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In this episode, Charles Duhigg explains how we can improve communication in polarized times. He explores how to foster active listening, social reciprocity, and techniques like “looping for understanding.” The conversation covers different types of conversations, the importance of focusing on common ground, and strategies for building and changing habits. Charles also shares insights on handling online conflict, the psychology of identity threat, and how intentional communication and habit design can improve relationships and personal well-being.

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Key Takeaways:

• Importance of active and ostentatious listening in conversations.
• Concept of social reciprocity and its role in effective communication.
• Techniques for improving dialogue, such as “looping for understanding.”
• Different types of conversations: practical, emotional, and social.
• The idea of meta conversation and setting clear goals for discussions.
• Strategies for focusing on common ground before addressing differences.
• The impact of politeness in online communication and reducing hostility.
• Understanding identity threat and its effects on open dialogue.
• The habit loop framework: cue, routine, and reward in habit formation.
• The significance of implementation intentions in managing habits and responses.

Charles Duhigg is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and was previously a reporterat the New York Times where he won a Pulitzer prize for explanatory reporting in 2013. He has appeared on This American Life, N.P.R., The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Frontline. His latest book is Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.

Connect with Charles Duhigg: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

If you enjoyed this conversation with Charles Duhigg, check out these other episodes:

Oren Jay Sofer on Mindful Communication

How to Unlock the Power of Deeper Connections with David Brooks

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Episode Transcript:

Charles Duhigg 00:00:00  When somebody proves to us that they’re listening to us. When someone is polite to us, we have an instinct to listen back to them, to be polite to them, back in return. So one of the things that we have to do is instead of just listening, we have to ostentatiously listen. We have to prove that we’re listening.

Chris Forbes 00:00:25  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:10  I have a confession. I’ve gotten pretty cynical about certain conversations because here’s what usually happens I try to listen, I ask questions, I’m genuinely curious, and the other person just keeps talking. There’s no reciprocity. No. What do you think? It feels less like a dialogue and more like I’m just absorbing someone’s monologue. My guest today is Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit and Super Communicators, and he said to me something I’d never really considered. Maybe they just don’t know how to ask questions back. Maybe they need permission. That really helped reframe some things for me. We also talk about why your exercise habit still requires effort, even though you’ve done it a thousand times how 12 step programs are essentially habit rewiring, and why some online conversations could be fixed with basic politeness. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Charles, welcome to the show.

Charles Duhigg 00:02:12  Thanks for having.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:13  Me. I’m happy to have you back on. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, Super Communicators, which we talked about in a previous episode, but I’d like to talk about it in the context of how we talk to each other in an increasingly polarized time.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:28  And I also want to talk about your classic book that I think is about 13 years old, but the audio book you just rerecorded in your voice, The Power of Habit, which is a topic that I’m always thinking about. But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Charles Duhigg 00:03:16  Well, you know, we’re going to be talking a little bit about polarization today.

Charles Duhigg 00:03:19  And I think that polarization is a great example of this. Look, there is this instinct when we meet someone who believes something differently than we do, voted for someone different than we voted for to try and and beat them, right. To win, to to kind of raise the flag for our cause and defend it valiantly. And that can feel really good in the moment, but it does very little to make this nation better. Right. If you think about it, our country has always been its best. Not when we agree with each other, but when we disagree with each other cordially, when we know how to get along with our neighbors, even though we hold different opinions. And so, for me, I think that there is this, this feeling of wanting to win, wanting to be right. That’s the bad wolf. And the good wolf is the one that says, look, I want to have a conversation with you. I want to understand where you’re coming from, and I want you to understand where I’m coming from.

Charles Duhigg 00:04:08  And when we walk away from each other, we might not agree with each other. And that’s okay. Yeah. Because the goal here is understanding not for one person to be right and the other person to be wrong.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:17  So one of the things that I have found challenging is I agree with everything you just said. And I recognize, like making my point doesn’t actually work, right. I’m probably not going to convince anybody who thinks something differently, but the conversations seem to be like, everybody comes at everybody else. So like, I’m, I’m I’m not saying I’m a saint. I’m trying to be in a receptive listening position and the other person is not in that position. And so they do their thing. I might ask a couple questions, but there’s never not, never there’s very often no reciprocity where we’re having dialogue back and forth. And so I think about like, what do we do when the other person doesn’t want dialogue? Is it just you just don’t bother? Like, what do you think about that?

Charles Duhigg 00:05:04  So I think there’s two things.

Charles Duhigg 00:05:05  The first is there are times when people don’t want dialogue, right? When I tell my kids that I want to talk to them about their rooms, I don’t actually want to have a conversation about their rooms. I want them to go clean their rooms. Right. And so if you’re in a situation where the other person genuinely does not want to have a dialogue with you, there’s very little you can do. But that actually happens very, very infrequently. What often happens much more frequently is that we miss assume if the other person wants to have a dialogue or not. And you’re exactly right. Some people who are more talented at communication, more comfortable communication, what they can do is they can get into this pattern where they’re asking questions and the other person isn’t asking questions. And so what do we do at that moment? Well, there’s two things that we can do. The first is we all have in our brain hardwired into our neurology, this instinct for social reciprocity, which is when somebody proves to us that they’re listening to us when someone is polite to us.

Charles Duhigg 00:05:58  We have an instinct to listen back to them, to be polite to them, back in return. So one of the things that we have to do is instead of just listening, we have to ostentatiously listen. We have to prove that we’re listening. And there’s a technique for this known as looping for understanding. And I think we mentioned last time and it has these three steps, right. Step one is you ask a question. Step two is when the person answers that question. Afterwards you repeat back in your own words which you heard them say. And the goal here is not mimicry. The goal here is to prove to them that you’re paying attention, to prove to them that you’re actually thinking about what they’re saying. And most of us learn to do this somewhat intuitively. It’s step three that I always forget to do, which is when I’m done to say, hey, I’m just wondering, did I get that right? Did I understand you correctly? Because what I’m doing in that moment is I’m asking them for permission to acknowledge that I was listening.

Charles Duhigg 00:06:49  And what I know is, if you acknowledge that I’m listening. That’s social reciprocity instinct in your brain. It will make you want to listen to me in return. So the best thing that we can do to get the other person to listen is we can prove that we’re listening by demonstrating that we’re listening. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, and I do this myself all the time, sometimes you get these these conversations. You ask question after question. The person doesn’t ask you any questions back. Now you might think, oh, maybe they’re just self-obsessed or maybe. But it might also be that they’re just they just don’t know how to ask questions or uncomfortable at it. They need permission. So oftentimes what I do in those situations is I say, oh, you know, I’ve been asking you so many questions. I’m sure you have some questions for me. Let me stop and give you a second to ask me some questions. And whenever I do that, inevitably I find the other person.

Charles Duhigg 00:07:36  They have lots of questions that they want to ask me. They just didn’t know really how to do it. They’re not socially at ease quite as much as I am, but when you invite them to ask you questions, what you find is it becomes a dialogue or it becomes a back and forth.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:48  That’s really great. I never thought of that second point really at all as like a way to invite them to do it and that they may simply not know how to do it. I’ve also sometimes wondered whether the fact like you just if I’m the one asking questions, the interaction takes a certain shape, and things that take a certain shape sometimes stay in that shape unless you consciously alter the shape well.

Charles Duhigg 00:08:16  And I think what we’re getting at here is what’s known as meta conversation, right? When we’re talking about talking. And when I say, oh, I’ve been asking you so many questions, you probably have some questions for me. I’m engaging in meta conversation. What I’m saying is let’s deliberately shape this conversation together.

Charles Duhigg 00:08:31  When I say, oh, look, the reason I wanted to talk to you today is because I really wanted to figure out where we should go on vacation for next year. That’s meta conversation. I’m announcing my goal for the conversation, and then I’m really well served to ask you what your goal is. Does that work for you, or is there anything else you wanted to talk about? When we engage in this meta conversation and the best communicators engage in meta conversation all the time, it doesn’t feel awkward. It doesn’t feel clumsy. It feels like we’re saying, hey, here’s what I’d like to talk about, or here’s how I’d like us to share with each other. And that actually feels very clarifying and good to everyone in the dialogue.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:03  Right. And this takes us kind of back to the heart of super communicators, which was that there are different types of conversations, and knowing what type of conversation you’re in is really important. And to your point, being able to to sort of name that and set up the right context for that type of conversation.

Charles Duhigg 00:09:21  Absolutely. What researchers have found is that when we’re having a discussion, we think we know what that discussion is about. We think we’re talking about where to go on vacation next year, what the budget should be. But actually, if you look inside our brains, what you see is we’re having multiple different kinds of conversations all at the same time. And in general, these different kinds of conversations, they tend to fall into one of three buckets. There are practical conversations where we’re making plans together or we’re solving problems, but then there’s also emotional conversations where I tell you what I’m feeling And I don’t want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then finally, there’s social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society. And all three of these different kinds of conversations are equally legitimate. But what researchers have found is if you’re not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, it’s almost impossible for you to really listen to each other.

Charles Duhigg 00:10:13  It’s almost impossible for you to feel connected to each other. Right. If I come home from work and I’m having a bad day, and I start complaining about my day, and my wife says, oh, here’s a solution. Like, you know, if you’re not getting along with your boss, just take your boss out to lunch. Odds are I’m not going to be able to hear what she’s saying. I’m going to get even more upset because I’m having an emotional conversation and she’s responding with a practical conversation. Yeah. And they’re both equally legitimate conversations. But we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same moment. And within psychology, this has become known as the matching principle that says successful communication requires having the same kind of conversation at the same time.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:50  And what is a learning conversation.

Charles Duhigg 00:10:52  So a learning conversation is when I go into a conversation with the goal of wanting to understand how you see the world and wanting you to understand how I see the world, right? Oftentimes, if you think about it, when we get into a conversation, our goal is, I want to convince you that I’m right and maybe you’re wrong.

Charles Duhigg 00:11:08  I want to convince you that I’m smart. I want to convince you that you should like me. Those usually are not great conversations, right? The best conversations or conversations when I go in to say, look, I’m talking to you because I really want to learn who you are. And I might disagree with some of the stuff you say, but what’s more important to me than is telling you is trying to understand how you see the world. And then once I understand how you see the world, I want to speak in a way that you can understand how I see the world. And if we both walk away with understanding, then the conversation is 100% of a success. That’s a learning conversation.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:41  Got it. Makes sense. You have a couple rules that you posted. You have a Substack. I can’t remember what it’s called. The science.

Charles Duhigg 00:11:48  The science.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:49  Of better signs of.

Charles Duhigg 00:11:50  Better science.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:51  Is close. To put an extra word in there.

Charles Duhigg 00:11:53  That’s okay, you say.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:54  If you and a friend have very different opinions, you can talk about them and feel even closer afterwards.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:00  But you had something really interesting there, which is if you focus on your similarities first, then move to differences.

Charles Duhigg 00:12:07  Yeah, I think that’s really important. And, you know, and this comes from a study where they would pair these, these people who had very different political ideas. And for some of them they would say, okay, you guys have something in common and figure out what it is. And it was that they had the same they came from the same hometown, or they were both, you know, in the model trains or something like that. As soon as the two people figured out, like, oh, we have something in common. Then they moved on to their differences. Their differences were much easier to discuss. And this kind of makes sense, right? Because if I get into a conversation with you and we’re talking about politics and you voted for your person and I voted for my person, and that’s literally all I know about you, is that we voted for different people.

Charles Duhigg 00:12:45  That’s going to kind of overshadow the conversation. It’s going to overshadow my mental image of you and what I think I need to do in this conversation to stand up for my perspective. But if we start by saying, oh, hey, Eric, you know, I know you grew up in in Michigan and I grew up in Michigan. Like, I think we actually went to high schools in the same town. Now we have something in common then. And then when we start talking about our differences, that difference is not the overwhelming characteristic that typifies who I am and who you are. It’s just one of many elements. Right. And inevitably, we have something in common with everyone we bump into. We just have to figure out what it is. And once we’ve established that thing in common, we’re much more likely to have a productive and a useful conversation about what we disagree about and both walk away feeling better about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:31  It strikes me that even in established relationships, that might be a good idea.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:39  So, you know, I have friends who who feel differently than I do on key issues. And we have a long history together. And yet sometimes the conversation is about that thing. And it occurs to me as you’re talking that if I were to be warming the conversation up with like reflecting on the songs we used to listen to together when we were 16, I’ve brought the similarities to mind in a way.

Charles Duhigg 00:14:05  And you.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:05  Could even sort of latent otherwise.

Charles Duhigg 00:14:07  And you can even be more specific than that. You can say things like, and I say this with my wife all the time. We’re talking about where to go on vacation, okay? We both want to have a relaxing vacation, right? That’s our goal. Our goal is to have a relaxing vacation. And I know that, you know, for you, relaxing means by the beach. And for me, relaxing means being in the city where I can walk or walk around. But since we both have this goal in common, let’s see if we can figure out a place that satisfies both of our need for relaxation.

Charles Duhigg 00:14:31  So I don’t even have to talk about, like, you know, the songs we listen to when we’re 16, although that’s kind of fun and that’s a great thing we have in common. What I can do is just say, actually, we have the same goal in common, and we have hunches of different ways to achieve that goal. Once we know what we have in common, it’s a lot easier to. A lot easier to find the path that satisfies both of us.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:51  San Sebastian, Spain. That’s the. That’s the answer to your beach and see.

Charles Duhigg 00:14:55  Oh, yeah, I know I love San Sebastian. It’s. It is beautiful. The Basque Country is amazing. The surfing is great there. And then the ponchos.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:02  We talked about surfing on our last conversation. I learned the surf at San Sebastian about.

Charles Duhigg 00:15:09  Oh.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:10  About three years ago. And I think it’s kind of ruined me for all the other beaches because it is like the perfect beginner wave.

Charles Duhigg 00:15:18  Yeah, no, it’s a pretty nice place to learn.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:20  I mean, it’s just. Yeah. Anyway, let’s not go too far down the surfing rabbit hole here. The other thing that you talked about a little bit was when the, when we’re online, that even somebody inserting something positive into like a comment thread often changes the flavor of the whole thread.

Charles Duhigg 00:15:41  Yeah. And it’s, it’s not just positivity, it’s actually politeness. So there was this really interesting study that was done where they looked at editors on Wikipedia. Right. And the and people on Wikipedia, they get into arguments all the time, right, about what’s, what should be let in and what shouldn’t be let in. And so they were looking at the most heated arguments. And what they found was if just one person started saying please and thank you. It kind of changed the entire conversation, because as soon as one person is saying please or thank you again, this gets back to the social reciprocity. I kind of feel a little bit of an instinct to either say please and thank you myself, or at least not to be like, you’re a jerk.

Charles Duhigg 00:16:20  Thank you very much. Right? Like adding just a little bit of politeness really goes a long way. Now, there’s some other things that we know about online conversations and communication, which is number one. Sarcasm does not work online, right? Because if I say something sarcastic, you can hear the sarcasm in my voice. If I type something sarcastic and you’re reading it quickly, you think I’m being serious. And so that’s that’s a big thing, is dial down the sarcasm, dial up the politeness. And then also this meta conversation really works online, right? To say like, hey, look, I think we’re getting distracted here. The reason why I wanted to have this chat with you was because we need to figure out, like, what our lunch order. Right? That’s a meta conversation. And what you’re doing at that moment is you’re saying, oh, let’s reorient this so that we can communicate with each other.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:39  As we’re talking about this, I think it’s worth noting. And I sort of said it early on Like, these techniques aren’t magic.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:46  They’re not going to make somebody who’s just a true troll. Not a troll. Right? Yeah, but it’s going to shift the way that most people respond. There’s the outliers. But if we’re talking about how most people respond, they’re going to respond to, you know, as you mentioned, reciprocity and and politeness and.

Charles Duhigg 00:18:06  Yeah. No, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, one of the things that we know about studies of internet trolls is you don’t feed the trolls. If someone if someone is there just to, like, make you upset, your best policy is not to interact with them because that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for a reaction. And if you deny that to them, hopefully they’ll move on to something else in their life. But that’s a very small percentage of people who actually fall into that category. Most people, they get online and they actually they want to be heard. They have something that they want to say, and at the same time, they want to see how people react to it and they want to see other people’s comments.

Charles Duhigg 00:18:41  And it’s very easy for that to spiral. If I say like, oh, just like every other liberal that just like all you want to do is like, make this country weaker or you’re just like every other conservative, you don’t, you don’t care about poor people. You don’t care about anyone besides yourself. What’s happening? There is something that’s known as identity threats. So identity threat is a feeling that we feel. And it feels like a threat. It feels like a it feels like it triggers our fight or flight response. When you force me into a group that I do not want to belong to, or you deny me membership in a group that I esteem against my will, it feels like a threat. So if I say, oh, you’re just like those conservatives who don’t care about poor people, I’m forcing you into this group that you might that you probably don’t want to belong to, of people who don’t care about poor people. Right? Or if I’m saying, oh, you know, you never went to law school.

Charles Duhigg 00:19:30  You don’t understand how the law works. Then what I’m doing is I’m denying you membership in a group that you do want to be a part of. People who understand how the law works, because you actually know a lot about the law. And when we engage in this identity threat, It’s really, really dangerous because what it does is rather than allowing me to listen to what you’re saying, it triggers that fight or flight response. And once that’s triggered, it’s very hard for me to calm that down.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:54  Yeah, I have found over the years. I mean, anybody who’s, you know, in a public position on the internet, I’m sure you have this happen to you all the time. I will get very upset emails from time to time from people. And I have found that 95% of the time, if I reply with a kind and thoughtful email like I just, I just let the I let the venom sort of run off and I look at what their key point was, and I respond with some degree of compassion or like, I’m sorry that it landed.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:27  You know, that 95% of the time I get an email back that is lovely, where the person’s like, I’m sorry I overreacted. You know, I just it really hit me wrong. But I, you know, like literally 95% of the time. Now, occasionally it doesn’t work, but most of the time, even what seems to be somebody that you’re like, well, how could they be that angry about what I said? A little bit of understanding and of willingness to say, hey, I care that it upset you. Goes a long way.

Charles Duhigg 00:20:57  I agree, I completely agree, and I think that there’s something important. What you just said that you let the venom run off. Now, the question is from the other person’s perspective, do they see that as venom? Right. Or from their perspective is they’re like they’re like, look, I you know, I heard you say this thing on the radio and I just feel like maybe, maybe you don’t know what my experience is like.

Charles Duhigg 00:21:16  Or maybe, maybe you weren’t exposed to the same facts I was exposed to. Or maybe you’re just mistaken. So from their perspective, it might not be venom. It might not be them saying, I think you’re the worst person on earth. It might be them saying, hey, look, you left out my perspective, and my perspective is important. And so I think that one of the things that happens, particularly when we engage in this looping understanding, when we try and show someone that we’re really paying attention to them, it’s much, much easier for us to see their best intentions. Because if my job is to listen to you closely enough that I can repeat back. Okay, here’s the argument that I think you’re making. This is why. This is why it seems like it matters to you so much. Am I getting that right? If I make that much effort, usually I’m seeing the world a little bit from your perspective. And that doesn’t mean I have to agree with your perspective, right? It doesn’t mean that I have to walk away and say, oh, I’ve changed my mind.

Charles Duhigg 00:22:05  But it does mean that you see you see that I’m trying to hear you, and you become much more likely to want to hear me in response.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:12  Yeah. The thing that makes me think venom is the ones when it really is that way. And most always, I get an apology. I most always will get an apology. Like, boy, I really, you know, right? I came at you pretty hard, you know, or.

Charles Duhigg 00:22:26  I reread, I reread what I wrote and it really came off a lot, a lot more angry than I intended.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:31  It. Exactly.

Charles Duhigg 00:22:32  Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s interesting because what they’re really saying there, I think is true, is I wrote this and I didn’t understand how you would read it until like a couple of hours later with a clear head. I reread it myself and I was like, oh man, that’s that’s way overboard, right? And it’s not so much that they that they, they think that you are bad or wrong as much as they’re in a hot moment.

Charles Duhigg 00:22:54  And we all get into those moments when we type something and then later on we’re like, I wish I’d phrase it differently.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:59  Yep. I used to have a rule. I’ve said this before on the show. It was back when I had a job in the software business, and I had a hard and fast rule. I could not hit send on any email after 5 p.m. that the subject was at all contentious. Yeah, because I just couldn’t trust myself at that point in the day to be able to even read myself clear enough.

Charles Duhigg 00:23:23  And if you said it, for if you save it for tomorrow morning, you wake up and you think, oh, that’s sentence. That’s exactly that’s a little over the top. I need to scale that back a little bit.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:31  Yes, yes. So yeah, from a cooler perspective we can read very differently. All right. So I would love to turn our attention to the book that you’re very well known for, which is The Power of Habit, which is 13 years old now.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:46  And I’d like to start by seeing if we could talk about what a habit is. Sure. At its most basic level, like what do you think of as a habit?

Charles Duhigg 00:23:58  So we use this word habit. And what we oftentimes don’t, don’t fully understand is that every habit has three components, right. We think of a habit as a behavior, but it’s actually three different things. There’s a cue which is like a trigger for a behavior to happen automatically. That’s the first part. Then there’s the routine, the behavior itself, what we think of as the habit. And then finally, every habit in our life delivers a reward to us. That’s the third part. And this is known as the habit loop. It’s the cue, the routine and the reward. And that means that when I walk past that one ice cream shop, I start anticipating. What a chocolate ice cream cone tastes like. So the queue is walking past the ice cream shop. The anticipated reward is that chocolate flavor. And so I kind of almost unthinkingly walk into the into the ice cream shop, and I buy an ice cream like I do every week when I walk past the shop.

Charles Duhigg 00:24:52  Right. Yeah. And that’s the routine. And it’s important because for a long time we focused on the behavior, the routine as something we should change. But what we’ve learned is that we get much more power in trying to influence the queue and the reward that if we can identify or diagnose the queue and the reward, if we can sort of fiddle with the gears, then that behavior, that routine becomes much easier to shift. And so that’s what a habit is. And.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:43  I like that point about CU being really important because it speaks to there being a consistent context. Yeah. Like something like brushing my teeth becomes a habit because the context of getting ready to go to bed happens every day. Buckling my seatbelt, getting in my car becomes habitual because I’m always sitting in a car, in a chair with a belt to my right. Right. Or you know. Right. And so I think that context thing is really important. And one of the things that I’ve worked with people with over the years, and I’d love to just hear you talk about, is that for a lot of people, particularly people like you, you’ve got a busy career, you’ve got kids who are, what, 13 and 9 or 9 and 12, 14, nine, 19.

Charles Duhigg 00:26:26  12, 14 and 17.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:27  Yeah. So your life is very busy. Our context shift a lot.

Charles Duhigg 00:26:32  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:32  And and so how do we work to build a positive habit if our contexts don’t stand still very well.

Charles Duhigg 00:26:40  Well, okay. So what’s interesting is that so so let’s talk about where where how habits work in our brain. Yeah. There’s a part of the brain known as the basal ganglia. Every animal on Earth has a basal ganglia. And it evolved essentially just to create habits. Right. Because because if you can’t build habits, you basically can’t live. If you have to decide, like how to walk every single time you open the door, or if you have to decide every time you see a rock or an apple. Do I eat the rock or do I eat the apple? You’re so overwhelmed that you you just you can’t do anything.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:09  You have no teeth.

Charles Duhigg 00:27:10  Yeah. And you have no teeth. Exactly. So? So every creature that has succeeded has succeeded because they have a basal ganglia and the basal ganglia whose job is to make habits.

Charles Duhigg 00:27:18  So. Okay. So the basal ganglia is where this cued this routine and this reward get all linked together. Now the important thing is that when we’re talking about these cues, it doesn’t have to be the entire context, right? A cue usually falls into one of five categories. There’s a cue cuz oftentimes at the time of day, it’s a certain place, it’s a certain emotion you’re feeling. It’s the presence of certain people, or it’s a preceding behavior that’s become ritualized. Right. So let’s let’s talk about teeth brushing. I brush my teeth. If I take a shower and I don’t brush my teeth, I do not feel clean. Like right now, if I feel my teeth, I feel fine. But if I took a shower and I came out of the shower and I felt my teeth and I hadn’t, I didn’t have that minty feeling in my mouth, I would feel like, oh, the shower isn’t complete. I’m not totally clean yet. So for me, the cue for brushing my teeth has become associated with showering, right? And there’s probably other other cues as well in different settings.

Charles Duhigg 00:28:15  But but showering is a big one. Now, the thing is, I shower sometimes in the middle of the day. Sometimes I shower in the morning, sometimes I shower in a hotel room, sometimes I shower at home. So it doesn’t have to be exactly the same context for that cue to be powerful. And if someone’s trying to, for instance, change the habit in their own life or create a new habit, let’s say you want to go start exercising in the morning? The thing to think about is what cues am I going to create for myself? So am I going to? I’m going to put my running clothes right next to my bed, already laid out, so it’s super easy to get into them as soon as I wake up. Right? Or I’m going to I’m going to set the alarm for six instead of 615, so that I have an extra 15 minutes to to go into the garage and lift some weights. So I’m choosing a cue deliberately, and I might have a couple of different, cuz I might be a time of day and and a certain place and a certain behavior.

Charles Duhigg 00:29:05  I’m going to see which one will stick. And then equally importantly, is to decide what reward I’m going to give myself as soon as the exercise is done right. Okay. As soon as I’m done exercising, I’m going to let myself have one of those chocolate protein shakes that I really, really like, or a nice smoothie or something like that. And the reason why that’s important is because oftentimes when we’re trying to build a habit, we don’t give ourselves a reward afterwards, we sort of assume that the behavior itself should be reward enough, but our brain pays attention to rewards, and if we’re not giving ourselves a reward, our brain says, I’m not going to make this behavior easier. I’m not going to link these things together. So choosing a cue and choosing a reward is really, really important in building a new habit.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:49  I’ve asked this question of many different people on the show, and it’s this if reward theory is correct, which I believe it certainly is to some degree. Every single time I’ve exercised in my life, within minutes of being done, I have thought, I’m glad I did, that I feel better.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:09  Yeah. And yet, I mean, and I’ve got thousands of reps at this point, decades of reps of like 100%. I still have to very often. It just takes more friction to get me over the line than it seems like it should have to be for something that’s got such a high reward. What’s going on?

Charles Duhigg 00:30:31  I’d say a couple things. First of all, my guess is that when you first started exercising, you did not feel great after you. After you did all those sit ups, right? So what happens oftentimes is that we need an external reward at first. If I do 1010 sit ups, I’m going to let myself have a smoothie. And over time, our brain kind of comes to realize, oh, actually, if I do ten sit ups, I feel pretty good. Like, it actually releases endorphins and endocannabinoids and all dopamine, these these neurotransmitters that make me feel good. So the the reward, the brain’s recognition of the reward often moves from an external reward to an internal reward.

Charles Duhigg 00:31:05  And that’s really important. Now, that being said, the fact that you have an internal reward that you feel good after exercising, that’s enough to get you exercising. But it’s not the greatest reward on the face of the planet, right? Like my guess is that, for instance, like not sex is a great example of this, right? Sex rewards are so overwhelming that you very often do not need a lot of encouragement if you are with someone whom you love and in a sexual relationship to have sex because the reward is very large now the reward of feeling good after you do 1010 sit ups, it’s not. It’s not insignificant, but it’s not as big a reward as having like a nice ice cream or going or, you know. So I think what’s important here is the fact that you still have to work a little bit hard to do your exercise. That doesn’t mean that doesn’t mean that it’s not a habit for you. It means that you’ve learned that you need to remind yourself of that reward.

Charles Duhigg 00:32:01  You need to remind yourself that part of your cues is remembering how good you feel after exercise to get yourself to exercise right.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:08  And I think that gets to my my question about like, how do we define a habit? Because I would say from one view of of exercise, I have an exercise habit. I do it five days a week, almost always year after year. Right. So in that way it happens, right? But it doesn’t feel automatic in the way that brushing my teeth feels automatic.

Charles Duhigg 00:32:32  Well, because it takes a little bit more effort. But they’re still both. They’re both habits. Right. I mean, let’s take for instance, it probably takes more effort to brush your teeth than it does to breathe. Right. And and actually, you can stop breathing until basically you have a buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood. You don’t have to breathe. You don’t have an instinct to breathe. But the reason why we keep breathing is because it’s a habit that we fallen into, and it’s a habit that’s so easy that we hardly even think about it.

Charles Duhigg 00:32:56  It takes a little bit more effort to brush your teeth, right? It takes a little bit more effort to work out. That doesn’t mean that any of them aren’t habits, and a habit doesn’t mean it’s something that happens thoughtlessly. It means it’s something that gets easier and easier and easier in the context of that cue and reward. So the first time you exercised, you really had to think about it a lot, right? You had to like, okay, here’s the route I’m going to take. Here’s what I’m going to wear. I know that I’m gonna look really dumb running. So I’m only going to run for a couple blocks. Like you spend a lot of time thinking about it. A couple of weeks in, you’re like, oh yeah, just throw in the clothes. Like, let’s just go for the run. What happens is that our basal ganglia makes that behavior, that chunk of behaviors, the cue routines and reward easier and easier and easier. That does not mean it becomes completely thoughtless, but it does mean that actually your brain spends less time thinking about that that habit loop as the as time goes on.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:50  That’s a great way to think of it. I often think of it as momentum, right? There’s a certain momentum. Certain behaviors in my life have a momentum to them. Yeah, that is really strong. There’s been times over the last couple of decades where I will get completely off track with something that’s a habit, you know, for a few weeks, a month. And the effort then that it takes to get going again is, you know, 20 times what it takes me today. Yeah. So let’s talk about this habit loop in a little bit more detail, because it’s kind of the heart of what you just laid out is what makes something a habit. So walk us through each of the components of it and give us an example of each.

Charles Duhigg 00:34:33  Okay, so as I mentioned a cue it falls into one of these five buckets. Right. Let’s say that, you know, like my, my teeth brushing habit, the cue for that is a preceding behavior. It’s taking a shower. And that that triggers this craving for that minty feeling in my mouth.

Charles Duhigg 00:34:50  It’s not a huge craving, right? It’s not a craving. I mean, if it’s not convenient, if I’m rushing out the door, I’m not going to be consumed by it all day long. But it’s enough to remind me to go pick up my toothbrush and make that really easy.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:01  You’re not robbing somebody for a tube of toothpaste.

Charles Duhigg 00:35:03  Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So that’s that’s how cues work. And rewards. Rewards are just something that we enjoy. Now, the problem is that sometimes we create a habit and we don’t. We give ourselves a reward that, in theory, is rewarding. Like sometimes people say like, okay, I’m going to go for a run this morning, and if I do, my reward is I’m going to let myself eat some kale chips. Kale chips is not a reward, right? Nobody’s like, oh man, Kale chips. I love these things so much. Right? Or they. And so so you need to give yourself a reward that you actually find rewarding.

Charles Duhigg 00:35:35  Here’s another thing that people do, right. They say, okay, I’m going to go running tomorrow morning. So what they do is they wake up and they’re sort of in a in a hurry to try and figure out what their running clothes are. They go out, they, they, they go for a run, they come back, the kids are late for school. And so they rush through a shower, and then they’re rushing to get their kids to school. And finally they make it to their desk and they’re like, oh, finally I get to calm down. What they basically did is they punished themselves for exercising. Right now, your brain pays attention to those punishments and rewards, and it says, I don’t want to make running easier. Like whenever you go running, it’s kind of a nightmare afterwards that that seems like a sign that this is a bad behavior. So we really have to be deliberate about giving ourselves rewards that are genuinely rewarding and not letting ourselves think that like, just because we want it to be rewarding, it will be.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:23  Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call this still point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago. So you don’t have to stumble towards an answer that something is now here and it’s called overwhelm is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:27  The launch price is $29. If life is too full but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed. Them. That’s one you feed them. So let’s flip it on its side. We’re talking about if I want to do a behavior, I want to set up a, I want to engineer a queue to happen that will start off a behavior which will then have a reward, and then that’s going to make it easier to to start the loop again the next time. So if on the other hand, I want to stop a behavior, the the term we might use instead of queue, at least coming out of the recovery movement is trigger, right? That’s the that’s almost the negative connotation. Right. It’s the same thing. Yeah. Something happens. I start to get stressed out as I’m hanging out with my children. And then there’s a behavior. Then there’s a reward for what we’ve got in our mind is we have a reward out there that we think is coming, and we want that reward.

Charles Duhigg 00:38:31  Yeah, you’re right, it’s a little bit different when we’re talking about changing habits as opposed to creating habits. And there’s this, this expression which is a terrible expression break a bad habit. Right. What we know is that if you try and break a bad habit, if you try and extinguish a habit, you can usually through willpower, do it for a little while. But oftentimes your willpower is going to give out at the worst possible time. When you’re stressed, when you’re overwhelmed, and at that moment you’re going to say like, screw it, I’m just going to go get a drink. So, so how do we handle that? The first thing is that we have to train ourselves to recognize, to figure out what the cue and the reward of this old habit is. Right? Okay, I know that. I feel like I need a drink every single time that I’m stressed. So for me, stress is the trigger. Stress is the cue to have a drink. And what’s the reward that it gives me? Well, like my body relaxes.

Charles Duhigg 00:39:21  Like I sort of say to myself, okay, I can’t I can’t worry about that anymore right now because I’m having a drink, I need to. I’ll just put it off for tomorrow. Right? I get to relieve some of that stress. Okay, now I know what the queue and the reward is. That pathway exists in my brain. The Q reward routine reward. If I try and extinguish it, I can for a little while. But it’s going to be really hard. What’s much better is instead of breaking a habit simply to change a habit, to find a new routine that corresponds to that old cue and that delivers something similar to that old reward, right? Okay. Yeah. So when I get really, really stressed, here’s what I’m going to do. Instead of going to a bar, I’m going to go to a meeting. Right. And I’m going to talk about what’s stressing me and out. And I know that if I do that, I’m actually going to feel better. It’s going to make the stress go away.

Charles Duhigg 00:40:04  So now I have a new routine that corresponds to that old cue and that old reward. That’s a much better way to change your behavior 100%.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:13  So to sort of try and summarize this, when we’re trying to create a habit, we are deliberately engineering a cue and a reward. We’re very much focusing on the cue and reward. If we’re trying to get rid of a bad habit, we may be able to do some work on cues. It’s a good idea not to put yourself in triggering situations if you don’t have to, but sometimes they’re unavoidable, right? Getting stressed is an unavoidable cue. It’s an emotional state. I can’t turn it off. So I’m going to have a cue. And when I and when I have an uncomfortable state, I’m going to want a reward, even if that reward is losing that uncomfortable state. So I can’t necessarily change the cue, and I can’t change the fact that I want a reward. What I can change in that case is the behavior that sits in the middle.

Charles Duhigg 00:41:03  That’s exactly right. And if you think about like what AA does, that’s exactly what AA does, right? It tells you like I mean, if you think about the 12 steps, like one of them is that you go and you you acknowledge all the mistakes you’ve made. And and that’s basically forcing you to recognize all of your triggers, all of your cues. Right. And then you’re told to focus on how to get what you’re looking for in other ways. Right. Like, if I’m feeling stressed out, I can come to a meeting, I stand up and I have to say my name, and I have to say who I am, and I have to tell you about my day, which gives me a sense of relief, the same way that going to a bar and having a drink sometimes gives me a sense of relief. When people talk about addiction from a clinical perspective. They talk about it as a habit. Dysfunction. Right. Smoking is a great example of this. So you’re only physically addicted to cigarettes for about 100 hours after your last cigarette.

Charles Duhigg 00:41:53  By then, the nicotine has left your bloodstream. Yeah. But we all know people who crave a cigarette a year, five years, ten years after they give up. Right. That’s not physical addiction. That’s a habit dysfunction. And a habit. Dysfunction exists in these same part of our brain as the physical addiction. And so it feels exactly the same. But the way that you handle it is you look at it as a habit, and you figure out that cue in that reward, and you find a new routine to put in the middle of them.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:20  Yeah. I mean, we used to have a phrase in in recovery, which is like, I mean, if all if all you need is to get sober, just go to jail for a little while, you will be physically sober. Right? Right.

Charles Duhigg 00:42:30  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:31  You don’t come out of jail, and suddenly it’s fixed. And so many people I know focus on that first period. I was a heroin addict, and that was the thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:39  We were like, oh, my God, those first 72 hours. Well, yeah, that’s unpleasant. But it’s the next five years. The next five years that that tend to be harder. And I think the other thing that 12 step programs do is they address, in this case, they are addressing not just the behavior, they’re addressing the cue in that learning. So that, you know, my stress is at a four instead of an eight all the time, right? I’m learning exactly to exactly bring those things down.

Charles Duhigg 00:43:09  And and I know what to do when I hit that. Eight. Right. Within psychology this is known as an implementation intention that basically one of the things that works really well is if if we make a decision about what to do in a hot state. When we are in a cold state, we’re more likely to listen to our good advice. Right? So if I go, if I come up with a shopping list, not when I’m really, really hungry. But if I come up with a shopping list after having dinner, then that shopping list is probably going to be better than if I just go into the grocery store and I’m starving and I’m going to get Pop Tarts.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:41  Exactly.

Charles Duhigg 00:43:42  And so, so a lot of what recovery or or any other form of trying to change our behavior is about is about making decisions in a cold state, about what I will do in a hot state, and then coming up with ways to remind myself right when my stress hits an eight, I’m going to call my sponsor. And and like, it’s not like, should I call my sponsor? It’s the right time to call my sponsor. Nope. It doesn’t matter if it’s 2:00 in the morning, I’m going to call my sponsor and I tell my sponsor and my sponsor is like, yes, you do that. That’s okay. I want that phone call. Like, when we program that behavior ahead of time, that’s when it works.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:17  So we only have a few minutes left here. I would love to ask, 13 years later, from writing The Power of Habit. What have you learned that adds to what you know? What’s in the book that you would you think is important, that you would love to add now? Or anything that you feel like you would walk back a little bit?

Charles Duhigg 00:44:36  No, I think that, you know, super communicators helped me a lot with this.

Charles Duhigg 00:44:39  Super communicators is coming out in in paperback next week. And I think one of the things that I realized in writing it is that so much of how we relate to other people is built around habits, right? So in In The Power of Habit, I talked a lot about the habits that shape how we live. I talked less about mental habits, but we all have mental habits, right? We fall into mental habits, you know, whether we feel good about something or bad about something, whether we feel good about ourselves or bad about ourselves, whether we let ourselves get angry or we don’t get angry. And communication is how we verbalize those habits and oftentimes how we change them. The act of sitting down with someone and saying, look, this happened to me, this thing happened and I felt this way, and I want to feel differently. So let’s talk about how I do this next time better. That is the act of reprogramming our habits. And what I’ve been impressed by is literally any habit can be changed, like any mental habit can be changed and the physical habit can be changed.

Charles Duhigg 00:45:38  It’s just a matter of wanting to take the time to understand that habit and wanting to change it. And oftentimes the best way we do that is through conversation is by communicating with other people.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:50  Yeah, that’s really beautiful. And something I think about a lot because mental habits, they just run on repeat in such a way. Yeah. And so there’s this, there’s this almost case of how do I recognize the cue which is triggering the behavior, which is the thought pattern. And, and I’ve found, you know, and I’ve worked with people in an email course I have. We work on this of using prompts to get you to reflect on something multiple times during the day because just simple proximity. If I’ve just reflected it 3:00 on the fact that I want to offer myself more self-compassion, there’s a much better chance at 430 in the afternoon, I’m going to actually remember to do that. Then, if I write about it Sunday night as a vague intention, right?

Charles Duhigg 00:46:35  I think that’s exactly right. And I think you’re building a habit there.

Charles Duhigg 00:46:37  Right? You’re you’re deliberately saying, okay, look like like I’m going to I’m going to give myself self-compassion, like I’m going to do this every day three times a day. And the cue is that I’m going to get this, this text reminder from Eric that’s going to help me do it. Yeah, that’s really powerful. That’s how we change our behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:52  And the last thing I’ll say is that when you talk about habits and communication, I’m glad you tied that together, because I think about how habitual my conversational patterns are with certain people, which is not bad necessarily. We have a rhythm, we have a way. But it does make it harder when I want that conversation to go somewhere different.

Charles Duhigg 00:47:15  Yeah. No, it’s it’s worth reflecting on so that you’re you’re empowered. You have an implementation intention. Yes. To change when when you want to.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:23  Well, Charles, thank you so much for coming on. It’s always a thank.

Charles Duhigg 00:47:26  You for having.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:26  Me. The Power of Habit was such an influential book on me and the way that I see the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:33  So thank you. Thank you for that. I’m glad it’s out in audiobook with your your voice on it now. And until next time.

Charles Duhigg 00:47:39  Until next time. Thanks, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:41  Yeah. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

In this episode, Luke Burgis explores the question, “Are your desires really yours?” and how to recognize and reclaim what you truly want. He discusses how to tell the difference between “thin desires (fleeting, imitated wants) and “thick desires” (the deeper longings that bring lasting fulfillment), and why discerning between the two can change the direction of your life. Luke also shares practices for uncovering your true hierarchy of values, creating alignment between what you want and who you want to be. Explore how to pivot from “I don’t want to” to “I do want to, I just dono’t feel like it” and how to feed the desires that lead to meaning instead of comparison or regret.

Exciting News!!!
Coming in March, 2026, my new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!

Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of the concept of mimetic desire and its origins in the work of René Girard.
• Discussion on how desires are often imitative and influenced by others rather than being inherently personal.
• The importance of discerning between beneficial and harmful desires in one’s life.
• The parable of the two wolves as a metaphor for the internal conflict between positive and negative desires.
• Differentiation between “thin desires” (fleeting and influenced by external factors) and “thick desires” (deeply rooted in personal values and identity).
• The role of self-reflection and narrative in understanding one’s desires and motivations.
• The significance of establishing a hierarchy of values to guide decision-making and desire cultivation.
• The impact of social interactions on shaping desires and the responsibility individuals have in influencing others.
• The concept of “stalking your greatest desire” as a means to align personal desires with one’s life mission.
• The importance of having a trusted partner for exploring and communicating desires, emphasizing the value of attentive listening.

Luke Burgis is an entrepreneur who has founded and led multiple companies.  He is currently Director of Programs at The Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America.  He is also the founder and Director of Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator that he started to build, train, and invest in people and companies that contribute to a healthy human ecology. 

Connect with Luke Burgis: Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Luke Burgis, check out these other episodes:

How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag

Finding Zen in the Ordinary with Christopher Keevil

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Episode Transcript:

Luke Burgis 00:00:00  I think there’s a typical attitude that people want what they want, and whatever they want is fine. Well, that’s true, but not everything we want, not everything we desire, is going to be good for us.

Chris Forbes 00:00:17  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good Wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:02  I used to think my desires were mine, that they arose from some authentic core of who I am. Turns out I mostly learned them from other people. Luke Burgess wrote the book wanting about mimetic desire. The idea that we want what other people want because they want it. We’re wired to look around and copy what seems valuable, which means many of us are pursuing things we never consciously chose to pursue. We just saw someone else going after and thought, well, that must be worth wanting. As a former heroin addict, this concept fascinates me because I know what it’s like when desire takes over completely, when the strength of wanting something feels like proof that it’s the right thing to want and it’s not. We talk about fulfillment stories, thick versus thin desires, and the pivot that I often use daily. I do want to do this. I just don’t feel like it right now. That distinction has got me in motion countless times. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Luke. Welcome to the show.

Luke Burgis 00:02:08  Hey, Eric, thanks for having me on.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:09  I am really excited to talk with you about your book, which is called Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire and Everyday Life.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:18  I think the concept of what we desire and why is so fascinating and so important. So we’ll get into that in just a second. But let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable there is a grandfather who’s talking with his grandson. He says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Luke Burgis 00:03:03  I’ve thought about this parable for many years, and I’ve come to understand it on three different levels. But all of those different levels have to do with desire.

Luke Burgis 00:03:14  So for me, the parable is about which desires we should starve and which desires we should feed. So the first layer of that for me, I would call it just a basic relational level, how I’m in relationship with other people. Sometimes I have the desire to right my perceived wrongs to own somebody in some kind of an argument. I for an I kind of desires. And those are unhealthy. And those are the kinds of desires that I want to starve. And I want to feed empathy and compassion and understanding, the desire to listen, the desire to, understand somebody else’s perspective. That might be different from mine. And of course, you know, on that basic level, there’s fleeting, ephemeral desires. The desire, you know, to indulge myself with, you know, alcohol or little fleeting instant gratifications that I know are not going to lead to long term fulfillment for me. So those are the kind I want to starve. The second layer I would call a spiritual layer, maybe even a theological layer.

Luke Burgis 00:04:23  You know, and I’m a Christian, so I would understand certain desires as being sinful, which is really a source of alienation, and then other desires being the ones that lead to fulfillment or love. And those are the kind of desires that lead to to union and to healthy relationships. And the third layer is a mission oriented layer. So I believe I have a mission in life. I think that everybody does. And certain desires arise in me that are not aligned with my mission, their desires that, if pursued, will take me off track. And very relevant example of this is some desires that arose in me just during the pandemic, during the course of the pandemic, especially last year, early 2020. I hadn’t even finished writing my book yet, and I was dealing with, you know, trying to keep my elderly parents safe. I’m trying to plan a wedding. which, you know, has been moved. And, you know, we’re married now, but that was a whole story in itself and focused on writing this book and communicating these ideas.

Luke Burgis 00:05:27  And everywhere I looked, different desires were being modeled to me. Now, you know, the desire to move to upstate New York, the desire to start trading in the markets hardcore, you know, from crypto to getting in and the on the bull market last year. And I have a background in finance and investing. So it was incredibly tempting for me to want to get in on that. And you hear about, you know, the success that other people are having. Even earlier this year with some of the meme stocks, and there was an incredible desire to allocate a lot of my time and effort into doing that. I’m also a very competitive person, so I was incredibly attracted to the idea of getting into that, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But for me, that was a desire that I had to starve. Why? Because in this particular season of my life, I had a mission very clear. you know, taking care of my family. finishing writing a book as well as I possibly could.

Luke Burgis 00:06:21  I had to pour into that particular task and evaluating my desires based on that sort of vocation or mission throughout the various seasons of my life and throughout my life. Taken as a whole is really important to me, and I noticed that that wasn’t aligned. Maybe someday it will be. But I had to starve. That I had to feed and cultivate the desire to want to do other things more, you know, to to want to be with my family and, you know, my my now wife to want it so into my, you know, creative side and to right and to get better at that. So fundamentally that parable for me is is about desires. You know, my own desires are like two wolves fighting inside of me. And I know that some of my desires, you know, if I feed them, are going to make me miserable or are certainly not going to lead to fulfillment, and then others are. And the key for me is just discerning the difference between the two. And that’s not always easy.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:17  There is so much in what you just said there that I could unpack, and I think we’ll probably spend the rest of this conversation sort of doing that. But I think you summarize so much of what I loved in your book in that answer, and instead of responding to it directly, I want to back up a second and make sure that we talk about this idea of mimetic desire, because I think this is a really important idea. Obviously you do too, because you wrote an entire book about it. But what do we mean by mimetic desire? What does that mean?

Luke Burgis 00:07:52  The word mimetic comes from a Greek word that simply means to imitate. So mimetic desire is imitative desire. It means that humans tend to imitate the desires of other people, that we want what other people want because they want it. So not coincidentally, we happen to want the same thing that somebody else wants. When somebody else wants it, that thing becomes more desirable to us. That’s the key to understanding mimetic desire. So we’re social creatures, and we take our cues about what’s valuable, about what’s desirable from other people.

Luke Burgis 00:08:29  And the source of this term, mimetic desire, is a French thinker named René Girard, who taught at Stanford for many years and some other universities, and he noticed this key feature of human nature. Now, scientists have known, classical philosophers like Aristotle and Plato knew that imitation played a central role in human behavior. Aristotle said that humans are the most imitative creatures in the world. It’s one of the things that separates us from from animals. We have incredibly complex and powerful faculties of imitation. But imitation was always understood on a external level. So the imitation of art, of language, facial expressions, of styles of dress. And Girard realized that our powers of imitation go under the surface of all of the external things, and that we have this ability to read the intentions of other people, or to read their desires, and to desire what other people want. And this is part of what it means to be human. It’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just the way that we are.

Luke Burgis 00:09:40  We’re incredibly mimetic when it comes to more abstract things like, you know, the kinds of lifestyles we pursue or careers or hobbies or things that we’re interested in. We may not lean on mimetic desire as much with fulfilling our basic needs. Like, If I’m thirsty, I want something to drink. I don’t necessarily need anybody to model the desire for water to me, but once we move into the world of what I would call desires that are things that are less need based and more desire based. Humans are types of creatures that require models for their desire. So according to Gerard, we require models for for almost everything in this so-called universe of desire. And that’s incredibly important to understand for me, because we typically think of desire as arising just independently and autonomously, and we never think very seriously about how or why we’ve come to want something in the first place. And we typically don’t acknowledge the other people or the other social forces that have caused us, you know, to desire something. And that could be like, you know, to be a political revolutionary, or it could mean to pursue a career path.

Luke Burgis 00:10:57  If we don’t understand the forces that are acting on us and specifically on our desires, we’ll just sort of be at the mercy of them. And worse yet, we can even be manipulated, whether that’s by, you know, companies or people that want us to want something that is in their best interest but might not necessarily be in ours.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:18  Right. What I think is so interesting about that is that, as you said, we tend to think that our desires, they feel like they’re part of us. They feel so intrinsic to who we are. An example I often use, I’m talking about in a slightly different context, but I’m talking about it in the sense of sort of the Buddhist idea of everything is conditioned, right? Is I’ll say. You might say something like. And you could be a man or woman doing this, right. This is not a one sex or the other thing. But you might say I prefer people who look like x, I prefer blondes. Let’s just take that as an example, right? That may feel so unquestionable.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:01  It just arises and it’s very obvious and it’s very strong. But the reality is there’s something that occurred in my life that would have caused that to be the way it is. Maybe I saw a Marilyn Monroe movie at a particularly impressionable age. Maybe my mother was blonde or brunette, or as you said, I learned this desire from somewhere else. And so I just think this is a really interesting idea that everything that we desire, again, beyond the basic needs is somehow, again, to use the Buddhist term, conditioned in that it Arose as a result of conditions. And the conditions that you’re saying are imitative. It was modeled for us, right?

Luke Burgis 00:12:46  And if we look hard enough and we become aware of this feature of human desire, we can usually always find a hidden model for something that we desire. And to your point, Eric. You know, when I look back in my life, I have been attracted to different partners for different reasons, and they’ve changed as I go throughout my life.

Luke Burgis 00:13:12  So, I mean, it would seem to indicate that there’s not merely some kind of a physiological reason for that. Like, why would it change through different years and not only in a physical level? Has my attraction changed, my preferences have changed, but also, you know, in the kind of person that I’m attracted to, you know, like there was a point where, you know, some incredibly A professional, you know, kind of investment banker career, you know. Woman was was kind of like something that I was, you know, really attracted to and not so much anymore. Why is that so even that, you know, was probably conditioned by what the other people in my life desired or were attracted to. And I can’t really be explained through financial means or through through purely biological answers. It’s a wide and sweeping topic that applies to so many different areas of life. My goal really is, is just to get us thinking as individuals and also as a society, how this is affecting our behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:16  You say that desire is memetic. We learn it. In essence, someone else wants it. So we then think it’s something that’s worth wanting. The question that I don’t really understand is what causes certain things, certain models, to be the thing that we click in on, right? Because there’s a bunch of different desires, right? If I just think about high school as an example, there were some people who were really into sports could have had that model, right? And other people were really into academics and I could have seen that modeled. You know, so what is it that causes us to choose a particular model? Do you have any insight into that?

Luke Burgis 00:15:00  Well, the thinker that inspired my book certainly did. And, you know, his answer was is essentially that it’s always because of a sense of lack that we feel we have, and we perceive that the model might have whatever it is we think that we lack. So he says that all desire is a desire for being. It’s a desire to be somebody else, or a desire to have maybe more freedom and control over our desires.

Luke Burgis 00:15:35  So oftentimes an incredibly confident person that seems as if they know exactly what they want or what is wanted at all times is an incredibly attractive and powerful model to most people, because most of us secretly are not really sure what to want. So I look back to my high school days. I grew up on the west side of Michigan, in a town called Grand Rapids, and early days of the internet. You know, I was hanging out in AOL chat rooms and stuff like that, and I got it in my head that the kids my age that lived in New York City had something that I didn’t have, whatever that was. Okay, maybe a level of coolness or street smarts or something like that. And I quickly adopted them as models. And part of that came from a sense of, you know, lack, you know, or insecurity that I had. And of course, this all happened without me knowing it. And you know, I had my heart set and going to college in New York City, and I did, and I got there.

Luke Burgis 00:16:39  And it turns out that all the kids my age are exactly just like me. They’re all they all have their own, you know, kind of they’re all looking into their own models. This kind of dynamic is extremely powerful. And adolescence, you know, everybody’s like trying to figure out who they are and kind of like latching on to the first thing or group or person that might give them, you know, a sense of identity. It’s like, if I could just if I could just be a little bit more like them than, you know, X, Y, and Z would happen, you know? C.S. Lewis calls this the desire to always be in the inner ring, and he sort of describes it as a process of there’s always a ring that’s more inner that we’re never in, and we always go through life thinking it might not even be true, that there’s an inner ring, an inner circle that we’re not part of. And we decide that certain people are and, you know, that fuels our desire.

Luke Burgis 00:17:35  And he says, you know, obviously that onion can be peeled to infinity, basically. And, you know, that I think is a large part of the reason why we adopt different models and very importantly, why people’s models change as they go through life.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:07  So why is this important for us to try and understand that our desires are driven by imitation? Why is this important.

Luke Burgis 00:18:19  If we don’t see the things that are driving our desires? At best it can make us pretty miserable because There’s always another model modeling a different desire for us, and we can just kind of float through life like a dilettante, you know, or feeling like we have whiplash and pursuing new desires, perhaps getting new things, buying new things, entering into new relationships, changing careers, and, you know, never understanding why we’re so unsatisfied because we’re just, you know, we just simply have new models. Typically, though, it leads to conflict between people and resentment and, and, you know, jealousy or envy, you know, without us really understanding why that happens.

Luke Burgis 00:19:05  I mean, just to give you an example, most authors that have published a book have all kinds of desires modeled to them to want certain things. So, you know, you want to be a New York Times bestseller. You want X, Y, and Z award. You want to be recognized in certain ways. And I think few people ask themselves why that thing is wanted. I mean, sure, you might sell more books, but like, the desire ends up taking over everything and you know, you forget why you set out on a certain path in the first place. It was it really so that you could, you know, get a michelin star for your restaurant or, you know, get on a make a certain list for your book. And these desires are mathematically given to us. And part of the process, I think, of maturing and understanding the way that this works is being able to see that and calling it, you know, for what it is and being able to exercise a little more freedom in what we desire.

Luke Burgis 00:20:03  So it’s not to say like we can just do away with this altogether because we’re social creatures, but what we can do is have the self-possession and the agency and the freedom to make these things more or less our own, rather than just sort of unconsciously accepting these things as the things that I’m supposed to want. I grew up in a home with two doctors. I’m supposed to want to be a doctor or whatever. And, you know, this is a really important thing. It’s maybe I do adopt the desire to be recognized in a certain way for my book, but if I do, at least I’m doing it with intentionality. At least I’m realizing what I’m doing rather than just following. and we have a lot of followers in our culture. We have a lot, you know, people, I think, uncritically accept both thinking and ideas and desires. And then five, ten, 15 years later, it might be that they’re in a career that they’re miserable in or a relationship that they’re miserable in, and they don’t realize how they got to be in that place in the first place.

Luke Burgis 00:21:07  And chances are, if we if we dig deep enough, it may be that there was a desire or the desire for some object that they, you know, they had pursued without really ever having made it their own and chosen to pursue that thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:23  You say that being anti mimetic is having the ability, the freedom to counteract destructive forces of desire. So given that all this is modeled, how do we start to find what our real desire is or our deeper desire is? What are some of the ways we can start to unravel this unspoken, understood forces that are driving us? Because desire is what drives us.

Luke Burgis 00:21:55  It is what drives us. It’s what moves us. I think of desire like an energy of movement that draws us towards certain people or certain things, and we’re always moving towards something or away from something. We’re never standing still. You know, it’s a bit old saying if you’re not going forwards, you’re going backwards. And that’s desire. So when I say being anti mimetic, I certainly don’t mean just be a contrarian and just sort of do the opposite of what everybody else is doing or what everybody else wants.

Luke Burgis 00:22:25  That, in fact, is mimetic behavior, because you’re just modeling your behavior on what the other people want. there are positive and negative mimetic desires and positive mimetic desire. The kind that I would want to feed to go back to the fable would be if I see some noble, good, virtuous trait in somebody that I admire and I want to be infected with the desire, I want to feed the desire to be, to be more like that person. And that’s good, as long as I don’t end up seeing that person as a rival or a threat to me, as long as they remain, that relationship remains healthy. There are other cases where I want to be anti mimetic when I see, you know, sort of radical political polarization and rhetoric. I want to have the freedom, I want to have the ability to not engage the way that other people are engaging. It’s possible, you know, when somebody hates me, when somebody, you know, wrongs me. The memetic response is to do the same thing back, right? It’s treat people the way that they treat me.

Luke Burgis 00:23:27  I think there’s a there’s a higher way. And I think that that’s to step back and respond in freedom and medically and to treat them the way that I would have liked to have been treated. I mean, this is old, ancient wisdom, but, you know, this is just a new way to kind of think about this. One of the ways, I think to uncover and reveal the difference between what I would call thin desires and what I would call thick desires, is to kind of you have to step back and kind of look, look at life with a little more perspective. A thin desire is highly mimetic. You know, here today, gone tomorrow. It’s like my desire to sort of like go headfirst into crypto that summer. Definitely a mimetic desire. There was no kind of solid foundation that that rested on. you know, if the market had crashed, if all none of my friends cared about it the next week, then it would have been gone for me too, you know.

Luke Burgis 00:24:19  It was completely dependent on what everybody else was doing. You know, there was nothing intrinsic about it. There was nothing that I had made my own. It was just following the FOMO, you know, the fear of being left out. All my friends are getting rich. Right. And, you know, I noticed that, you know, I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to have learned. You know, when I’m feeling that and I pursue something and how it can leave me empty because I’ve made a lot of money, and, you know, it just didn’t do for me what I thought it was going to do. And I sacrificed a lot to make that money. It doesn’t bring me any fulfillment today. And that’s one of the signs that it was kind of a fleeting, sort of mimetic desires that it was. There was nothing enduring about the satisfaction that it brought me. What I would call a thick desire is the kind of desire that’s cultivated, the kind of desire that you feed over a very long period of time.

Luke Burgis 00:25:09  So you could begin to put your finger on what some of those thicker desires are. You know, by looking back at your life and what you desired as a child, what you desired as as an adolescent or at an earlier time in your life. Good and bad, but specifically trying to identify the kinds of wants that that we had that did bring us a tremendous sense of satisfaction and joy and sense of self, the kinds of experiences where we were in flow, where we really just felt like our like most like ourselves. And, you know, for me, I had that experience in sports a little bit. I had that experience in certain subjects in school and certain relationships that I was in, certain projects that I undertook after college. And I think it’s possible to begin to see a pattern in those kinds of desires, and you begin to see the kinds of desires that you want to feed. And with perspective, you know, I look back on my life and I see which ones ended up leaving me empty.

Luke Burgis 00:26:09  And when I see those arising in me again today, I know that those are the kinds of desires that I want to starve. So in a way, doing that, let’s call it a history of our desires, sort of a narrative, psychological and narrative psychology gives us a hermeneutic, an interpretive key to understand a little bit better what’s going on inside of us, to be able to kind of spot it before it metastasize and grows into this overwhelming desire, because there are some that we need to just pivot from and realize, you know what? I do want this, but not everything I want is necessarily going to make me happy. And this is just a fundamental realization. I think there’s a typical attitude that people want what they want, and whatever they want is fine. What’s true? But not everything we want, not everything we desire, is going to be good for us. And, you know, we have to have the self-reflection to, to to recognize that and to not convince ourselves in the brightness, you know, of our own desires.

Luke Burgis 00:27:08  We justify everything that we want. You know, we’re really good at justifying what we want and pursuing it.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:35  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to. What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection. That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one you feed, net, SMS and sign up. It’s free. No spam and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one you feel. Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. Strength of desire does not equate to the value of that desire. As a former heroin addict, I obviously took that to a far extreme.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:35  But I mean, boy, did I want it. You know, I wanted it to the extent that I was willing to burn everything in my life down. Obviously, it’s easy to see how destructive that was, but so many things in life, I think strength of desire is really confused for the right thing to want, or that it’s sort of, as we said earlier, that it’s who I am, you know, it’s intrinsic to me. I feel it so strongly it must be who I am. And that’s just not the case. A question for you is how does this idea of thick desire correlate to the idea of having values. Are they aligned or are they similar, or are they the same? You know, because one of the things that say something like acceptance and commitment therapy talks about, which is a type of therapy I think is a is a brilliant type is you find out what you value and then you commit your life to it, you know. So this sounds similar. Are those saying the same thing?

Luke Burgis 00:29:35  There’s a paradox here.

Luke Burgis 00:29:36  And the fundamental question is do we desire what we value or do we value what we desire? And yes, I think that it’s an iterative process because I think it’s very important to step back and establish values and not just values, but a hierarchy of values. And I talk about that in the book. And some of those values should be objective if you believe in objective values, right. Things like beauty and truth that are not merely determined through sort of cultural circumstances. You know, step back because that’s solid ground. But if I would have done that when I was 18, the values that I would have chosen would have been different than the values that I that I have today. There’s an iterative process where if we just value what we desire, then we get ourselves into big trouble. That’s like the default mode, right? Like we totally we desire things, therefore we value them. If we’re able to step back a little bit and establish, like concrete values that are not merely the product of our mimetic desire, of the culture of what other people are showing us as valuable.

Luke Burgis 00:30:53  Right. Like a lot of my values are simply not aligned with what I see in the world, and it’s taken me a long time to arrive at those values. And that is a way of being a little bit more anti mimetic. Like, I have these values and my understanding of them might change over the next decade. They will for sure, but at least I have like some solid ground. I have a true north and my desires begin to form around my values, right? I’ve decided that irrespective of how I feel right now, I know that one of my values is to love and serve my wife and my family and take care of my mother and father. Okay, who are you who are older right now? And that’s that’s a responsibility and a duty that I feel like I have. I might not wake up every morning and feel like I want to do that, but I know that that’s a desire that I want to feed. So this is an example of my values that I feel pretty confident in.

Luke Burgis 00:31:47  And my desires then are formed around those values. And if there’s a misalignment there that, you know, we all have our days. But, you know, if I find myself with a real misalignment, then I need to figure out what the heck is going on.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:00  Yeah. And I think the corollary to that is to sometimes Remember the desire. So as you talk about taking care of parents. Right. I’m in that stage of life, too. My partner and I both have mothers who are not well, father who’s not well. And so a lot of our time goes into that. And, you know, when I find myself and listeners of the show have heard me talk about this before, but when I find myself in the mode of, I have to do this, I kind of get well. I don’t like it when I stop and I go, oh, wait a second, I have a value of doing this, and thus I want to do it because it’s important to me.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:40  Then it reoriented me towards the whole experience, you know. So sort of going back and reflecting on the fact that I do want to do this, it is a want. It is a desire of mine. And I love what you said about sort of this hierarchy of values or desires, because I think that’s another piece that is so challenging to work through is what do I want? When the number of things I can actually have or devote time to is very limited, right?

Luke Burgis 00:33:11  Well, you know, the hierarchy is important because our values sometimes come into conflict with one another. Right. And if there’s no hierarchy, then how do you choose? And the most memetic value at the time typically wins out, you know. So like to give you an example.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:25  The thing that provokes the strongest desire. Is that what you mean by that?

Luke Burgis 00:33:28  Exactly. Exactly. The thing that provokes the strongest desire. And that could be determined by like, just what I saw in the news that morning. You know, and that desire could change tomorrow.

Luke Burgis 00:33:40  So we have to have a bit more grounding than that. I mean, just to give you an example. You know, this this really happened to me. You know, my my father has Alzheimer’s. And, you know, neither one of my parents are doing that well. And, you know, something came up. One of my parents was in the hospital. I’m an only child. And one of my good, good friends at a bachelor party in Vegas. You know, So both values. Right? Take care of my parents. Like love. My friends want to be there for my friends. But it was pretty clear which one went out for me in the hierarchy of values. Right? It wasn’t that hard of a decision to make, but if I hadn’t established that in my mind, that could have really been a difficult situation, right? How do I make it to Michigan and the out to Vegas and back to Michigan in 48 hours? And, you know, I decided to go to Michigan and take care of my parents.

Luke Burgis 00:34:29  But things like that happen all the time. They happen in companies where people have different ideas of which of the company values are more important than others, and everybody could have a different idea of which ones are more important. And then this is where problems happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:43  Yep, yep. I feel you on the parents thing. My father has Alzheimer’s and my partner’s mother has Alzheimer’s. And so we are deep in that world. I feel you.

Luke Burgis 00:34:53  It’s a brutal disease, you know, and there are times when he’s speaking about desires. You know, there are times with somebody who has Alzheimer’s. You know, it’s heartbreaking. And, you know, it’s I don’t necessarily always want to hang out with my dad for a couple of hours, you know, because he asked me the same question, you know, 120 times. Right. And, you know, it can get exasperating and exhausting, you know. And, you know, it’s been a few years now, and I’ve learned to want to spend time with him more than I did in the beginning.

Luke Burgis 00:35:26  In a certain sense, I’ve learned new ways of loving him, new ways of spending time. It’s been a process. You know, all I want to say is like, it’s tough, thank God. It sounds like we both have help.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:38  I have this little pivot I do with myself and with coaching clients. And for some people, it really makes a difference. And other people it’s just semantics. But it really is like what you were just saying, you know, about going to be with your dad and we’ll find ourselves saying, like, I don’t want to. I don’t want to, you know. And for me, I just sort of will do a quick connection back to what matters. And I’ll go. Oh, I do want to. I just don’t feel like it. And for me, that pivot all of a sudden sort of separates for me my values, what I want most from my mood. Once I make that separation, it’s easier for me. I go, oh, I don’t feel like it in two hours.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:17  I might feel like it in two hours. After that, I might not feel like it. Like that’s constantly changing my moods. You know? I’m hungry, so I feel like it. I recognize the changing ness that I don’t want to build my life on my mood. I’ve done that before. I know it’s a disaster. So that pivot from, you know, sort of I don’t want to to I do want to, but I don’t feel like it is often a powerful one.

Luke Burgis 00:36:39  Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:40  So sort of along this idea of hierarchy of wants or hierarchy of values, you have a section in the book where you talk about stalking your greatest desire. When you find it, all of your lesser desires be transformed. So they serve the greatest one. Say a little bit more about that.

Luke Burgis 00:36:57  So this is directly related to the hierarchy of values. And you know I believe I have a purpose and that everybody has a has a mission, something unique to them. And because of the circumstances that, you know, you’re born into and, and your family and the unique situation that each one of us is in, in life, we have a perspective that nobody else has, which gives us the ability to, to to do something, you know, truly unique or communicate something.

Luke Burgis 00:37:26  And I think that, you know, part one of the purpose of life, you know, part of it is trying to figure out what that unique thing is. And one of the ways to build a hierarchy of values and desires is to understand your mission, or your purpose or your vocation. So knowing what it is, and this goes back to that layer that I spoke about in the very beginning with the fable. If I know what that is, I’m able to evaluate the various desires that I have, and see whether they take me closer or further away from whatever that mission is. That thing that I feel that I’m supposed to do, that I’m called to do, and without sort of an ultimate purpose. That is a value, first of all, you know, and it’s it’s the most important one, in my opinion. You know, what is it that I’m meant to be doing here? What am I put here to do? And all of the other desires kind of are seen in the light of that one and, and, and sort of serve that one in some way.

Luke Burgis 00:38:27  So thinking about, you know, just a basic way to just evaluate them, you know, like is this desire that I have to, you know, travel around the world over the next year because I’m so antsy. I’ve been locked up in my house. Is that desire in any way? Like furthering sort of what I feel to be like my mission and my vocation in life. And it makes it a lot easier to evaluate in that, in that light. Right. So I think that when you find your mission or your purpose? I call that in the book your Single greatest Desire. All of the other desires begin to take shape around it, and hopefully sort of fit into an ecology of desire in some respect.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:07  One of the ways that you talk about getting clearer on these thicker desires, you sort of reference this a little bit earlier, but I’m going to put a slightly finer point on it, which is what you call a fulfillment story. Say a little bit more about what a fulfillment story is and what are the key pieces to have in one.

Luke Burgis 00:39:26  A fulfillment story is simply you recounting a story, preferably to somebody else, because there’s the element of this that’s dialogical and interpersonal, and there’s no substitute for communicating to another human being and having that person deeply listen to you and then be in dialogue with you. It’s more powerful if you do this exercise than I’m describing with another person, and then they can do it back to you. So it’s you communicating a story about a time in your life when you feel like you took some action and you accomplished something, you did it well. You did it with excellence. And most importantly, it brought you a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that lasted okay, that that endured. And this that final point is the most important point. So it gave you some enduring satisfaction and joy to the point where if you think about whatever that thing is that you did today, even if it was 20 years ago, you rekindle that sense of satisfaction and joy just telling the story. Many of us have forgotten some of those times, and part of the beauty of the exercise is drumming them up, right? Like these forgotten memories, these forgotten experiences, and sharing them with another person.

Luke Burgis 00:41:00  You know, until I was 30 years old, nobody had ever asked me to share one of these kind of stories. So I’d worked in a few different companies. Nobody had ever asked me, hey, Luke, tell me about a time in your life when you undertook some action and it was incredibly fulfilling to you. It seems to be something that’s very important for people to know. I mean, because it expresses something that’s like essential to understanding who I am. You can understand that. I’m from Grand Rapids, Michigan, that my favorite pasta is what my favorite sports teams are. All of those things do not communicate to you anything essential about and unique to me. You know, a lot of people are, you know, fans of the same football team and like the same pasta. But the fulfillment story communicates something personal and something essential that none of those attributes can ever communicate. And I think that’s incredibly important for us to understand about ourselves in terms of understanding our essence, our thick desires, and who we are.

Luke Burgis 00:41:58  And it’s important for other people to understand that about us, too. You know, how beautiful would it be to work in a company where people knew this kind of thing about the people that they work with? So there’s a level of intimacy involved in that, which I’ve found incredibly powerful. And these fulfillment stories what what I call fulfillment stories, they don’t have to be a story about you doing anything particularly impressive to anybody else but you. That’s part of why this is such a personal exercise. You don’t have to have, you know, knocked some work presentation out of the park. It could just be, you know, I learned how to make a fantastic homemade, you know, pizza. The key is understanding what it is about these fulfillment stories. And if you find five, six, seven of these kinds of stories from from our lives, a pattern tends to emerge and you begin to see, well. So what is it specifically about these kinds of things that are so satisfying to me? Three different people could have the same experience from the outside looking in, want to state championship in their high school sport or something like that.

Luke Burgis 00:43:06  But those three people could find the satisfaction from that accomplishment could come from three totally separate things. Right. So, you know, for one of them, it could be their individual performance. The other one, it could be the camaraderie that was formed in the locker room. And, you know, the third one could have found so much satisfaction in the little sort of nudge that, you know, they gave a teammate at a critical moment in the game. So three different things, you know, so it’s not the win that was important. It’s why. And understanding the why is, for me key to opening up a world of understanding ourselves and the people that we are with better. And it’s a clue to what. Some of those thick desires might be.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:52  I found two parts of that section really interesting. One was, as you said, doing this in dialogue with somebody else. How important that is, because most of the time when we take on activities of this sort, we’re off doing it on our own, writing in a journal.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:11  Filling out a form. You know, there’s a lot of values and desire exercises, but they tend to be done by ourselves. So that was the first thing I thought was really interesting about this idea of a fulfillment story is, as you said, how important the dialogue element is. The second thing I found interesting was you said once you started telling them, you started remembering a whole bunch of other ones. And my initial thought when I was reading that was like, I think I can think of like one, which I’m sure is not true. And so I found it really interesting to think that if I embarked on this process, more would start to come up. You said as you did it. It was just like boom, boom. They just kept showing up to you. You know, once you sort of understood the pattern.

Luke Burgis 00:44:52  Sure. And it’s true. And, you know, that’s why the challenge I kind of issue to readers is try because the sort of the nature of the memory is that, you know, one thing can kind of lead to another.

Luke Burgis 00:45:03  And it’s also why the partner is really important, why being able to communicate this to somebody who’s truly listening is really important. And that’s a key. This is just as much an exercise in listening as it is in telling the stories. Because if you find somebody who’s a good partner to be having this conversation with, they will hear and see things in the stories that you might not even realize, you know, they might notice that you continue to use certain kinds of verbs as you’re telling the story. You know, the verb might be, I organized or I took control of this thing and it’s like, well, that’s interesting. It seems like the kinds of action that you’re describing that seems to be so satisfying to you is bringing order to chaos. You know, a good listener will just pick up on little things like that, you know, and then ask the right questions to draw out more. I find is human beings. Certain people can close us up and other people can open us up. You know, when you’re sort of in front of somebody that you don’t trust or that doesn’t make you feel like you want to speak to them, you just shut down and you don’t reveal a lot about yourself.

Luke Burgis 00:46:14  On the flip side, there are some people that you know, because they they seem to be, you know, approaching us with in love and compassion and understanding makes us want to communicate even more. And the right interlocutor in this exercise is, I think, critical for bringing out the second and third and fourth and fifth stories is we have that effect on one another in the right context. So choose your conversation partner carefully.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:42  Having this sort of conversation with another person points to another thing you say late in the book, which is, try and live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want. Say more about that.

Luke Burgis 00:46:54  This speaks to the social nature of our desires and what it means to be human. I think we live in a very individualistic age where, you know, if somebody has chosen a path that, you know, we never would have chosen or, you know, has voted for a candidate that we wouldn’t vote for or has ideas or is hostile to something that’s important to us.

Luke Burgis 00:47:20  We often don’t realize the very role that we ourselves had to play in them arriving at that point, and especially people that are close to us in our lives. Right. I don’t I don’t mean to say that we’re responsible for what everybody else wants. I mean to say that we’re social. We are in some sense a brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper, and we have a responsibility to other people rather than just seeing them as different or other or threats as if they are walking their path on their own, because nobody is. And, you know, the idea is derivative from C.S. Lewis, who wrote about this in an essay of his called The Weight of Glory. And he just says, you know, think of everybody that you encounter as, you know, as having this responsibility. There’s no neutral encounter with another human being. There’s no such thing as a neutral encounter. Even the small ones, like, you know, the people that are in the self-checkout section of the grocery store that I go to practically every day, they’ve been there since the start of the pandemic.

Luke Burgis 00:48:20  One particular guy who’s always there, you know, seeing myself as having a responsibility to, you know, affect him in a positive way. You try to make him laugh when I go there because I know, you know, a lot of people are not in the best mood when they’re trying to get through the line at the self-checkout place, right? Trying to just. It’s kind of a habit of mind. A habit of spirit of, you know, just realizing that I could make in that very encounter, make him sort of completely affect his mood, for sure. But even his desire to serve other people in a way. So, I mean, this is incredibly important when it comes to our families and our friends. And I just think thinking of ourselves as not wholly cut off or independent from the way that other people are, or think and thinking of ourselves as having some degree of responsibility for that, based on the way that we relate to them, is been important for me in my life, in sort of stepping back and before I label anybody anything thinking about, well, what role do I have to play? How can I positively enter into this relationship so that both of us come away a little bit better than we started.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:32  As we wrap up? Take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join Good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at once. You feed us. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. I love that idea of no neutral interaction with another person. That’s a really beautiful idea.

Luke Burgis 00:50:10  Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:10  Well, Luke, you and I are at the end of our time here. We’re going to continue in the post-show conversation where we are going to talk about the difference between calculating thought and meditative thought. And by meditative, in this case, we don’t mean what we normally think of as meditating. But I found this a really great part of the book calculating thought, meditative thought. We’ll talk about that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, you can get access to that as well as ad free episodes.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:38  Other post-show conversations. A special episode I do every week called Teaching Song and a poem, and the joy of supporting something that matters to you by going to one you. Net. Luke, thanks again so much for coming on. I have really enjoyed this conversation and I really enjoyed the book.

Luke Burgis 00:50:55  Oh, thanks so much for having me on Eric. I feel the same. Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:58  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

In this episode, Daria Burke discusses the non-linear path to healing and how to find wholeness after trauma. She shares her experiences growing up in Detroit with parents struggling with addiction, the impact of adversity, and her path toward self-discovery and integration. Daria also explores the complexities of healing, the importance of embracing all parts of oneself, and the power of nature and personal growth as metaphors for transformation and hope.

Exciting News!!!
Coming in March, 2026, my new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!

Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of trauma and its impact on personal development.
• Discussion on resilience and the capacity to heal from past experiences.
• The concept of integration as a means of reconciling different aspects of oneself.
• The role of inherited legacies and environmental factors in shaping identity.
• Examination of coping mechanisms, including dissociation and adaptive avoidance.
• The nonlinear nature of healing and the importance of self-compassion.
• Insights into various therapeutic modalities, including somatic therapies.
• The significance of control and surrender in the healing process.
• Metaphors illustrating the journey of healing, such as the growth of hydrangeas.
• Emphasis on the ongoing nature of personal growth and the importance of community support.

Daria Burke is an award-winning business leader, board director, investor, speaker, and advisor. Her creativity and impact have been recognized by Women’s Wear Daily, AdWeek, Forbes, Vogue, Teen Vogue, the CFDA, Town & Country, the Cut, and NYLON Magazine. She has written for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, Black Enterprise, and has appeared on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, Philly Speaks, and numerous podcasts. Her new book is Of My Own Making: A Memoir.

Connect with Daria Burke: Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Daria Burke, check out these other episodes:

Healing Painful Patterns and Finding Freedom with Radhule Weininger

What Brings Healing, Strength, and Connection with Dani Shapiro

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Episode Transcript:

Daria Burke 00:00:00  I think I always knew that I could survive things. I had proven that to myself. I was highly confident in my ability to navigate difficult things, but I think rather than chiding myself, I could say, what is this here to teach me? What am I supposed to be getting from this moment?

Chris Forbes 00:00:26  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:10  Sometimes growth depends less on sheer effort and more on where we’re planted.  Daria Burke tells a story of hydrangeas she thought were ruined, chewed down, wrapped in burlap until she replanted them in new soil, where they eventually bloomed. Even more beautifully, it’s a perfect metaphor for her own life. In her memoir of My Own Making, she shares a journey through trauma, resilience, and self-discovery, reminding us that no matter how deep the damage, with time and care, we can still flourish. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Daria, welcome to the show.

Daria Burke 00:01:49  Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:51  I’m happy to talk with you about your book, which is called Of My Own Making a memoir. And it’s wonderful on so many levels, and we’ll get into it in just a second. But we’ll start like we always do, with a parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two roles inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:20  And the grandchild stopped. They thought about for a second. They looked up at their grandparent. They said, well, which one wins? And the grandparent said, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Daria Burke 00:02:36  That is such a rich way to start and to think about so much of what I’ve written about, which is nature and nurture. And I think we’ll get more into that in a moment, in that I hear choice, that there is a decision that we get to make. We may not choose to stay with the parable and the metaphor. We may not choose the wolves that exist. The way our lives begin is not up to us, but we get to choose who we become. But it makes me think a lot about and I don’t see it as a binary. Honestly, I see it as and so much of my my own personal work and to some degree, professional work.

Daria Burke 00:03:24  The ideas that I explore and what the science of healing teaches us, is that integration is the goal, that we have to find a way to coexist with the truth of what we’ve inherited. Maybe it’s our psychic inheritance, our emotional inheritance, the the ways in which legacies have been left in us or on us in the form of footprints. And sometimes those are traumatic and threaten to debilitate our sense of self or or destabilized the ways in which we might develop, but that if we can pull it in and hold it close, that we can get to know it, befriend it to some degree, at least create conditions for the courage to tolerate it in closer proximity that actually you can feel more integrated and feel more whole. And so that also, I would say it leads me to think a lot about epigenetics, right? This study that suggests that our environment, our behaviors, the conditions that we create and find ourselves in play a meaningful role in the ways in which our genes get expressed. Our propensity towards something may or may make manifest. But all of that is rooted in choice. And so I love the way that it ends, even though I don’t see it as a binary. I think of it very much in the integration, but that it’s a choice to do so.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:49  Yeah, that’s wonderful. As I was reading it to you, it occurred to me that it’s a story that has grandparents in it. And your grandmother is a big piece of your story, and I’d like to get to her in just a second. I’m wondering if you could just. However you do it, give people the basics that they need to kind of understand what this book about and who you are. Before we go into more specific pieces, let’s set the general stage.

Daria Burke 00:05:19  Sure. Well, the context in which I was born was Detroit in the 1980s. I was born in 1980. And so at a macro cultural systemic level, to some degree, that looked like coming into a city that had fallen from favor, it had been the richest, most powerful, arguably American city in just the generation before me, when my parents were born, it was the richest, fourth largest from a population standpoint.

Daria Burke 00:05:50  And by the time I arrived, it was at threat of bankruptcy and had sort of collapsed under industrial conditions that it moved. You know, moved a lot of automotive manufacturing out of Detroit, but also. The blast radius of the poverty that existed when those jobs left. And we saw heroin and crack really ravaged a lot of the neighborhoods in the city. So that was the greater context in which I was born and the specific context with my family. I was born to parents who struggled with addiction. I’ve since learned, since reading the book, actually, particularly with my mother, that her addiction began before I was born and continued to plague our family and really be leading sort of factor for what my early experiences were like as a child. They were young when they got married, 18 and 21, and I was born three years after that. And I should add, in deep poverty. I grew up, my parents split up when I was two years old. And so my front row seat to my mother’s addiction, I had greater proximity to that.

Daria Burke 00:07:01  Although my father struggled with heroin, it really sets the stage for a lot of early years that were conditioned by loss. And my grandmother, who you alluded to, I think to to an extent that I can’t even fully articulate because I was seven when she passed away, was the scaffolding that upheld some semblance of normalcy. She kept a roof over our heads. We actually lived in a home that she owned. My mother didn’t work. And so my grandmother was the financial, the emotional, the spiritual. Yeah, the structural support of our family. But it was a really tumultuous upbringing and one that I think caused a lot of trauma. You know, I didn’t use the word abuse really, until I started to write the book. It was very hard for me to use that word for some reason, for many reasons. And but it was, it was it was deeply a lot of neglect and abuse took place, particularly after she passed away.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:06  Yeah. You talk in the book about something called the Ace test. Adverse childhood experience test? Yes. And it’s enough to say for right now, you you scored very high on it. Right. You know, you were you were a nine out of a ten, which means you were dealing with a lot. And coming out of that, you became very successful. And part of what I’d like to explore with you, and I think the book explores a lot, is it seems like you had to do two contradictory things throughout your whole life. One was you had to completely ignore where you came from, the messages that put in you, the messages your mom put in you. You had to be like, just no. This is a different world that I’m going to create, and I’m going to just laser focus on it. And eventually you also had to integrate to use the word that you just used a minute ago. These old wounds had to be dealt with. And I just as the book goes on, I was sort of noticing again and again how you even once it became time to sort of start healing the trauma, there was still that first part of you that was the coping mechanism that was also still really valuable.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:33  And I think sometimes we get mired in we can get mired in trauma work, right, where just everything is about that. Or we can be get mired in just shut it all out and work mode. And I think you eventually found a place where you did both.

Daria Burke 00:09:53  Yes. Dissociation is sort of this extreme flight response. And as a child, it absolutely helped create that laser focus. It allowed me to sort of float above those circumstances and detach from them enough to be able to imagine something else, something different, that I didn’t get so lost and swept up in it that I couldn’t function, and it kept me detached from myself as I got older, and I could appreciate the ways in which I was so deeply disconnected from feeling all of those things. And so it is. I’m constantly, even to this day, I think healing is very much a practice, and I’m always interrogating the ways in which I’m being able to disconnect from something, have perspective. Therefore, I can have a different relationship with the the emotions that are arising from it, and it feels that it can function in a healthy way.

Daria Burke 00:10:58  However, it was definitely, I think, in the ways that triggers were disruptive, the ways in which I could get sort of knocked off my star or off balance and be disoriented by things that were resonant with or rhymed with my childhood. And I couldn’t figure out why those things were happening. And it was because, oh, well, you haven’t dealt with them. You haven’t allowed yourself to feel them. You haven’t. You haven’t created space and the conditions for that interrogation to happen and to do it knowing that you’re safe. And so it is this really interesting sort of thing. I describe it in the book as, as a warm blanket with a glass of wine by the fire, because if there’s comfort in that, but and there’s strength and power in that, but there’s also I think we all have to know our own limits and bound our emotional boundaries for when we’re hiding from ourselves, when we’re so deeply disconnected from ourselves that we can’t move forward.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:23  I interviewed a therapist yesterday, and he had a term that I had not heard this exact phrase before. Adaptive avoidance. That avoidance sometimes is a very adaptive trait. Yeah, there are times where that is the right approach.

Daria Burke 00:12:39  That is so good.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:40  And as we know, anything you do too much of becomes a problem. That avoidance can then become maladaptive. And I actually think what I’ve seen just for, you know, a decade kind of talking to people about all this is that people can go a long way on that, like fuel of getting away from where they were.

Daria Burke 00:13:03  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:03  And the ambition that that can drive, they can go a long way on that. And then sometime 30s or 40s, it starts to break down. It’s like that worked. And now it no longer does. You know, and I think about it like your parents, I’m an addict. I was a heroin addict. It got sober at 24. There was a period of time where my use was sort of adaptive, meaning it solved all sorts of problems in me that I had not had the resources to solve. And then, right. It became extraordinarily maladaptive over time. But I was just struck by reading your book, how the balance of that with you has been really interesting.

Daria Burke 00:13:52  Thank you. We all find ways to quiet the noise in our minds. I happened to be fueled, for better and for worse, by work, by achievement, and more than anything, by the awe that I received from others. The applause that came when I did something that people thought, damn, that’s impressive. And it was enough to keep me going. That hedonic treadmill was driven both by the brain’s need the dopamine dopamine hit that I would get every time I achieved a goal, but also whatever sort of oxytocin I could sort of generate, too, from what came from others when I did those things. And it’s a dangerous cycle to be in. My mother’s was crack, right? She tried to quiet that noise with crack and she couldn’t figure out how to how to quiet it enough. Right. And so then you tip over to yeah, full blown addiction where everything is, is stunted.

Daria Burke 00:14:58  But yes, it is. It’s an adaptive avoidance. I love that term. It’s such a great way to describe it. And I think the work of our life is to figure out where the line is 

Eric Zimmer 00:15:10  100%.. And I think that’s the other thing that really struck me in your book, was the nature of a healing journey, because there’s a whole lot of you sort of move forward. You think, yeah, okay. I think I’ve got I think I’ve covered all this, like you move on and then boom, something else happens and you’re like, oh, wait a second. I clearly maybe have more work to do here. And then you do that work and you’re like, oh, things are right. And it it kind of comes up and that can seem discouraging. So tell me how for you, you didn’t get discouraged by that, because what is really easy to do in that situation is to say, I did all this work. It must not have done any good, because here I am again.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:55  How do you think about that? And how did you encourage yourself when you found those moments?

Daria Burke 00:16:01  I think I’ve come to think of them as moments of information, right? Those triggers, those setbacks, the things that challenge your sanity, where you say, how do I feel like I’m reliving this all over again? How is it that I’ve changed the set? My wardrobe is different, the cast of characters is different, and somehow this feels like the same script I just read five years ago. Ten years ago. Oh, it’s the story that I’ve told myself about those events. I’m recreating them. And I think choosing to see healing as a conscious intervention to disrupt despair. To disrupt the instinct for the brain. To sort of predict where it’s going to go next, what the outcome is going to be, how this is supposed to end. But it’s a conscious intervention. And I think trying to be kind first to myself and to say that if a child were learning how to do something, that they were going through the repetition, you get your reps in enough where you can learn to tie your shoe, and then you can remember not to touch the hot stove.

Daria Burke 00:17:15  And oh, this other thing is not the hot stove, but it’s hot as well. I mean, all those things that seem really obvious when we’re dealing with vulnerable beings and creatures are the same practices that we have to give to ourselves. And when you didn’t have that growing up in particular, I think being so willing to find and create some kind of space for that compassion Passion and to know that it’s okay. That you can survive those feelings. I think I always knew that I could survive things. I had proven that to myself. I was highly confident in my ability to navigate difficult things. But I think rather than chiding myself, I could say, what is this here to teach me? What am I supposed to be getting from this moment? Why does this rhyme with this other thing? There’s clearly something I’ve not looked at. And typically when that happens and when it’s really earth shattering, it’s because you’ve spent a long time avoiding it and not looking at it. And it’s sort of telling yourself the story that I told myself was I was healed, and I had spent a decade in talk therapy and everything was great.

Daria Burke 00:18:29  And then I see this photo of the accident that took my grandmother’s life, and I lose. I lose it, and I’m sent back in 30 years. Oh, there’s a lot I haven’t been doing. And I could only in that in that instance in particular, I could. I could very clearly just say, oh, there’s something that needs to be held here. I’ve not made a home for this grief.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:54  Yeah. And you’ve worked closely with therapists. I think they can help us center that. A couple years ago, I had a couple of things happen in my life that re triggered for me. I’m careful with words because I don’t necessarily want to say re triggered because I, you know, I think maybe if I had trauma, it was more of a complex kind of trauma. And anyway, it brought a whole bunch of stuff back that I’d not felt in a long time. And I was a little freaked out, and I was a little discouraged because I thought, But I’ve done all this work, I’ve done all of this work, and my therapist put it in a way that I thought was really helpful.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:33  He said, what your work has done is it has allowed you to be able to deal with that stuff in more and more and more and more situations.

Speaker 4 00:19:44  That’s right.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:45  And put under sufficient stress that will come back. It’s there. It’s not going away. Right. You’re not going to just unearth it and throw it out. It’s there. And to your point about how there’s an integration, his point was it just doesn’t get triggered for you 98% of the time now. And that’s a huge accomplishment. And there are going to be times and, you know, this was one of those times. And the way it was, it was it was just custom built to do it. Right. It just was the right, right exact button. And but that really helped me think about what the work of healing often is. And I think you may have had I might be mixing this up, but the idea that I get from your work, and I don’t know if you said it explicitly, is we become bigger and bigger around the thing that’s the problem.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:40  It’s not that it’s gone. It’s not that we erase it. You were talking to Elena Brower and talked about, like, footsteps in cement, right? It’s not that that engraving in the cement is going to go away. It’s just that there’s so much more space around it.

Daria Burke 00:20:52  That’s right. Gosh, you’ve said so much, right? Judith Herman talks about about healing and trauma in that way, that it’s not an exorcism. You don’t get to just exorcise it and it’s gone. You do have those footprints. You do carry them with you. And and yes, I love that you referenced my conversation with Elena. We were talking about her partner, who had very similar childhood experiences to mine, a parent who struggled with crack addiction. He had grown up in New York City. But this idea that a tree that grows next to a fence doesn’t stop growing. It grows differently. It grows around the fence and it finds its way around it. And that it’s such a beautiful metaphor for how, if we can imagine our lives working in that way.

Daria Burke 00:21:41  We can do that. You know, Eric, I do SoulCycle, and I’m sure some of your listeners will be familiar with this idea. But there’s a part in the ride where you’re holding weights and you pick up weights, and you’re doing weights like a song worth of lifting, essentially. Right. Couple minutes and, you know, they’ll inevitably have you hold the weights out away from your body. Just hold it. Maybe you pulse, but you just hold it.

Speaker 5 00:22:09  You’re like God.

Daria Burke 00:22:10  These £3 weights are really, really heavy. I’m now feeling it in my shoulders and my elbows and even maybe in my in my lower back a little bit. And the moment that you get to pull it closer, the moment that you get to release and come back and bring those weights and you’re like, gosh, I could hold them differently now.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:25  Totally. Yeah, that’s a great that’s a great example.

Daria Burke 00:22:28  Differently with them now right. That’s what it looks like. And so the triggers change. They’re not the same as the ones before.

Daria Burke 00:22:37  And the stimuli will change and and hopefully healing is, is that your relationship with what comes up starts to change. Not that it goes away.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:11  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to. What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection? That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight, help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one Eufy net and sign up. It’s free. No spam, and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one Eufy net tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. There’s one other metaphor that I find helpful with this, which is the idea of a spiral staircase.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:07  And if you think of a spiral staircase, imagine there’s like pictures hanging on the wall. You keep coming around and seeing that picture again. The picture doesn’t go away, but each time you’re seeing it from a slightly higher level. And I often think that’s how this process works too. You know, your mom just keeps reappearing, reappearing, reappearing, reappearing. Right. It’s not that that’s not going to happen, but when she does, you are at a different place than you were before. You know you’re higher up that spiral so you are able to engage with her. And I don’t even mean with her personally. I mean the idea of her differently.

Daria Burke 00:24:47  Yes. You’re rinsing the sponge as my very first therapist said. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:52  Share that analogy.

Daria Burke 00:24:53  Yeah. I remember just questioning, am I am I always going to feel like this? Is it always going to be like this? Is it always going to be this hard? Well, I always be doing this work. And she said, think of it like rinsing a sponge when you wash the dishes, or you clean something soapy and you run it, you put it under water and you rinse some of that soap out and gosh, okay, you think it’s rinsed and then you squeeze it again, you wet it again and the soap comes back.

Daria Burke 00:25:21  You sort of think about healing as rinsing the sponge. It’s a slow release over time, and there will be moments where you think you’ve got it. And don’t be alarmed. Something will be there, remnants will be there. And so, yeah, I think that whether it’s the a different elevation than you. Elevation on the staircase, the bringing of the weights back into you to hold them differently. The rinsing of the sponge, right. These are all metaphors for how it feels and looks and to not be surprised, but it really creates a different strength, really that we’re talking about that, that you can have for how to hold it, how to live with it and to not let it completely disorient you.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:03  Yeah. And I think the other piece that’s important in that is not to focus on like that. You’ve got to get to the end of some process before it starts to yield benefit. Right, right. Like even though for me, I continue to as I think all humans are doing this right.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:21  We’re always trying to sort life out. Right? Because as soon as we get one thing sorted, something else happens, right? That’s right. You know, it’s just life. But there’s this idea that we’re going to get somewhere and then suddenly it’s all going to be fine. And and I think that that is an illusion. But I also think if we look at it healing that way, we’re not cognizant of the very real benefits that are occurring as we go. Now, sometimes in those moments, as you’re working on it, it doesn’t feel like a benefit, but you don’t have to get to the end of some long journey before life starts to improve.

Daria Burke 00:26:57  I don’t think there is an end. Yeah, I really don’t know. And I think that’s why I’ve always tried to use the word integration. I know Elise Lunin, who’s been a guest on your show. I’m a huge fan of hers, and she talks about wholeness. It’s the same idea. Yeah, yeah. It’s just it’s all the same idea.

Daria Burke 00:27:14  It’s like, can I be whole with all of the holes that have been left in me? Can I find a way to feel complete? So much of this book I’ve described as a reassembly of all of these selves that I sort of shed along this journey of survival, feeling like this part of me was too innocent to move forward in the journey. This part of me doesn’t belong here because her narrative doesn’t fit the environment that I’m in, right? All of these selves that I had to let go of and to see this as a knitting together, a reassembly, a re dash membrane right of all of these parts of myself and saying they all have a room somewhere in the house, that is me. They all have the same amount of space, but they all live here. And that’s okay. That’s okay. They all belong here.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:07  Yeah. You share in the book about how you did ten years of talk therapy, and then still had a place where you realized that you needed to go sort of deeper into the experience, the felt sense, the emotion.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:23  And I think that mirrors a lot of people’s journeys for me. I don’t feel like all that cognitive work was like, misplaced And that I you know, what I really need to do is to get to this other work. It feels to me like that had to happen. Yes. For me to get to that place, say a little bit more about what I’m describing, how it showed up in your life, and how you think about it.

Daria Burke 00:28:46  Well, I integrate by speaking, so it gave me a place to do that. I think to some degree I integrate when I say that I mean ideas. I can start to piece things together in a way that I say, oh, that makes sense to me now. I’ve heard myself articulate in a way that once it was out of my mind and sort of it got some air, it could land in a way that I could make sense of it in a different way. Right. And to your point, we are seekers and we are meaning makers.

Daria Burke 00:29:12  And there will always be things that will push us to to do that kind of work. And talk therapy allowed me to do that. I think, first of all, it allowed me to just surface everything that I swallowed and pretend it didn’t exist. And so I went into therapy at 26, thinking that I was troubleshooting a very specific acute problem of how do I tell my classmates when I graduate from business school that no one in my family will be there, right? That was my impetus for going to therapy. It wasn’t. Oh, hi. I’m 26 years old. I’ve spent my entire life traumatized by my drug addicted, abusive, neglectful parents.

Speaker 4 00:29:53  And I need help.

Daria Burke 00:29:55  Parsing that because, you know, I’m an MBA student at NYU and I’m about to go launch this beauty career. Not at all. So when I went into therapy, it was with that one intention and what that experience allowed me to do for the very first time in my life was say it out loud and then start to say, oh gosh, that did happen.

Daria Burke 00:30:17  And, you know, for better and for worse, the more you remember, the more you remember. And so I sort of flipped the cap off of all of these things that came flooding. Now. What was great about that was that I started to try to create containers for it. What was not great about it was that I did not have modalities that allowed me to deal with the feelings when they emerged, so I could name things and I could label things and I could go, oh, that was this, oh, this thing happened. And then it sort of just that was where it ended. That’s where the work sort of ended. And I was doing that week over week for basically ten years, not with the same therapist and a little bit off and on, but largely for that period of time. It was important. And it was, I think, step one, and I think it laid the foundation for a kind of resilience that would allow me to when I saw that image of grandma’s car accident in the article that I wrote about, about was it was tragic and it was brutal.

Daria Burke 00:31:22  And so it made the news. And so in finding that and reading it and remembering that and being carried back to that time when I was seven years old, I did have some support in the work that I had done in talk therapy. Even though I felt ill equipped in other ways, I wasn’t. My psyche could only allow me to go there because of the work that I had done.

Speaker 4 00:31:48  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:49  And so then what did the work? Moving from a more intellectual understanding of what happened to you, being able to put it into different cognitive frames, all these things that were really helpful. What then prompted you to try different approaches, and what did you do then?

Daria Burke 00:32:11  First it was learning about neuroplasticity. It was just the term that kind of was this light bulb moment, this idea that our brains are not fixed, that we are not just who we are. That you sort of get baked and you arrive and that’s it, that we will continue to grow and change and form new neural connections with experience and information, and that our brains could could adapt to accommodate a new paradigm.

Daria Burke 00:32:41  And I thought, that explains a lot. But also, what does that mean for what healing might actually then look like in my life? I learned about it in the context of Norman Deutsch’s work, amongst others, but he was really kind of the person who, through a podcast interview, introduced me to that term in 2017 and was sharing it in talking about people who had experienced Parkinson’s and debilitating neurodegenerative diseases. And I thought, well, if they can do that, what does that look like for other kinds of emotional trauma? And then it was during that time that somatic healing in many forms began to kind of fill in my understanding of what that might mean, that it wasn’t just talking about it, that you had to actually do something with it. And for some people, that was in how they could physically get it out of their bodies through movement. And that could be dance, it could be exercise, it could be jumping and shaking and tapping. And, you know, there are lots of ways that we do that.

Daria Burke 00:33:47  But that was really kind of what cracked it open for me and starting to more actively research ways in which I might do that for myself. And so that has looked like at you name it in the ways that I’ve tried to test that it’s looked like eMDR therapy and actually trying to resurrect those memories and emotions tied to those memories, the stories that I created related to certain events in my life, but it has also been extremely physical in nature. Breathwork is a really, really big one for me. I meditate, I find all the ways to feel it in my body to recognize, and a lot of it honestly. Eric was the pattern spotting of oh, when I was really nauseous. This was happening when I was feeling like this. This was so a lot of it too, was really kind of going back and figuring out when my body was telling me something. I just wasn’t paying attention to it and thinking about how it was moving through me physically and what I might do to to respond to that.

Daria Burke 00:34:56  And so for me, it always starts in my in my gut and my tummy. And so I tend to get very nauseous and then sometimes very sick. And so just that awareness that it was not just my mind that needed to do some work, that I needed to figure out how it was showing up physically in myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:17  We were talking about how we cope. And one of the things that you used as a real tool early on is you said something to the effect of a relentless pursuit of control. To what extent have you been able to lessen control? And how do you tell useful control from not useful. Right. You’ve been very successful in a lot of different ways, and that’s not a bad thing. Right. And and control is part of a control of yourself. And I don’t want to say control of others because that sounds bad, but like guidance, like there is a place where thinking about what’s going to happen and trying to shape the way it happens is a back to our maladaptive and adaptive strategies.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:05  This seems to have been one of your big ones. So I’m curious how have you lessened and how do you tell when you are sort of in. All right. I’m in a maladaptive control mode versus I’m just doing what kind of what needs to get done here to move this thing forward.

Daria Burke 00:36:22  Sure. It looks like hypervigilance for me when I feel like I have to be hypervigilant around the environment or what I say, or how something is presented, or that I am over architecting and solving for circumstances that, first of all, aren’t my business, that I don’t need to be managing, or that I actually have no real influence over. That’s when I know that it is not serving me well. And when my thoughts are consumed with trying to manufacture something that is just either I don’t want to say not there, but that doesn’t need that level of attention from me. That is not my work to do. And I find myself often actually one of the questions that I sort of ask of myself and I suppose to the universe, to God is, is this mine to do? And that shows up for me that question a lot, whether it’s an idea that I’m noodling on or.

Daria Burke 00:37:26  in real time, some problem that needs to get solved. And I’m like, it’s mine to do. And it allows me to just take a minute and say, okay, who’s showing up in this moment? Because it could be this protective part of yourself that feels like if you have all the knowledge that you can gather, that information is control, right? That if you know everything, then you can you can thwart off whatever threat you’re you’re trying to anticipate. Or if it’s just am I trying to create a set of conditions that I will never fully be able to? I’m not singularly responsible for these conditions. I think that’s typically how it shows up for me. And so that awareness is step one for sure. I think that’s the step one for any kind of change, any kind of of evolution. I think the second thing typically is that question of is this mind to do? And what do I do with what I what comes up for me in that moment, right? Sometimes it’s the reframe.

Daria Burke 00:38:27  You’re safe. You’re fine. There’s nothing for you to do. Be there. Be present. Lots of things can inspire what I call a psychic surrender. Right? Which is just the like. Take your hands off the steering wheel. Because this is not mine. And I say that without any sort of religious context, but this deep faith in knowing that I’m held and that I have the tools that I need to actually handle something if it comes up. But this isn’t something to manage right now. And knowing the difference. But I think that interrogation and slowing down and not operating from this place that feels, you know, we like to call it instinct. And I think, I think even about success in the same way. But we want to call it. Oh, gosh. Well, I’m just driven. I’m ambitious. You’re like, is that ambition or anxiety? Yeah, that’s my instinct. Well, sure. Is that your instinct and is that coming from an intuitive place or is that coming from fear? And I think having the courage to actually ask yourself that question, determine what the answer is and then say, okay, this I need to I need to stop here.

Daria Burke 00:39:32  This is a moment to pause.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:34  Yeah. I want to come back to intuition and fear for a second, but I want to stay with this a little bit longer. You and I, before we started, we’re talking about book covers, and I was sharing. You know, I’ve had quite a journey with my publisher on getting to the book cover that we want. And I was talking about how wonderful your book cover was, and it sounds like we had a very similar sort of journey. Like you, you exercised a certain amount of control or will to get the book cover. Right. And what I always think is interesting is in something like that, how do we know when, like we’ve done what’s the right thing to do for the situation or when have I tipped over? And for me, that’s kind of how I think about it. Like, yeah, book covers are important. Right. I put all this time into writing a book covers one of the most important parts of it. I want it to be right.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:29  Yes. And there’s a place at which point I need to set it down and put it back into a bigger global context. And and I’m curious how, you know, for those things where you kind of have to do it to a certain degree. I think it’s easier when we’re like, that’s just not mine at all. Yeah, it’s harder when it is ours. We are responsible, but we don’t want to become obsessed.

Daria Burke 00:40:54  Yes. That’s such a great example. And thank you for saying that. I’ll thank you on air as well, because I do love the cover and how it turned out, and I don’t feel like I needed to control that situation so much as I was demonstrating my own agency in that part of the process and having the vision that I had for the book. This is a very deeply personal story that I’m sharing, and having the clarity to bring forward how my story would exist in the title, in the cover and in the text, those things that were all mine to do.

Daria Burke 00:41:38  And they were things that to some degree were co-creative.  I think where I try to hold the line is when I felt fully out of alignment in trying to get to a good place. So as long as I was in a good place, even if I meant another round, another round, another round, right? Another. But when I found myself like losing my shit where I was like, oh my God, I’m going to lose it.  It’s like, okay, Daria.

Daria Burke 00:42:07  What is happening right now? Is it that you’re not feeling cared for in this moment? Is that you’re not feeling understood? Is it that you’re feeling somehow neglected? What wound is being scratched.

Daria Burke 00:42:21  Here and I could be very clear and.

Speaker 4 00:42:24  Usually.

Daria Burke 00:42:24  Quickly I could say this is scratching something and I know what’s coming up in this moment. And also, I think I could rely on my professional experience as a career marketer. I have great taste. I have a great eye. I know the vision, and I.

Speaker 4 00:42:39  Knew that we had a shared vision, too.

Daria Burke 00:42:41  So, I could also come back to the good intentions that we all had. And to say, I know I’m pushing for something that right now we’re not all aligned with. We’ve got to keep going, though. We can do better. I know that we can. And then knowing again when, when to take your foot off the gas and when you’re not going to fight, you know, fight the fight. But I think I did I did have that, try to hold the space for those, those two things to be true, to coexist, and also to realize when I was being completely sort of taken out of my own kind of alignment, where I felt so upset by how difficult it was. And I was like, okay, this is good information. What is this telling me? And then in some cases I was like, okay, got it. I’ve captured what it’s telling me. I’m still going to push because it means that much, and I’m not going to be told that it doesn’t matter as much to me as I as it does.

Daria Burke 00:43:37  Right. And I think to me, I just I see that as agency more than anything. And sometimes it’s okay to really, really fucking care. Excuse my language, but like, sometimes things really matter and I think we have to allow ourselves to feel and know and recognize and name those moments to let that desire be a teacher. Now, how I handled it all the time, I think that’s a different yeah, that’s a different conversation. I think I handled it largely pretty well. But, you know, I had moments where I was like screaming into the void when I was alone.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:11  One of the things that we’re not capturing as we go through this very well is how beautifully written the book is, And I want to give listeners just a small flavor of like a paragraph that jumped out to me, although there are so many of them. I mean, it is so beautifully rendered, but if you would read the bottom of page 176 for us, because I think it kind of sums up a lot of what we’ve been talking about up to this point.

Daria Burke 00:44:38  Thank you. Yes. Integration, then, means knitting together these detailed observations and broad understandings into a coherent sense of self. It is about acknowledging the contradictions, holding the complexities and finding clarity in the confusion. It is a series of ongoing negotiations between the past and the present, the self and the other, the details and the bigger picture. It is delicate work, one that requires patience and the courage to face the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, and the courage to do the same with ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:15  That’s a beautiful section. Is there anything you would like to add to that, or is it just stand alone?

Daria Burke 00:45:20  Thank you. I think it stands alone because of what we’ve been talking about. Yeah. And it’s that simply stated and that hard to do at the same time.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:31  So where I would like for us to wrap up here is to have you tell us the story that ends the book about the hydrangeas. And I may ask you to read something else from that also, but set us up.

Daria Burke 00:45:45  Yes. Well, I bought a house, so I’m here now, a little house in East Hampton, out in the woods, and I’d have this fantasy of planting hydrangea bushes in the front of my house. I found all these pictures, and I have a little cedar shingle, gray cedar shingle house. And so I could imagine these big blooming white hydrangeas in the front of the house, under the windows, under the two front windows. And so I finally got into a place where I was ready to do that kind of work, and I bring in my, my landscaper, and we make the plan And even in talking about the kind of hydrangeas I wanted, I said, well, I want yeah, I want white hydrangeas. And he says, well, you know, he calls me Miss Daria. He says, area. The, the soil is really what determines the color, right? You have to actually have the right conditions for it to turn out that way. There are some that are bred that way.

Daria Burke 00:46:37  Yes. The pH in the soil helps dictate the color. So funny story, which I’ll get to, but mine have actually changed color as the season has gone on. But so I say okay, interesting. Well this is my aspiration. And so maybe it’s this breed and this variety, this variety. So we plant them. And at the time I was in Los Angeles and so he had done the work. And I come back maybe a month later. And they had been ravaged like the leaves were chewed, it looked like lace, and the deer had gotten to them. They had started to bloom and they were apparently quite lovely. I didn’t get to see them because they had been ravaged by deer. And I’m like what is happening?

Daria Burke 00:47:18  So I call him. He comes over and we try to figure out what to do next. And I was so beside myself, forget the expense. It was like the emotional investment that I had made in them. And so I said, well, can we just cover them with burlap for now? I don’t know what to do with them.

Daria Burke 00:47:33  I don’t know what else we can do to save them and leaving them like this. They’ll only continue to be eaten. So we cover them in burlap, and a whole year goes by before I decide to relocate them, to repot them, to change their environment. So one by one and I had a dozen of them, six on either side. I dig them up myself really gently and try to protect the roots, and I repotted each of them in planters on my deck, which is fenced in. And as you can imagine, when I first replant them, they looked kind of quite sad, actually. But as the season goes on and months go by, and then eventually, especially the next summer, they began to bloom. And they were stunning and beautiful. And they had they were just sprigs when I had replanted them. So I was terrified that nothing would happen. And they began to bloom these big green, leafy leaves and flowers. And it was such a beautiful articulation of the pain that we go through sometimes in certain environments, and the ways in which if we can just reframe and reimagine, get creative.

Daria Burke 00:48:44  And sometimes it takes time to figure out what that looks like. But we can move to a new space and find flourishing again. And that’s exactly what happened. And I can actually see them right now. And what’s really funny, I’ll add, is that they started this season white and now they’re bright pink.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:03  Really? That is so interesting.

Daria Burke 00:49:05  And I’m deeply invested in what happened over the course of the summer because I’ve never seen them like this. And so the soil clearly has something, has found its way in there and has changed the color. But it’s such a sometimes obvious but beautiful I think metaphor for how this all works. We’re not unlike them in many ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:29  As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at oneyoufeed.net/sms. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. 

I’m going to say something. I’m going to ask you to read something to wrap up, and I can’t. I just can’t go without saying it. There’s a book I’ve been reading called The Light Eaters, and it’s all about plant intelligence, for lack of a better word. Although a lot of people in the plant world tread carefully around that term, it will blow your mind. All these things that that plants can do. It really is like what it shows just how embodied into nature is this incredible intelligence, resilience, change, evolution, all of these things. Yes. So I would love you to read the last two paragraphs of the book. Thinking of that idea and of those hydrangeas in mind.

Daria Burke 00:50:48  They stood there, lush and quiet, their fullness a far cry from the brittle beginnings of the year before. And there, amid the green, the first white blooms unfurled, delicate and resilient proof that life could return even after what felt like a devastating ending.

We carry that same power in us to rise again, to transform to flourish. Against all odds. To stretch toward the light. Even after being buried, we can still grow. Still we become. And in those quiet moments when new life finally breaks through, we remember that we were always meant to be.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:28  That’s so lovely. Thank you so much for joining us on this show. This has been wonderful.

Daria Burke 00:51:33  The pleasure has been mine. Thank you so much.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:36  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time.  Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.