Speaker 1: Life is the story you tell yourself, because our lives
Speaker 1: are fundamentally stories that we tell ourselves. And what a
Speaker 1: lifequake is is a breach in the normal, and a
Speaker 1: breach in the normal is what makes any story good.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Bruce Filer, the author
Speaker 1: of seven New York Times bestsellers. He's also the presenter
Speaker 1: of two primetime series on PBS and the inspiration for
Speaker 1: the drama series Council of Dad's on NBC. Bruce's two
Speaker 1: Ted talks have been viewed millions of times. Today, Eric
Speaker 1: and Bruce discussed his book Life Is in the Transitions,
Speaker 1: Mastering Change at Any Age. Hi, Bruce, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much to Life. We'll be with you.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to have you on. Your book is called
Speaker 1: Life Is in the Transitions, Mastering Change at Any Age.
Speaker 1: And we'll get more into the book in a moment.
Speaker 1: But let's start, like we always do, with the parable.
Speaker 1: There's a grandfather. He's talking with his grandson. He says,
Speaker 1: in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are
Speaker 1: always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents
Speaker 1: things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other
Speaker 1: is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
Speaker 1: hatred and fear and the grounds that stops. He thinks
Speaker 1: about it for a second, and he looks up at
Speaker 1: his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?
Speaker 1: And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to ask you what that parable means to you
Speaker 1: in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: So what I love about this parable, and what I
Speaker 1: love about this question, is that the work that I
Speaker 1: do now and that I've been doing for half a
Speaker 1: decade is talking to people about the stories they tell,
Speaker 1: that the stories of who they are. Right, we all
Speaker 1: have this kind of voice that's going on in the
Speaker 1: back of our head and who we are and where
Speaker 1: we came from and who we want to be and
Speaker 1: what I've come to realize that that story is not
Speaker 1: part of us, like it is us in a fundamental way.
Speaker 1: And in the course of this process of thinking about stories,
Speaker 1: it turns out that wolves are a huge part of
Speaker 1: these stories. Right, because we all want our stories to
Speaker 1: be fairy tales. Okay, the kind of the the ore stories,
Speaker 1: like the original story is like the fantasy stories that
Speaker 1: we all carry around. What's the essence of the fairy tale? Yes,
Speaker 1: most people they're gonna say there's a hero and there's
Speaker 1: a happy ending, but that's not what makes it a
Speaker 1: fairy tale. What makes it a fairy tale is that
Speaker 1: the hero has to go through the woods, and that
Speaker 1: the hero, when the hero goes through the woods, is
Speaker 1: going to encounter a wolf. And so I've come to
Speaker 1: think that wolves are central to our story. And the
Speaker 1: Italians I discovered accidentally have this phrase lupus and fabulou
Speaker 1: like the wolf in the fairy tale. And they use
Speaker 1: this to mean, just when our story is going well
Speaker 1: and it's going along swimmingly, along comes a wolf. And
Speaker 1: it may be a wolf or an ogre or a dragon,
Speaker 1: or a downsizing or a diagnosis or a death or
Speaker 1: a pandemic. That wolf is what makes it a fairy tale.
Speaker 1: So my response to this story that you've just told
Speaker 1: is that we should feed the bad wolf. In some ways,
Speaker 1: what I want to say, what I feel like is
Speaker 1: the right answer, Like the part of me that like
Speaker 1: that wants to do good on this test says we
Speaker 1: should feed the healthy one that's like the one that's
Speaker 1: self confidence and self the steam and allow us to
Speaker 1: push forward. But what I really believe, as a person
Speaker 1: who's faced a lot of wolves and talked to hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of people about their wolves, is that we
Speaker 1: should feed the bad wolf, and we should feed the
Speaker 1: difficult wolf, because when we get over, around, or through
Speaker 1: that wolf, that's the moment that we've become the hero
Speaker 1: of our own story, and that's the moment when our
Speaker 1: story becomes a fairy tale. There are so many great things,
Speaker 1: and what you just said there that I could take
Speaker 1: a part. I could go down the spiritual alley of
Speaker 1: are we really are stories? Yeah, I could go down
Speaker 1: that route. I love that part in your book. I
Speaker 1: was hoping you talk about wolves in the fairy tale
Speaker 1: and I think we're all go is just to say,
Speaker 1: I agree with you very much that we all want
Speaker 1: to be part of a fairy tale, and yet when
Speaker 1: the part of the fairy tale that's hard shows up,
Speaker 1: we all go no. We all want to be in
Speaker 1: a good drama until it gets dramatic, you know, and
Speaker 1: then we want to turn away. And then my final
Speaker 1: thought was, I think the nature of life for better
Speaker 1: or worse. And your book really makes this point is
Speaker 1: we don't have to feed the bad wolf because it
Speaker 1: shows up with alarming regularity, right, And that's really a
Speaker 1: big part of what you talk about in this book
Speaker 1: is that we tend to think of life as it
Speaker 1: just kind of goes along and it has a path
Speaker 1: and and there's the occasional deviation from that. But what
Speaker 1: your research really showed was that these transitions such that
Speaker 1: we have them, you call them disruptors life events. These
Speaker 1: things happen a lot more frequently than we tend to
Speaker 1: think I want to begin and that question is this
Speaker 1: idea that the wolf has a way of showing up.
Speaker 1: There's the thing I say around my house. It's not
Speaker 1: in my book. My wife is a warrior, right, and
Speaker 1: so she'll walk in. We have to worry about this,
Speaker 1: or we have to plan for that, and and and
Speaker 1: my responses. We don't have to go looking for problems.
Speaker 1: Problems have a way of showing up. And so I
Speaker 1: think that that sort of captures my philosophy. And just
Speaker 1: to sort of take a half a step back, and
Speaker 1: how did I get into this line of work, so
Speaker 1: to speak? Right? How did I become a life story?
Speaker 1: And as I sometimes like to call it, like someone
Speaker 1: who goes after these stories? And the answer, I think
Speaker 1: gets to what you've been saying. Like I grew up
Speaker 1: in Savannah, Georgia. I left fair, I went to Yale,
Speaker 1: I left there. I went to Japan and I started
Speaker 1: writing letters home on crinkly airmail paper, like you're not
Speaker 1: gonna believe what happened to me. And when I got
Speaker 1: back to Georgia six months later, everyone said I love
Speaker 1: your letters. I was like, great, have we met? And
Speaker 1: it turned out that my grandmother had zero to them
Speaker 1: and passed them around and they went sort of viral
Speaker 1: and an old fashioned sense of the word. And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: if this is that interesting to me and to all
Speaker 1: these people, like I should write a book about this.
Speaker 1: I didn't know anyone to written a book, but one
Speaker 1: thing led to another, and in my twenties I write
Speaker 1: books about Japan, spent a year as a circus clown,
Speaker 1: and write a book about England. As you know, I
Speaker 1: then started traveling back and forth to the Middle East,
Speaker 1: like exploring like the original stories, like the stories of
Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible, the stories that have formed the backbone
Speaker 1: of Western civilization. And I wrote a book of walking
Speaker 1: the Bible. It becomes a thing. It's spent a year
Speaker 1: and a half of the best Settle List. I make
Speaker 1: a TV show, And so I'm going back and forth
Speaker 1: to the Middle East doing these things, exploring stories. Right,
Speaker 1: So stories have always been a part because I'm like
Speaker 1: this Jew from Georgia, and that's like two storytelling traditions
Speaker 1: and they like collide in me and a never ending
Speaker 1: fountain of stories. But what I did think of, and
Speaker 1: what I didn't realize is the time, is that this
Speaker 1: was the fairy tale version of life. This is the
Speaker 1: linear fantasy that we all have. Like I stumble early
Speaker 1: on into what I want to do with my life.
Speaker 1: I do it for no money for a long time,
Speaker 1: I have some success, and then I get married, I
Speaker 1: have children, Like it's working, like I'm living that fantasy
Speaker 1: linear life. Then what happens is in my forties, I
Speaker 1: just get this back to back to back set of
Speaker 1: disruptive events, almost in a way like the first non
Speaker 1: linear things that happened to me. First at forty three,
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm a new dad of identical daughters. I
Speaker 1: get cancer and in fact so nonlinear, actually have adult
Speaker 1: onset pediatric cancer. Right then I have financial troubles, almost
Speaker 1: go bankrupted the recession, and then my dad, who's struggling
Speaker 1: with Parkinson's, gets very depressed and tries to take his
Speaker 1: own life six times in twelve weeks. And I think
Speaker 1: what I've since learned many people think in such situations,
Speaker 1: just like this is only happening to me, Like I'm
Speaker 1: the only one who's lost control of the fairy tale,
Speaker 1: you know, And there's this sense of shame and isolation.
Speaker 1: You don't want to tell anybody, you know, what's the
Speaker 1: biggest epidemic we have now, It's like loneliness, right, because
Speaker 1: everybody feels that their thing is can't be discussed, that
Speaker 1: everybody else is out their own social media posting, you
Speaker 1: know how they're skipping through the woods on the way
Speaker 1: to grandmother's house. Because that's sort of one of the
Speaker 1: kind of scourges of our time, is this perception of fantasy.
Speaker 1: But when I tell you everybody's got a similar story,
Speaker 1: I'm just getting to know you. I mean, I could
Speaker 1: start asking you questions and when the thirty seconds you're
Speaker 1: going to tell me you have a similar story of
Speaker 1: medical problem or financial problem, or anxiety or drinking or addiction,
Speaker 1: or you know, your boss is a criminal, you're being sued, right,
Speaker 1: you went through a divorce, your child has an anxiety disorder,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. And this all comes to the head
Speaker 1: to me at a cullege reunion of mine when I'm
Speaker 1: hearing all these stories, and I called my wife and
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, no one knows how to
Speaker 1: tell their story anymore. So to your question of like,
Speaker 1: is our life really a story? I think yes, because
Speaker 1: what I realized was to no one knew how to
Speaker 1: tell it, and So the point I want to make
Speaker 1: before we get into some of what up in this
Speaker 1: I didn't go looking for linearity or nonminearity, or disruptors
Speaker 1: or life quakes or transition, none of this. I just
Speaker 1: went into this whole thing with a simple question of
Speaker 1: how can I help people figure out how to tell
Speaker 1: their story? Which is why I went collecting stories. It
Speaker 1: became hundreds and all fifty states, and you know, people
Speaker 1: lost limbs and homes and change careers and genders and
Speaker 1: all of this kind of stuff. And then I spent
Speaker 1: a year coding these stories, and that's where I discovered
Speaker 1: in the stories themselves this pattern. And the pattern was hastening, quickening, alarming,
Speaker 1: lee fast pace of change that we're all dealing with. Yep,
Speaker 1: thank you for putting that all in context. You know,
Speaker 1: what happened to you in your forties is amazing, and
Speaker 1: I agree that I think we don't talk about these
Speaker 1: things that much. I often say that it's one of
Speaker 1: the things I like about Buddhism so much as I
Speaker 1: think it points us to the fact of, like, this
Speaker 1: is the way life is, you know, not the modern
Speaker 1: version that says, oh, everything should go along smoothly Buddhism
Speaker 1: sort of starts from a position of you know what,
Speaker 1: things don't go well a lot of the time, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, that's reality. And I think that's a useful
Speaker 1: starting point. And I think that's a lot of what
Speaker 1: you're trying to say in the book is, Hey, this
Speaker 1: happens a lot more than you think it will. I
Speaker 1: think that what's interesting, and you're bringing up Buddhism is
Speaker 1: that Buddhism offers a different shape of life, a shape
Speaker 1: of cycles and circles and repeating certain patterns over and
Speaker 1: over again. And what's interesting about that is that that's
Speaker 1: not all religions. So Western religions right starting with Judaism
Speaker 1: and Christianity and Islam, are offering essentially a linear construct.
Speaker 1: And to me, the most electrifying moment in this whole
Speaker 1: process is one that I actually don't often talk about,
Speaker 1: but I feel like what happened to me was that
Speaker 1: one day I pull off a book off a chef
Speaker 1: relatively common act around my life and my house, and
Speaker 1: the whole shelf moved and there was suddenly a room
Speaker 1: behind that shelf, like that fantasy that we have, like
Speaker 1: you know, in a kid's novel, like the library has
Speaker 1: a different room that no one ever invited me into.
Speaker 1: And in that room it turns out that Dan Brown
Speaker 1: like has one of these in his castle France. His
Speaker 1: castle in France, by the way, that he just lost
Speaker 1: to his wife, if I'm correct, in his divorce. What
Speaker 1: I discover in this room is this idea that for
Speaker 1: me was new and like electrifying, and that was this
Speaker 1: that the way we look at our lives is shaped
Speaker 1: by how we look at the world, and how we
Speaker 1: look at the world has changed over time. So in
Speaker 1: the ancient world, they don't have linear time. There's mc
Speaker 1: clock's right, there's even sunned out. So they think that
Speaker 1: life is a cycle because it's agricultural and that's the calendar.
Speaker 1: So you don't have your own life. You try to
Speaker 1: kind of recreate this sort of cyclical pattern of the gods.
Speaker 1: In the West, it's the Hebrew Bible that introduces the idea. Right,
Speaker 1: you have Adam and Eve, and then you have the patriarchs,
Speaker 1: and then you have the kings and the prophets. This
Speaker 1: is a linear path and so this is where the
Speaker 1: idea of linear life course gets introduced. But in the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, and as you know, in the book. I
Speaker 1: have this because I was just so fascinated by it.
Speaker 1: They're looking at life as a staircase up to middle
Speaker 1: age and then down. That is different from how we
Speaker 1: grew up in the twentieth century. In the nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: which is that life bottoms out in midlife. They think
Speaker 1: it peaks. So that's no new life at forty, no
Speaker 1: new love at fifty, no retiring to Florida and opening
Speaker 1: up you know, a B and B or an Airbnb.
Speaker 1: Now straight up and straight down. And it's when the
Speaker 1: introduction of science in the nineteenth century that the idea
Speaker 1: of a linear path gets solidified. Right, So you have
Speaker 1: pH with development for children, and Freud with the sexual stages,
Speaker 1: and ericson with the moral stages, and the five stages
Speaker 1: of grief and heroes. These are all linear paths. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing, and that reaches to speak with the
Speaker 1: idea of a midlife crisis and you know passages and
Speaker 1: the seventies which want to get into But that's what
Speaker 1: everybody believes, and anybody over fifty is still haunted by
Speaker 1: this ghost of linearity. But here's the thing. We've now
Speaker 1: changed how we look at the world, and we understand
Speaker 1: that there's chaos and complexity and the network theory that
Speaker 1: life goes in all sorts of different directions, and yet
Speaker 1: we haven't updated our view of our lives. So we
Speaker 1: have linear expectations and non linear lives, and that gap,
Speaker 1: that delta between those two causes a lot of the loneliness,
Speaker 1: causes a lot of the anxiety, and causes a lot
Speaker 1: of distress because we think that we're not doing what
Speaker 1: we should be doing, like the tyranny of the shoulds,
Speaker 1: I call it right, but the truth is everybody else
Speaker 1: has live in the same life, and by being willing
Speaker 1: to talk about this and go out with it, I
Speaker 1: think this can address a lot of the kind of
Speaker 1: the core dissatisfaction and unhappiness that plagues so many of
Speaker 1: us today. I agree completely. I think that delta between
Speaker 1: what we expect and what's happening is a constant source
Speaker 1: of pain. And so any time we can get more accurate,
Speaker 1: you know that we can have a view of what's
Speaker 1: happening that is more accurate, more in tune with what's real,
Speaker 1: we're going to suffer less. And that's the essence of
Speaker 1: the challenge here and the reason I would defend the
Speaker 1: idea that this is a narrative exercise is because the
Speaker 1: fundamentally we have to tell a story both to others
Speaker 1: but even more important to ourselves that says we're going
Speaker 1: to have these changes. They're gonna come when we least
Speaker 1: expect them. And I actually think in an odd way,
Speaker 1: for all of its pain and death and destruction and
Speaker 1: loss of economic life and loss of social connection and
Speaker 1: all of the lifestyle events that were lost the pandemic,
Speaker 1: if there is a silver lining, so to speak, it
Speaker 1: is that it is a blunt force reminder that we
Speaker 1: cannot control our lives and that these events happen whenever
Speaker 1: they happen. If you're between thirty and nine and forty
Speaker 1: four and a half, which is the original, you know,
Speaker 1: window of the midlife crisis, congrat reletions, the pandemic is
Speaker 1: giving you a bit life crisis. But if you're twenty
Speaker 1: seven to thirty one and a half, you're also having
Speaker 1: a crisis. And if you're sixty seven to seventy one,
Speaker 1: you're also having a crisis. And frankly, if you're a
Speaker 1: teenager like my daughters are now, you're also in a crisis.
Speaker 1: And this is a great reminder, and I actually think
Speaker 1: the pandemic in a certain way is a corrective. You
Speaker 1: deal these stories, and I coded all these things. And
Speaker 1: one of the surprising things is that most of the
Speaker 1: lifequakes that people go through we're personal. It was a
Speaker 1: very small number of them that were collective. And there's
Speaker 1: this line, you know, as a writer, I would say,
Speaker 1: it's a throwaway line in my book where I say, oh,
Speaker 1: if I had done these conversations a century ago, when
Speaker 1: we had two world wars and depression and civil rights
Speaker 1: and women's rights, right, that many more people would have
Speaker 1: had collective involuntary life quakes. But we don't do that anymore. Well,
Speaker 1: guess what, We're all on a collective involuntary life quake.
Speaker 1: And in an odd way, I actually think that that's
Speaker 1: going to not only connect us, but give us a
Speaker 1: certain amount of empathy. Because I can just look into
Speaker 1: your eyes as I'm meeting you on a zoom called
Speaker 1: as I passed you on the street, even if I
Speaker 1: can't see your mouth with a zoom, and I'm looking
Speaker 1: into your eyes and I know that you're suffering from something.
Speaker 1: Everybody that's listening to us right now stayed up late
Speaker 1: last night, or sat with a cup of coffee and
Speaker 1: stay out at window this morning, and is dealing with
Speaker 1: some life quake. That's the reality. The difference is yours
Speaker 1: is different from mine, is different from hers, is different
Speaker 1: from his, and then that leads to somebodys. So what
Speaker 1: is the big revelation of this project, which is it
Speaker 1: turns out that the toolkit is much more similar than
Speaker 1: I would have expected when I set out early in
Speaker 1: the book. You have three sort of statements. The linear
Speaker 1: life is dead, the nonlinear life involves more life transitions,
Speaker 1: and then life transitions are a skill we can and
Speaker 1: must master. So I want to spend some time there
Speaker 1: before we run out, because this show is a lot
Speaker 1: about skills for how we live through things in our lives.
Speaker 1: So I don't think we can get too far here
Speaker 1: without at least moving through a couple of stages. And
Speaker 1: the first is to kind of talk about what you
Speaker 1: call the a b cs of meaning, because these are
Speaker 1: important as we talk about mastering transitions, and maybe it
Speaker 1: would be helpful to talk about how you define a
Speaker 1: transition versus a disruptor. You know, the COVID is a disruptor.
Speaker 1: What kind of transitions occur as a result of that
Speaker 1: delineate that for us. Okay, So let me just tick
Speaker 1: through a number of these ideas really quickly to set
Speaker 1: the stage for where you want us to go. Number one,
Speaker 1: the linear life is dead. Okay, The idea of one home,
Speaker 1: one job, one relationship, one sexuality, one source of happiness
Speaker 1: from adolescence to assist a living that's gone and incoming back.
Speaker 1: It's been replaced by what I call a nonlinear life,
Speaker 1: which has many more changes. So my data, when I
Speaker 1: analyze these hundreds of stories, a thousand hours of interviews,
Speaker 1: six thousand pages of transcripts, finds that we have basically
Speaker 1: one disruptor every twelve to eighteen months, say three dozen
Speaker 1: in the course of our adult lives. And these could
Speaker 1: be as small as a car wreck or twisting an ankle,
Speaker 1: or as big as getting married or you know, losing
Speaker 1: your legs, and most of these we get through relatively quickly.
Speaker 1: It turns out that we're pretty good change management machines.
Speaker 1: But one in ten of those, that's three to five
Speaker 1: in the lifetime, becomes so big, and so a lifequake
Speaker 1: is kind of a massive kind of outburst of change.
Speaker 1: It could be one of the events is very large,
Speaker 1: like there's a pandemic and you run a restaurant and
Speaker 1: it's closed down so you have no income or what.
Speaker 1: It's fast and frankly, in all the literature of social
Speaker 1: change that I have read, no one's really talked about this.
Speaker 1: They tend to clump. Right. So just when you break
Speaker 1: your leg, you know, you wreck your car, right, or
Speaker 1: just when your wife is diagnosed with breast cancer, your
Speaker 1: mother in law needs cataract surgery, like for whatever reason.
Speaker 1: And I actually come to think that it's almost like
Speaker 1: our immune system gets weakened by one disruptor and along
Speaker 1: comes another one, and you know what, it just sends
Speaker 1: us into a lifequate. But here's the thing. The lifequate
Speaker 1: can be voluntary or involuntary. Right. So an involuntary one
Speaker 1: is your spouse cheets on you, or our tornado destroys
Speaker 1: your house. A voluntary one is you leave one enterprise
Speaker 1: to start another, or you cheat on your spouse, right,
Speaker 1: So they're different, the voluntary involuntary. But here I think
Speaker 1: is kind of if there's one moment that we can
Speaker 1: pause on that would be helpful to anybody listening to us,
Speaker 1: is that the lifequke can be voluntary or involuntary, but
Speaker 1: the life transition must be voluntary. You have to choose
Speaker 1: to lean in and go through the process. So the
Speaker 1: first one, if you will, kind of puts you back
Speaker 1: on your heels, and the next one like puts you
Speaker 1: forward on your toes. And by the way, that process
Speaker 1: could happen in a weekend or it could take a
Speaker 1: year and a half, like, depending on how people process it.
Speaker 1: So you know, in some ways, I'd say the most
Speaker 1: comforting thing to say, you know, this book had landed
Speaker 1: in the middle of a giant life quake in the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and you know, became a bestseller and all that, and
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it was the number one
Speaker 1: reaction was like sort of shute, like I'm not alone
Speaker 1: and feeling this way, and like it gives me a
Speaker 1: sense of comfort that I can get through it. And
Speaker 1: I think the main comfort is the other thing that
Speaker 1: you kind of tetup that you want to talk about,
Speaker 1: which is these transitions turn out to have phases. Okay,
Speaker 1: the three phases are what I call the law goodbye,
Speaker 1: where you kind of say goodbye to the life that's
Speaker 1: not coming back. There's this messy middle right where you
Speaker 1: shed certain habits and experiment with new ones. And then
Speaker 1: there's the new beginning where you unveil your new self.
Speaker 1: And you know, transitions. There hasn't been a major book
Speaker 1: on them in forty years, but for a hundred years
Speaker 1: they've really been talked about, and everybody said, you kind
Speaker 1: of must do this in or her. That turns out
Speaker 1: to be total bunk, like you must first say goodbye
Speaker 1: to the old view and then then you have to
Speaker 1: go through the wilderness and then you get to the promise.
Speaker 1: Now that's not true. It turns out people have a superpower,
Speaker 1: like they're good at one of these phases. So let
Speaker 1: me just ask you, like, which of those three phases
Speaker 1: are you good at? Probably the new beginning piece, I
Speaker 1: would guess the new beginning pace. Okay, So someone who's
Speaker 1: go to the new beginning would be I just lost
Speaker 1: my job, but I'm going to start a new podcast, right,
Speaker 1: and you get that and you get that going right,
Speaker 1: or I'm going to start a new company. That's great. Like,
Speaker 1: you know what, if you're going to the new beginning,
Speaker 1: let's start at the new beginning. You just got out
Speaker 1: of a bad relationship, you know, you're the one who
Speaker 1: in three months is dating somebody else. That's great, that's
Speaker 1: your superpower. Let's start there. But what that suggests to me,
Speaker 1: having talked to people for years, is that you're probably
Speaker 1: not good. Everyone has a superpower but also a kryptonite
Speaker 1: um that you're not good at one of the others. Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe you're not good at the long goodbye. Maybe you're
Speaker 1: not good at exploring why you got divorced right and
Speaker 1: asking no difficult questions, or why did the last job
Speaker 1: not work out because you feel shame about how you
Speaker 1: conducted yourself, or maybe the last marriage failed and famine listening.
Speaker 1: I don't know your story, so I don't know, but
Speaker 1: maybe you were, you know, suffering from an addiction and
Speaker 1: you did a behavior that you're ashamed of. But this
Speaker 1: is what happens. And I'm like, why start with the
Speaker 1: artist part? And I'm not just I'm not saying this,
Speaker 1: this is what people do. Go start with a new one.
Speaker 1: But if you wanted to be successful, you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to go at Everybody knows that the next relationship is
Speaker 1: not going to be successful until you deal with the
Speaker 1: issues of what happened in the last relationship. And that's
Speaker 1: true of anything a new job. But it's also true
Speaker 1: like I mean, a good example of this is the pandemic.
Speaker 1: When the pandemic hits, I think we all thought, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'll sit inside for six weeks, I'll make
Speaker 1: some sour dough, I'll zoom with my friends, and then
Speaker 1: we'll go back to normal. It was about six months
Speaker 1: in before everyone relse you know what, We're not going
Speaker 1: back to normal. And that's the problem with resilience as
Speaker 1: a metaphor, because resilience is about a spring, like you
Speaker 1: bounce forward and you bounce back. No, some people bound.
Speaker 1: Usually you bounce sideways or forwards or a new direction entirely.
Speaker 1: So I think that the long goodbye is hard, and
Speaker 1: it's emotional and it's difficult. That's why it's called the
Speaker 1: long goodbye because it takes a long time. But that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you can't be making progress on your transition,
Speaker 1: because you can be experimenting with new you, or you
Speaker 1: can be getting in a new relationship where you can
Speaker 1: start a new company, or you can begin to imagine
Speaker 1: what your life is after you've lost your legs that
Speaker 1: you just had to get amputated because you had an accident,
Speaker 1: so it can work. But it's like life is nonlinear,
Speaker 1: and the transitions themselves are nonlinear. So let's describe them
Speaker 1: real quick. You know, the new beginning is kind of obvious,
Speaker 1: but what's happening during the long goodbye? So this gets
Speaker 1: to the tools, and yeah, we don't have time to
Speaker 1: go into all of them, but to say, there are
Speaker 1: three stages, and there are these kind of seven tools,
Speaker 1: and they are kind of vaguely associated with the stages,
Speaker 1: all but one of them. So the long goodbye involves
Speaker 1: number one, excepting that this is an emotional experience and
Speaker 1: that you are emotional about it. I mean, pick any
Speaker 1: transition that you went through, professional or personal in your
Speaker 1: life or medical, Like, what's the biggest emotion that you
Speaker 1: struggled with in that transition? Failure, failure, feeling of failure,
Speaker 1: and that's a fear of failure, or that's disappointment that
Speaker 1: you failed, disappointment, disappointment. Okay, so that's interesting to me.
Speaker 1: So the number one people say is fear. Okay, I
Speaker 1: won't be able to get through it, I won't be
Speaker 1: able to live without that person, I won't be able
Speaker 1: to pay my bills, Okay, my new enterprise will not succeed.
Speaker 1: So fear is the number one emotion. The second is
Speaker 1: what you said, it's kind of sadness, like I'm sad
Speaker 1: that my marriage didn't work out, or I'm sad that
Speaker 1: the job didn't work out, or I'm just sad that
Speaker 1: I have cancer and I have to go through this treatment,
Speaker 1: or that I lost a loved one. Number three, I
Speaker 1: sort of alluded to this earlier, which is a bit
Speaker 1: of a surprise to me. With shame, I'm ashamed that
Speaker 1: I lost my job. I'm ashamed I have to ask
Speaker 1: for help. I'm ashamed that my child has an anxiety
Speaker 1: disorder or a drinking problem and I don't want to tell.
Speaker 1: Just to s poll question, I'm at the supermarket and
Speaker 1: I run into my old high school teacher or whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, and she says, oh my god, how is
Speaker 1: little Julie. I always loved her in class, And you're thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, she's drunk, you know, and I had to
Speaker 1: shut the door in her face and say until you
Speaker 1: get sober. You're ashamed of that. Back to them not
Speaker 1: wanting to talk to you and not normalizing. So that's
Speaker 1: the first emotion. But the second, then people you have
Speaker 1: to get beyond it, so you have to accept that
Speaker 1: it's emotional. And then and people do lots of things.
Speaker 1: They write their feelings down, they do what I do,
Speaker 1: which maybe what you do, which is kind of buckle down,
Speaker 1: you know, like and just go back to work and
Speaker 1: like sort of compartmentalize it, if you will. But a
Speaker 1: lot of people and this was so almost inspiring to me,
Speaker 1: and especially someone who cares about religion and knowing that
Speaker 1: religion is sort of under attack in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways in this culture right now. Is people use rituals.
Speaker 1: They like candles or sing songs, or have farewell parties,
Speaker 1: or put flags out, or go to sweat lodges or
Speaker 1: jump out of airplanes. They do kind of ritualistic gestures
Speaker 1: to say goodbye. This is what I kind of feel
Speaker 1: like the country needs on the pandemic, is we need
Speaker 1: some sort of ritualistic way of saying we're not going back,
Speaker 1: kind of mourning it, processing it in some way, not
Speaker 1: making it go away, but just having some sort of
Speaker 1: ritual way of bringing the pain or fear or disappointment
Speaker 1: or shame out into the opening, kind of blanching it
Speaker 1: in some way. MM hmm. That's an interesting idea because
Speaker 1: it seems so hard to imagine us as a country
Speaker 1: doing any one thing altogether. Seems like a challenge at
Speaker 1: this point. But think of why is a Memorial Day there? Right?
Speaker 1: Or why is Labor Day there? And why is Thanksgiving
Speaker 1: Day there? And Thanksgiving? Was that kind of a history
Speaker 1: of people having national days of gratitude that began right
Speaker 1: during the revolution. I mean it wasn't It wasn't a
Speaker 1: shopping day and a parade day and every all day,
Speaker 1: but it was this idea. And I actually personally think
Speaker 1: this is something that we've lost by sort of saying
Speaker 1: that religion doesn't belong in public life, and I don't
Speaker 1: believe proselytizing belongs in public life. But there's a lot there.
Speaker 1: There's a reason that these institute should survive for thousands
Speaker 1: of years, and the rituals are powerful because life cycle
Speaker 1: events and death and loneliness and anxiety are among them
Speaker 1: need to be expunged. And this is a national one
Speaker 1: that we're going differently, it's a global one that we're
Speaker 1: going through, right. So I think we've lost something by
Speaker 1: saying everybody go, you know, under your own covers and
Speaker 1: deal with it yourself. That I totally agree with this
Speaker 1: doing it all on our own. I mean, you've been
Speaker 1: talking about this. I was thinking a little bit about
Speaker 1: you know. I've had a number of big transitions, and
Speaker 1: probably the biggest was twenty four. I was a homeless
Speaker 1: heroin addict and I got sober, and I was thinking
Speaker 1: about how how useful that was to have as a
Speaker 1: first big transition because so many of the things I
Speaker 1: learned in recovery I feel like equipped me for better
Speaker 1: handling other transitions. This idea of not being ashamed about
Speaker 1: sharing what's going on, about talking to other people about
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, just so many of the tools
Speaker 1: of recovery I think have been so helpful as I've
Speaker 1: navigated other transitions down the road. Well, first of all,
Speaker 1: thank you for sharing that. I'll say that a quarter
Speaker 1: of my stories had addiction in some way, which I
Speaker 1: was shocked by, moved by, and kind of made aware. Bye.
Speaker 1: But I really want to like put a spotlight on
Speaker 1: what you just said, because I think that's powerful. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: in your life is dead, the nonlinear life involves more
Speaker 1: life transitions. Transitions are a skill that we can and
Speaker 1: must master. So what it came to realize if we're
Speaker 1: going to go through three to five of these lifequakes
Speaker 1: in a lifetime, and I haven't even mentioned in this
Speaker 1: conversation maybe with a signature piece of that, that the
Speaker 1: average length of the transition that comes out of the
Speaker 1: lifequake is five years, So three to five and on
Speaker 1: lifetime four or five six years, that's twenty five years.
Speaker 1: That's half of our adult lives. We're in transition. That's
Speaker 1: what this book is called. Life is into transitions. To
Speaker 1: realize if you just look in the ads as periods
Speaker 1: that you have to grit and grind and kind of
Speaker 1: grovel your way through your waist in half your life.
Speaker 1: But the point is this is a lifelong sport that
Speaker 1: no one is teaching us how to play. When I
Speaker 1: speak to college kids, a lot of what I say
Speaker 1: is what is going to college? It's the long goodbye
Speaker 1: where you're saying goodbye to this life where your parents
Speaker 1: made your decisions and everything was taken care of and
Speaker 1: you were comforted. Then what's the messy middle? It's shedding
Speaker 1: certain habits and expectations. Do I want to be a believer?
Speaker 1: Do not want to be a believer? Right? Do I
Speaker 1: want to be up someone who's my homework or not.
Speaker 1: And then you shed habits and then you create new ones.
Speaker 1: And that's what we're talking. Should I try to do this?
Speaker 1: Should I try this columb Should I try this activity?
Speaker 1: Do I want to, as I said, sleep around, save myself?
Speaker 1: Do I want to you know, drink a lot, you
Speaker 1: know in my home room into my homework. These are
Speaker 1: all experimentations with new selves. And then the last is
Speaker 1: the new beginning, which is you said it's simple. I
Speaker 1: could poke at that and say it is simple, but
Speaker 1: part of it is unveiling it, which is maybe rewarding.
Speaker 1: It turns out, by the way, almost temper. Some of
Speaker 1: the people are not good at this phase. But then
Speaker 1: ultimately it's updating my life story to acknowledge that I
Speaker 1: was an addict, I got divorced, I lost my job,
Speaker 1: I lost my limbs, my child as an anxiety dis
Speaker 1: or whatever it is, and being able. That's the part
Speaker 1: that we both agreed that people don't do a lot.
Speaker 1: So I actually would argue that that's harder than it sounds.
Speaker 1: It's making that shame or fear or sadness or difficulty
Speaker 1: part of your narrative that you take ownership over as
Speaker 1: opposed to trying to lock in the safe. You know,
Speaker 1: in the inside of your being, in the darkness of
Speaker 1: your closet. That's not gonna work. So back to college
Speaker 1: for a second. Then you get out of college. How
Speaker 1: long is college? Four or five years? Like it's a
Speaker 1: classic transition to kind of one of them, kind of
Speaker 1: I don't know, like Windmills, I want to tilt. It
Speaker 1: is kind of redefining college as a transition forge where
Speaker 1: you learn these skills. So that's what you said when
Speaker 1: you were twenty four, you know, I mean, like, if
Speaker 1: if you have a kid that's going to take a
Speaker 1: test or being a sporting event or go on stage
Speaker 1: and sing something, or maybe a spouse or maybe yourself,
Speaker 1: the best thing you can do for that kid, putting
Speaker 1: on my Secrets of Happy Family hat here is to say,
Speaker 1: remember last time you did it, not you can do it.
Speaker 1: I believe in you. You've already done it. That's what
Speaker 1: the research shows. So you at twenty four, having gone
Speaker 1: through this hellish experience, no doubt because you didn't lock
Speaker 1: it away in the safe and say that was something
Speaker 1: that's no longer part of me. No small thing you
Speaker 1: did you said, it is part of me, and therefore,
Speaker 1: next time I go through it, I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: myself I already did it. That's what I think. If
Speaker 1: we can teach young people that you've already done it.
Speaker 1: And here's the pandemic again, guess what. You got through it.
Speaker 1: Some people didn't. Half a million of us are gonna
Speaker 1: lose our lives in the best case scenario. But you
Speaker 1: got through it. You made adjustments, You have the skill
Speaker 1: of rewriting your story. You know how to get around
Speaker 1: the wolf. You didn't just feed the good wolf. You
Speaker 1: face down the bad wolf, and damn it. That means
Speaker 1: you could do it again. I could not agree more
Speaker 1: that that is one of the most fundamental and helpful
Speaker 1: things to be able to do for ourselves or to
Speaker 1: do for other people, is to be able to say,
Speaker 1: you know how to do this, You've done it before.
Speaker 1: I think of all the things you've gone through and overcome.
Speaker 1: Such a powerful way to remind us of our ability
Speaker 1: to handle this stuff. And I think a key of
Speaker 1: it is to normalize the nominearity of it. I know
Speaker 1: it sounds abstract, but to say I had an addiction
Speaker 1: problem at twenty four, I had a cancer at Attree,
Speaker 1: I almost went bankrupt as a multiple times New York
Speaker 1: Times best selling author. My dad tried to kill himself
Speaker 1: six times after an incredibly successful career building Owls is
Speaker 1: in Georgia. And you can't say that. No, we must
Speaker 1: say that, Yes, we must say that. We must say
Speaker 1: we've all got wolves. I could attack on your story
Speaker 1: my mom tried to kill herself. Listeners of the show
Speaker 1: are probably tired of hearing about my partner Jenny's mom
Speaker 1: who has Alzheimer's. It's a thing we're going through, you know,
Speaker 1: we we certainly share about. I was talking with somebody
Speaker 1: today and I've got this program called Spiritual Habits, and
Speaker 1: we talked about combining behavioral science with spiritual principles, and
Speaker 1: one of them around generosity. And I was saying that
Speaker 1: one of the ways we can be generous is with
Speaker 1: our story to say things like I went through this,
Speaker 1: I went through that. You know, that's a generosity because
Speaker 1: we're putting it out into the world that is making
Speaker 1: it okay for other people to go through those things.
Speaker 1: It's also a healing exercise, but it's also a generous exercise.
Speaker 1: And to me, the best phrase that I've heard to capture.
Speaker 1: This is a kind of forgotten phrase from sociology and
Speaker 1: then teen eighties, this scholar came up with this phrase
Speaker 1: and autobiographical occasion. Okay, so an autobiographical occasion. What he
Speaker 1: meant by that was that these are occasions when we
Speaker 1: are forced, in effect, to tell our life story. Okay.
Speaker 1: And I love this idea because when I asked people,
Speaker 1: was your life quake? Was your transition an autobiographical occasion?
Speaker 1: Of the people said yes, eight zero. And the reason
Speaker 1: is because life is the story you tell yourself, Because
Speaker 1: our lives are fundamentally stories that we tell ourselves. And
Speaker 1: what a lifequake is is a breach in the normal,
Speaker 1: and a breach in the normal is what makes any
Speaker 1: story good. Right. I live in a house. True story,
Speaker 1: where I live. It's it's snowed fourteen inches last night. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you story. What happened to me today.
Speaker 1: I walked downstairs. I put my jacket on, and my
Speaker 1: mittens and my gloves and my hat. I guess I
Speaker 1: didn't do mittens and gloves, but my snow boots. I
Speaker 1: opened the door, and what did I see? Right in
Speaker 1: front of me? The most beautiful vista of So what
Speaker 1: we know about storytelling now is that as I tell
Speaker 1: that story, you are finishing that story. So what you
Speaker 1: see in front of me, you know I'm going to say,
Speaker 1: I'm now going to tell the story again. It's snowed.
Speaker 1: I went downstairs, I put on my jacket, my mittens,
Speaker 1: my hat. I walked out in my boots. I walked
Speaker 1: out story and they're in front of me. Right in
Speaker 1: front was this beautiful mountain of donuts. So you don't
Speaker 1: know that I'm going to say mountain of donuts. You
Speaker 1: think I'm gonna say blanket of snow or whatever. I'm
Speaker 1: going to say. A mountain of donuts makes you sit
Speaker 1: up and listen. That's the breach and the normal, and
Speaker 1: I now have a story. Those donuts are gonna do.
Speaker 1: What am I gonna do? I gotta go back in that.
Speaker 1: How do I get to Bruce's house? If there's a
Speaker 1: mollont of donuts? We gotta get over? Do I eat them?
Speaker 1: Do I give them around? Like? What is the donuts? Okay?
Speaker 1: The donut in this story is the wolf? Okay? The
Speaker 1: donut is the downsizing or the death, or the addiction
Speaker 1: or the tornado or the pandemic that the donut in
Speaker 1: the story. So it is a breach in the normal,
Speaker 1: and the only way to repair that is with a story.
Speaker 1: That's why. Yeah, I believe that these lifequakes are autobiographical occasions.
Speaker 1: They are occasions when we are asked and in some
Speaker 1: ways forced to rethink and retell the story of our
Speaker 1: lives and add a new chapter. I was addicted, and
Speaker 1: then I got to clean um. My mother had Alzheimer's
Speaker 1: and the family had to rally together and figure out
Speaker 1: a way through it. I had a cancer and I
Speaker 1: was on crutches for two years, and I was in
Speaker 1: the hospital for a year, and I asked a group
Speaker 1: of male friends to form a council of dads to
Speaker 1: take care of my daughters, whatever it might be. I
Speaker 1: tried to kill myself six times in twelve weeks, and
Speaker 1: my children started sending me a question about my life
Speaker 1: every Monday morning, and over the next six years, I
Speaker 1: wrote a fifty two thousand word autobiography has applies to
Speaker 1: my Dad? So this is a storytelling solution. What is
Speaker 1: fundamentally a narrative problem. Because lifequakes are autobiographical occasions, I
Speaker 1: totally agree if we look at the seven tools, and
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna read them real quick, just so people
Speaker 1: get a framework for what they are, because you know
Speaker 1: these things are in there. We talked a little bit
Speaker 1: about accept it, identify your emotions. We talked a little
Speaker 1: bit about market ritualize the change. Third is shed it.
Speaker 1: Give up old mindsets, uh, create it, try new things,
Speaker 1: share it, seek wisdom from others, launch it, unveil your
Speaker 1: new self, and tell it. Compose a fresh story. And
Speaker 1: that last one you were just hitting on being the
Speaker 1: composing a fresh story. The autobiographical part of this. The
Speaker 1: other thing I think is really interesting, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to circle all the way back to one of the
Speaker 1: first things I said, which could take this a spiritual
Speaker 1: direction about whether the stories are really what we are.
Speaker 1: Certainly from a Buddhist perspective, of Buddhist would say, your
Speaker 1: story is what is created, but you are actually something different.
Speaker 1: But we all know that for all intents and purposes,
Speaker 1: it is the stories that we tell about our lives
Speaker 1: that shape kind of who we are. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that I thought was really interesting is that
Speaker 1: you talk about people going through transitions. That a big
Speaker 1: transition that I think is interesting to discuss is identity transitions,
Speaker 1: because that's where the story really gets different. Right, So
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about the malleability of identity.
Speaker 1: I like that, and that allows me to also double
Speaker 1: back to something that you raised and I didn't address earlier.
Speaker 1: So while I could push back on this idea that
Speaker 1: our life is still a story, actually if I were
Speaker 1: even to go one level deep, but what I really
Speaker 1: believe is that our our life is a sort of
Speaker 1: braiding of multiple stories. Okay, so if you think of
Speaker 1: the uh, the Walt Whitman who lived not far from
Speaker 1: my home here in Brooklyn Heights talking about I contain multitudes,
Speaker 1: so that we have three stories, and I call them
Speaker 1: your me story, the story that kind of where you're
Speaker 1: at the heart of it, what you do or make
Speaker 1: or create. Then there's your wee story, your relationships, your family,
Speaker 1: your loved ones, your colleagues, your co religionists, members of
Speaker 1: your basketball team or your political party or whatever it
Speaker 1: might be. And then there's your the story. Right, so
Speaker 1: you have your me story, your we story, your these
Speaker 1: stories some sort of higher calling or spiritual identity or
Speaker 1: or higher purpose. And so what I came to realize
Speaker 1: that this was really, really, really hard thing for me
Speaker 1: to kind of piece together from all these conversations. And
Speaker 1: what I came to call the Life Story project was
Speaker 1: that our identity is built braided, if you will, from
Speaker 1: these multiple sources of identity. And I came to call
Speaker 1: this the a b CS of meaning. You know, if
Speaker 1: you go back a hundred years ago, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: for someone who spends as much time in the ancient
Speaker 1: world as I do, not that long ago. If you
Speaker 1: look back a hundred years ago, we had to live
Speaker 1: where our parents wanted to live, believe what our parents
Speaker 1: wanted to believe, do what our parents wanted us to do,
Speaker 1: love who our parents wanted us to love on and
Speaker 1: our identity was essentially given to us. And this great
Speaker 1: opportunity of kind of contemporary modern postmoder or whatever, but
Speaker 1: the great opportunity of the life we lead now is
Speaker 1: that we can love who we want to love, and
Speaker 1: be who we want to be, believe what we want
Speaker 1: to believe, and live where we want to live. You know,
Speaker 1: we can even change our bodies, you know, and our
Speaker 1: sexual identity or our gender, things that seemed not even possible,
Speaker 1: you know, barely a generation that come. So this is
Speaker 1: an incredible opportunity that we all have, but it's also
Speaker 1: a burden because in effect, there's so many choices, right,
Speaker 1: we get writer's block trying to write the story of
Speaker 1: our lives, you know, it's kind of the way I
Speaker 1: think about it. So, but what we have is these
Speaker 1: building blocks of meetings. So the A b cs of
Speaker 1: meeting the A that's agency, right, that is what we
Speaker 1: do make for many of us, our jobs, or for creators,
Speaker 1: or the things that we do, our personal way of
Speaker 1: impacting the world. That b is our relationships, our loved ones,
Speaker 1: our family, all these things we talked about in the
Speaker 1: sea as a cause. So we have agency, belonging and cause.
Speaker 1: And so to your core question, in some ways, maybe
Speaker 1: you know, a kind of essence of what we're talking
Speaker 1: about is that in these life quakes and in the
Speaker 1: transitions that grew out of them, we shift the balance
Speaker 1: that we give to each one. So think of the
Speaker 1: A b cs of meaning as being like um, lady justice,
Speaker 1: but without two dishes three and each one has a
Speaker 1: few pebbles. And what happens in our lives is that
Speaker 1: we get a little unbalanced, right, and then we want
Speaker 1: to rebalance. So maybe we've been working too hard and
Speaker 1: we want to spend more time with our family. Maybe
Speaker 1: we are your partner who has been caring for her
Speaker 1: mother and then you know, ultimately her mother passes and
Speaker 1: she says, you know what, I want to do something
Speaker 1: for myself, Like I'm I'm just spent. I've been raising
Speaker 1: my children and I need to do something for myself.
Speaker 1: Or maybe we've been giving back. Right my wife starts
Speaker 1: an organization that supports entrepreneurs in fifty countries around the world.
Speaker 1: Like she gives and gives and gives. Maybe she one
Speaker 1: day she burns out and says, you know what, I
Speaker 1: want to spend more time with my family, or I
Speaker 1: want to do something for myself. So what happens is
Speaker 1: that I call this shape shifting, is like in these transitions,
Speaker 1: we we think why because we have a pause. That's
Speaker 1: what a rupture in the normal means. Okay, guess what.
Speaker 1: I've just been buried under a mound of donuts. It's
Speaker 1: gonna take me a while to dig out. And while
Speaker 1: digging out, I'm going to rethink. Am I really doing
Speaker 1: what I want to do? Am I being how I
Speaker 1: want to be? Am I spending my time nobody I
Speaker 1: want to spend my time, or is now the occasion
Speaker 1: I didn't seek it out, or maybe even I did
Speaker 1: seek it out, or I want to rethink which part
Speaker 1: of my identity do I want to emphasize now? And
Speaker 1: here's the main thing I want to say. It's not
Speaker 1: a forever choice. That myth that if you're working and
Speaker 1: you take time off to raise your children you can
Speaker 1: get back in the workplace that died in the seventies.
Speaker 1: It really really did, the idea that this startup failed
Speaker 1: and you're never going to find another job. You can't go.
Speaker 1: That's just not how we live. And that's the gift
Speaker 1: of the nonminear life. Get on and off the treadmill
Speaker 1: whenever you want, because there ain't no treadmill, and and
Speaker 1: no one's keeping score because everybody else has got a
Speaker 1: wolf or stack of donuts that they're struggling with. Two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that, And I think it's interesting because if
Speaker 1: you search deeply into the literature on deep spiritual transformation,
Speaker 1: right often the most clear cause is, like we've said,
Speaker 1: some sort of life quake seen over and over and
Speaker 1: over again as a very likely route to deep transformation.
Speaker 1: Is when everything blows up, you know. And so that's
Speaker 1: both the good news and the bad news of what
Speaker 1: you're saying, Hey, there's a lot more blowing up going
Speaker 1: on than we thought, you know. So that's the bad
Speaker 1: news if we don't like that. But the good news
Speaker 1: is it offers this multiple opportunities to really reassess who
Speaker 1: we are, what matters, what do we want to do,
Speaker 1: and move forward from a new place. And look at
Speaker 1: the oldest stories that have survived the longest. Look at
Speaker 1: the Abra Bible. Where are the moments of breakthrough. Abraham
Speaker 1: leaving his father's house and going down to the Promised Land.
Speaker 1: The Israelites leaving Egypt, going into the desert, the Jerusalem
Speaker 1: leaving Jerusalem by the rivers of Bamblane. That's the moment
Speaker 1: of the greatest breakthroughs in the story. Jesus going into
Speaker 1: the desert, Paul on the road to Damascus, Mohammed, you know,
Speaker 1: going out into the desert, the Buddha going to sit
Speaker 1: under the tree, okay, the you know, the Hindies going
Speaker 1: into the forest dwelling, Okay, Orpheus, Jason Hercules, I mean,
Speaker 1: you can go down and down and down all of
Speaker 1: the great stories, the ones that have survived thousands of years,
Speaker 1: are full of wolves, and specifically they're full of people
Speaker 1: who go out on into the wilderness, into the messy
Speaker 1: middle and my framework, have some sort of transform experience
Speaker 1: and then come back and share it with others. And
Speaker 1: how do they share it with others with a story? Right?
Speaker 1: And I think that again, I'm kind of going back
Speaker 1: to the good news in lots of transitions is because
Speaker 1: a lot of us think, well, Okay, that's great, but
Speaker 1: I don't have an opportunity to go out into the
Speaker 1: desert or I go out into the wilderness. But as
Speaker 1: we sort of said earlier, you don't have to take
Speaker 1: you know, as they say you have to take Mohammed
Speaker 1: to the mountain. The mountain will come to mommed. You
Speaker 1: don't have to go looking for problems. They'll have it.
Speaker 1: Don't don't worry. The desert will show up at your door.
Speaker 1: Exact back to that idea of like, well, you could
Speaker 1: feed the bad wolf of you are, but he's still
Speaker 1: gonna show up. That's why this book is called Life
Speaker 1: is in the Transitions. Okay, it's a William James phrase
Speaker 1: from the Birth of Psychology and the essence of it
Speaker 1: is that these are horrible. They're miserable, they're difficult, they're overwhelming,
Speaker 1: but they are also essential, they are opportunities. But if
Speaker 1: I could say one thing, that would be to everybody
Speaker 1: listening to us, that's in the spirit of what you
Speaker 1: just said, it's don't shield your eyes when the scary
Speaker 1: part start, because that's when the heroes are made. And
Speaker 1: if there's one thing I learned from listening to a
Speaker 1: thousand hours of interviews like people who had problems as
Speaker 1: you know, that made even your worst problems seem tame
Speaker 1: and made me grateful in the long category of miseries
Speaker 1: i'd already gotten through that there was still a lot
Speaker 1: that I hadn't gone through. Is that we all want
Speaker 1: to be and need to be and can be the
Speaker 1: hero of our own story. Well, I think that is
Speaker 1: a perfect and beautiful place to wrap this up. Bruce.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation. You
Speaker 1: and I will spend a little bit of time in
Speaker 1: a post show conversation talking a little bit more about
Speaker 1: these ideas. Listeners, if you'd like access to that, and
Speaker 1: things like weekly many episodes and all sorts of other
Speaker 1: good stuff. You can go to one you Feed, dot
Speaker 1: net slash Join. Thanks again, Bruce, I really enjoyed this.
Speaker 1: Thank you my provoch, Thank you for having me, and
Speaker 1: we'll go through this everybody. There is wisdom out there.
Speaker 1: If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
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