’s like my ritual has been interrupted and they become a little bit more emotional, which is really interesting because that’s their method of decompressing the school day. Now.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:09  You say each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:14  It’s that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder. Talk to me about what you mean by positioning.

Shane Parrish 00:22:21  Yeah. Putting yourself in the right position is so important, and it’s a key element to sort of clear thinking. Right. So one of the most beneficial skills in life is learning to put yourself in a good position. And think about it this way. When you’re in a good position, all of your options available are great. And when you’re in a bad position, you need like a Hail Mary, right? You’re like praying for something to work out. You have no good options. And if you put Warren Buffett in a consistently bad position, he’s going to look very average. But what he does, and this is sort of where this idea came from, is he’s constantly in a good position. And so a good position means you’re never forced by circumstances to do something you don’t want to do. So if we take this and we apply it to decision making, well, how does that impact you? Well, all the stuff that we learn about decision making is how to be rational, how to make the best choice in the moment.

Shane Parrish 00:23:15  But if your choices are all bad, it doesn’t matter that you pick the best of the bad choices, right? You don’t want to be in a bad way. Avoid this situation? I don’t put myself in a position where I’m consistently making good decisions, and often the people who are right a lot are just people. They’re not predicting what the future is. They’re positioning themselves for multiple possible futures. And it’s such a powerful sort of concept. Right. So we talked about Buffett. We talked about a more practical example, maybe with my kids is what it means to do your best. Right. Parents are listening. You have kids. Your kids come home, they have a bad score on their test. And they said, I did my best. And what they mean in that moment was I did my best in the hour that I sat down for my test. What they don’t mean is that they put themselves in a position to be successful. And so I’ve defined this with my kids. As you know, you are in a position for success before you even take the test.

Shane Parrish 00:24:16  It’s the moment when you sit down. Have I done all the things I control You think about Tom Brady or another athlete, you know. They put themselves in a position all week. They do the work. They eat healthy. They sleep, they practice. Well, for my kids it’s the same thing, right? Did I study? Did I work hard? Am I in an argument with my brother? Am I eating healthy? Am I sleeping well? And we do this in life, right? I might not know what my next job is. I might not know what the next sort of level of my career path is, but I know, hey, there’s probably some skills that I can go out today and get in advance. I can put myself in a position. So if the opportunity ever comes, I can take advantage of it or think about it this way, if you like investing and the Acme Brick Co is the the number one brick company in your community and you’re really interested in this.

Shane Parrish 00:25:11  And you know, it’s always just been too expensive. And then one day the owner knocks on your door and he’s like, I’ll sell it to you for two times earnings. And you’re like this, the bargain of a lifetime. But you go to your bank account and you have no money, so you might make the right decision, but you’re not in a position to take advantage of it. So you’re going to get the same outcome as if you made a bad decision almost. You want to put yourself in a position where you’re you’re not predicting what’s going to happen in the future. But no matter what happens in the future, you’re always going to look right, because you just pivot and change with the environment, and you’re never forced by circumstances into doing something that you don’t want to do. And I think if you look at all the sort of like greats or titans of decision making, if you want to call them that, the people who just generally consistently make good decisions, they’re never forced by circumstances to do something they don’t want to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:04  Yeah. And I think, you know, for a lot of people hearing that, I think the response might be, well, I’ve already sort of got myself into a less than optimal position here. Right, right. And so what do I do with that. Because I am not in a good position. Where do we start working from there?

Shane Parrish 00:26:22  You have to start where you’re at, right? You have to start in the position that you’re currently in. But if you think about every moment as strengthening or weakening your position, yes, your rate of improvement matters more than where you are in the current moment. How do I accelerate my rate of improvement? Stop the decline. How do I improve? And for everybody, that’s going to be different. You might be paying off your credit card bills. It might be, you know, downsizing your house and it might be saving more money. It might. All of these different things add to your position and you know which areas of your position. You probably feel weakest because they’re the ones you want to avoid talking about.

Shane Parrish 00:27:01  They’re the ones you probably feel a little bit of shame around. If you’re having a hard time visualizing where you might be ill positioned. Imagine like a camera crew following you around all day documenting your success? Well, what would you not want them to see? And that might be a good angle for, oh, how can I improve my position? Right? It might be your lazy getting out of bed in the morning, and a way to improve your position and start to learn something new in that one hour, instead of that film crew watching you lay and roll around in bed on your phone for an hour and a half before you get out of bed, it’s all of a sudden you’re getting up, you’re learning something new, you’re challenging yourself, or maybe you’re just going for a walk. I think that there’s always something we can do to better our position. There’s never a moment where I don’t think and do that. And that’s not to say it should dictate your entire life either. But yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:46  Yeah, yeah, that tends to be a pretty foundational belief of mine, which is that there’s always a move towards the better. It may not be as big a move as you would want. The distance to travel may seem insurmountable, but there’s always a move that is towards the better position. And back to that question you ask your kids, right? Is this going to get you what you want? Am I doing something today that’s improving? You know, there’s always something, some small step, whether you’re in the deep depths of depression or addiction, or you’re at the very top of your industry, right? I mean, I think that’s true for all of us.

Shane Parrish 00:28:22  When you were saying that, the thing that came to mind for me was one of the reasons we have trouble improving our position is because we want it improved now.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:32  Yes.

Shane Parrish 00:28:32  And it’s the same element of human nature that exists everywhere. I have another one of those little catch phrases I use in these moments, which is a lack of patience changes the outcome.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:46  A lack of patience.

Shane Parrish 00:28:48  Changes the outcome by wanting something faster than naturally. Like we often know how to accomplish the things we want to accomplish, but they take longer than we would like, or we’re starting later in life than we would like. And so what we seek in these moments is like, I’m behind, we feel behind. It’s an unconscious feeling and we want to catch up. So if you’re you’re out of position, you want to catch up? What are you going to do? You’re going to chase secrets. You’re going to chase hacks. You’re going to chase quick fixes. Because you want to get there rapidly. You want the real estate course that’s going to make you a success. You buy all these products and you never seem to go anywhere because you’re avoiding the work of doing what you need to do to improve your position, which is going to take time. It’s going to take energy, and you’re going to get your knees scraped. And that’s just part of the process. And you have to learn to invest in that process and know that it’s going to take time and take pleasure in the fact that every day you’re improving your position.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:52  Yep. You say the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason, or you can cede control and execute a default behavior. The problem is our default behavior often makes things worse. Let’s talk about what is a default behavior. And then we can explore the four default behaviors that you lay out in the book. I mean, there’s certainly more of them, but but I think you’ve done a nice job of sort of capturing the big hitters.

Shane Parrish 00:30:17  So examples of default behaviors are emotion is in charge. And we’ve talked about this. It could be fear. It could be something else. Another example is ego right. We’re often making decisions. We’re on the wrong side of right. We just want to be right. It’s not anything that we’re doing. It’s just sort of who we are as a person. They’re social. Right? There’s a social default, which is when we blindly sort of conform to the group norms or the expectations. And inertia is such a powerful one.

Shane Parrish 00:30:50  We’re habit forming. We’re comfort seeking. The habits that served us years ago may no longer serve us, and we want to resist those changes. And these defaults are really powerful, and they cause us to sort of stay in place if they’re making the decisions for us instead of us making the decisions.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:08  Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about each of those, because there’s a lot to unpack there. I’m going to jump to the ego default for a second and see if you could tell us a story about Mr. Rolex. I think that’s where it came in the book under ego default.

Shane Parrish 00:31:22  If I remember correctly, because I wrote the book a couple of years ago, that was the that when I was a cashier and this guy would come in and he would just be right. Everybody, he would just be like, better than everybody else, right? He illegally park. He’d come in. He was very flashy. He’s like that stereotypical person that irritates us all. And one day he said to me, This Rolex doesn’t pay for itself.

Shane Parrish 00:31:46  Hurry the fuck up. I don’t know if I can swear on here. Hurry up.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:50  Man. It’s done now. No, I’m just kidding. Go right.

Shane Parrish 00:31:53  Ahead. And I responded, right. Like. Cause I’m like, who is this guy to tell me to do this and said something? You know, in the moment that I wasn’t thinking at all, I was just responding. I’m like, you’re not better than me. This isn’t right. And on the way home that night. You know, he’s got his ego. I’ve got my ego. If we’re talking on the level of ego. I mean, we’re just not going to go anywhere. I’m not going to get what I want. I’m not getting closer to what I want. Which was a paycheck at the time to pay for university. He’s not getting what he wants, which is faster service. And, you know, to be treated like the way that he wanted to be treated. Nobody wins. Like there’s no outcome here that’s positive.

Shane Parrish 00:32:32  Right? Walking home that night, I sort of rationalized this because we are hierarchical. And I reorganized the world in a way where I came out on top of him and I have a job anymore, but at least I’m not an asshole. And so I felt better about myself. And we often do this right. We do this in everyday moments where we we tell ourselves these stories, and these stories are sort of like, at least I’m not. I’m better than at least I didn’t do this. I really didn’t want that. And these stories aren’t true. They’re just us protecting that very vulnerable part of us that is sort of. Yeah, maybe it is. There’s an element of truth to all of this, which is why we can believe the stories we tell ourselves. But at the end of the day again, are we moving towards or farther away from the outcome that we want to get? Can we wrap our ego instead of wrapping our ego into our self-identity and our territory about ourselves? Can we wrap our ego into an outcome? And if we can wrap that ego into an outcome, I think we’re going to get a lot farther in life.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:29  I love that story because, as you said, I’m walking home and I think at least I’m not like him. I’m better than him. You know, and you say, in that moment I rearrange the world in such a way that I, the newly unemployed high school student without a car or a lavish wristwatch, came out on top. And what I just love about that is that’s what we all do. Yeah, right. We all, if we’re not careful, we rearrange the world in such a way that we are right. And you may do deep search on your values and be like, that’s not the kind of person I want to be. And, you know, like, that’s different. Totally. Than the ego response of this doesn’t feel good. So I’m going to make myself better than you. You know. And boy, do we do that a lot.

Shane Parrish 00:34:11  All the time. It’s so crazy. It happens with promotions. It happens with dating. It happens in every element of our life.

Shane Parrish 00:34:18  We tell ourselves a story that we’re right, that we’re a good person, that we did the right thing, that we thought about it right. That it just worked out that way by chance, or they didn’t deserve it because they’re not a nice person, but we’re a nice person, and we just unconsciously do this all the time. And I think it’s sort of like it’s self-defeating because it takes us away from, again, are we getting closer or farther away from what we want to achieve?

Eric Zimmer 00:34:44  Yeah. You sort of talk about how complaining just is us arguing with the way the world is, which is usually a losing strategy.

Shane Parrish 00:34:53  Yeah, I remember I think maybe the story you’re referring to is I went to my mentor, I didn’t get a promotion. And I said, well, you know, I justified it in a very similar way to what we’re talking about right now. And he’s like, you’re just arguing with reality. Like, this is happening, right? This isn’t a strategy. This isn’t effective.

Shane Parrish 00:35:10  It’s not moving you closer to what you want to get. You just have to deal with it. And the longer you’re arguing with it, the more you’re putting off dealing with it. And, you know, often we just don’t deal with it at all because by the time we’ve we’ve maybe like toned down our emotions a little bit, we’ve come to realize that we might have had a contribution to this whole thing playing out the way that it did, including me. I mean, my contribution was escalating at the grocery store, right? Like, I totally yep, I had a contribution there, but I couldn’t see my contribution because my ego and my emotions are in charge. And by the time that those sort of like dissipate and I felt them and I can see the situation more clearly for what it was. Well, now I’ve moved on to the next story I’m telling myself. So I never really go back and sort of adjust to reality.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:09  Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:20  But I had a persistent feeling of I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call this still point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago. So you don’t have to stumble towards an answer that something is now here and it’s called overwhelm is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have, taking less than ten minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:21  Go to one. You feel overwhelmed. That’s one you feed. Overwhelm. As we’re talking, I’m thinking often about in my own life where my emotions do overwhelm me and I don’t act the way that I want to act, you know? And I’m thinking about how even after the fact, we can still pause, we can still reflect, and we can go try and fix. You know, like, I’ll sometimes just say to my partner, Jenny, like, that was not the me I want to be to you Like I was upset. And so the me that came out is not the me that I want to be. Here’s who I want to be. Here’s my intention. I fell short this time. I’m going to keep trying to do better, you know, and that ability, even after we’ve become overwhelmed. Right. Because we’re describing here a high level of emotional maturity and regulation where you always pause, you’re always able to stop doing the difficult thing. And for many, many people, that’s not the case.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:26  But just even if that happens, there’s still room for repair, there’s still room for reflection, and there’s still room to change our position. To use your terminology.

Shane Parrish 00:38:37  That is a very interesting angle to positioning, right? Because it makes your relationship better, makes it stronger, and it means that you’re open to sort of being right in a different way. Right? It means you’re open to getting a better outcome. You’re open to. It doesn’t have to be me. That’s right. All the time. Yeah. And not only does that make you more vulnerable, it makes her more vulnerable. And it makes your relationship more vulnerable and more powerful. And it makes it stronger. So we talk about unexpected events. You can’t predict the future, but if your relationship is stronger, you can withstand a lot more possible futures. And I think that’s a brilliant sort of example. I do this with my kids too, right? Like, it takes a lot of courage to go in and apologize to your kids.

Shane Parrish 00:39:22  Or at least it does for me. Yeah. You know, but I’m like, I’m trying to model this behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:26  Exactly.

Shane Parrish 00:39:27  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:28  I mean, and there’s no task that I have found in my life that more frequently pushed me up against my limits of what I was able to handle than being a parent. Right. I was like, this test just seems like it was designed to make me fail. You know, I think good parents are able to go in and say, I made a mistake. I didn’t handle that right because a it repairs the relationship. But to your point, even more importantly, it models like, okay, I’m not always right. I make mistakes. And when I do, here’s how I handle it. Because you’re going to make a ton of them, too.

Shane Parrish 00:39:58  Yeah. And back to your earlier point, right? It’s not about being perfect in every moment. It’s really just about getting better and learning to recognize what you’re doing to your position. Learning to recognize if you’re moving in the right direction.

Shane Parrish 00:40:11  Learning to recognize if circumstances are deciding for you or you’re in charge, and the recognition of those things. I don’t have to tell you what to do in those moments. Once you start to recognize them, you know what you want to do. You just can’t see it because your perspective is like blinders right in this moment. You can’t see the broad perspective. Just like if I look back on my 16 year old self and I did things that were pretty stupid, but my 70 year old self is going to look back on my 40 year old self now and be like, you did things that were pretty stupid too. And what that is, is it’s just a different perspective. I don’t have the perspective of a 70 year old. And in those moments, what’s happening is just that horse, right? We got the blinders on and our perspective in that moment. It’s just not what it needs to be. We need to widen it a little bit, and by widening it, we can actually see what to do, right? We’re just blind to what we need to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:04  Yep. What are some ways of working with the inertia default? Because that is a really big one. Like you said, we are wired to seek comfort. We are wired to be like, well, this is doing all right. I mean, you talk about the zone of average being a dangerous place. You know, it’s the point where things are working well enough that we don’t feel the need to make any changes. And I have found myself there many times where I’m like, well, this is pretty good. It’s not great. Could be better, but I’m just getting through the day. I don’t know, I’ve got a lot left to continue to break this inertia.

Shane Parrish 00:41:36  Well, one of the ways that I like to think about this is to take a step back. And instead of framing this as inertia, let’s frame it as like pre deciding and automatic rules. Let’s create our own inertia where our desired behavior becomes our default behavior. And so we’re taught to follow rules from a very early age.

Shane Parrish 00:41:59  We don’t question though, we just follow them. However, we’ve never thought about how we can turn them around and use rules to our advantage. Use rules on ourselves, right? We can create our own rules, and our own rules become this sort of inertia that counterbalances groupthink. Maybe it counterbalances sort of like the social angle of this too. And so like, let’s say, for example, you want to lose weight. And most people sort of tackle this with willpower. However, eventually we all lose the battle with willpower. If you’re out with friends and they’re drinking and they’re having, you know, an unhealthy meal and ordering dessert, and you tell them in that moment I’m watching what I eat, well, they’re going to nudge you. Oh, you know what? Just just have a drink tonight. Just have some dessert tonight. You can go do that tomorrow. But tonight you deserve a break. And that’s often how they phrase it. You deserve a break and you’ll believe them and you’ll do it.

Shane Parrish 00:42:56  And that takes you farther away from the place that you’ve identified you wanted to go. But if you have a rule and I got this from Daniel Kahneman when I was talking to him in New York in his house, if you have a rule, you don’t argue with it. But not only do you not argue with it, other people don’t argue with it. So our tendency to follow rules can work for us and create this positive inertia, where we just create a rule, we decide before we’re in the moment. My rule is I don’t need dessert. You don’t argue with yourself. You’re not negotiating with yourself. You pre decided before you’re in the situation what’s going to happen. And that negotiation with yourself is super important because that negotiation is where you start telling yourself stories. I’ll just opt out this one time. The contract is done, man. Your friends won’t argue with it either. If your rule is you don’t need dessert, you’re not going to eat dessert. And so another one of like my positive inertia or automatic rules that I have is that I work out every day.

Shane Parrish 00:43:52  I don’t have any days off. I don’t take any days off. And why? Because I find it easier to work out seven days a week, 365 days a year than two days a week or three days a week. Because when I work out 2 or 3 days a week, I don’t get the consistency. I don’t get the inertia going for me. And now I start negotiating with myself. I’m not going to work. I don’t feel like working out.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:13  I can do it tomorrow and still do it three times in this week.

Shane Parrish 00:44:17  Yep, yes. And that’s what I used to tell myself. Like, these stories were crazy because it’s like, I’ll do extra tomorrow. I don’t feel like it today. Well, if you don’t feel like it today, you’re not going to feel like it tomorrow. Yeah, the contract is done. You don’t negotiate. You create positive inertia around the desired behaviors that you want, and then you just stick to the plan.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:36  One of the things we know about habit creation, right, is that habits tend to need a stable context in which to really form meaning if your context is always shifting, it’s much harder to create an automatic behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:52  So, you know, I’ve done a lot of coaching work with people over the years on positive habit formation, and what I found is those hard and fast rules work in situations where life is kind of predictable, but when life is really unpredictable, there’s a degree of flexibility that is needed in order to not fall into all or nothing thinking. Make a mistake and give up. You travel, I imagine, a fair amount for work, you know? How do you handle traveling? Or if a kid is sick or I work out every day, but there are going to be times where something perhaps overtakes that gets in the way. You know, a lot of people I know tend to be like, well, if I do it perfect, I’ll keep doing it. But if I don’t do it perfect, I’m done. And so I’m kind of curious how you think about that in your own life.

Shane Parrish 00:45:39  So to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, James Claire, never miss twice. Yep. And so I think, you know, the second time you miss is the start of a pattern the first time.

Shane Parrish 00:45:51  I mean, life happens. Right. Again, it’s not about being perfect. If you hold yourself to this perfect standard, you’re always going to be perpetually dissatisfied with yourself. You’re never going to be happy. It’s not about that at all. I mean, rules is a catchy phrase, and rules is the great way to think about, but they’re more like principles. And there’s a saying that a friend of mine has, which is the young man knows the rules, the old man knows the exceptions. And I think that that is never more resonant than it is in these moments. Right. Like, it’s not about holding yourself to this impossible standard. It’s about adjusting to life and positioning yourself where you can adjust to life.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:29  Yeah, you’ve got a line that I really like that I highlighted, which you said, as simple as they seem, automatic rules for common situations get results. And I think that word right there, that common situation is the thing, right. Like we can make rules that apply the vast majority of the time to situations that we encounter again and again and again when we’re in uncommon situations, is when we need to have the cognitive flexibility to really say, all right, what’s the right response? What do I do here? You know.

Shane Parrish 00:46:56  There’s an element of common sense here, right? If your rule is I don’t need dessert, but you’re at your wedding and your partner or your spouse is like feeding you cake and you say, hey, I don’t eat dessert. Well, you know, I don’t think that’s the situation where you want to apply that. Yeah, you’ve got to be smarter than that.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:11  Yeah, well, it is true, though. Like being a recovering alcoholic and addict, I often say there’s a beautiful clarity to zero. Yes. You know, like, I’m not having to debate, is it? Okay. What’s a special occasion? What’s not a special occasion? Like, for me it’s really simple. Now most of life is hard to get to be that crystal clear. Simple. But the more often the principle holds again, the vast majority of the time the far easier life is.

Shane Parrish 00:47:38  It doesn’t also have to work forever, right? It can work to change your inertia, to change your behavior, and then you can go to more flexibility.

Shane Parrish 00:47:47  Yeah, right. If you work out every day for a year, it doesn’t mean you have to work out every day for ten years. But if you work out every day for a year, I guarantee you it’s going to change your trajectory.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:57  Yeah, that’s a great way to think about it and say it, because I don’t really set exactly how much I’m going to work out each week, but I have been pretty consistent for about a decade now where I am close to every day. And so I don’t have to sweat it if I miss a day or two because it’s an in-built pattern. You know, I try and move my body in a way every day. Same thing with meditation for a long time. It’s like once I got very consistent, I didn’t have to worry about it being exactly every day because again, the momentum was moving in the right direction. But again, that can change, whereas all of a sudden it’s like, well, the momentum was moving in the right direction. Now the momentum is petered off.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:38  Now I need to go back to being a little bit more firm and clear and, you know, drive the ambiguity out of this. And then as the momentum picks back up, I can sort of take my hands off the reins a little bit more.

Shane Parrish 00:48:51  I think one of the most powerful ways to talk to yourself in those moments is I chose not to, because.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:00  Yes, yes.

Shane Parrish 00:49:02  Circumstances did not force me to. Yes, I chose not to because I was at my son or daughter’s X-ray. I was incapable of getting out of bed. I was whatever, I would not take that power away from you, because that power is what enables you to do the things that you want to do, and that power is what enables you to not be a victim. And that power gives you control over your position, over your actions, over your choices, over your words.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:35  Yeah, absolutely. I would say to clients like, you can choose not to exercise next week while you’re on vacation. That is a perfectly fine choice to say I just want to be with my family.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:44  I don’t want to mess with it. Like, you can make that choice, but choose it.

Shane Parrish 00:49:49  Yeah, don’t tell yourself you couldn’t do it because you’re on vacation. No, you chose not to do it because you’re on vacation.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:54  Be conscious about what you’re going to do when and when you’re not doing something. Think about why you’re making that choice. I’m choosing to do something else because it’s more important to me right now versus letting the default be. I just slid back into an old pattern.

Shane Parrish 00:50:10  Totally.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:11  So you have a line in the book that says, show me your role models and I’ll show you your future. And you talk a lot about, you know, having exemplars in life. And I thought we could talk a little bit about that. Why that’s important, how you go about choosing people, what sort of person you do and don’t choose. You know how you filter your decisions through those lens. Talk to me a little bit about that idea.

Shane Parrish 00:50:34  We’re all born with exemplars, right? But we don’t control them.

Shane Parrish 00:50:39  Our parents, our environment. Our teachers. We’re surrounded by these people who create rules around society for us that demonstrate effective or ineffective behaviors that model how to talk to each other. We learn unconsciously all of these things. And there comes a point where you become an adult and you know, it could be 14. For some people, it could be 25 for some people. But when you take control of your destiny and the best thing you can do when you take control of your destiny, if you were unlucky and you didn’t have exceptional exemplars in your life, which most people don’t, is work for somebody exceptional. And if you can’t work for somebody exceptional. We live in this era, this great internet era where you can go online and you can learn directly from exceptional people and whatever your domain, whatever your field, whatever your interest is. And those people can model how to behave, and they can model how to behave in different situations. And when you’re reading books, you can create this repository in your head.

Shane Parrish 00:51:44  How did this person handle this situation? I don’t have to figure everything out the first time I’ve done it, I can. Oh well, this person did this in this situation and it’s not exactly the same. But now I have a starting point. So exemplars can give you a starting point. And also going back to what we talked about having blinders on. If you think like I do, that the source of all bad decisions is basically blind spots. We’re blind to our emotion or ego and how that’s affecting us. We’re blind to the outcomes. If we can change our perspective, we’re going to remove some of our blind spots. One really effective way to change your perspective is to adapt the persona of somebody you admire. If you admire Warren Buffett, what would Warren Buffett do in a situation like this? And you consciously try to think like that person. You want to see the world the way that they see it. You want to smell it the way that they smell it. and you want to tell yourself what they would do and the way that they would do it.

Shane Parrish 00:52:39  Now, that is not a judgment that you are going to do that or you agree with what they’re saying, but it gets you out of the blinders that you have on, and it gets you to see something else. And your exemplars. If you think about it the way that I think about it, they’re always sort of watching you. They’re like on your shoulder. They’re these little invisible figures, and they follow you around all day and they can hold you to this higher standard of behavior, but you’re really holding yourself to it, and they can make you be a better person. They can nudge you to be a better person than you otherwise would be.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:07  It’s funny, as you were saying, that I was thinking about what a spiritual teacher told me once. I’ve done a lot of training in Zen Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism is somewhat arcane, right? It’s strange. Right? You read it and you’re like, that does not make the slightest bit of sense. And I did a lot of koan work and they said, what you want to try and do is imagine what state of consciousness someone would have to have in order to say what they just said, or believe what they believe.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:34  Like, what would your brain have to be like? Yes, to do that. And it was a useful reference point to be like, okay, that seems like nonsense, but what would my view of the world be like if that was actually true?

Shane Parrish 00:53:45  So this is incredibly powerful, right? Because when you see somebody doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t make them crazy or wrong. It means that they see the world in a completely different way than you do. Because if you saw the world the way that they see the world, you would do the exact same thing. And I think that that’s a really powerful way to look at a situation.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:09  We can all probably in our given fields of career, think of some exemplars. Right. Where do you turn to for exemplars in other aspects of your life about being a good person, about, you know, and how many of your exemplars are people you know, versus people you’ve read about versus alive versus dead? I’m just kind of curious, like your makeup of your you call them your own board of directors?

Shane Parrish 00:54:33  Like what?

Eric Zimmer 00:54:34  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:34  You know, the makeup of your board of directors. How many of them are career people versus moral people living dead, etc.?

Shane Parrish 00:54:42  So I got this idea from Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Create and Jim’s become, you know, very impactful in my life in some ways. And this concept he has of a personal board of directors, where you can have these people that you report to in your head. It’s like an imaginary conversation. I feel crazy even talking about it, but it’s super effective for changing behavior. So you pick a board of directors and you sort of like you can get advice from all of these people. You don’t have to know them. They don’t even have to be alive. Some of them you can talk to, some of them you can’t. And those people help you with various aspects of your life. And some can be parenting role models. We all have a friend group, and there’s probably one parent that you sort of like think, oh man, I wish I was that good of a parent.

Shane Parrish 00:55:25  Maybe that person could be on your board of directors and they don’t have to be there permanently. There’s no, like, voting. There’s no like, year long requirement. They can come and go it. You can try them out and be like, that’s not really a fit for me. But what you’re really doing is you’re giving yourself a check and balance. You’re trying to live up to the expectations of these people who are going to hold you to a higher standard. And if you look through history, where do we tend to learn the most? Right. All of our history, whether it’s us going through life, whether it’s an athlete being challenged, it’s all challenge. It’s that teacher in school who held you to a higher standard, who came up to you and said, Eric, this is not good enough. You can do better. Yeah. And that standard. Right. Because you can’t get away with being half assed. You can’t get away with being lazy. Well, now all of a sudden you start doing the work.

Shane Parrish 00:56:16  Yeah. And by raising the bar you do a lot better work. But we can raise the bar for ourselves. We don’t need anybody to tell us we can do better. We can hold ourselves to a higher standard. I find the personal board of directors really helpful for holding me to a higher standard doesn’t mean I’m always perfect. Doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes just like everybody else. But it does give me this element of accountability to it, where I have these conversations in my head sometimes about like, you know, I’m in a store or somebody, you know, does something that I don’t like or I’m on an airplane and, you know, that person beside you just irritates you. And I’m like, what would this person do right now? And I have a good friend and I just picture him. What would. I’m not going to say his name, but what would he do right now? And I’m like, he just let it go. And then all of a sudden it’s it’s really empowering because it’s not me letting it go.

Shane Parrish 00:57:06  Like, I’m actually the one letting it go. But the story I’m telling myself is that he would let it go and therefore I want to be like him. So therefore I’m going to let it go. Yeah, but I’m not consciously sort of like, oh, I’m just going to let this go, because that would be really hard. Yeah. Decision to come to. But if you do it through this other person, I find it’s actually easier to do these little moments in life. Or I’m like, oh, he would just let it go. You know, same thing you would tell somebody else if they told you that story. But when you’re in the story, you’re like, oh, that’s really hard to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:36  Totally. Yep. Yep. Well, Shane, thank you so much. It’s an excellent book. I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can find your website, where they can get your book and all things related to you.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:48  So thank you so much.

Shane Parrish 00:57:49  Awesome. Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate it.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:52  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:

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.