Speaker 1: Most of us sell out our true natures and join
Speaker 1: the culture, and then we wander around feeling weirdly divided
Speaker 1: from ourselves, and integrity is the way back. Hello, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Martha Beck
Speaker 1: on the show. Martha is a New York Times best
Speaker 1: selling author, life coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard
Speaker 1: degrees in social science. Oprah Winfrey has called her quote
Speaker 1: one of the smartest women I know. Martha is a
Speaker 1: passionate and engaging teacher and coach known for her unique
Speaker 1: combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her newest book is
Speaker 1: called The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your
Speaker 1: True Self. In this episode, I talked to Martha Beck
Speaker 1: about integrity. According to Martha, we are all born true
Speaker 1: to ourselves with our integrity intact, but then we lose
Speaker 1: sight of who we are because we try so hard
Speaker 1: to fit into our society. Martha shares advice on how
Speaker 1: to live authentic in a culture that doesn't necessarily share
Speaker 1: the same values as you. We also touch on the
Speaker 1: topics of neurodiversity, emotions, coaching, and transcendence. Martha is one
Speaker 1: of the best coaches alive on this planet, and it
Speaker 1: was such an honor to chat with her on this
Speaker 1: podcast and to gain her unique wisdom on integrity and
Speaker 1: living a life of authenticity and purpose. She's just such
Speaker 1: a delight. So, without further ado, I bring you Martha Beck.
Speaker 1: Martha Hello. I love your podcast, I love your books.
Speaker 1: I've been a fan of yours that I was stunned
Speaker 1: when I realized it was you doing the interview. I
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, are you serious. I had
Speaker 1: no idea that the great Martha Beck even knew I exist.
Speaker 1: Are you kidding? I am? I am, I'm not kidding.
Speaker 1: I loved Wired to Create, I love Transcend. I'm like
Speaker 1: I am. I just wade a book proposal where I
Speaker 1: leaned quite heavily on Transcend, and my agent said, look,
Speaker 1: not everyone is as excited about Meslow as you are.
Speaker 1: I was like, well I should be, because this is awesome.
Speaker 1: Well that made my day. So thank you so much.
Speaker 1: And I know we have a mutual friend Andrew me
Speaker 1: and Gino, and he speaks so highly of you. Ah,
Speaker 1: he's amazing, He's amazing. Yeah, just so I was, so
Speaker 1: I'm just so excited to get you on this show,
Speaker 1: and and just a chat. You know, we have very
Speaker 1: formal chats, you know that don't feel the need, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, just come as you are, you know, and
Speaker 1: we'll just sort of riff. And I loved your I
Speaker 1: loved your most recent book on integrity, of course, and
Speaker 1: I love all your books. But can we talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about, you know, what's your motivation? What, why'd
Speaker 1: you get into the field of coaching? You know, how
Speaker 1: did that? How did that start? What's the backstory there?
Speaker 1: It was a complete accident. I literally tripped and fell
Speaker 1: into it. I was teaching multinational business management at Thunderbird
Speaker 1: Business School in Phoenix, where I lived, and I developed
Speaker 1: a career class to help the business school students there,
Speaker 1: and they really really liked it. And then they started
Speaker 1: asking me to just talk to them outside of class.
Speaker 1: I said, well, I'm not a therapist. They're like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we just want to talk about So I started calling
Speaker 1: it life design and I started doing it, and then
Speaker 1: like I've been doing it for four or five years,
Speaker 1: but still didn't have a name for it. And then
Speaker 1: I was on a plane and I opened USA Today
Speaker 1: and they were naming me as one of the best
Speaker 1: known life coaches in America, and I was like, what,
Speaker 1: what a life coach? That's it yourself that way? Oh
Speaker 1: my gosh. No, I was like, that sounds yeah. Sorry,
Speaker 1: all your coaches out there. I no longer think that
Speaker 1: that is so funny. That must be so surreal. Though.
Speaker 1: See a headline of how the world perceives you? Oh
Speaker 1: my god, and that's not how you had perceived yourself.
Speaker 1: I just think that's really interesting. It really was, and
Speaker 1: it was another lesson in the fact that the way
Speaker 1: the world sees you really has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: who you are or how you feel inside. But I
Speaker 1: was very you know, I was thrilled to be that.
Speaker 1: Other papers have said things about me that weren't as complimentary,
Speaker 1: so I've learned to take it all with a grain
Speaker 1: of salt. And you have a degree in sociology, is
Speaker 1: that right? I do? Yeah, I have three Harvard degrees actually,
Speaker 1: and I was counting. Yes, all my friends play drinking
Speaker 1: games whenever I mentioned that, and they're perpetually plastered. Now
Speaker 1: they drink water, but they do have a drinking game.
Speaker 1: I'm not even kidding. That's impressive. But sociology is just
Speaker 1: one then what are the other two? My undergraduate degree
Speaker 1: was in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. So I was
Speaker 1: a Chinese major basically. Yeah, so obviously Chinese by heritage,
Speaker 1: and uh oh yeah, yeah, I just thought, well, that
Speaker 1: sounds weird. I'm going to take that. I mean, for
Speaker 1: a girl from Utah, I want to learn Chinese. That's
Speaker 1: what I want to do, and the others are in
Speaker 1: sociology socioeconomic development. I thought about psychology, but at the
Speaker 1: time I was at Harvard, if you studied psychology, it
Speaker 1: was you and a rat alone in a lab, and
Speaker 1: if you brought another person in, it immediately became sociology.
Speaker 1: So that's where I went. I mean, this wasn't when
Speaker 1: Skinner was there, was it? Well not when he was
Speaker 1: there there I saw him want some elevator. But I'm
Speaker 1: not as old as Beef Skinner. It's surprise. Well I
Speaker 1: know that. I know that, but it's possible. Maybe you
Speaker 1: were young to a Turk, you know, when he was
Speaker 1: very old. Yeah, I was seventeen and he was very old,
Speaker 1: but they were still swimming rats around. I told a
Speaker 1: story in one of my books that I had a
Speaker 1: friend who was swimming rats around in a solution of
Speaker 1: powdered milk and water with electrodes in their brains, and
Speaker 1: the pool she used this little pool that was for kids.
Speaker 1: It was called u a Smurf pool because they had
Speaker 1: the cartoon characters, the Smurfs on it was so I
Speaker 1: was talking to her, and I had a seminar one
Speaker 1: floor below in William James Hall, and I was late,
Speaker 1: so I ran down there and there were all these
Speaker 1: visiting professors that day, and I said, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: I was I was upstairs watching my friends swim rats
Speaker 1: around a Smurf pool, and they all started talking about
Speaker 1: Smurf and Smurf's work and how they'd read his latest articles,
Speaker 1: and I realized they thought it was like a skinner box.
Speaker 1: B F Skinner made these boxes for training pigeons and
Speaker 1: his daughter and it was very very benevolent, but he
Speaker 1: did keep his daughter in a skinner box a lot
Speaker 1: of the time. So people thought that a Smurf pool
Speaker 1: was by doctor Smurf. And everyone sat there talking about
Speaker 1: how what strides Smurf was making in psychology. That's so funny,
Speaker 1: that is so funny. Well, I know that you never
Speaker 1: intended to become a life coach and kind of fell
Speaker 1: into it. But the thing that seems to be underlying
Speaker 1: all of that is your your deep passion and interest
Speaker 1: in eliminating human suffering by any means available. Good, Okay,
Speaker 1: confirmation on that there's no confirmed, but you get it
Speaker 1: in lots of different ways, right, So you do. I
Speaker 1: love how you draw on brain science. I love you drawing.
Speaker 1: You know my field of psychology, but you also draw
Speaker 1: a lot on timeless spiritual texts and animal videos on YouTube. Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not just human suffering I would like to eliminate.
Speaker 1: I don't like the idea of any any being suffering.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, I entertained myself with watching otters play
Speaker 1: with rocks about an hour a day, and the rest
Speaker 1: of it is science. The rest of it is been
Speaker 1: trying to help people. And you're right. I do draw
Speaker 1: on pretty much anything I can find. If it works,
Speaker 1: if it does alleviate suffering in any way, I want
Speaker 1: to know about it. So I've studied everything from shamanic
Speaker 1: practices to as I said, Chinese ancient Chinese philosophy, Asian
Speaker 1: philosophy in general, and all the wonderful things that Western
Speaker 1: psychology and science have been teaching us it's a fun
Speaker 1: time to be playing around in this field. It really
Speaker 1: is a fun time. And the more the more I
Speaker 1: dig into Eastern philosophy historically, even you know, two hundred,
Speaker 1: three hundred and four years ago, the wisdom, I realize, like,
Speaker 1: what's the point of the scientists because I feel like
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, we keep just replicating and
Speaker 1: we're like we've discovered right, Well, what we've really discovered
Speaker 1: is what someone said like four hundred years ago in China. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so trying to justify, you know, being a scientist. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't feel like I get that many surprising findings.
Speaker 1: We still need to do the science to see what's
Speaker 1: what's real. But if I'm being honest, I can't say
Speaker 1: I get that many surprising findings anymore, you know, where
Speaker 1: it's like, oh my god, it turns out people don't
Speaker 1: want to be happy in their lives at all. What No, No,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know there's just timeless truths, right, Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think it's super exciting to find out,
Speaker 1: for example, that the what we know about the neuroplasticity
Speaker 1: of the brain. I mean, everybody throughout history has known
Speaker 1: that people's minds can change right, but to watch it
Speaker 1: happening with machines and see the different ways it happens.
Speaker 1: I ran out in the nineties and found a lab
Speaker 1: that would wire me up with one of the hats
Speaker 1: with the electrodes, so that I could watch my own
Speaker 1: brain at work and learn to move something a cursor
Speaker 1: around a computer screen just by thinking different thoughts. And
Speaker 1: it was so so bizarre because the thoughts that I
Speaker 1: thought would work didn't work. I was trying to bring
Speaker 1: me own anxiety, for example, and I was wired up
Speaker 1: with my little hat, trying not to blink because that
Speaker 1: would make the electrodes go crazy. And I thought, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to meditate. My phato waves went up, but
Speaker 1: my anxiety did not go down at all. I was
Speaker 1: just watching my anxiety. And then I started thinking just
Speaker 1: random thoughts, and I started thinking about dangerous situations, and
Speaker 1: my anxiety just dropped and dropped and dropped, and it
Speaker 1: dropped to zero. When I thought about skiing in a
Speaker 1: blizzard with no visibility on the edge of a cliff,
Speaker 1: or being live on Oprah, those were zero anxiety. I
Speaker 1: would have taken a lot of years to figure that out.
Speaker 1: If they hadn't had my fancy hat and my fabulous
Speaker 1: brain scientists there with me, and it really it informed
Speaker 1: my knowledge and opinion about what happened when I meditated,
Speaker 1: for example, which is an ancient Asian practice and well
Speaker 1: all over the world practice. I actually think that you're
Speaker 1: in the know. You're sort of down in the clay,
Speaker 1: and you're looking at little, tiny advances because that's how
Speaker 1: scientists do it. But for those of us who are
Speaker 1: looking at it from a broad historical perspective, your books,
Speaker 1: I love your books. I think they're full of exciting
Speaker 1: new ideas, and those ideas are old, old, old. I mean,
Speaker 1: transcend is all about this ability to move beyond our
Speaker 1: suffering and into liberation, and that that comes from all
Speaker 1: over the world. But it's so exciting to hear you
Speaker 1: say it. I have to say it's I love the
Speaker 1: fact that you defended my field of psychology on the
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. To me, I love that. I love that
Speaker 1: that just happened. I love that because you're right. You're right,
Speaker 1: you know what you're right. You know. I like to
Speaker 1: play Devil's advocate sometimes just for the fun of it.
Speaker 1: And you're a modest man. Let's face it maybe maybe
Speaker 1: a little too modest. And also I must say, my
Speaker 1: parietal lobe is not active this morning. I feel behind
Speaker 1: me the lights blew out the lights. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: get a replacement. I just order a replacement brain. I
Speaker 1: love it. Got a parietal love stick it through your ear.
Speaker 1: He'll be fine. Exactly. I apologize for that. That explains
Speaker 1: why I was critical of my field for a second there.
Speaker 1: So can I double click on something you said because
Speaker 1: maybe I'm not understanding it. That is a super fascinating
Speaker 1: finding that your anxiety levels were lower for these really
Speaker 1: high stakes situations. What was the explanation for? Did I
Speaker 1: miss it? You didn't tell me that yet, did you?
Speaker 1: You may have noticed I have diagnosed add That was
Speaker 1: one thing they diagnosed. They looked at my brain and said,
Speaker 1: holy smokes, you have add So that's why I'm watching
Speaker 1: otters with rocks and I can't stick to the point
Speaker 1: and everything. But I don't suffer from mental illness. I
Speaker 1: enjoy it. So because my brain was jumping around, I
Speaker 1: was able to track. Okay, here are the thoughts that
Speaker 1: bring it down. What did they have in common? And
Speaker 1: what's the explanation? And it is it? Is only when
Speaker 1: I am in an absolutely crucial situation where any mistake
Speaker 1: feels catastrophic, that I am truly present without any wavering attention. Colpe, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's what did it? Wow? I think I can relate
Speaker 1: to that. And actually my mom I don't really. Maybe
Speaker 1: I shouldn't bring my mom into this, but God bless her.
Speaker 1: I find that she is so neurotic about every little,
Speaker 1: tiny thing in the world, but to her credit, when
Speaker 1: an emergency happens, she goes into this like completely different
Speaker 1: state of like concentration and like Okay, let's get this,
Speaker 1: you know, sorted, But like she'll worry about like the
Speaker 1: widdows tiny as things every other second of her life.
Speaker 1: So it's just so interesting how that can happen. You
Speaker 1: mentioned being an Oprah, aren't you Oprah's coach? Is that?
Speaker 1: Is that true? I wouldn't say I am. I mean
Speaker 1: she would. I wrote for the magazine. I wrote for
Speaker 1: her magazine for almost its entire existence. I had to
Speaker 1: call him every single month, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: topics came through people who had been talking to her,
Speaker 1: and I would write directly to her, and she always wrote.
Speaker 1: She always told me that she read my articles first
Speaker 1: every month, and she often thanked me for insights and stuff.
Speaker 1: But it's not like I sat down and said, well,
Speaker 1: obviously your life sucks, so you need a life coach.
Speaker 1: I was kind of watching her life to see how
Speaker 1: it works. Frank So I was Oprah's coach in the
Speaker 1: sense that I sort of belonged to her. She was
Speaker 1: my boss. But I was never like, I can help
Speaker 1: you Oprah with your problems. No, not that way. You
Speaker 1: may not have explicitly said that to her, but you
Speaker 1: did help her, you know. So that's maybe you're being
Speaker 1: too modest. Now. There was one time when I just
Speaker 1: sort of said to her, you are exhausted. Nobody ever
Speaker 1: thought about how tired Oprah must have been after She's like,
Speaker 1: she never missed a show. There was never a sub
Speaker 1: for Oprah and she was. I said, go rest, go rest,
Speaker 1: and she sent me a blanket, which I suppose was
Speaker 1: barter of a kind. She's so generous that you can't
Speaker 1: even give her a bit of advice without getting something
Speaker 1: wonderful in respect. And look on your chair, there's a blanket.
Speaker 1: I love. I love that, And I have to say
Speaker 1: I'm able to distracted with this painting behind you is.
Speaker 1: I love it, Thank you. I'm intrigued by it. Can
Speaker 1: you can explain a little bit about it? So it's
Speaker 1: in a forest. This is an audio, so a lot
Speaker 1: of people won't be able to see unless thing on
Speaker 1: YouTube to watch this. But they're in a forest and
Speaker 1: there's and what I see is is it like a
Speaker 1: father and a child. No, it's a woman and a pig.
Speaker 1: I am not even kidding. I can't see from this distance,
Speaker 1: but it's no, you can't. You shouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: see from it doesn't hang on. Okay, it's a woman
Speaker 1: in a wild before more to the point, I see now. Now,
Speaker 1: I see it, Now, I see it. That is so cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I painted that as the cover for a novel. I wrote,
Speaker 1: So you painted this painting? Yeah, it is my own painting. Wow,
Speaker 1: you're so you're an artist as well. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: had I had a bunch of autoimmune problems and my
Speaker 1: hands stopped working for a couple of years, and it
Speaker 1: really it made me sort of change course and decide
Speaker 1: that I kind of had to work with my mind
Speaker 1: because that was the only thing that wasn't falling apart.
Speaker 1: The book is about a woman who gets lost in
Speaker 1: a forest. And I found one fact in my YouTube
Speaker 1: ramblings that I think all your listeners need to know,
Speaker 1: and that is that if you take a farm raised pig,
Speaker 1: little pink pig, put it out in the forest, let
Speaker 1: it fend for itself, it will revert into a wild boar.
Speaker 1: It'll grow darker, it'll get shaggy, it'll grow tusques. And
Speaker 1: if you in the same individual creature, this is not evolutionary.
Speaker 1: It's a it must be epigenetic. I don't know anyway.
Speaker 1: I use that as a metaphor for regaining our wildness,
Speaker 1: for being like, we're kept in little pens and society
Speaker 1: puts many many pressures on us and we lose our
Speaker 1: true nature. We become docile and easy to deal with.
Speaker 1: But that's not what's in us. So she goes out
Speaker 1: to the forest and she goes wild old herself and
Speaker 1: it goes wild. And yeah, it's a whole thing about
Speaker 1: regaining our our natural selves. Now, I describe myself as
Speaker 1: a wild introvert. That's my descriptive. Yes, can I be
Speaker 1: one too? That's perfect. I've never heard the race thankful,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to like coin this. It resonated with a
Speaker 1: lot of people. When I came out as a wild introvert,
Speaker 1: people like, that's me too. You know, I'm definitely wild inside.
Speaker 1: I need a lot of rest. I need a lot
Speaker 1: of rest. I am also a wild introvert. I love that.
Speaker 1: I mean, consider it coin that is brilliant, and I
Speaker 1: will credit you for at least a year and then
Speaker 1: I'll forget. But here's the thing. I'm a wild introvert,
Speaker 1: but I'm also and I need a lot of rest.
Speaker 1: But I'm also not culturally cooperative. So introvert means I
Speaker 1: like to be away from people a lot. I like
Speaker 1: to go to the forests myself. But it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that I'm not willing to be weird. I don't care
Speaker 1: if people think I'm weird, and this means that my
Speaker 1: wildness can come out more. I think. So is your introversion?
Speaker 1: Does your introversion makes you? Does it make you cooperate
Speaker 1: with social norms? Or is it just no, not at all?
Speaker 1: It's agnostic to that? Yeah, what's agnostic to that? Yeah? Absolutely? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The trauma, loss, and uncertainty of our world have led
Speaker 1: many of us to ask life's biggest questions, such as,
Speaker 1: who are we what is our highest purpose? And how
Speaker 1: do we not only live through, but thrive in the
Speaker 1: wake of tragedy, division, and challenges to our fundamental way
Speaker 1: of living. To help us all address these questions, process
Speaker 1: what this unique time in human history has meant for
Speaker 1: us personally and collectively an emerge whole, I've collaborated with
Speaker 1: my colleague and dear friend, doctor Jordan Finegeld, MD to
Speaker 1: bring you our forthcoming book. It's called Choose Growth, a
Speaker 1: Workbook for transcending trauma, fear, and self doubt. It's a
Speaker 1: workbook design to guide you on a journey of committing
Speaker 1: to growth and the pursuit of self actualization every day.
Speaker 1: It's chock full of research from humanistic psychology, positive psychology,
Speaker 1: developmental psychology, personality psychology, cognitive science, and neuropsychology. So lots
Speaker 1: of themes that you hear about on this podcast, and
Speaker 1: it's aimed to help us all integrate the many facets
Speaker 1: of ourselves and co crete our new normal with a
Speaker 1: renewed sense of strength, vitality, and hope. Whether you're healing
Speaker 1: from loss, adapting to the new normal, or simply looking
Speaker 1: ahead to life's next chapter, Choose Growth will help steer
Speaker 1: you there too, deeper connection to your values, your life vision,
Speaker 1: and ultimately your most authentic self. Choose Growth will officially
Speaker 1: hit the shelves September thirteenth, and you can border your
Speaker 1: copy or the audiobook in the US now on Amazon,
Speaker 1: Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound, and all major retailers. If
Speaker 1: you're in the UK and Commonwealth, you can order now
Speaker 1: at bookshop dot org dot UK. We truly hope this
Speaker 1: book helps you grow and thrive and become your best self. Okay,
Speaker 1: now back to the show. Well, maybe this would be
Speaker 1: a nice segue into a whole rich discussion we can
Speaker 1: have about integrity, an area of mutual interest to both
Speaker 1: of ours. But I loved your book, The Way of Integrity,
Speaker 1: and I heard somewhere that you almost called the book undivided.
Speaker 1: That's true, right, you almost called it And I see why.
Speaker 1: I see why, Yeah, because that's so core to your
Speaker 1: definition of integrity, right, yeah, the whole The word integrity
Speaker 1: just means intact. It doesn't mean. There's sort of a
Speaker 1: virtuous Sunday School sort of nuance to it that is
Speaker 1: taken on in English, but it really just means being
Speaker 1: one thing, not divided. So we're all born in perfect integrity,
Speaker 1: and we have a genetic predisposition, and then we have
Speaker 1: a culture around as a family culture, you know, religious, ethnic, national,
Speaker 1: all these different levels of culture, and before we can
Speaker 1: even talk, we basically sell out our true nature to
Speaker 1: be more like what people want us to be, which
Speaker 1: is cultural. And that all also is inherent our incredible
Speaker 1: susceptibility to socialization. And it's fine as long as it
Speaker 1: doesn't really pull us away from who we are in
Speaker 1: our essence. But I would think that most people, certainly
Speaker 1: by the time they're an adult, would have confronted social
Speaker 1: pressures that pulled them away from something that was very,
Speaker 1: very essential to them. And most of us sell out
Speaker 1: our true natures and join the culture, and then we
Speaker 1: wander around feeling weirdly divided from ourselves, and integrity is
Speaker 1: the way back. Wow. Look, there's some interesting connections here
Speaker 1: between your writings some integrity and how the humanistic psychologists
Speaker 1: thought about integrity, especially the Book of the Insane Society
Speaker 1: by Eric crom I think that he really he've used authenticity,
Speaker 1: which is authenticity as being true to your value use,
Speaker 1: especially in environments that challenge it. Right, So, what does
Speaker 1: it mean to be happy when everyone else around who's unhappy?
Speaker 1: Isn't that the highest mark of insanity depends on who's
Speaker 1: defining it, because it is. I mean, you know, if
Speaker 1: like you're in a you know, in an environment where
Speaker 1: everyone is being killed around you and dying, you know,
Speaker 1: and you're part of the problem, you know, and you're like,
Speaker 1: I'm happy, I'm being authentic, you know. Yes, Anyway, he
Speaker 1: wrote a lot about that, and it just it just
Speaker 1: dawned to me that there's I think that there's a
Speaker 1: relationship there because he very much viewed the environment and
Speaker 1: your relationship to the environment as essential to authenticity. Well,
Speaker 1: I think pretty much as you said earlier, all these
Speaker 1: concepts have been done in it from a million different directions, right,
Speaker 1: So if you look at any great psychologist, I mean,
Speaker 1: even Freud with the ego the end supero thing, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's kind of about achieving harmony between these unlike parts.
Speaker 1: So I think everybody's sort of feeling for the concept
Speaker 1: step of making the psyche hole, making a life whole
Speaker 1: and intact integrity is just another way to say it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and even I'll throw another phrase into here. Maslow talked
Speaker 1: about synergy, which I think is what you talk about
Speaker 1: inner and outer world simply works, you know, being unharming
Speaker 1: each other. Maslow said, what is good for you, it
Speaker 1: is automatically good for the world, and that's what he
Speaker 1: viewed a synergy, which he actually got from Ruth Benedict,
Speaker 1: the anthropologist. We should give her some credit. She was brilliant,
Speaker 1: absolutely brilliant. She talked about synagionistic cultures. Yeah, yeah, she
Speaker 1: talked about synergistic cultures. Then Maslow adapted that phrase to
Speaker 1: talk about individuals who are synergynistic with their environment. Fabulous Anyway,
Speaker 1: what I'm going on too much here? No, it's awesome.
Speaker 1: And it's a point of faith that if what is
Speaker 1: good for me is good for you. And that's a
Speaker 1: huge schism in Western knowledge, like is the natural state
Speaker 1: of man be competitive and mutually destructive or can we
Speaker 1: say that if everyone went and became completely themselves the
Speaker 1: world would benefit from it. And the conventional wisdom is
Speaker 1: that everybody would just take a bunch of stuff for
Speaker 1: themselves and destroy other people. And we have to rein
Speaker 1: in our natural impulses because they're destructive. You me, Maslow,
Speaker 1: Ruth Benedict, and Eric from Apparently we all share this
Speaker 1: optimism that what's good for the individual is ultimately going
Speaker 1: to be good for the group and for the world.
Speaker 1: And like we've been going on the other assumption for
Speaker 1: a long time and things are not looking good, So
Speaker 1: maybe we should try the other way where we find
Speaker 1: ourselves instead of giving ourselves away. Yeah, part of ourselves
Speaker 1: of so much of your writings as well, is the notion.
Speaker 1: And you don't really necessarily use this phrase, but I'm
Speaker 1: going to use it people pleasing. You know, you do
Speaker 1: talking about pleasing our culture, this incessant drive to feel
Speaker 1: like your needs don't matter and it's only the other
Speaker 1: you have to serve, you know, completely selflessly. I think
Speaker 1: that can be very dangerous, especially if you're a child
Speaker 1: and you have parents who don't listen to your real
Speaker 1: felt needs. Carl Rogers talked about this a lot as
Speaker 1: important for developing to a fully functioning human is individually
Speaker 1: your your own self. So yeah, I can talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about that. Well, I think I do use
Speaker 1: people pleasing in there a couple of pay but because
Speaker 1: it's it's the same as what I'm calling duplicity, where
Speaker 1: integrity is one thing. Duplicity is two things, and the
Speaker 1: duplicity that most of us suffer from has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with being bad. It's not that we're out of
Speaker 1: integrity because we are willful liars. It's always that we're
Speaker 1: trying to be good. We're trying so hard to be good.
Speaker 1: Even people who end up doing bad things are usually
Speaker 1: trying to please someone around them because the the propensity
Speaker 1: to be incredibly vulnerable to socialization is part of our
Speaker 1: genius wonderful so and we're so helpless and completely dependent
Speaker 1: as infants that we'd better please the people around us
Speaker 1: because they have to get up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night every night. These people are exhausted. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you have kids, but trust me, anyone raising
Speaker 1: a human infant is exhausted. And it does them both good.
Speaker 1: At the infant is really keyed in and going, okay,
Speaker 1: I want to figure out what's right for you and
Speaker 1: I want to become that. It helps them both survive.
Speaker 1: But there's a period, maybe in toddlerhood, where kids say no,
Speaker 1: and they call it the terrible twos, and I think
Speaker 1: it's where the child is trying to recognize where or
Speaker 1: she or they do not want to please the other people,
Speaker 1: and that can be either crushed out of us at
Speaker 1: that very moment, or it can be celebrated by parents
Speaker 1: and people around us who are interested in who we are.
Speaker 1: I've got this great educator from South Africa with me
Speaker 1: right now, with her daughter, and what's so interesting to
Speaker 1: me about her is she never uses the word children
Speaker 1: or the word babies. She always says small people, little people.
Speaker 1: From the moment a child is born, that child is
Speaker 1: a person to her, and they're sort of moving through
Speaker 1: the stage where they have to finish just dating outside
Speaker 1: the womb, because they're basically just plasma pets when we're born,
Speaker 1: and then waiting as the child learns to talk and
Speaker 1: walk and do things to see who it is who
Speaker 1: has come to visit, and that curiosity and the dignity
Speaker 1: of calling an infant a person. I've noticed that with
Speaker 1: people who are wonderful, wonderful teachers and parents, and I
Speaker 1: think our culture could really benefit from saying, yeah, the
Speaker 1: terrible twos are when the child says who hears you
Speaker 1: or they are, and it's an exciting thing to discover.
Speaker 1: I love that. I love that I'm thinking about education
Speaker 1: as my mind went when you were talking about this
Speaker 1: because I'm really a favor of a human centered education system.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should stop calling them students, Maybe maybe we
Speaker 1: should call them humans. Yeah. I have a son with
Speaker 1: Down syndrome, and he's been a huge teacher of mine
Speaker 1: on especially in integrity, because he will not say anything
Speaker 1: that's not true for him, and he will not he
Speaker 1: will do things that aren't things he wants to, but
Speaker 1: he will never lie to himself and say that he's
Speaker 1: doing it for his own good. He knows he's doing
Speaker 1: it to, you know, go along. But when he was born,
Speaker 1: people told me there are lots of therapies you can
Speaker 1: they do early intervention with these kids. Now, you can
Speaker 1: teach them to almost act like other kids. And I
Speaker 1: thought I knew he had Down syndrome for a couple
Speaker 1: of months before he was born, and people kept telling
Speaker 1: me things like this, And I thought, you know, if
Speaker 1: I went to the pet store for a puppy, because
Speaker 1: everybody has puppies, and I came home with a pet
Speaker 1: and it turned out to be a kid, and people
Speaker 1: would say, it's okay, it's okay, you can teach you
Speaker 1: can work with these kittens, you can teach them to
Speaker 1: kind of bark, sort of wag their tails, you know,
Speaker 1: And I thought, what about maybe cats are kind of cool.
Speaker 1: Maybe I wait to see what the cat likes to do,
Speaker 1: and then it's okay that I have a cat and
Speaker 1: you have a dog. Even if you don't think it's
Speaker 1: okay to have a cat, I am enjoying it. And
Speaker 1: that is another thing about integrity. I read books saying
Speaker 1: you will always be ashamed of your child, and I
Speaker 1: was like, nah, I don't think so. And I also
Speaker 1: didn't think that he was bad because he was different.
Speaker 1: He was just another kind of wild to me. Yes, yes, well,
Speaker 1: I'm big into neurodiversity and kind of just appreciating that
Speaker 1: all the different things we have in the human genome,
Speaker 1: we have a lot. There's a lot there in the
Speaker 1: human genome, you know. The wisdom of crowds that weird
Speaker 1: principle from economics that if you ask everybody in the
Speaker 1: room to guess how many beans there are in a barrel,
Speaker 1: the average answer of all the answers in the group
Speaker 1: will come closer to the truth than any individual answer.
Speaker 1: So the crowd is wiser than any one person in
Speaker 1: the crowd. But it's more true if the crowd is diverse.
Speaker 1: So if you get a huge number of Harvard professors
Speaker 1: and have them, guess, there's less diversity than if you
Speaker 1: throw in a few people with down syndrome, right or
Speaker 1: you know, so getting that diversity makes us more intelligent
Speaker 1: as a group, as a global group. And I think
Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons. Is, as you say, it
Speaker 1: might be nice to change education and start judging people
Speaker 1: along such a narrow band of abilities. Right, The only
Speaker 1: use they have is to be students, to get good
Speaker 1: scores in a standardized test. Yeah, you know, is that it?
Speaker 1: It never did meet any damn good nothing, nothing. I
Speaker 1: was very pleased with my scores. They did not translate
Speaker 1: to life skills. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: what about Dante's divine comedy? Why do you bring that
Speaker 1: into your work? Ah, because it's just such a knee slapper. Now.
Speaker 1: I read Dante. I read The Device the Inferno when
Speaker 1: I was eighteen and very depressed, and there was this
Speaker 1: image of Dante going through Hell and it gets worse
Speaker 1: and worse and worse and worse until he gets to
Speaker 1: the very center of Hell, where Lucifer, the fallen Angel
Speaker 1: is locked in the Lake of ice. I remember thinking
Speaker 1: that like of ice sounded very familiar to me. It
Speaker 1: feels like depression when you read about it. And his
Speaker 1: guide tells Dante, you have to keep going down, and
Speaker 1: he says, I'm as down as it gets. I'm at
Speaker 1: the center of the earth. And his guy says, no, no,
Speaker 1: you have to keep going down. So he finds a
Speaker 1: hole in the ice, and he actually has to climb
Speaker 1: on the body of the monster to get down, and
Speaker 1: then he has to turn because he has passed the
Speaker 1: center of the earth and now what was down has
Speaker 1: become up. So by going the same direction, he emerges
Speaker 1: into a place where he can then climb toward paradise.
Speaker 1: And I read that at eighteen and I recognized it
Speaker 1: as it or maybe I just projected, but I thought,
Speaker 1: that is a psychological metaphor, and it gave me this.
Speaker 1: There's sort of a validation that if I kept going
Speaker 1: through my own suffering the way I was doing it,
Speaker 1: I was getting worse, but it was going. The only
Speaker 1: way out was through right, and it worked. It worked.
Speaker 1: And then I read the whole Divine comedy, and everybody
Speaker 1: reads Inferno, but nobody reads two thirds of the epic poem.
Speaker 1: That come after that. One is Purgatorio, and the last
Speaker 1: is Pardiso. And the Inferno is about how awful the
Speaker 1: world is once you get through that. Purgatorio is about
Speaker 1: once you've gotten through the horror of the world, once
Speaker 1: you transcended to use a book from a word from
Speaker 1: your book, there's still a lot of work to do.
Speaker 1: You have to start actually doing, in three dimensions in
Speaker 1: your real behavior what you've found to be true in yourself.
Speaker 1: So you have to do One metaphor would be, you
Speaker 1: have to be yourself with your parents, even if they
Speaker 1: don't like who you actually are. You have to defy
Speaker 1: the norms of your culture if your culture doesn't serve
Speaker 1: your truth. And that's what I think Purgatorio is about.
Speaker 1: And then the Paradiso is about once you've really, really
Speaker 1: gotten to the point where you are living your truth
Speaker 1: in every aspect of your life, something unbelievable happens, and
Speaker 1: Dante says, don't even try to understand this, And then
Speaker 1: he goes on to describe an experience that is almost
Speaker 1: exactly like the experiences of awakening or enlightenment that I
Speaker 1: had read about from Asian philosophers, And I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: Dante did it too. There is this thing called awaken
Speaker 1: or transcendent, and people experience it with similar metaphors and
Speaker 1: symbols no matter where it happens in the world, and
Speaker 1: I believe it to be the end of suffering. I
Speaker 1: think the end of your psychotherapy is when you're enlightened. Wow.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's actually ever a state that anyone
Speaker 1: gets to though, as opposed just to process? Oh? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I think it's a state. Why well, if you look
Speaker 1: at like Andrew Neuberg's work that I've been following forever.
Speaker 1: Of course he's a friend of mine. Yea God, would
Speaker 1: you like tell him I'm a massive fangirl. I'll introduce
Speaker 1: you to each other. Yeah, I'll make an intro. Oh good, heavens.
Speaker 1: I'm just rereading one of his books right now. Anyway,
Speaker 1: when he I don't know if he was one of
Speaker 1: the people who wired up those Tibetan monks like Younger
Speaker 1: Minger young A Minger Rimpochet another one of my favorite
Speaker 1: people to read a spiritual perspective, but he's probably spent
Speaker 1: more time meditating than anyone on earth, and when they
Speaker 1: wired up his brain and had him go to a
Speaker 1: state of compassion. It practically blew up the machine. Right there,
Speaker 1: there were two distinct parts of the brain and you
Speaker 1: probably know the names of them. Off you'r the cuff,
Speaker 1: but part that establishes self other differentiation, it seemed to
Speaker 1: go dormant. Well, funnily enough, part of the part of
Speaker 1: the pridal little that is dormant here on my behind
Speaker 1: me right now. Yeah, yeah, that's so cool. I wonder
Speaker 1: if that's a coincidence. And then the other part is
Speaker 1: so there's self other differentiation, and then there's a sense
Speaker 1: of being in control, which it is probably I don't know.
Speaker 1: My friend Jill Taylor would say, is the left hippocampus
Speaker 1: is part of it. Anyway, you lose the sensation of
Speaker 1: being separate in a body, and you lose this sensation
Speaker 1: of controlling what happens. Those two things. Like, I know
Speaker 1: so many people who would love to be enlightened and
Speaker 1: go beyond suffering. And then if you said to people, okay,
Speaker 1: that you will have to surrender two things, your sense
Speaker 1: of self and your sense of control, they would be like, okay, No.
Speaker 1: We are so obsessed, especially in Western cultures, with you know,
Speaker 1: clarifying ourselves and getting our own things going, and we
Speaker 1: are so obsessed with controlling everything in our own lives,
Speaker 1: everything in the world. But what the enlightened people say
Speaker 1: is that after a certain period of introspection meditation, what
Speaker 1: happens to Dante, after he's gone deeply into his integrity,
Speaker 1: is that the self falls away, the sense of self
Speaker 1: falls away, and what replaces it is this unbelievable connection
Speaker 1: with a felt sense of connection with the universe. Yes,
Speaker 1: the sense of control goes away, but what comes then
Speaker 1: is in Chinese they call it wei wu wait, which
Speaker 1: means to do without doing. You become, in a weird way,
Speaker 1: a puppet operated by the benevolent force. I mean. The
Speaker 1: absolute symbol of it for Western culture is when Luke
Speaker 1: Skywalker is trying to destroy the Death Star and he
Speaker 1: hears Obi Wan Kenobi say trust the Force, Luke. Why
Speaker 1: do we love that so much? Because when we put
Speaker 1: down the sense of control and the sense of self,
Speaker 1: there is a force that we experience, whether it's real
Speaker 1: or not as moot because it's perceived, it's an experience
Speaker 1: that is real, and then the force works through us
Speaker 1: and that is also extraordinarily blissful. So I think this
Speaker 1: has been happening to people all over the world in
Speaker 1: different cultures at different times. Some of them wrote it
Speaker 1: about it, some of them didn't, but all those that did.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a twelve thousand year old story that
Speaker 1: came across the Bearing Straight with some of the Native
Speaker 1: American peoples. It's called the Tale of Jumping Mouse. That
Speaker 1: is one of the most powerful stories about enlightenment I've
Speaker 1: ever seen. It's been everywhere all through history. It's just
Speaker 1: not very common, but I think it could be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. That's true. It's not very common, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I like expert meditators would tend to have certain neurological profiles.
Speaker 1: The happiest man in the world. About Turocard, They did
Speaker 1: scan his brain and found that he had a lot
Speaker 1: of compassion and they were able to distinguish that from empathy.
Speaker 1: Oh cool, So that's really that's really cool, because you know,
Speaker 1: with empathy, you can get burnout, right, you can burn
Speaker 1: out if you're in the helping professions and you're always
Speaker 1: feeling what other people feel, you know, you can get exhausted.
Speaker 1: But compassions actually energize us to approach and help reduce
Speaker 1: suffering in the right way. Okay, So what is the
Speaker 1: idea of personal effect then, because you talk about that
Speaker 1: in your book, and maybe some techniques to become better
Speaker 1: at what we do, better, what we do professionally, better
Speaker 1: what we do. What do you mean by personal effectiveness?
Speaker 1: I think it would be that we work towards the
Speaker 1: well being of ourselves and others, in whatever form that
Speaker 1: would take. And the instigation of the desire to do
Speaker 1: anything effectively has to come from authenticity, from the place
Speaker 1: where we are truly ourselves. So the first thing that
Speaker 1: starts with is deciding what it means to be effective
Speaker 1: in your own life. You have to know what it
Speaker 1: is you truly, truly want. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that I often say to clients is I ask them
Speaker 1: to write down things they want. They come in and
Speaker 1: life coaching, do well, financially whatever, make a vision board,
Speaker 1: they make lists of things they want, and then I say,
Speaker 1: all right, now, when you wake up at night alone
Speaker 1: in the dark that you yearn for and you can
Speaker 1: feel the like when you think about things like wanting
Speaker 1: a professional achievement, it's it doesn't come from the same
Speaker 1: part of the body as the yearning for that beautiful,
Speaker 1: warm presence you know with everything that that is body
Speaker 1: sell the whole thing. When we yearn for other people,
Speaker 1: it's deep. For me, it comes from my solar. I
Speaker 1: feel it in my gut, my solar plexus. Like wants
Speaker 1: come from but a yearning comes from my body. And
Speaker 1: the things that people really really yearn for are very similar.
Speaker 1: And it's a short list. Love is one of them.
Speaker 1: Having someone to love and to love you back, Peace, freedom, joy,
Speaker 1: that's kind of it. I was like, that's and I've
Speaker 1: been all over the world asking people if that's all
Speaker 1: we really want? So how do you move yourself toward
Speaker 1: what you yearn for? You find out what choices you
Speaker 1: make on an everyday basis, on a minute to minute basis,
Speaker 1: how do they affect the part of you that yearns.
Speaker 1: So to be really effective is to be like an
Speaker 1: animal tracker. I love to go animal tracking, and you
Speaker 1: find the track of the thing you're looking for in
Speaker 1: the joy of your body. The tracks that you use
Speaker 1: what would be footprints or whatever you're following in the wilderness.
Speaker 1: You find what you really want to track, and you
Speaker 1: really define what that looks like. Before you track an animal,
Speaker 1: you have to know what it's prints look like. Once
Speaker 1: you get that really, really solidly in place, you start
Speaker 1: to begin to track this thing by the experience of
Speaker 1: joy in the body, the sense of sort of settling
Speaker 1: into integrity. And let me tell you what it feels like.
Speaker 1: I call it a sense of peace or sorry, a
Speaker 1: sense of truth. And it's the same thing that you
Speaker 1: feel when you solve a math equation and you know
Speaker 1: it's right, as it is when you go to the
Speaker 1: pound and get a dog and you know it's right.
Speaker 1: That's your dog, that's right. That's what you need to do,
Speaker 1: the same feeling of rightness. And I've asked people all
Speaker 1: over the world to say different things and see if
Speaker 1: they got this ring of truth or chime of truth.
Speaker 1: And the one sentence that I've found rings truest to
Speaker 1: everyone is the phrase, I am meant to live in peace.
Speaker 1: But if you just repeat that, or whoever's listening, if
Speaker 1: you can repeat that silently in your mind, I'm meant
Speaker 1: to live in peace. It immediately makes me take a
Speaker 1: deep breath. It did, yeah, And then it drops you
Speaker 1: into a state of nervous system alignment, where ah, there's
Speaker 1: a clarity, there's an alignment of all the different parts
Speaker 1: of the self, body, heart, mind, spirit. A lot of
Speaker 1: traditions divide it that way, and they're all on the
Speaker 1: same path and they're looking for the same things. And
Speaker 1: from that sense of truth, everything you do is very
Speaker 1: very effective. Wow. Wow, Can this help people in their
Speaker 1: lives who they feel like they're doing all the cult
Speaker 1: right things in their life, but things are just not
Speaker 1: working as they expected. Something just feels off, you know,
Speaker 1: Can some of these techniques help help them feel more
Speaker 1: whole in their lives? I could just type that up,
Speaker 1: put it out on a newsletter and say, this is
Speaker 1: what the way of integrity is about. Yeah, you absolutely
Speaker 1: nailed it. The people who are trying hardest, doing the best,
Speaker 1: getting the best grades and the best salaries and all
Speaker 1: the things, very often are the most lost. So at
Speaker 1: the very beginning of the Divine Comedy Dante, it starts
Speaker 1: out in the middle of my life, I came to
Speaker 1: myself in a arkwood. He was lost. He was confused,
Speaker 1: he says, the right way had been lost. He didn't
Speaker 1: remember getting there. He just felt wrong. He was scared
Speaker 1: all the time. He was unhappy, he was tired, he
Speaker 1: didn't feel good, and he didn't know how to get
Speaker 1: back and then he sees rising out of the murky forest,
Speaker 1: this bright mountains and it's the sun is shining on
Speaker 1: it and it's all golden, and he calls it mount delectable.
Speaker 1: And he sees all these people scrambling up toward the
Speaker 1: top and it looks fabulous, and he thinks that's the
Speaker 1: way out of here, and so he starts trying to climb.
Speaker 1: And to me, this is trying to climb up the
Speaker 1: pyramid of status, wealth and power in your culture. Like
Speaker 1: all those people are trying for that stuff. That must
Speaker 1: be the good stuff. I'm going to go for that.
Speaker 1: And you do really, really, really well. He gets so
Speaker 1: tired and he's animals keep attacking him, and they have
Speaker 1: like mood state names like the sad the sad Wolf.
Speaker 1: There's a wolf that makes him super sad and that
Speaker 1: makes him scared, and a leopard that makes him ravenous. Anyway,
Speaker 1: as he gets up the mountain, it gets worse. And
Speaker 1: what I've found as a coach is the most suffering
Speaker 1: I've ever seen has come from like people who just
Speaker 1: won an Olympic gold medal, people who just made a
Speaker 1: billion dollars, people who just got number one on the
Speaker 1: bestseller list, And this is not hypothetical. These are real people.
Speaker 1: I've also coached homeless addicts on the streets, and they
Speaker 1: have actually less suffering going on than that person who's
Speaker 1: sold out every ounce of his or her strength and
Speaker 1: time and will for some social goal that when you
Speaker 1: get there, is not it's not deeply joyful in itself.
Speaker 1: It's just what you were told would work and it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It's so powerful, and you said something so powerful just now,
Speaker 1: you know, you said this idea of kind of using
Speaker 1: up all of your talent strengths. You know, that can
Speaker 1: also just feel so depleting and also like where do
Speaker 1: I go? Where do I go from here? You know,
Speaker 1: like and then you also can have the pressure of like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: your next book has to be even better, and you're like,
Speaker 1: what if I don't have it in me? You know,
Speaker 1: I'm used up? So then does that mean I'm done?
Speaker 1: You know? My life is over? As there's something really
Speaker 1: energizing about being on the other side of potential where
Speaker 1: you feel like you have so much potential and you
Speaker 1: are on the journey that's energizing. Oh yeah, it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It seems completing when you're when you when you reach it.
Speaker 1: It nearly killed me. I mean by the time I
Speaker 1: was like, by the time I was getting my third
Speaker 1: Harvard degree, I was so sick. I had all these
Speaker 1: drinking games. Yes, yeh, drink, drink, but I was looking
Speaker 1: around at the people who were I mean, the pressure
Speaker 1: there is intense, and everybody there is intense. Right, they're
Speaker 1: all climbing mountain delectable as hard as they can am.
Speaker 1: I was climbing away too, but fortunately for me, my
Speaker 1: body gave out. And then what you just said about directionlessness,
Speaker 1: I think I made I made a list of things
Speaker 1: that I called Darkwood of error syndrome, things that make
Speaker 1: us feel like Dante waking up in the dark wood.
Speaker 1: And the very first thing was this loss of a
Speaker 1: sense of purpose. The number one thing people complain to
Speaker 1: me about is not they can be sick, they can
Speaker 1: be miserable, but that losing your sense of purpose. It's like,
Speaker 1: why not just kill yourself in it's really deep suffering
Speaker 1: And that's really deep. Yeah. And if that goes on
Speaker 1: for a while and you don't change course, you get
Speaker 1: really negative moods, depression, hostility, whatever. And if that doesn't work,
Speaker 1: your body will give out. You'll start to get sick.
Speaker 1: And there's lots of research showing that lying and secret
Speaker 1: keeping just incredibly increase physical illness because the body hates
Speaker 1: to lie. The body does not like to lie. True.
Speaker 1: That's a good quote too. Yeah, by the time I
Speaker 1: was twenty nine, I was literally just bedridden and couldn't
Speaker 1: move my hands, couldn't I was an absolute mess. I
Speaker 1: had all these diseases and I just decided I can't,
Speaker 1: I can't do this anymore. I have to find what
Speaker 1: gives me some kind of physical relief from pain. And
Speaker 1: that was the first step toward integrity for me to
Speaker 1: move away from what gave me physical pain. So it's
Speaker 1: not just depleting, it's actually it actually creates a very
Speaker 1: very positive environment for illness and disability when we're pushing
Speaker 1: that hard for things that aren't ours. Well, I'm so
Speaker 1: proud of you. I'm so proud of you. You really
Speaker 1: chose growth and really really did what it took to
Speaker 1: get out of that hell. I didn't really have that
Speaker 1: much of a choice. It's kind of like, yes, I
Speaker 1: chose to pull my hand out of the fire. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't an option for me to not find my
Speaker 1: integrity and try to live it. I feel like I
Speaker 1: want to coach you right now, Martha Beck. You know
Speaker 1: what is it within you that can give yourself a
Speaker 1: little bit of at least a pat on the back?
Speaker 1: Oh all right? Value it? Yes? Yes, yes, a little
Speaker 1: bit of agency you did take in taking and steering
Speaker 1: your own life. Is it makes me very proud of you? Oh?
Speaker 1: Thank you? Yeah, you're welcome. Well, in the book this,
Speaker 1: I want to reconcile a couple of things here what
Speaker 1: you just said with Well, you do write in the
Speaker 1: book about how negative emotions can actually be guiding you
Speaker 1: towards a better version of yourself if you follow your integrity,
Speaker 1: And I think that's the big if, right, if you
Speaker 1: follow your integrity. So can you kind of integrate that
Speaker 1: thought with what we're just talking about. Well, the negative
Speaker 1: feelings are always things that are there to show you
Speaker 1: your blind spots. So you're doing your you know, if
Speaker 1: you're like most people, you're doing your level best to
Speaker 1: be a good person and to be successful every minute
Speaker 1: of your day. But you have you've been taught things
Speaker 1: that aren't exactly true for you, because nothing can be
Speaker 1: exactly true for everybody. So there are places where you're
Speaker 1: gonna have blind spots, and as you feel the negativity
Speaker 1: of those things, it's a steering mechanism. It's like rumble
Speaker 1: strips on the highway. They put those, They corrugate the
Speaker 1: asphalt on the shoulder of the road so that if
Speaker 1: somebody goes to sleep and you drift over to the shoulder,
Speaker 1: it goes and it wakes you up. And that's what
Speaker 1: it's suffering is to me. It's the it's the guidance
Speaker 1: mechanism of the human psyche and the human body for
Speaker 1: that matter. And so there's there's a time when stress
Speaker 1: feels good. You can have positive stress, like working out,
Speaker 1: but if something hurts you, it's telling you stop. It's
Speaker 1: really simple. It's just stop. And in that way, suffering
Speaker 1: is our greatest ally. It's telling us all the time,
Speaker 1: and it can tell us that there fine levels of
Speaker 1: discrimination whether something is good or bad for us. Now
Speaker 1: I get to the point where if I have the
Speaker 1: slightest twinge, I'm like, my whole philosophy is cave early.
Speaker 1: When you start to suffer, immediately I give up. Uncle, No,
Speaker 1: I won't do that anymore. And it puts you on
Speaker 1: a really rapid course toward happiness. Strangely enough, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: so interesting. But you don't let things spiral downward is
Speaker 1: another way of putting it. Right. If you do, you
Speaker 1: just and you will because you have illusions and because not,
Speaker 1: you won't always have the same amount of effort or energy.
Speaker 1: But the beauty of it is the more you spiral down,
Speaker 1: the worse it hurts. So at a certain point it
Speaker 1: becomes unbearable. And then you pull your hand out of
Speaker 1: the fire unless you're very considered, you want to really
Speaker 1: please your parents and you just let yourself burn alive.
Speaker 1: That's powerful. That's powerful. So if you have the integrity
Speaker 1: and it goes against the grain of the culture, Now
Speaker 1: it's not, you're not it's not always going to be
Speaker 1: the case, right, Like, it's not like integrity is equivalent
Speaker 1: to going against the grand nature? Right, No, no, no no,
Speaker 1: but sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. Won't everyone hate you?
Speaker 1: How can you mentally have a mindset that's that's productive
Speaker 1: when you go against the grain of culture and you're
Speaker 1: the kind of person who likes to be liked. Well,
Speaker 1: in my case, and I am, I was born such
Speaker 1: a massive people pleaser. When I finally pulled my hand
Speaker 1: out of the fire. When I was so sick I
Speaker 1: could barely move, and I realized I had to find
Speaker 1: my integrity. I was raised very Mormon, and I was
Speaker 1: living in the community i'd grown up, and I went
Speaker 1: off to Harvard I had when my son was born.
Speaker 1: I moved back to Utah because I knew everybody would
Speaker 1: agree with me that down syndrome wasn't such a bad deal.
Speaker 1: But then I was surrounded by the people I'd grown
Speaker 1: up with, and they were all Mormon. And as I
Speaker 1: started looking for the deepest truth in my soul, I
Speaker 1: saw I didn't believe what they believe. And I actually
Speaker 1: left the Mormon Church, which is the only sin that
Speaker 1: they see as being worse than murder. So I asked
Speaker 1: to be taken off the list. And it took some asking,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you, because if they take you off, they
Speaker 1: feel like they're condemning your soul to eternal misery. And yeah,
Speaker 1: so people I loved I basically lost. I decided that
Speaker 1: for a year I would not tell a single lie,
Speaker 1: and I didn't tell a single lie that year, and
Speaker 1: everything fell apart. I left Mormonism, left Academia, left every
Speaker 1: brand i'd ever had, my extremely large immediate family. It
Speaker 1: was complicated. I explained it in the book, but basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: I sort of got cut off from pretty much every
Speaker 1: source of social feedback i'd had in my life. We
Speaker 1: don't need to go any details. But you had some trauma.
Speaker 1: I mean, you had some real trauma and abuse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a really good reason, a really good reason
Speaker 1: why left. I want to make that clear. My father
Speaker 1: was a big cheese in the Mormon church and I
Speaker 1: he had also sexually abused me as a child, And
Speaker 1: so when I left, it was very public and it
Speaker 1: wasn't just one little church member leaving. It was a big,
Speaker 1: big deal. And I got deaf dreads, I got a
Speaker 1: lot of hate mail. It was very intense. And I
Speaker 1: always tell people your journey to integrity will not be
Speaker 1: if there is any justice in the universe, it won't
Speaker 1: be as bad as mine. And mine still set me free.
Speaker 1: I started getting better here, I am yeah, and I wasn't.
Speaker 1: It was incredibly painful in the way that I suppose
Speaker 1: surgery without anesthesia would be incredibly painful. It's different from infection.
Speaker 1: What I had felt like it was toxic and infecting me.
Speaker 1: And then the pain of getting back into my integrity
Speaker 1: was like a surgery that was extremely painful, but I
Speaker 1: knew it was helping, and so there was this sort
Speaker 1: of rightness to it almost. And I went through the graving.
Speaker 1: I went through the center of hell and out the
Speaker 1: other side, and then here we are. I mean, Wow,
Speaker 1: what a journey of self actualization it's been for you
Speaker 1: in your in your own life. You've almost had to
Speaker 1: fight for your self actualization. Yeah, yeah, for periods protected protected. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I went and learned karate actually literally to get this wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to get the fear out of my body. I went
Speaker 1: and got some belts. I have so many follow up questions,
Speaker 1: but you know, we don't have that much time. But
Speaker 1: I feel like I want to coach you in a
Speaker 1: water down fashion. People. It may not be that they're
Speaker 1: they're so dramatic in how they need to go against
Speaker 1: their environment, but there may be many cases, as you
Speaker 1: talk about or book, where people the environment won't let
Speaker 1: people be true to themselves. So like if a family
Speaker 1: holds different views, or the boss is impossible, or you
Speaker 1: don't have enough money to do what you want to do.
Speaker 1: What's your advice to people in holding true their integrity?
Speaker 1: In those situations as well. Well. The first thing is
Speaker 1: don't lie to yourself. If you realize that your culture
Speaker 1: that people around you aren't doing, I always compare it
Speaker 1: I like to go to extremes. Logically, at the end
Speaker 1: of my year of not lying at all, I thought,
Speaker 1: if I were living in Germany during the World War
Speaker 1: Two and I was hiding Jews in the basement and
Speaker 1: the Gestapo came and quiz me, I would have lied
Speaker 1: to them and felt moral. So there's this. If you're
Speaker 1: in an insane system, you may not want to march
Speaker 1: around proclaiming your beliefs. I mean. One example is people
Speaker 1: of color in America. I had people friends come to
Speaker 1: me after I wrote the book and say, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot less latitude for speaking your mind if
Speaker 1: you're a person of color in this culture. And I
Speaker 1: was like, oh my gosh, you are so right. So
Speaker 1: you but you want to know you like for a
Speaker 1: person of color in this culture to be careful and
Speaker 1: avoid racists and avoid like getting hurt by racists. That
Speaker 1: is integrity, But it's also integrity to knowing your absolute
Speaker 1: heart mind sells that racism is wrong and that you
Speaker 1: are no less worthy than any other kind of person.
Speaker 1: So don't lie to yourself. That's the first thing. The
Speaker 1: second thing is there are a couple of ways. One
Speaker 1: I call the Monte Cristo approach. The Count of Monte
Speaker 1: Cristo was kept in a dungeon and he dug his
Speaker 1: way out through solid rock with a spoon over fourteen years.
Speaker 1: So keep working towards your liberation, even if it's you
Speaker 1: can only do a little a day. And another metaphor
Speaker 1: for that is what I call one degree turns, where
Speaker 1: if you're in a plane and you're going ten thousand
Speaker 1: miles and every half hour you just turn it one
Speaker 1: degree north, no one will notice the change, but you'll
Speaker 1: end up in a really different spot. So keep heading
Speaker 1: toward your authenticity, your integrity, even if it's just one
Speaker 1: degree at a time, little shifts, ten minutes a day
Speaker 1: spent doing what you love instead of what other people
Speaker 1: want you to do. Yeah, it adds up love that
Speaker 1: I must say. Martha Beck, you have lit my brain up.
Speaker 1: Look behind me. Yeah, it's a miracle. But you were,
Speaker 1: you were enlightened before. Well you know that's the other
Speaker 1: thing that that Dante says at the end of the parody.
Speaker 1: So that things happen with this miraculous, benevolent, wonderful magic
Speaker 1: kind of And yeah, I mean you do start to
Speaker 1: see the world that way for sure. I don't know
Speaker 1: how you made dead bulbs come alive, but you did.
Speaker 1: I just love it. I love it. Lit up that brains,
Speaker 1: and I love how lit up you are. I just
Speaker 1: I think you're so wonderful. I love your work so much.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Martha. That that all. I'm gonna go to
Speaker 1: text Andrew right now and be like, can you believe
Speaker 1: what Martha has said about me? But thank you so
Speaker 1: much for coming on the podcast today. I just really
Speaker 1: appreciate your authenticity and uh and just openness to the world.
Speaker 1: And it's a hard one, hard one, you know, in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, and you've done it such a
Speaker 1: joy to come on. And I'm so grateful for your
Speaker 1: work and everything you put into the world. It's it's
Speaker 1: really made my life, Richard. So thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
Speaker 1: you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast.
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Speaker 1: Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show,
Speaker 1: and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity.