Speaker 1: In case you're just recently joining us, or however long
Speaker 1: you've been a listener of the show. You may not
Speaker 1: realize we have years of incredible episodes on our archive.
Speaker 1: We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to
Speaker 1: handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you,
Speaker 1: but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope
Speaker 1: you'll enjoy this episode with Greg McEwan.
Speaker 2: If you focus on what you lack, you will lose
Speaker 2: what you have. If you focus on what you have,
Speaker 2: you will gain what you lack.
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
Speaker 1: think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
Speaker 1: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Greg McEwan,
Speaker 1: an author, public speaker, and leadership and business strategist. Greg
Speaker 1: often speaks on how to live and lead as an essentialist.
Speaker 1: His books include twenty Tens, Multipliers and twenty fourteen's Essentialism,
Speaker 1: and today Greg and Eric discuss his new book Effortless
Speaker 1: Make It Easier to Do what matters Most.
Speaker 3: Hi, Greg, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: It's great to be with you. Thank you, Eric.
Speaker 3: I am really happy to have you on. We are
Speaker 3: going to be discussing your book, Effortless Make it Easier
Speaker 3: to Do what matters Most. But before we do that,
Speaker 3: we'll start, like we always do, with a parable. And
Speaker 3: in the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking with
Speaker 3: his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two
Speaker 3: wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One
Speaker 3: is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
Speaker 3: bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 3: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 3: the granddaughter stops. She thinks about it for a second.
Speaker 3: She looks up at her grandfather, and she says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 3: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 3: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 3: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 3: the work that you do.
Speaker 2: Well, this is the great choice of life. I had
Speaker 2: an experience a few years ago where we moved to
Speaker 2: quite an idyllic area just north of Malibu. It's this
Speaker 2: area that was built in the nineteen fifties. The whole
Speaker 2: world moved on and no one told anyone here. So
Speaker 2: it's got white picket fences, it's more horseways than roads.
Speaker 2: And our four children really seemed to thrive, especially one
Speaker 2: of my daughters, who was always climbing trees and naming
Speaker 2: our chickens, yes we had chickens, and just always writing journals, reading,
Speaker 2: constantly interested in animals, voluminous in her talking, and all
Speaker 2: of this is how it was until she turned fourteen,
Speaker 2: and then she started being slower in doing her chores.
Speaker 2: She'd answer as in more sort of one word answers,
Speaker 2: and we just thought pretty age appropriate behavior until in
Speaker 2: a routine physical therapy appointment, the therapist pulled my wife
Speaker 2: and her aside and said, look, I don't want to
Speaker 2: alarm you, but she just failed a reflex test, and
Speaker 2: so I just think you should go see a neurologists
Speaker 2: just to be sure, to be worn twice. What began
Speaker 2: that day was a let's call it an agonizing experience,
Speaker 2: because she had a free fall in her capability, Like
Speaker 2: just every single day, we were watching it differently now,
Speaker 2: so we were seeing it differently, but also there was
Speaker 2: more to see. So eventually, you know, within a couple
Speaker 2: of months, she was maybe it would take her forty
Speaker 2: five seconds to write the last three letters of her name,
Speaker 2: two minutes to write out her whole name, hours to
Speaker 2: eat a meal. Her personality, once so vibrant, just full
Speaker 2: of light, just became monotone, a loss of emotional complexity.
Speaker 2: And to make it even more challenging, neurologists, some of them,
Speaker 2: thirty five year experts in their field, just shrug her shoulders.
Speaker 2: All tests coming in in the normal range. They didn't
Speaker 2: even offer as even the beginning of a diagnosis. So
Speaker 2: in the midst of that, what I experienced was the
Speaker 2: opening of two paths. It became clear that there were
Speaker 2: two parts. I think it's probably pretty analogous to the
Speaker 2: two wolves one wolf is saying worry, panic, blame, doctors
Speaker 2: get subsessed about these things that we can't control about.
Speaker 2: It just puts you in a state of anxiety and fear,
Speaker 2: a scared state. Let's call it. If you feed that wolf,
Speaker 2: that just makes everything harder. Yeah, the problem itself isn't
Speaker 2: served by that. So you've taken a problem which is
Speaker 2: already immensely challenging, and you just make it worse. Or
Speaker 2: on the other side, we found that there was this
Speaker 2: other path, this other wolf to use the mesophor that
Speaker 2: you introduced, which says, can we be grateful in the
Speaker 2: mimiest of this? Can we still focus on what we
Speaker 2: can control? Can we still have a lighter spirit? Can
Speaker 2: we adopt a lighter way of living life where we'll
Speaker 2: still laugh together, We'll still get around the piano and sing,
Speaker 2: We'll still play together, and pray together and go on walks.
Speaker 2: And although it seems obvious which wolf you ought to feed,
Speaker 2: the temptation was to feed the first. For sure, that
Speaker 2: was the path of least resistance. But quite fortunately, early
Speaker 2: on I felt inspired to read a chapter of a
Speaker 2: compilation book by Gordon B. Hinckley, and there was a
Speaker 2: chapter in that about cultivating an attitude of happiness and
Speaker 2: a spirit of optimism something like that, and I felt
Speaker 2: quite inspired to listen to that every day, and for
Speaker 2: the next four months I did. I think I listened
Speaker 2: to it almost every single day for four months, and
Speaker 2: I felt that that was in a sense, feeding the
Speaker 2: right wolf and rewiring my brain in the midst of
Speaker 2: this extremity. And what I saw happen almost immediately was
Speaker 2: almost magical. There was a positive force, a sense of hope,
Speaker 2: of faith. It was tangible in myself and in our family.
Speaker 2: There were plenty of tears along the way. We're not
Speaker 2: talking about positivity here where you just pretend everything's okay. No,
Speaker 2: we're facing the facts. But we weren't taking a hard
Speaker 2: situation and making it harder. And that really is what
Speaker 2: sent me down the path of researching and writing effortless.
Speaker 2: Is just this idea that you know, just because something's
Speaker 2: essential doesn't mean you have to then do it the
Speaker 2: hard way. Something can be essential and then you still
Speaker 2: have a choice to make you know what really matters.
Speaker 2: We knew what really mattered in this case was helping
Speaker 2: our daughter to become fully well again. So the goal
Speaker 2: isn't ambiguous for us, but there was still two paths,
Speaker 2: broadly speaking of how to handle it. And if we'd
Speaker 2: taken the harder path, the heavier path, if we'd fed
Speaker 2: the wrong wolf, then we would have been burned out
Speaker 2: in half a minute. We'd have been in such a
Speaker 2: state of anxiety that we would have burned out our
Speaker 2: own mental state. Well, then what happens to your marriage? Well, okay,
Speaker 2: then that gets harder, and that life isn't even almost
Speaker 2: worth living if your marriage is this hard enough and
Speaker 2: gets tough enough, and the culture in the family that
Speaker 2: we'd invested so much in could easily have been demolished too,
Speaker 2: And then what does that do for our daughter? I mean,
Speaker 2: if you're in that state of exhaustion mentally, emotionally, in
Speaker 2: that kind of traumatic state, well then you can't help
Speaker 2: her either, because you can't make good decisions, your discernment
Speaker 2: is gone, and so your chance of actually being successful
Speaker 2: is lower. All of that goes with the first path.
Speaker 2: The second path. We just saw so much good come
Speaker 2: out of being and what I now would call the
Speaker 2: effortless state. So much good came of it, and we
Speaker 2: were able to In the end, it was a long journey,
Speaker 2: and that's an important part of the story. It took
Speaker 2: two and a half years ups and down along the way,
Speaker 2: but we had the energy and the light. We fed
Speaker 2: the right wolf, so we were able to be there
Speaker 2: and we saw her come back to full health and
Speaker 2: now to be thriving and to be moving forward in
Speaker 2: her life. You know, superbly. That story is what comes
Speaker 2: to mind when you ask me a question about the
Speaker 2: one you feed.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you.
Speaker 3: Went there right away, because it's kind of at the
Speaker 3: end of your book, and I was going to bring
Speaker 3: it around to the front of our conversation, so I'm
Speaker 3: glad that you did that. I'm curious, as you were
Speaker 3: early on in that process and you talk about that
Speaker 3: eventually that led you to sort of seeing this easier
Speaker 3: path versus the harder path. I'm curious would you been
Speaker 3: able to define it that way early on, or would
Speaker 3: there have been a different way you looked at it
Speaker 3: or phrased what you guys were choosing to do.
Speaker 2: I think we could have find it as something close
Speaker 2: to the lighter path than the darker path. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure I would have said easier versus harder in the moment,
Speaker 2: but it reminds me a little bit of that movie.
Speaker 2: I can't remember the name of it, but it's the
Speaker 2: story of a spy from Russia who's here in the
Speaker 2: United States, and it's his story and that he has
Speaker 2: this extraordinary ability to maintain equanimity in the midst of
Speaker 2: all of these crazy ups and downs. And the phrase
Speaker 2: he uses all the time when he's asked, why are
Speaker 2: you so calm right now? And he said, well, would
Speaker 2: it help, you know, to get all emotional, to get angry?
Speaker 2: Would it help? And I think that that's the right
Speaker 2: beginning place, is you say, well, would it help to overreact?
Speaker 2: Does it help to get all negative? Or does it
Speaker 2: just take a hard situation to make it harder? Life
Speaker 2: is hard, Yeah, I got no questions about that. Life
Speaker 2: is full of challenge. And every person listening to this
Speaker 2: is dealing with something pretty hard right now, or maybe
Speaker 2: many things that are hard right now. And even if
Speaker 2: they don't share it with other people, even if it's
Speaker 2: quite secret, people are suffering. And I think that that
Speaker 2: is true for most people most of the time. In
Speaker 2: a hundred ways. You don't write a book on effortless
Speaker 2: of life is effortless. You write a book on effortless
Speaker 2: because it's full of challenge, and so to me, the
Speaker 2: key decision in every moment is whether to make it
Speaker 2: harder than it needs to be, or whether you can
Speaker 2: at least open yourself up to the idea, what is
Speaker 2: there a better way? Is there an easier way? Is
Speaker 2: there a lighter path? And as soon as you start
Speaker 2: to open up, you find that there are all sorts
Speaker 2: of simple strategies that are all sorts of better approaches,
Speaker 2: and so you still achieve results that you want in life.
Speaker 2: You still get to focus on the things that matter most,
Speaker 2: but you find yourself better able to do them best,
Speaker 2: are able to cope. You can achieve even breakthrough results.
Speaker 2: I mean imagine, if you can start training yourself to
Speaker 2: look for effortless solutions. Then let's say someone who is
Speaker 2: already on the edge of exhaustion, somebody who has burned
Speaker 2: out with the challenges of life, and maybe they're overachievers,
Speaker 2: but they've just run out of space. They're already working
Speaker 2: effectively as hard as they can. So what if they
Speaker 2: want to achieve as many overachievers do, ten x results,
Speaker 2: much better results? Can any of the people listening to
Speaker 2: this who want that level of results, work ten times harder.
Speaker 2: Nobody listening to this can work ten times harder. They
Speaker 2: wouldn't even put in the effort to be here. So
Speaker 2: for those people, my brother Justin calls the hit squad
Speaker 2: a hard working, intelligent, talented group of people. For those people,
Speaker 2: they can't work ten times harder. So suddenly you say, well,
Speaker 2: if you can't work tens harder, let's find ten x
Speaker 2: easier way to achieve the results. Then you can achieve
Speaker 2: extraordinary things and still without burning out. That sort of
Speaker 2: becomes the value proposition of effortless. Is that impossible things
Speaker 2: start to seem within reach because we don't have to
Speaker 2: do them the old paradigm way of just through grinding effort.
Speaker 2: I'm fully in favor of effort, but it will only
Speaker 2: take you so far past a certain point. You just
Speaker 2: have to find better, smarter, simpler, in fact, yes, easier strategies.
Speaker 3: And so, what would you say are some of the
Speaker 3: things that were most important as you applied this idea
Speaker 3: to you and your family's life, Because I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people listening to this, Certainly, people who are
Speaker 3: listeners of this show on any kind of regular basis
Speaker 3: are going to be people who at least go, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't want to make life any harder. We talk
Speaker 3: on this show all the time about all the ways
Speaker 3: we make things worse. Sometimes I feel like everything I
Speaker 3: teach people is about how to not make things worse,
Speaker 3: which sounds kind of pessimistic, except we are incredibly good
Speaker 3: at making lots of things in life worse, and sometimes
Speaker 3: simply not adding to the burden is a really big deal.
Speaker 3: So what sort of things helped you, guys, to either
Speaker 3: not add to the burden or actively lighten it sort
Speaker 3: of in your family life? And I think then we'll
Speaker 3: I'll turn our attention to some of the strategies in
Speaker 3: the book that I wanted to hit on, But I'm
Speaker 3: kind of curious which of them were closest to sort
Speaker 3: of you and your family's experience that were useful.
Speaker 2: Well, let me offer too. Well. We've all heard, surely
Speaker 2: that thankfulness and gratitude is important. But it's a principle
Speaker 2: that is unique among principles because there's no way to
Speaker 2: overdo it. Most principles have point of breaking where if
Speaker 2: you do it too little, that's not good. If you
Speaker 2: do it too much, now it's a problem. Most principles
Speaker 2: most characteristics are like that, most truths are like that.
Speaker 2: I have not found a place that gratitude breaks. I
Speaker 2: haven't come anywhere close to that point. It's enormously powerful.
Speaker 2: It can be applied far more broadly and deeply than's obvious.
Speaker 2: For example, so I've done for years a gratitude journal,
Speaker 2: and past ten years now, I think we're probably at
Speaker 2: eleven years. And I don't think I've missed a day
Speaker 2: in eleven years, right, And in that journal, I'm writing,
Speaker 2: you know, all the things I'm thankful for, So I'm
Speaker 2: way past ten thousand items. Now that's great. I mean
Speaker 2: it is so centering, and all the way through this
Speaker 2: situation with our daughter, I was doing that. That's level one.
Speaker 2: Let's say what's level two? It's what do you do
Speaker 2: in between? You know, what I describe is a ritual
Speaker 2: that means something to me. Right, That's more than a habit.
Speaker 2: A habit is a thing you do consistently. Ritual is
Speaker 2: something you do that you enjoy the doing of it.
Speaker 2: The way you do it matters. A ritual is a
Speaker 2: habit with a soul. And so writing, you know, my
Speaker 2: journal in the way that I do is a ritual.
Speaker 2: I enjoy the process of it, not just the fact
Speaker 2: that I've done it. Later, Oh good, I've written today.
Speaker 2: That's a good feeling. Doing it is good. But in
Speaker 2: between that ritual, you've got the real life. Right, most
Speaker 2: of life is not in the journal writing process. It's
Speaker 2: in between. So how does gratitude play in that? And
Speaker 2: one of the habit recipes that we began that is
Speaker 2: still a part of our family culture, woven into the
Speaker 2: fabric of it now, is that after I complain, I
Speaker 2: will say something I am thankful for. And what I
Speaker 2: noticed when I started doing that myself is that I
Speaker 2: complain much more often than I realized. So I think
Speaker 2: of myself as quite positive, quite grateful person. In some ways,
Speaker 2: it was just the easiest thing to walk into the
Speaker 2: other room and you see a child doing the wrong thing,
Speaker 2: and you focus on that the meeting goes too long,
Speaker 2: or the temperature is too hot or too cold, I mean,
Speaker 2: endlesslygin with the complaint. Well, this recipe accepts that as
Speaker 2: a sort of natural tendency in humans and builds on it.
Speaker 2: You just take advantage of that. You turn let's call
Speaker 2: it a negative tendency into a positive tendency. So every
Speaker 2: time you complain, you say something you're thankful for. I mean,
Speaker 2: even if you change the ratio to fifty to fifty,
Speaker 2: the impact is instant and what begins as just a
Speaker 2: nice new technique quickly changes the culture and dynamic around you.
Speaker 2: Barbara Frederickson called this the broaden and build theory, and
Speaker 2: it basically means that if you can get into what
Speaker 2: I call now an effortless state, but into a state
Speaker 2: of gratitude in this moment to positive emotions, that it
Speaker 2: creates a natural upward momentum. So it doesn't just say, oh,
Speaker 2: I feel better, which gratitude will instantly do. You will
Speaker 2: instantly feel happier. You will instantly feel better about your
Speaker 2: life and about yourself and circumstances. Well, that means that
Speaker 2: you show up differently. It means the next interaction you
Speaker 2: have with somebody is more positive. So that increases your
Speaker 2: optionality with them, it improves your relationship with them, and
Speaker 2: that materially improves the resources you have at your disposal
Speaker 2: in life. And so this is why she calls it
Speaker 2: broaden and build. There's an upward momentum, and it all
Speaker 2: begins by just catching yourself when there's something you know
Speaker 2: you can plain, you catch yourself and you say something
Speaker 2: you're thankful for. I've done it now with our children.
Speaker 2: I remember one time doing it. The ante was that
Speaker 2: if you can plain, that's fine. I know you have
Speaker 2: to say three things you're thankful for. And I remember
Speaker 2: my son at the time. I said, okay, now, I'd
Speaker 2: give you three things you're thankful. Okay, number one, I
Speaker 2: am so thankful that my dad wants to play this game.
Speaker 2: But we have to say three things with thankful every
Speaker 2: time we can plain. And he said it just like that,
Speaker 2: you know. And here's what's powerful is that it didn't matter.
Speaker 2: We all laughed and it worked. And seriously, a principle
Speaker 2: or a characteristic that is so powerful that you can
Speaker 2: do it with a degree of cynicism and it still
Speaker 2: works is powerful stuff. And that's exactly what I found.
Speaker 2: It almost doesn't matter your attitude. It just has this
Speaker 2: disproportionate effect. I'll summarize the effect this way. If you
Speaker 2: focus on what you lack, you will lose what you have.
Speaker 2: If you focus on what you have, you will gain
Speaker 2: what you lack. Benjamin Hardy, who I had on the
Speaker 2: wat's Essential podcast not very long ago, he said are
Speaker 2: you living in the gain or in the gap. If
Speaker 2: you're in the gap, you're looking at all the things
Speaker 2: you haven't achieved, or you don't have what everybody else has,
Speaker 2: the gap between what you are now and what you
Speaker 2: would like to be. Well, that gap always exists, that's
Speaker 2: never going away. So if you live in the gap,
Speaker 2: you could be making great progress actually in your life,
Speaker 2: but you'd still be miserable. Alternatively, if you get in
Speaker 2: the gain, you're looking at all the progress that's having made,
Speaker 2: all the good that's happened, the successes that you've had,
Speaker 2: and in this moment, I think you'll achieve more, but
Speaker 2: you'll certainly be happier in the journey. This, I would say,
Speaker 2: is one of the great lessons that we learned and
Speaker 2: are still applying and still building into the culture in
Speaker 2: our family.
Speaker 3: Makes me think of slightly different context, but same sort
Speaker 3: of principle, which is Stephen Covey's circle of concern versus
Speaker 3: circle of influence. You know, the idea is we've got
Speaker 3: this big circle which is everything we're concerned with. The
Speaker 3: small circle is our circle of influence. The more time
Speaker 3: we spend in our circle of concern outside our circle
Speaker 3: of influence, the more our circle of influence actually shrinks.
Speaker 3: We wear ourselves out by worrying about stuff and what
Speaker 3: we can actually affect and change shrinks, Whereas if we
Speaker 3: flip it and we spend our time in our circle
Speaker 3: of influence, spend more time there, it actually starts to
Speaker 3: grow and we begin to be able to affect more things.
Speaker 3: It's a very similar idea to that, when you focus
Speaker 3: on what you lack, you lose what you have. When
Speaker 3: you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I really agree with that. Gratitude is always within
Speaker 2: usphere of influence, so I think it would fit within
Speaker 2: Stephen Covey's be proactive within the seven habits. It's a concrete,
Speaker 2: immediate thing, and you saying that just makes me want
Speaker 2: as you say one more thing about it, which is
Speaker 2: this principle so ubiquitous you don't just use it for
Speaker 2: the things that are good. This pushes people past where
Speaker 2: I think they would generally see the edges of gratitude.
Speaker 2: It's not just that you are grateful for the things
Speaker 2: that are going right. This is deeper. Be thankful in
Speaker 2: everything when something goes wrong. I'm thankful this thing went wrong.
Speaker 2: And you don't know why. When you begin that sentence,
Speaker 2: you don't know why. Really you're not thankful, but you're
Speaker 2: pushing yourself to go through a pattern of thinking that
Speaker 2: suddenly opens you to the idea that the thing that
Speaker 2: you're calling bad could be good. That life, let's say
Speaker 2: it this way, isn't just happening to you but for you.
Speaker 2: That the bad thing so called is also happening for you,
Speaker 2: That in each challenge there is an opportunity and you
Speaker 2: just haven't seen it that way yet. It becomes a
Speaker 2: way of living whatever's going on. And so immediately something
Speaker 2: doesn't happen the way you want it. The flight is delayed,
Speaker 2: the flight is canceled. Somebody's not helping you be grateful
Speaker 2: in it. And suddenly, as soon as you are, I'm
Speaker 2: thankful for this situation. It's sort of almost positive irony
Speaker 2: or something. But I'm so glad that that person isn't
Speaker 2: helping me right now. Why Oh, because I can develop
Speaker 2: in this moment greater compassion and understanding of how the
Speaker 2: world works and what they might be dealing with. I'm
Speaker 2: thankful because it's an opportunity to develop by character. And
Speaker 2: maybe this just seems a step too far for people,
Speaker 2: But to me, a person who can receive all things
Speaker 2: with thankfulness will achieve not ten X results, but literally
Speaker 2: one hundred X, and it will start to flow to them.
Speaker 2: The power of what we're talking about, I think, is
Speaker 2: difficult to overstate.
Speaker 3: Makes me think of the old Taoist story of the
Speaker 3: farmer who has a horse and his horse runs away,
Speaker 3: you know, and his neighbor comes over and says, well,
Speaker 3: I'm so sorry about you losing your horse. You know,
Speaker 3: it's the most valuable thing you had, and he goes, well,
Speaker 3: it could be good, could be bad, you know, and
Speaker 3: then the horse comes back with five horses. I won't
Speaker 3: go through the whole thing, but I think sometimes, you know,
Speaker 3: if we can even get to where that farmer was,
Speaker 3: which was where he was was, could be good, could
Speaker 3: be bad. I don't know, right, but I'm not going
Speaker 3: to rush to judge this thing as good or bad
Speaker 3: because I don't know how it's going to play out
Speaker 3: in my life. I don't know how it's going to
Speaker 3: play out in making me be the person that I'm
Speaker 3: going to become. Let me at least move from this
Speaker 3: is awful to a place that holds open the door
Speaker 3: of possibility that says, Okay, this seems bad to me
Speaker 3: right now, but let me at least move to a
Speaker 3: neutral place where I say, okay, I'm going to be open,
Speaker 3: and then if you can even where you are, which
Speaker 3: is that extra step beyond which says I'm going to
Speaker 3: be thankful because in some way this can be worked
Speaker 3: for me. It's that phrase. I think. I've often heard
Speaker 3: that things happen for the best. You know, I don't
Speaker 3: believe that, but I do believe we can make the
Speaker 3: best out of everything that happens. And I do believe
Speaker 3: that in everything that happens there is a seed of
Speaker 3: our future growth. It's in there if we look for it.
Speaker 2: I certainly think that's true. And at some point, I
Speaker 2: mean C. S. Lewis puts it this way, that we
Speaker 2: have to decide. And of course he was an atheist
Speaker 2: for a long time, became a Christian, and in the
Speaker 2: journey started to write some of the most eloquent modern
Speaker 2: writings on what it really means to be a Christian
Speaker 2: and what it doesn't mean and how it would apply
Speaker 2: in a modern context. And one of the things he observes,
Speaker 2: and somebody can take this whether they have an active
Speaker 2: faith in God or not. But he says, we have
Speaker 2: to decide at some point point whether God is a
Speaker 2: vivisectionist or whether all things are there to work for
Speaker 2: our good. You know that every test is really with
Speaker 2: purpose and might even be analogous to that New Testament idea. Well,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's a story, but there's an idea
Speaker 2: in it too, where Jesus is brought to the most
Speaker 2: agonizing part of his entire ministry, this atonement, this moment
Speaker 2: of total suffering, and he asks, if there's any way
Speaker 2: for this to pass from me, let it pass from me.
Speaker 2: And I've often wondered why that's even in the account.
Speaker 2: Are we really saying that now, the manifestation of God
Speaker 2: in the flesh, this superman embodiment of all that is good,
Speaker 2: is actually saying, hey, listen, I'd rather not do this
Speaker 2: if you don't mind, you know, I'd rather not do
Speaker 2: the big challenge. And one thing I think it illustrates
Speaker 2: is it puts in the record that there was no
Speaker 2: other way. It gives opportunity for the writers to be
Speaker 2: explicit their no other path, there was one way to
Speaker 2: being able to achieve this mission and I do think
Speaker 2: that that is a helpful idea to all of us
Speaker 2: when we're dealing with things that would otherwise or are
Speaker 2: causing as suffering or otherwise would keep us in total misery,
Speaker 2: is to just go, well, what if there was no
Speaker 2: other way? But if the only way to have learned
Speaker 2: what we need to learn in this life to progress
Speaker 2: and the way that we do in this life is
Speaker 2: to go through this path where you start to do that,
Speaker 2: you can get out of so much of the self
Speaker 2: recrimination and also blaming and actively grudge keeping about other
Speaker 2: people and well that I'm a victim of their thing
Speaker 2: and this awful thing, and so on it, and just
Speaker 2: go what if this is the path? But if this
Speaker 2: is the only way for us to become what we
Speaker 2: need to become, it's the only way for us to
Speaker 2: gain the good things that are just around the corner,
Speaker 2: there was no other path? Is There's something about that
Speaker 2: that I think can be very liberating and again builds
Speaker 2: on this idea of like, yeah, let's just get back
Speaker 2: to the effortless state. There's a whole chapter on grudges
Speaker 2: in effortless and the importance of being able to let
Speaker 2: go of them and talk about a way that we
Speaker 2: make life harder than it needs to be. There's no
Speaker 2: number of opportunities for us to pick up a grudge,
Speaker 2: to hire a grudge. We might say, even I like that.
Speaker 2: Language echoes Clayton Christiansen's question of like, what do we
Speaker 2: hire this product or service to do for us? And
Speaker 2: if you do that with grudges, it opens the whole
Speaker 2: subject up because you say, we have grudges for a reason,
Speaker 2: what did we hire them to do for us? We
Speaker 2: hire a grudge. Maybe we hire a grudge to make
Speaker 2: us feel one up with the relationship with the person
Speaker 2: that hurt us. We go, well, yeah, well I see,
Speaker 2: look at that, and I'll hold them to it and
Speaker 2: that terrible thing they did. See, there's a concrete thing,
Speaker 2: and I can point to it, and I can point
Speaker 2: to it one hundred times they did this wrong to me,
Speaker 2: And we do it to kind of make ourselves feel superior.
Speaker 2: But does it the grudges actually make us feel superior?
Speaker 2: Do they make us more powerful? You can evaluate a
Speaker 2: grudge like a job evaluation, where you say, okay, well
Speaker 2: I hired you to do this, how you're doing your
Speaker 2: performance evaluation? Are you making me more powerful? Or do
Speaker 2: you make me endlessly feel like a victim, endlessly feel weaker.
Speaker 2: Grudges make us feel weaker. They don't make us feel
Speaker 2: more powerful. Maybe we do it to get people to
Speaker 2: feel sorry for us, you know, provide a sympathy. They
Speaker 2: might give us things, opportunities, benefits might come to us.
Speaker 2: And that's true too, but it's a short lived benefit
Speaker 2: because in general, people get quite fatigued with that kind
Speaker 2: of victimhood story, which is one of the reasons we
Speaker 2: have to keep finding new people to tell our grudge
Speaker 2: story too, because people only have so much time for it.
Speaker 2: And so if you go through and evaluate it, you
Speaker 2: find that grudges don't perform their duties well, and so
Speaker 2: it's time to fire grudges. And when you do, when
Speaker 2: you fire a grudge, you just find your life comes
Speaker 2: back to you can move forward in your life. I
Speaker 2: asked Tim Ferriss on his podcas asked, what percentage of
Speaker 2: your mental and emotional energy have you given to grudges
Speaker 2: and anger in your life? And he laughed and he said,
Speaker 2: for about a fifteen year period of his life, he
Speaker 2: probably gave between sixty and seventy percent of his mental
Speaker 2: and emotional capacity to grudges and anger. Think of that.
Speaker 2: You'd never think of firing grudges as being the ultimate
Speaker 2: productivity hack. No one's ever said that. I mean, maybe
Speaker 2: I have now, but like you don't find that in
Speaker 2: the average productivity book. And yet, what else can you
Speaker 2: call a return of sixty percent of your capacity or
Speaker 2: seventy percent of your abilities come back to you. That's
Speaker 2: all being siphoned off, that's all making as putting us
Speaker 2: in a state of suffering instead of an effortless state.
Speaker 2: And the moment we get it back, we can take
Speaker 2: all those resources and we can actually put them to
Speaker 2: use on things that really are essential, things that really
Speaker 2: matter to us. Get back to our mission, get back
Speaker 2: to the purpose of our lives, and that to me
Speaker 2: is a worthy change.
Speaker 4: As women, as humans. Really, the world can trick us
Speaker 4: into believing we're doing life wrong, which keeps us small
Speaker 4: and separated. But we don't have to play along. Let's
Speaker 4: make a plan together, shall we. I'm Jenny Gay.
Speaker 5: And I'm Brandy Lust, and we host a podcast called
Speaker 5: Something to Normalize. As best friends and experts in mindfulness
Speaker 5: and adult learning, We've done the hard work of courageously
Speaker 5: engaging and self exploration, healing, and self expression.
Speaker 4: In our podcast, You'll be a fly on the wall
Speaker 4: for intimate, safe conversations where we share our life experiences,
Speaker 4: collective wisdom, and research from experts to help you breathe
Speaker 4: that big sigh of relief that comes from feeling seen
Speaker 4: and understood.
Speaker 5: When we join forces in honest conversations, we find the
Speaker 5: very thoughts, experiences, and feelings we often keep to ourselves
Speaker 5: are the very ones that are most likely to connect us.
Speaker 5: This leads to more self trust and greater connection. This
Speaker 5: is the power of normalizing.
Speaker 4: Join us. There's nothing off limits. It's all just something
Speaker 4: to normalize.
Speaker 5: You can listen to something to normalize wherever you get
Speaker 5: your podcasts.
Speaker 3: People have often asked, you know, well, how do I forgive?
Speaker 3: How do I let go? I often think the very
Speaker 3: first and most important step is to do exactly what
Speaker 3: you just described, which is to see what it's costing me,
Speaker 3: you know, to really see what's happening by me holding
Speaker 3: on to this. You know it's attributed to the Buddha,
Speaker 3: but I don't think the Buddha said it that resentments
Speaker 3: are like drinking poison and waiting for the other person
Speaker 3: to die. You know, once you really sort of see
Speaker 3: the nature of a grudge, As you've said, I love
Speaker 3: your framework of it. What did I hire this grudge
Speaker 3: to do? And is it really doing it? When we
Speaker 3: get clear on that, these things are a lot easier
Speaker 3: to let go.
Speaker 2: I think absolutely right, And I mean forgiveness is a
Speaker 2: foundational principle across every religious tradition. It's part of the
Speaker 2: wisdom of every generation of every societal culture that survives
Speaker 2: over a long period of time. Why because if you
Speaker 2: burden yourself with the kind of costs you're just describing,
Speaker 2: then you can't progress well. And if you make the error,
Speaker 2: as societies can definitely do of, then teaching those grudges
Speaker 2: to their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and sharing
Speaker 2: it around, the cost is absolutely enormous. It can lead
Speaker 2: to war, to civil wars. We've seen these things, we
Speaker 2: do still see them sometimes even now. And I do
Speaker 2: agree with you too that a key breakthrough is to
Speaker 2: realize it's not a selfish thing. So I can't say
Speaker 2: it that way, that there is a self interested reason
Speaker 2: to do this. The forgiveness is not saying, well, I'm
Speaker 2: just going to do something good for this other person
Speaker 2: it may do good for the other person, but it
Speaker 2: isn't the point at all. I just interviewed Chris Williams.
Speaker 2: I think he'd be a great person for you to
Speaker 2: talk to him. Chris Williams had a catastrophic situation in
Speaker 2: his life where he's driving his car and his car
Speaker 2: is hit broadside by a drunk teenage driver, kills his
Speaker 2: wife and their unborn child, kills a couple other members
Speaker 2: of his family that were with him that day, injures another,
Speaker 2: and then one of his children wasn't in the car
Speaker 2: on that day, but of course has all the massive
Speaker 2: emotional trauma of the experience. So he's in there. He says,
Speaker 2: he hears a sound right there. It's in the middle
Speaker 2: of like this, in the middle of the winter, freezing colds,
Speaker 2: in this car, broken bended metal, everything, and he just
Speaker 2: hears this sound, this screaming. It takes him a moment
Speaker 2: to notice it's him. It is in this absolute true agony.
Speaker 2: You know, you can look across its wife, you can
Speaker 2: see that she's not breathing. And in the moment he
Speaker 2: discovers the two paths. He has two choices, two wolves.
Speaker 2: Pick your metaphor, and that's what's so profound to me
Speaker 2: is that it happens so fast for him, and he realizes,
Speaker 2: past one, I will add to this trauma, bitterness, revenge, anger, hate,
Speaker 2: all of that, and then that will then destroy what's
Speaker 2: left of us all. It will then take the rest
Speaker 2: of my life. It will cost me everything that remains.
Speaker 2: Plus it will cost me all of the possible upside
Speaker 2: and opportunities and blessings that still exist in life. So
Speaker 2: it won't just cost me what I already have. It
Speaker 2: will cost me all the things I could still have
Speaker 2: or this other path. It's not like suddenly this is
Speaker 2: an easy path, but it is. He recognizes even this moment,
Speaker 2: an easier path is to forgive that person, whoever they
Speaker 2: are in that car right now. And if he does that,
Speaker 2: it doesn't mean that all the problems that he now
Speaker 2: has in his life will disappear, but it does mean
Speaker 2: he won't add to them these unbearable burdens of resentment. Well,
Speaker 2: he does make that choice, and within a very short
Speaker 2: while word spreads about that, and he's interviewed somehow by
Speaker 2: the media. I suppose it's quite a major story. In
Speaker 2: the moment he gets asked about it, so he makes
Speaker 2: this comment. He said, like, yeah, please, just somewhat everybody here,
Speaker 2: just forgive someone who are coming up to February fourteenth,
Speaker 2: Fountain's day, do something for someone as an act of
Speaker 2: kindness in the name of my broken family is just
Speaker 2: do something to forgive or to do good. He got
Speaker 2: thousands of responses all over the world where people did that.
Speaker 2: And so you see already that his choice is turning
Speaker 2: a negative into a positive. And a person who can
Speaker 2: turn a negative into a positive can never be defeated.
Speaker 2: I mean, so many good things have already come or
Speaker 2: he went on to write a book about it, to
Speaker 2: teach about it, to talk about it, to share it.
Speaker 2: He continues to do it. Well, he got remarried, they
Speaker 2: have more children, They've built good and good has come
Speaker 2: from it, and here we are talking about it. Now
Speaker 2: that's the power he let go. He made another, though
Speaker 2: important distinction. I think this matters. He did the forgiving
Speaker 2: right there. And now that doesn't mean he never felt
Speaker 2: bad again, of course that's not right. But he still
Speaker 2: made an important choice. But he said, if you make
Speaker 2: forgiveness conditional, then you're trapped. Because even in his case
Speaker 2: where he forgave the person and has had a relationship
Speaker 2: with them, a positive relationship with them, since like the
Speaker 2: person still went to jail, they still had their cost.
Speaker 2: He says, if you make it at orc conditional, you
Speaker 2: are trapped by that decision, because he said, like, what's enough?
Speaker 2: At what point has that individual in his case actually
Speaker 2: paid the full price to society? What's enough goes to jail?
Speaker 2: What if the person actually says sorry, well he did
Speaker 2: say that, is that sorry enough? Was there enough remorse
Speaker 2: in him on that day? Has he really been truly
Speaker 2: remorseful enough? Does he understand the intergenerational impact that that
Speaker 2: moment had, Like, you can go on forever even if
Speaker 2: the person is trying to make amends, So you can
Speaker 2: be trapped forever if you make it conditional, You make
Speaker 2: your forgiveness unconditional, so that you can be unconditionally free
Speaker 2: from the burden. That doesn't mean that someone else isn't responsible.
Speaker 2: Doesn't violate the responsibility that somebody else faces for what
Speaker 2: they have done to you or wrongs that they have done.
Speaker 2: You just don't self harm over it.
Speaker 3: I think that's such a great way you just ended that,
Speaker 3: which is to think about what we are doing, which
Speaker 3: is the self harm we're doing to ourselves. I think
Speaker 3: it's really important. We've had several interviews focusing on forgiveness,
Speaker 3: and this is not an easy thing to do. I
Speaker 3: think it comes from where we set our intention. Our
Speaker 3: intention is to unconditionally forgive. That's what I want. That's
Speaker 3: where I want to be, knowing that we don't always
Speaker 3: feel that, but that that's what we're aiming at all
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 2: I think it's similar to the idea of after I complain,
Speaker 2: I will say something I'm thankful for. In this case,
Speaker 2: it's I will say after I feel frustrated with someone,
Speaker 2: I will say the words I forgive you. Like treat
Speaker 2: it like a checkbox, not a Once I feel a
Speaker 2: certain way, I will forgive you. It's exactly the opposite order.
Speaker 2: You say I forgive you even when you don't feel
Speaker 2: it at all. You just say it. You start to
Speaker 2: try to make that check box moment, and the feeling
Speaker 2: will eventually catch up with the decision.
Speaker 3: That sort of is the phrase that I think might
Speaker 3: be the most common one on this show, which is
Speaker 3: sometimes you can't think your way into right action. You
Speaker 3: have to act your way into right thinking. And so
Speaker 3: that's exactly what you're saying, I decide. The action I'm
Speaker 3: going to take is every time this comes up, what
Speaker 3: I'm going to do is say I forgive you and
Speaker 3: do my best to forgive you. And I hope that
Speaker 3: by taking that action, by checking that box, that then
Speaker 3: the feelings come along.
Speaker 2: Words are so much more powerful than is obvious. The
Speaker 2: words we choose are not descriptors. I think that's how
Speaker 2: they would typically be thought about by people. That we
Speaker 2: use words to describe the world we live in, to
Speaker 2: describe what's happened to us. But I think of words
Speaker 2: as creators. When we speak, we're creating, We're breathing. Our
Speaker 2: words create the future. Yes, will say it that way.
Speaker 2: There's another biblical reference. And again you can read that
Speaker 2: as literal as somebody wants, or a symbolic as somebody wants.
Speaker 2: But if you think about the creation story, even if
Speaker 2: somebody thinks about this as a myth, as stories that
Speaker 2: frame the Western world, there are all sorts of symbolic benefits,
Speaker 2: and one of them is the idea that God says,
Speaker 2: let there be light, and there was light. There's something
Speaker 2: really important about the order that you use language to create.
Speaker 2: That language is a creative force in our lives. As
Speaker 2: a writer, I feel, perhaps especially conscious of this, that
Speaker 2: I'm writing the future into existence. When I'm writing. It
Speaker 2: is quite a profound process. I mean sometimes it can
Speaker 2: be just a messy process. It often is, but it
Speaker 2: also is profound as you try to weigh up words,
Speaker 2: aware that it could be that a million people or
Speaker 2: millions of people will end up reading what you're writing
Speaker 2: right now, that this is not just describing something in
Speaker 2: the past, that you are breathing something into existence in
Speaker 2: your words. Well, similarly, in our own lives, I think
Speaker 2: we use the power of words quite unthinkingly, sometimes a
Speaker 2: little thoughtlessly. I mean that can include something as obvious
Speaker 2: as saying something rude to someone in your own family,
Speaker 2: you know, saying something a bit too bluntly, saying something
Speaker 2: a bit worn out, You're a bit exhausted, and you
Speaker 2: say it. What are you going to get back? What
Speaker 2: is so predictable? Mimetic creatures? People tend to return exactly
Speaker 2: what they're given, And so you do that you have
Speaker 2: now created in your future an argument. You have created
Speaker 2: an unpleasant conversation in the future. So words, I mean,
Speaker 2: wordsmithing is one thing for writing, but I think it's
Speaker 2: a similar process in our lives to be so careful
Speaker 2: to use words that help create the kind of life
Speaker 2: you want. There's a great book, classic book, as a
Speaker 2: man Thinketh, and it's all about this, right, does a
Speaker 2: man thinketh? Whether the verse it's from also biblical, is
Speaker 2: a man thinketh in his heart? So is he? That's
Speaker 2: the rest of that phrase. Well, that's interesting too, because
Speaker 2: it suggests that thinking isn't something that you just do
Speaker 2: in your head. Thinking is something you do in your heart,
Speaker 2: which I think is quite a profound change. Their thoughts
Speaker 2: are derived from your heart. Well, I think words are
Speaker 2: similar to that that they derive from your heart and
Speaker 2: they come up and they create. And so trying to
Speaker 2: work out how can I use words intentionally to try
Speaker 2: and create the kind of future relationships and results that
Speaker 2: I want is a non trivial change once people start
Speaker 2: to discover power in those words.
Speaker 3: As you were quoting that, I was thinking of more
Speaker 3: my spiritual tradition of Buddhism and the Damapata or some
Speaker 3: of the first sayings of the Buddha, and it's basically,
Speaker 3: you know something to the effect of, you know, mind
Speaker 3: is the forerunner of all states. If one speaks or
Speaker 3: acts with an impure mind. It can be translated a
Speaker 3: lot of different things. Suffering will follow, just like the
Speaker 3: wheel of an ox cart when the ox pulls, you know,
Speaker 3: it's the same basic idea. It starts there. And as
Speaker 3: you were saying that, I was thinking of another guest.
Speaker 3: We had on, a guy by the name of Christian Conte,
Speaker 3: and he had a phrase that I've reflected on a
Speaker 3: lot lately, and I used it in the Spiritual Habits
Speaker 3: of course I teached recently, which was basically inflammatory words
Speaker 3: lead to inflammatory emotions. And you can say that externally,
Speaker 3: but for me, where I've noticed that the most is internally,
Speaker 3: you know. And one of the things that I've noticed
Speaker 3: that I've gotten way better at is my brain is
Speaker 3: an exist aggerator of internal state. My brain will say
Speaker 3: something like my back is killing me. When I finally
Speaker 3: tune into the thoughts, I'm like, that's what it's saying.
Speaker 3: And then I'll check in with my back and I'll
Speaker 3: be like, well, I mean, I've got a little twinge
Speaker 3: back there, I suppose, you know. But I'm bringing that
Speaker 3: into life with these words. I'm creating a state of
Speaker 3: mind by the description that I'm giving something and that
Speaker 3: description isn't even accurate.
Speaker 2: This is so true, and I think somebody with any
Speaker 2: Buddhist training will read well both essentialism and now Effortless
Speaker 2: with different eyes. It's really rich whenever somebody is reading
Speaker 2: it who has had some Buddhist exposure, because the whole
Speaker 2: idea of effortless state, I mean, I think it's represented
Speaker 2: in all the major religions and of course cross positive
Speaker 2: psychology and beyond, but it's like not emphasized in certain cultures.
Speaker 2: And this is one of the great benefits the Eastern
Speaker 2: philosophies and Eastern cultures is that it helps us to
Speaker 2: rediscover things that actually are in Western philosophy, but just
Speaker 2: somehow we just don't emphasize it, and so we don't
Speaker 2: see that it's right there, hidden in plain sight. Effortless
Speaker 2: state leading to effortless action. I mean that's tourism, right,
Speaker 2: I mean that fear of effortless effort or you know,
Speaker 2: to act without action. These are all not just consistent
Speaker 2: with what I'm writing about, Like they're right there. They're
Speaker 2: what I want people to get to, but I'm trying
Speaker 2: to do it in a way that would be palatable
Speaker 2: let's say to people that are working in corporate environments
Speaker 2: and so on, so that you know that they can
Speaker 2: still absorb them, so you don't have organ rejection. But
Speaker 2: we're definitely looking for this deeper wisdom, and we need
Speaker 2: Eastern as well as Western. Oh, we absolutely do. There's
Speaker 2: so much to learn. There's a group that used to
Speaker 2: meet at Harvard. I think it was the Dean of
Speaker 2: Divinity harm that started the group, and they would have
Speaker 2: these people meet to discuss basically into religious dialogue. And
Speaker 2: one of the rules they had was you can't compare
Speaker 2: the best of your own faith to the worst of
Speaker 2: someone else's. So that seems like a good rule.
Speaker 3: It's a good rule.
Speaker 2: But a second is that we should allow ourselves. The
Speaker 2: phrase he came up with was wholly envy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that you.
Speaker 2: Can say, even if at first or even ever, we say, well,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to actually absorb that that's not what
Speaker 2: I believe, but I can see why that would be
Speaker 2: so good to believe. I can see why that would
Speaker 2: be so advantageous. And I think out of holy envy
Speaker 2: grows an even deeper thing, where you say, all truth,
Speaker 2: wherever it is, can be circumscribed into one great haule.
Speaker 2: All truth is interrelated, and this idea that all truth
Speaker 2: is in one tradition or in one group or one philosophy.
Speaker 2: Maybe this is too blunt of a way of saying it,
Speaker 2: but to me, that's an appalling idea. What we need
Speaker 2: is to pursue truth wherever it is, to discover it,
Speaker 2: to try it. Takes a lot of a certain kind
Speaker 2: of mindset and heart set to even approach this. I'm
Speaker 2: working on a new book now about deep listening, and
Speaker 2: I'm so excited about this work. I've spent twenty years
Speaker 2: thinking about this and working on it, and it's finally
Speaker 2: time to do it. But one of the very first
Speaker 2: things you have to conclude to even want to get
Speaker 2: into deep listening is to just discover how little you know,
Speaker 2: how truly you know. Use that word again, appalling. It
Speaker 2: is how little we know compared to what there is
Speaker 2: to be known. And so suddenly you stop being in
Speaker 2: a mindset of well, I think the way I see
Speaker 2: the world is probably about how it is, and instead say,
Speaker 2: every person you talk to you in the uber car,
Speaker 2: you're asking questions and learning, and there's a lot to
Speaker 2: learn from the person who's driving you in the uber
Speaker 2: car because well, just speaking literally, the chances are not always,
Speaker 2: of course, but the chances are that this is going
Speaker 2: to be an immigrant, and that person has made really
Speaker 2: powerful choices to be able to be where they are
Speaker 2: with you, and they've made trade offs that are serious
Speaker 2: trade offs, and they've come from a culture very different
Speaker 2: to your own. And if you listen and ask questions,
Speaker 2: you might be the only person that day, that month
Speaker 2: that's doing it. So you have a lot of opportunity
Speaker 2: and richness to have somebody describe under what circumstances they
Speaker 2: left and why, and what they're achieving and what family
Speaker 2: is where. And that's just one tiny illustration of I
Speaker 2: think what starts to happen once you discover do you
Speaker 2: don't even know what you don't know in life?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think that's a profound place to operate from.
Speaker 3: Is grasping just how little we actually know makes me
Speaker 3: think of a couple of things. As you were talking
Speaker 3: for a minute there, I was thinking about my spiritual
Speaker 3: director as a Christian priest. That's not my faith tradition.
Speaker 3: I'm primarily zen. But Hey has a saying that I love.
Speaker 3: He says every time I find something I love in
Speaker 3: another tradition because he's been a big interfaith guy for years.
Speaker 3: He's like, I run back to my own tradition and
Speaker 3: I look for it, and I always find it. It's
Speaker 3: always there, and I just think that's such a beautiful mentality.
Speaker 3: And then I was also thinking, as you were talking
Speaker 3: about deep listening. I don't know when I completed it.
Speaker 3: It's been a little while now, but I did a
Speaker 3: interfaith spiritual direction training for eighteen months, and that was
Speaker 3: the heart of the entire thing. You know, if I
Speaker 3: was going to boil the entire thing down to what
Speaker 3: did they teach for eighteen months primarily deep listening.
Speaker 2: And give me an example of how they tolt that.
Speaker 3: Well, it was really a lot of it, I would say.
Speaker 3: In some ways, you can sum it up so quickly,
Speaker 3: and yet it's a constant practice. And the practice was
Speaker 3: constantly recognizing when as you're trying to listen, you're being
Speaker 3: pulled into your habitual reactions, thoughts, comments, responses, all the
Speaker 3: different ways that you move from listening in to reacting
Speaker 3: internally and learning to notice that movement as it happens
Speaker 3: and just shift back into listening. You know, it's one
Speaker 3: of those things that again you sort of describe it
Speaker 3: and you're like, this is very easy, like okay, great,
Speaker 3: just you know, just listen. You're doing podcasting now, so
Speaker 3: you know a little bit about what it's like when
Speaker 3: you're trying to interview somebody. You're trying to really listen
Speaker 3: to what's going on with what they're saying. You want
Speaker 3: to respond. You've also got an idea of where the
Speaker 3: conversation might go, You've got your notes. You're sort of
Speaker 3: juggling a couple different things, right, And I think deep
Speaker 3: listening for me was learning to juggle this like listening
Speaker 3: to the person and giving them my full attention. But
Speaker 3: the other thing I'm juggling is what's going on inside
Speaker 3: me at the same time, and learning to sort of
Speaker 3: not get stuck or lost in that, because that's where
Speaker 3: typically we stop listening is when we start wanting to
Speaker 3: either respond now we're formulating what we're going to say,
Speaker 3: or there's an emotional reaction happening inside me, like they're
Speaker 3: talking about this thing and I'm thinking do I agree,
Speaker 3: do I not agree? What do I think about that?
Speaker 3: Or there's some feeling coming up, But it's all sort
Speaker 3: of pulling me away. So I've got to be listening
Speaker 3: really deeply to the person, but I also have to
Speaker 3: be listening to what's happening inside me, not to give
Speaker 3: it a lot of attention, but to notice that it's happening,
Speaker 3: so I can shift back. M.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds, as you describe it, like a meditative.
Speaker 3: Practice one hundred percent. That's often the way it was phrased.
Speaker 3: So it was interface spiritual direction, and deep listening was
Speaker 3: framed as a the heart of what spiritual direction is,
Speaker 3: but b as a contemplative practice.
Speaker 2: I relate to so much of what you're describing there.
Speaker 2: I think deep listening is the closest experience I have
Speaker 2: on a regular basis to meditation. I do meditate, but
Speaker 2: I find deep listening when you to use the Gatlin's
Speaker 2: phrase for this, that you shelve your agenda. You have
Speaker 2: an agenda, but you shelve it so that you can
Speaker 2: even be here, so you can even give attention to something.
Speaker 2: And then when you get into not just surface listening,
Speaker 2: which I think surface listening can be quite hard, but
Speaker 2: deep listening, I think once you develop the skill, you
Speaker 2: know what you're doing with it is easier than surface listening.
Speaker 2: Because it's so much more interesting. Surface listening is painful.
Speaker 2: If you're just listening to somebody, they're just rambling on
Speaker 2: and rambling on, and you're not really paying attention and
Speaker 2: you're not really there. It's just a tax. You're not
Speaker 2: getting much from it, but you're still having to give something.
Speaker 2: So it's kind of like a pound of flesh. But
Speaker 2: deep listening everybody so interesting once you get beyond the surface.
Speaker 2: So much going on in them. There's so much to
Speaker 2: relate to, there's so much to absorb. It's the richest
Speaker 2: journey of life. And my observation currently is that it
Speaker 2: is missing. In fact, I just put on Twitter going
Speaker 2: to pull it up. I thought this was really interesting.
Speaker 2: I just did this yesterday. I asked a question, do
Speaker 2: you ever feel we have lost the ability to deeply listen?
Speaker 2: And there's just tons of responses. I wasn't expecting to
Speaker 2: people to really write responses to it. It was more of
Speaker 2: a rhetorical question or something, but I just had so
Speaker 2: many people talk about this lost art. I mean, certainly,
Speaker 2: I put out a poll on a different on LinkedIn,
Speaker 2: where I am quite active, and I don't know it's
Speaker 2: non scientific, Paul, but sixteen hundred people are so responded immediately,
Speaker 2: and ninety percent of people believe that we either have
Speaker 2: lost it or we never had it to begin with.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a very robust Paul, but that means that
Speaker 2: just only eleven percent of people think that we haven't
Speaker 2: lost it, and that speaks to something. Somebody was just
Speaker 2: talking to me just a couple of days ago. I
Speaker 2: was doing a TV appearance and I was talking with
Speaker 2: the director afterwards for about forty five minutes, and he said,
Speaker 2: when you told me you were writing this new book
Speaker 2: and you sort of said the approximate title of it,
Speaker 2: he said, I just realized there was something missing in
Speaker 2: my life. It named something missing in my soul. The
Speaker 2: deep listening just isn't there. It's not a part of life.
Speaker 2: Everything's interrupted. Is that at home, everything's interrupted. There's always
Speaker 2: something someone some input digital input, of course, is if
Speaker 2: you have children, it's definitely going to be inputs there.
Speaker 2: Somebody knocks on the doors, something's on the radio, something's
Speaker 2: on you know, there's always something. And that's even not
Speaker 2: even to mention the phone. This this, you know, makes
Speaker 2: a useful servant but a poor master. And I sense
Speaker 2: it's just mastering so much of our lives, and still
Speaker 2: too much of my life. It just makes deep listening rarer.
Speaker 2: And yet this is what we yearn for. Maybe that
Speaker 2: is the deepest human need is to be known, to
Speaker 2: be heard, to be seen. I mean, what happens, Eric,
Speaker 2: what happens psychologically to a person who has never been
Speaker 2: deeply listened to. I haven't done the research yet, but
Speaker 2: I'm doing it, beginning it to try to answer this
Speaker 2: and many other related questions. But I'm so curious to
Speaker 2: actually identify what research we have about what happens when
Speaker 2: people are never deeply listen to. I mean, we can
Speaker 2: hypothesize that they feel no value, that they feel not
Speaker 2: fully human.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a lot of childhood attachment theory around attunement, right,
Speaker 3: we could say that the process of attunement between parent
Speaker 3: and child is a process of deep listening. I think, sir,
Speaker 3: and we know all the ways that when that doesn't happen,
Speaker 3: that things can go wrong for children.
Speaker 2: Well, the disorder attachments can be some of the most
Speaker 2: catastrophic psychological issues that people then live with for the
Speaker 2: rest of their lives. They don't trust, they don't trust humans. Yep, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I had Josh Ship on the show's he wrote a
Speaker 2: book called The grown Ups Guide to Teenage Humans.
Speaker 3: But yeah, we've had him but a long time. But yeah,
Speaker 3: amazing man.
Speaker 2: Joship was left by his mother, abandoned, That's how certainly
Speaker 2: he felt about it, and what he learned from that
Speaker 2: experience for years was that you couldn't trust adults, and
Speaker 2: so he never did, And of course that causes incredible dysfunction. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because every time anyone does something, even if they're trying
Speaker 2: to do something good, will be distrusted by him. Even
Speaker 2: if they are sincere, even if they're genuine, even if
Speaker 2: they're reliable, they are trustworthy, he won't trust them, And
Speaker 2: so it does create a detachment that it took somebody
Speaker 2: coming along and being so consistent with him for years
Speaker 2: for him to just question the paradigm that he'd gained.
Speaker 2: And so I think maybe there's a miniature version of
Speaker 2: that going on for all of us now because of
Speaker 2: this what we would call it disconnected, wouldn't we We'd say,
Speaker 2: you know, technology has made us disconnected rather than connecting us.
Speaker 2: But isn't that not much of a stretch linguistically from
Speaker 2: disconnected to detached? I wonder if it isn't true that
Speaker 2: for many people they're suffering with a sort of lightweight
Speaker 2: virgin of detachment disorder. They just feel disconnected from people.
Speaker 2: You know, they've been isolated for the last eighteen months
Speaker 2: because of COVID, but then even in normal life when
Speaker 2: they're in a big group of people, it's almost worse.
Speaker 2: If you're in a big group of people and you
Speaker 2: feel detached and disconnected, that's like, that's a greater form
Speaker 2: of loneliness. Yeah, if you feel that, that separation. And
Speaker 2: so I mean, I think we could probably tie up
Speaker 2: all these threads into a single idea which was shared
Speaker 2: with me by a friend. He said, he said, in life,
Speaker 2: we have to shift between being in the scared state,
Speaker 2: the scared state, and the sacred state. Yeah, and I
Speaker 2: love that because again, linguistically just one letter difference, scared
Speaker 2: and sacred. And to really get into that mode where
Speaker 2: you're listening deeply past the surface scared state, which I
Speaker 2: think is sort of at the periphery, and get deeper
Speaker 2: so you can start to feel that, you know, whatever
Speaker 2: the language we choose, that wisdom, that conscience, that guidance,
Speaker 2: and that I think produces somehow a certain ability, confidence, ability,
Speaker 2: not sure the right word, to be able to even
Speaker 2: listen to other people, to even be able to gauge
Speaker 2: appropriately with the world around us, to orient ourselves well
Speaker 2: and surely that path of deep listening within deep listening
Speaker 2: without is key to being able to live our lives
Speaker 2: more effortlessly. To even know what is essential to us,
Speaker 2: to know what's essential to other people, and then to
Speaker 2: do it to be more aligned, is so much better
Speaker 2: than this state of suffering. Makes everything harder, makes it
Speaker 2: harder to even know what is essential to and what
Speaker 2: is not, makes it harder for us to engage with
Speaker 2: other people because we distrust them and we're out of
Speaker 2: alignment with them, and we're all of this I think
Speaker 2: adds up to a life that it makes everything much
Speaker 2: harder for ourselves than the people around us.
Speaker 3: I think that is a wonderful way to bring it
Speaker 3: all around and sum it up. There's about seventy five
Speaker 3: ideas in the book that I wanted us to talk about,
Speaker 3: and we've run out of time. The book is called Effortless,
Speaker 3: Make it Easier to do what matters most. There's so
Speaker 3: much great stuff in it. Courage listeners to check out
Speaker 3: your What's Essential podcast? Yes, check that podcast out and Greg,
Speaker 3: thank you so much for your time. I've really enjoyed
Speaker 3: this conversation and it's been really rich for me.
Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure. Eric, it's great to be on
Speaker 2: the One You Feed podcast.
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