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Tara Brach 00:00:00  How do we become present enough and open enough and courageous enough to really be with the life that’s here?

Chris Forbes 00:00:14  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 00:00:58  For years I tried to meditate by following my breath and honestly, it never seemed to work. It just seemed like my mind raced and raced. I used to joke it was like the dark circus coming to town.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:11  If that’s you. When it comes to following your breath and meditation, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. You may just not have found the way that works best for you. Tara Brock, who’s a psychologist, a world class meditation teacher, author of wonderful books like Radical Acceptance and True Refuge, helps us experiment with a variety of approaches that are guided by a simple compass intention. We talk about stepping out of trance, the tight story of what’s wrong with me or what’s wrong here, and in the direct experience where kindness and awareness can grow. At the same time, I share how shifting my own practice from the breath to listening to sounds uncovered more aliveness and peace for me. If you’re ready for practical ways to be here. Not perfectly, but more fully. Stay with us. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Tara. Welcome to the show.

Tara Brach 00:02:08  It’s lovely to be with you, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:10  I am very excited to have you on. I think I’ve been trying to arrange this for a while.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:15  When I started the show, you were one of the guests right away that I was like, I definitely want to get her on the show. Your your writing and your teachings have been a big influence on me and on several people that I am close with, so I’m really happy to have you.

Tara Brach 00:02:28  Thank you. Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:30  So let’s start, like we always do with the parable. There’s a grandfather who’s talking with his grandson, and 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:08  And I know you know it because it was in one of your books.

Tara Brach 00:03:11  Yeah, it’s a familiar one. And I remember it was coming out right after, you know, the the bombing of the World Trade Center and so on. And that was kind of one of the ones that was circulating. And I think what it means is that every one of us has the conditioning towards, greed and aversion and aggression. You know, we all have that in our nervous system, our kind of primitive limbic conditioning. And we also, each one of us has this, evolving brain and evolving consciousness that’s capable of, unfathomable amounts of loving and of creativity and of presence. And so the question is, do we get hijacked? And is our life run by the fear part, or do we have more increasing access to our our highest potential? And so the the parable says it’s whichever one you feed. And I would say that’s partly accurate. And by that I mean it’s really important to pay attention to and nourish our hearts and to bring to mind the goodness and other people and be very compassionate towards where they’re suffering.

Tara Brach 00:04:27  And when the more primitive conditioning arises, which it does. I think for every one of us, every day.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:36  Yep. At least.

Tara Brach 00:04:36  Me. Every single day. Yeah. When you have a judgment, that’s a more primitive part of our conditioning. When that arises, it’s not about starving that wolf. It’s more about bringing that into our awareness with interest and with care. So when the fearful wolf appears not to make it bad. It’s. It’s just fright, a frightened part of ourselves. But to not be not buy into the narrative, not buy into the narrative. That the only way that people will do what I want is if I threaten them, or if I judge them or, you know, not buy into the narrative. Watch that part of ourselves with interest and with care so that we’re not. Our identity doesn’t get captured by it.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:24  Yeah, exactly. And I’d like to talk about clarifying that idea just a little bit, because in your work, you talk a lot about being present with the emotions.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:33  You know, here is this situation, here is this emotion being present with it and opening to it. at the same time, also in, in the Buddhist tradition and a lot of your work, we talk about the direction that we point. Our mind is going to be more of what we get. If we think more about hostility, we get more and more hostility. And I’m always interested in. Where’s the balance between those things? What’s the right way to tell? I’m genuinely feeling and emotion. I’m going through what I what I need to go through versus I’m telling myself a story or I’m taking a point of view that is is painful and should be dropped.

Tara Brach 00:06:12  I think the way you ask that question, Eric, actually points to a response, which is that if you’re paying attention to the storyline of, you know, the repeating stories of somebody else is wrong and bad, or I’m wrong and bad, then you’re just going to be perpetuating the cycle. In other words, whatever, where thoughts are going through, have a certain biochemistry and we get stuck in that state.

Tara Brach 00:06:40  But if instead you actually come into the body and in a very unconditional and kind way, open to the feelings and the energy and the body, then there’s actual transformation. Then what happens is that there’s a shift in awareness, where you open into a larger sense of being, and the emotions are current in your ocean, but you’re not identified with them. So I would say whenever there’s a strong, sticky, charged emotion, that’s the time it’s asking for attention. What a great sage once said that if you if there’s one question you ask yourself, it’s what am I unwilling to feel? And it’s the raw, sticky, vulnerable stuff we’re unwilling to feel. And it’s in the moment that we become willing that it no longer has so much control. It’s like the shamans say that when you begin to name a fear and then touch into it, it’s no longer controlling you. So I would say that that’s a key element in healing and spiritual awakening. And sometimes it’s described as, you know, in the Tibetan art.

Tara Brach 00:07:54  You see these animal headed goddesses that represent delusion and fear and hatred and so on, and you see them really at the gateway to the temple, that you have to go through them to enter sacred space, and you see them around the circle of the mandala that you have to go through them to get really to the place of stillness and peace. So that’s one key domain in spiritual life. But then there’s another one which is to be able to remember and visualize and pray for and turn towards the light. In other words, it’s already there in us. This our awakened potential is already there. But there’s a real value to remembering the goodness to on purpose, remembering what we love, remembering what we’re grateful for because we can get a habit we can get in this habit of being addicted to the suffering. So I think that’s kind of what you’re pointing to. And that balancing of yes, be with the difficult emotions. Feel. Feel them in your body and take time each day to remember what you’re grateful for.

Tara Brach 00:09:02  Or when you see something beautiful, pause and savor it. Because we don’t take in really, sometimes the goodness and the beauty. We tend to kind of skim over it. We’re so busily on our way somewhere else.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:16  Yeah, I love that whole whole description of it’s kind of not one or the other. It’s it’s it’s both.

Tara Brach 00:09:23  Right, exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:24  And yeah, we had, Rick Hanson on who I, I know that you also know and he, you know, he talked a lot about that idea of taking in the good positive thinking sometimes is is presented as a panacea for a lot of things. And that’s not what this is. This is just choosing there is good there at any time. You don’t have to make it up. It’s that which gets the most of our attention, if we can, to place it there.

Tara Brach 00:09:47  And so I love what you’re saying because. And Rick talks about this a lot too. We do have our survival conditioning, that negativity bias that gives us the habit of looking for what’s wrong.

Tara Brach 00:10:01  And one of the things I’ve become aware of in the last decade or so is how often we’re in a mindset where we think we have a problem, that there there’s something we need to solve or figure out, or there’s something that’s wrong about what’s happening right now, and we need to change it. And I have become very aware that in the moment that we stop thinking of it as a problem and just say, oh, so this is what’s happening. It’s asking for my attention. We actually have a lot more access to creativity, to empathy, to a real vitality. So it’s an interesting inquiry. And I invite your listeners to consider this of, you know, if right now There’s not a problem. Really? What’s the moment like? I mean, if there’s really no problem, if there’s nothing wrong and we can get without a taste of freedom to not add the negativity bias in.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:04  Yeah, that’s such a powerful idea. I was asked that question once by a by a meditation teacher. Like what is here? You know, just pretend for a minute that nothing is wrong.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:13  You know, you may you may not believe it, but just pretend that everything is perfect. Right in this moment, you know there’s nothing you have to do or solve. What is it like? And there is a you know, I had a pretty profound experience in that moment when I kind of went, whoa. And I think that second thing is a guest recently referred to our brains as a problem factory. Like, if, you know, once one is gone, it just creates another. And I’ve noticed that for myself, if I’m not, if I’m not consciously working on being more present and more aware, it’s just I just go from one to the next and I’ll probably find one because that’s what my brain is used to doing is working on problems.

Tara Brach 00:11:50  Yeah, it’s almost like if we’re not being vigilant and, you know, tossing around a problem, we feel like there’s something that’s going to blindside us. So we’re always, you know, in that kind of defensive mode. That sense that around the corner, something’s going to be too much to handle.

Tara Brach 00:12:08  So it becomes very powerful when we challenge that, because in a way, if we’re living all the time, like around the corner, something’s too much, we’re not really bringing our whole heartedness and our tenderness and our clarity to what’s right here.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:23  And so this idea of coming back to the present moment, you know, that that being the one of the solutions to, to a lot of what troubles us is one of those things that is easy to say but is hard to do. At least I found certainly earlier and still sometimes, like I would come back to the present moment, but there wouldn’t. I wouldn’t know what was here. And then my brain would be back in two seconds and there I would be again. And I would come back to the present moment and again, same thing. It’s like I’m here. But wait, there’s nothing compelling enough in this moment. Is your perspective that that’s really just a thing of training, that the formal meditation process and the formal process of awareness allows us to come back to see the the deeper nuances in the present moment so that we’re able to stay there longer.

Tara Brach 00:13:11  Yeah. I think you’re saying it in a really, powerful way. I mean, one one teacher said, you know, when asked to describe the world, his response was lost in thought. And we spent so many moments in a virtual reality where we’re in some trance of thinking we don’t actually have that much experience staying in our senses. And if you ask, if you ask yourself right this moment, how aware am I right this moment of the energy inside my hands are. My feet are the feeling in my heart. It’s like for most of us, we’re mostly in the head and in our ideas of the world. So the training really of coming into the moment is coming into our senses. So if we can pause and start practicing bringing the attention down into the body and feel the throat and the chest and the belly and get the knack of staying a bit more, then all the nuances of what we call present start coming alive. Because in the space where we’re not lost in thought, really, the light of awareness begins to shine through.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:52  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.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:53  I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed. Them. That’s one you feed them. I think that’s one of the things that can be discouraging for people is you do it, and then it’s kind of done, and then you feel like you have to keep doing it. And you have a line that I love in which you say that, meditation is a setup for feeling deficient. Unless we respectfully acknowledge the strength of our conditioning to race away from presence.

Tara Brach 00:16:33  It’s the truth. And one thing I’ve noticed is that the more we have either trauma or major wounding early on the moor. The strategy of dissociating and leaving our body is pronounced. So for those that have had that kind of really difficult early childhood or whatever, it’s even harder. It’s even harder because the rawness feels in the body feels intolerable. So it takes a tremendous self-compassion.

Tara Brach 00:17:05  I probably rate self-compassion as the single quality that most can serve us in meditating in, in getting more intimate with each other and whatever matters to us in our lives.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:22  Yeah, that is such an important piece. And I think that recognition that this is a really challenging endeavor and it doesn’t happen quickly and unfortunately. Right. I think we all wish we had some silver bullet to give. That would be like, okay, now everything’s better. But this constant coming back to awareness into the moment, into our body can can take a great deal of time to, to get better at. And I think it’s so important because I hear people say all the time, well, I can’t meditate. I’m not any good at meditating. And I’m sure you hear that, that also it’s that recognizing that like a there isn’t any goal and B, that’s the human condition and it’s okay.

Tara Brach 00:18:00  Exactly right. It really helps to know that we’re not alone in it. That coming into the present moment is hard for everyone, but it’s also important to know that it’s really possible.

Tara Brach 00:18:11  One of the challenges is if we’ve just been introduced to one kind of meditation or another, that isn’t a match for what really is a good gateway for us, then we can get discouraged. So when I teach, I and I offer, you know, I have like hundreds and hundreds of guided meditations. I offer a lot of different gateways in because for some people, it’s going to be through a very gentle, repeated scanning of the body. And for another person, it might be through a heart meditation that helps us remember and trust our own goodness. And yet for another person listening to sounds, just just listening to sounds helps to quiet the mind. And then for another person, there’s a certain kind of breathing that actually calms the nervous system and makes it easier to quiet and collect and arrive. So part of what I really invite is experiment, experiment and trust that there’s something in us that wants to settle. And we will if we find kind of the pathway that’s most of a match for us.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:15  Will you lead me perfectly into the next question? because I’m one of those people that the breath doesn’t work, and that’s what I tried. Year after year after year. And, you know, never really became a consistent meditator. And then when I heard about sound and the body, all of a sudden kind of everything changed. But my my question is, I agree, I think experimentation is great, but what I don’t have a good handle on and that I find myself wrestling with is, okay, I’m going to meditate today. What am I going to do, you know? Should we pick the one that that we like and just sort of stay on that path? Or is there some degree of trying different ones or that’s what I’m, you know, kind of kind of going through now is should I just keep doing the same thing or there’s several different approaches that I seem to get results with. and it ends up being, you know, I try and make that decision before I go into meditation, obviously, but sometimes I’m in the middle of meditation.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:11  This isn’t as good. Maybe I should be trying that kind or that kind, which is obviously profoundly against the point.

Speaker 4 00:20:17  yeah. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:18  So what are your thoughts on that?

Tara Brach 00:20:20  That’s a great question. So two levels of response. And one is I’ve now watched people over probably four decades, people, all different kinds of spiritual traditions and meditations and so on. And one thing I’ve noticed the difference between people that really keep on evolving and unfolding in a creative way, and those that either plateau out or quit. It’s not. It doesn’t have anything to do with what particular meditation or practice they’re doing, whether it’s tai Chi, Chi gung, Zog, Chen Zhen, whatever it has to do with, staying connected with a very sincere quality of aspiration, really sincere about waking up. And when somebody that’s the longing, there’s a passion about truth. Well, really, what’s the nature of reality? And there’s a passion about loving without holding back. Like, I just really want this heart to be free.

Tara Brach 00:21:21  That and there’s it coming back again and again to that aspiration. There’s a certain intuition, then, about finding our ways to the practices that serve. There’s less inclination to pull away from our practice just because it’s challenging. There’s less inclination to hop around because we’re restless, but there’s less inclination to stick with something out of duty when we might be experimenting. So it’s really very individual. I mean, if you’re the kind of person that is restless and is going to is kind of always needs to sample something else on the menu, then I’d encourage you to let some roots go down and just gain some real familiarity with some meditation practice that, you know, in some ways helping you become more present. If, on the other hand, you’re a person that that doggedly just always stays with one thing or doesn’t, you know, just somebody tells you something, you just keep doing it. Take a chance and an experiment for you. It sounds like, you know, you might want to have a weave that you do that includes something that’s, you know, is going to keep on, letting go of armoring around the heart, but also bringing clarity and then keep going deeper and deeper with that.

Tara Brach 00:22:43  so it’s it’s always going to be case by case, but there are some guidelines that we can kind of stay alert to. The deepest thing, though, is your intention. And I really encourage us all to at the beginning of every whether it’s an interview like this or a meditation sitting or being with somebody to just remember what about this really matters to me because our heart is a compass. It will show us where to go.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:09  Yeah, that’s great advice. And it’s something I took from reading your book again in preparation for this interview that I don’t think I had landed on before, which is to set an intention. Why am I? I find that helpful in keeping a steady meditation practice for sure. Is remembering why am I doing this? You know, it’s not another chore on the list. It’s there’s a reason that I’m I’m doing this.

Tara Brach 00:23:30  We will not stay with meditation unless there’s a certain degree of fun and pleasure in it for us. Yeah, it just won’t work if you’re grim. It just won’t work.

Tara Brach 00:23:38  So I know for myself, part of what’s going on is I really want to follow my interests and interests. Not like conceptual, but I want to stay where it feels alive. And I also there has to be a certain amount of pleasure in it. So weaving in the hard practices, really bringing alive sensation and whatever helps to feel us most vibrant in it, play around because, humans don’t keep doing things unless they feel gratified.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:08  That’s right. It’s that elephant. In the rider analogy, the rider is your conscious brain, and it’s trying to direct things. And the elephant is your emotional side. And you know, the elephant is only going to go where the rider wants it to go so long if it doesn’t want to go. Right, exactly. You got to get the elephant engaged in the game. And that’s the emotional piece of it. The reward and the enjoyment and the the feeling of satisfaction.

Tara Brach 00:24:31  Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:32  So one of the things that I wanted to explore a little bit more. Is there’s this idea, we talked about it right out of the gate about dropping into the body.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:40  About feeling our emotions, dealing with difficult emotions. But a lot of people that I know and myself firmly included in this camp. Depression is one of the things that we that I tend to wrestle with more. And I get this question from listeners a fair amount, which is I don’t feel much of anything. So what am I dropping into? I don’t have a strong emotion. I’m working with. What I’ve basically got is numbness, and I drop into my body and I pay attention to my hand. And honestly, it doesn’t feel like there’s much going on there. What’s the way that we work with with that, in order to deal with that condition or that situation?

Tara Brach 00:25:18  I’m really glad you brought up depression because I’ve had many people say, you know, I’m either that I try to get in touch with it and it’s numb, or when I get in touch with it, I sink and it’s like, it’s just like an endless, endless sinking downward. It’s like it doesn’t. If there’s no real insight or anything refreshing that comes out of it, I just feel more depressed.

Tara Brach 00:25:38  So there’s a few things you know in for all of us, the deepest place of transformation is when there’s just pure awareness. Awareness is what makes us up. And there are all these different, skillful means that help us to be positioned in a way that we can be more aware. And for depression, the skillful means really often have to do with exercising and engaging our body and mind, with nature, with the elements and with other people. Getting enough sleep and then being physically and emotionally engaged is a skillful means. If there’s depression to activate enough. So then as you bring the attention inward, you actually can connect with the aliveness.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:31  Yep. I think that’s such good advice. And I think for me, it’s that active movement and nature that are the two best anti-depressants I know.

Tara Brach 00:26:41  Me too, me too. Anti-anxiety too.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:43  Yeah. And of course, the challenge that can make depression such a monster is that it’s that the energy to do anything is so lacking. It’s like this sort of catch 22.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:52  Like if I. If you do something, you’ll feel better, but I really can’t. You know, I don’t have the energy. And so for me, I think over the years it’s become a I’ve made it into just sort of a habit that like when I start to feel that way, like I just, I have learned to propel myself into motion. depression hates a moving target. Is the is the saying I love.

Tara Brach 00:27:14  It’s a very good saying and it helps to have other people, you know, on the team with you. Yeah. In other words, sometimes whether it’s having a running partner or a walking partner or whatever. engagement, depression needs engagement, and it needs one other thing, which is it needs to be forgiven because we, whether it’s depression or shame or whatever, we take it personally like it’s my depression or my fear. And then that brings more of a sense of something’s wrong with me, which actually deepens the cycle. So to add to engagement, commit. And this I’m speaking to all of us commit to truly forgiving the presence of the difficult emotion.

Tara Brach 00:27:59  It’s not our fault. It’s like depression is not our fault. It whether it’s genetic or epigenetic, having to do with early childhood stuff or the culture, it’s just not like we, you know, got born and pressed the button saying, this is the emotion I want to be living with. You know, we didn’t choose it. And so there’s something about forgiveness that actually creates space. Like, I’ll often I do it with anger, you know, I have anger will come up and I’ll have this idea of, oh, I shouldn’t be angry. I mean, I it’s not a spiritual, you know, feeling. And one of the first things I’ll do is go. Okay. Forgiven. Forgiven. I send that message into the anger like it’s. It’s just another weather system. It’s coming just like the outer weather. And when I forgive the anger, I’m not so identified with it. And I can then just feel it as sensations and not believe the the dialogue that goes with it. And it comes and it goes in a much more wholesome way.

Tara Brach 00:28:58  So forgive the depression.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:00  Yeah, I think that’s such a big one in such an important one. And the parable of the I don’t know if it’s a parable, but the Buddha’s teaching of the second arrow is one that I talk about on the show all the time, because it’s that I’m feeling bad about feeling bad that we can actually work with. Right? Like, it’s very hard to not feel depressed. Right. There’s things we can do, but I do feel like we have more control over what we layer on top of that. You know, the and you talk about this in your book And it kind of leads into that next question, which is your first book was really about accepting ourselves the way we are and the suffering that that happens to ourselves. And your second book is more a little bit about, hey, there’s going to be suffering out in the world. That’s an inevitable fact, you know, or, or pain that comes in from the outside world. But how do we deal with that in the most skillful way? And that’s one of the things I love about the Buddhist teachings, is it really normalizes for me that things are not going to be going well in life, like difficult things happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:58  That’s part of being human. And to your point, it’s not our fault and it’s not our, you know, it’s not a failure. But what are some of the more skillful means we can use in, you know, when when life presents us with things that we really wish it wouldn’t?

Tara Brach 00:30:11  Yeah. No, it’s a it’s a powerful question. And that is why I wrote True Refuge. I had in my own life. I got really sick and the spiral of sickness went on and on. So I was going pretty downhill. And that’s an example of okay, stuff happens. And, you know, I went from being very, very athletic to not being able to even walk up a slight incline. I am now much, much better than I was. But for about eight years, I didn’t know what was going to happen. And what that did was it forced me to find a way to get my arms around sickness, death, dying at the same time. I lost both parents and, you know, so all the encounters and the teachings, both in Buddhism and I think it’s really all the perennial teachings, basically point us towards finding the awareness and heart that’s really timeless.

Tara Brach 00:31:05  It’s, it’s it’s accessible to each of us that helps us to rest in something large enough so we have room for the waves, and that can sound abstract. And yet, if you’ve been with somebody that’s dying and you’ve sensed how the only thing that’s big enough for that dying is the loving that’s there. That’s the only thing that allows. It still hurts, but there’s space for it. And that’s the way it is with everything, that there are things that are still going to hurt us tremendously. But if we find access to that, what I sometimes think of as the fearless heart, the heart that is big enough for fear, the big enough for the losses and the grief, then we have a way to take refuge away, to come home to beingness that can move through things with a sense of tenderness and open heartedness and grace, even when it’s really, really difficult. That’s the essential message in True Refuge, my second book, and really, how to then find our way to that timeless heart.

Tara Brach 00:32:09  How do we become present enough and open enough and courageous enough to really be with the life that’s here?

Eric Zimmer 00:32:47  I’m going to ask a question that I don’t think there’s really an answer for, but I’m always I’m fascinated by it, and I find more and more people asking me this question. so which is what is the meaning of life? Or why are we here? Or, and, and I’m just curious to get your, your take on that. I don’t actually believe you have the answer. if you do, though, I’m very excited to hear it.

Tara Brach 00:33:17  you know, that’s not the kind of question I pose in my own inquiries. I don’t pose the why questions so much. Why are we here or whatever, but a similar question is what matters the most to me or to us? And and that that has a similar feeling tone to it. And I could say, I could say, you know, for myself what matters. And sometimes described as the two wings of awareness that we really need both to be free.

Tara Brach 00:33:51  What matters is deeply understanding truth or understanding reality. Not not like in a mental way, but a lived way. And the other side of that is loving fully. And so if I had to say, what’s our purpose or anything? It’s to love fully, to totally inhabit our being in a way that we feel our belonging to all other beings and can express that, really express that authentically in the way we live our lives.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:24  And do you think that you don’t think about and ask those questions because you have an experience of being alive that feels meaningful?

Tara Brach 00:34:32  The word meaning sometimes trips me and others up because it’s a cognitive word. So for me, Matt, what matters is more, mattering. What I long for, what what my heart cares about has a more visceral experience than meaning, which is a little more mental. So it may be just that I’m going at it with a more feminine quality of inquiry. I’m not sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:59  Yeah, I like that word matter, because the analogy I’ve been thinking about lately is, you know, intellectually, I’ll never have any idea why this is and what’s happening.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:09  And, and I could never intellectually convince you of, you know, why something was important. But if I walked out my door right now and I saw a dog laying in front of me suffering, I would know to your word that it mattered that dog not suffer. I could never explain it intellectually. There would be no way I could be like, well, you could be like, well, there’s billions of dogs. I mean, we could go through the whole, you know, but you could never talk me out of in that moment that that dog suffering mattered. And for me, that was a big turning point when I went, oh, I’m never going to answer this question intellectually. I’m never going to get there. But I can feel kind of and I think it’s exactly what you just said in a more eloquent way than I had been saying. It is that what matters is what connects us to those bigger things. And it’s a felt sense, not in an intellectual sense. And the reason I asked you if you thought you didn’t ask those questions is that the more I have moved into that part of my life and in that way, the less I’ve had those questions also.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:08  And I’m just kind of curious because I do get them, you know, from people. I’m sure you do too. And it’s it’s a genuine yearning, but it seems to come up less in people who are truly engaged in life in a deeper way.

Tara Brach 00:36:21  Well, that’s why when I get a conceptual question, I reframe it in a way that allows a person to discover what is true for them in a more visceral way. And that’s why I would shift the word meaning to matters.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:35  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You use the word trance a lot. You talk about different types of trances, but let’s talk about what? What you mean in the use of that word? In general.

Tara Brach 00:36:46  When I talk about trance, I’m talking about a kind of narrow, distorted, contorted experience of reality. And it and it narrows because we’re, there’s an overlay of mental, conceptual, you know, words, ideas, interpretations. And so to step out of a trance means to step out of our mental interpretations and into reality, back into our bodies and our hearts and what we’re directly experiencing and the biggest way we have a trance in our lives.

Tara Brach 00:37:19  The most immediate is that we move around with an ongoing storyline about moi, about who I am, what I need to do, what’s wrong with me, what what’s going to make a difference, and so on. We it’s like our world is very narrowed into this self-conscious, self-centered narrative. And it’s not that we’re bad for it, it’s more that it’s just keeping us from a much more mysterious and vibrant experience of beingness. So the way out of trance is just to recognize, oh, okay, I’m living right now in a thought realm, you know, and thoughts are like a map. We need them. In other words, it’s what allows humans to be the most dominant species on planet Earth. It’s our, you know, surviving and thriving and so on. We need them. But if that’s the end of development, then we’re stuck in a conceptual world. There’s a further evolution beyond a self living inside thoughts. And that’s a self that’s actually awake and awareness.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:19  Yeah, I like the way that you have addressed it before, because I hear a lot of Buddhist teachings saying that the sense of a separate self is an illusion, and I like the way that you sort of describe it as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:29  It’s not exactly an illusion, but it’s only it’s a very small part of the picture. It’s a very limited way of viewing it, because I think when people hear it’s an illusion, they go, well, it feels so real. And I like that instead of saying what it is, is giving a context of it as as it’s not the only way to view reality.

Tara Brach 00:38:49  One of the phrases that I find most valuable when you think of, let’s say, I have a story about myself and that I’m falling short, and I say to somebody, well, if you’re believing that is real, is that belief really true? And they say, well, it feels really true. It feels like I’m deficient, I’m defective, I’m, I’m a failure. So the phrase I like is real but not true. And the reason I like that phrase is that the belief I’m deficient, I’m defective. It’s a real story in our minds and it feels real in our body. So it’s real in that way.

Tara Brach 00:39:22  It’s happening. The thoughts happening, the feelings are happening. It’s real, but it’s not the truth of existence. In other words, it’s not that that’s what’s actually the living reality. In other words, it’s just an idea in our mind and a feeling in our body. And to begin to get that opens up a little space so we can sense there’s something bigger and maybe more a living reality than our belief about ourselves. It helps us to shake some of the most limiting experiences that really bring suffering in our lives.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:58  That’s really powerful. I love that one. I had not heard that before, and I think that is a very useful tool. We’re nearing the end of our time here, but I want to ask you, you say that we all have our own ways of distancing ourselves from reality or going into trance or, you know, call it whichever of these things are or we all have our own ways for doing that, that are, that are kind of individual, but that the process of waking up is universal.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:24  Can you tell me a little bit more about that? And then I’d like to maybe circle it back to some of our earlier conversation around how, for each of us, some of the things on the path are going to be different. You know, some of it’s individualized. So what’s universal and what parts are kind of ours to tailor to what we need?

Tara Brach 00:40:40  We all have strategies of trying to control things. You know, every one of us comes. I sometimes think of it like we come into this world and conditions are not always cooperative. So we have, you know, parents that might not see us for who we are, might not give us unconditional love. We have a culture that’s addictive and violent. So we all put on a spacesuit. We all are trying to navigate best as we can. And the spacesuit is our ego control systems to defend ourselves, to appear good, to try to produce, sometimes to pretend something so others don’t attack us too. We have addictive qualities to numb and soothe, so we all have our strategies, and they’re all ways of trying to control things so we don’t have to feel bad so we can feel more comfortable.

Tara Brach 00:41:27  So it’s universal that we have ways of leaving the present moment. And there’s all sorts of particulars on your strategies versus mine. Some people are more have withdrawing strategies and others are more aggressive. They’re all spacesuit strategies. But the universal is that when we have those strategies, we get identified with the strategies with our ego control system and we forget who’s looking through the mask. We forget the the consciousness right now that’s listening to these words. And we forget the the tenderness and the heart that’s really that really cares about living and loving. So there’s a forgetting and that’s universal. If they’re suffering, it’s because you’ve forgotten really who you are. You’re identified with a more limited version of being with the spacesuit self. And so the way back first is just to begin to notice how that’s happening. Okay. So what happens when I feel threatened just to begin to notice our strategies without judging them, just to notice. And the the very simple, you know, strategy for coming back is just to name what we notice.

Tara Brach 00:42:44  Okay. Defending afraid. You know often obsessions just to name it. And then just very gently kind of invite ourselves back into the moment, into the body, into the heart. That’s kind of a universal of noticing the way we strategically dissociated and gently bringing ourselves back. Another universal is that this is from the Bodhisattva path. You know, the path of the Awakening Being is. It has to be with compassion. So one of the things I teach most regularly is when you’re suffering just to put your hand on your heart and offer some message of kindness inwardly, because in the moment that there’s a gesture of kindness, even if it’s just the intention to be kind. Something in the armoring of the separate self begins to soften, and we begin to get a little more of a taste of who we are. Beyond that, that spacesuit self, we begin to sense the purity of our hearts and trust that a little more. So those are two examples of the ways of coming back that are universal to notice the strategy, come back into the body and feel what’s right here, and to bring a gesture of kindness to that moment.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:00  I think that’s a beautiful place for us to wrap up the interview. Tara, thank you so much. Again, I encourage everybody to check out your talks and your books and everything. You’ve been a genuine inspiration to me, and I’ve really gotten a lot out of this conversation.

Tara Brach 00:44:15  And so have I. Eric, you’re wonderful to talk to. I love your inquiry and thank you for what you’re offering. I feel like you’re offering something that really invites others into this whole stream of waking up. So many blessings.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:29  You also. Okay. Take care.

Speaker 4 00:44:31  All right, all right. You too. Bye bye.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:33  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 ofWhat 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.

Vauhini Vara 00:00:00  When I communicate. And I think this is not just because I’m a writer, I think it’s because I’m a human being. When I communicate, the gratification I get from that communication is from having made the effort of communicating myself, and it sort of does nothing for me if a machine does it for me. I mean, it doesn’t feel that different from like using a magic eight ball or something to produce words.

Chris Forbes 00:00:31  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 00:01:15  We live in a world where technology is both a lifeline and a trap. Take Amazon I want swore them off after a broken blender and the most absurd customer service call imaginable, I made a big declaration. That’s it. No more Amazon. And my grand boycott lasted five days. And the worst part? I disliked myself a little when I went back because it wasn’t just the blender. This was already a company that had killed my beloved bookstores, and now it feels like they’re coming for everything else. That’s the trap we keep returning to what we wish we didn’t need. Vauhini Vara explores this exact tension in her book Searches Selfhood in the Digital age, showing how the very tools that connect us also exploit us. In our conversation, we wrestle with this ambiguity. How do we live with technology we can’t seem to live without? I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, wahine. Welcome to the show.

Vauhini Vara 00:02:15  Thanks for having.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:16  Me. I’m excited to talk with you about your latest book, which is called Searches Selfhood in the Digital Age, and it’s really a book that explores, I think, our relationship with technology, broadly speaking, and it’s a topic that I think is a really important one because we are in deep relation to technology, most of us all the time.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:38  And so I think it’s always worth exploring that. But before we get into your book, we’re going to start with a parable like we always do. 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 thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, 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.

Vauhini Vara 00:03:17  Yeah. I mean, it makes me think of a couple of different things. One thing that makes me think of is the way in which sometimes those two wolves are very intertwined. Like it’s actually the same wolf, right, with two sides.

Vauhini Vara 00:03:31  And I think about that when it comes to our relationship with big technology companies, products, which is the subject of my book, because I think we sometimes like to talk about that in binary terms. You know, we say these technology companies are exploiting us and they’re evil. And then the technology companies will say, but you’re using these products, so you must find them pretty useful and even fun and enjoyable. And maybe they even bring you joy. And the truth, of course, is that not only both of those things are true, but that they are deeply intertwined. Like the way in which these products are useful to us requires the exploitation. So, for example, when we use Amazon and we’re delighted that things don’t cost much and they come to us quickly. That’s because there are labor practices at Amazon and its suppliers that, you know, can be described as sort of shady and exploitative, that are responsible for making these products cheap and come to us quickly.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:39  Yeah, that’s one of the things I really loved about the book was the deep ambiguity in it, the ambiguity that you have and write about really honestly with technology and the nuance of recognizing that these are both good and bad things, and I like what you say.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:59  That can’t necessarily just be taken apart, right? Like one of the things that makes a search engine more valuable to us over time is that it knows what we want. But that’s the exact thing that is being exploited is knowing what I want. Right. And so, you know, it’s it’s very hard to envision a world in which you got one without the other. And so maybe you could just first describe for us what the book is, because there’s, there’s a lot of different ways of talking about it. And I want to make sure that you get to present it in the way that makes sense to you.

Vauhini Vara 00:05:34  Yeah. I mean, I think the I think of the book as a, a document of what it’s like to live in a world in which our consciousness has been so colonized by big technology companies and their products. And then in addition or relatedly, what it feels like to be complicit in the rising power and wealth and exploitation of that power and wealth of big technology companies. you know, the way in which all those things provide us with usefulness, the way in which that makes us feel guilty and ashamed, and also glad that these products exist in our lives.

Vauhini Vara 00:06:23  and I do that in the book in a way that I think is is sort of unusual in that I write about it. So the book has chapters where I’m just I’m talking about this in my life and all of our lives. And then there are chapters and, you know, bits that are interspersed between the chapters where I’m kind of showing this in action, using my own interactions with these companies products. So there’s a chapter, for example, made up of my own Google searches over ten years.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:50  Which I found absolutely fascinating. and made me kind of want to go find all my Google searches over ten years, because you’re right. What an interesting way to look back on your life and your interests. I loved how in you were talking about these search things that you quoted somebody John Battelle called it the database of Intentions, a comprehensive record of human desires, fears and needs that becomes raw material for corporate profit.

Vauhini Vara 00:07:20  Yeah, I love that characterization. that that comes to me from the scholar and writer Shoshana Zuboff.

Vauhini Vara 00:07:28  That idea that all this material that we put into these products is raw material that they then render into a product, and the product is actually the information about us that they’re then able to use to get marketers and advertisers to ask them to, to present ads to us. And so, yeah, I mean, there’s that. But then also, I’m a I’m a writer, I’m an artist. And so that term raw material sort of has this additional artistic meaning to me. And it’s interesting to me that my searches on Google. Anyone searches on Google function both as raw material for this corporate technological machine that companies like Google are operating and as raw material for my own work. Right. Like I know more about myself from having had Google maintain this database of my intentions over ten years or longer than I otherwise would have. And I can use that. I can go back to that database and remember what I was doing 15 years ago on this day, in a way that might serve my writing. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:39  Is that something everyone can do? Is this publicly? Like my search results are available out there somewhere for me.

Vauhini Vara 00:08:45  So even I, as a tech reporter, with all these years of experience covering Google and other companies knew that Google was collecting that information, and I could have sworn that I would have turned off its ability to collect that information about me. And it seems like I did at various points in time, but then either turned it back on or I don’t know what happened. But most of the time that I’ve used Google, it’s been collecting this information about me.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:12  As I said earlier, the thing that really I felt throughout this book is this, this sort of wrestling with how we use this technology, what we allow this technology to know about us, and really weighing the cost and benefits. I mean, you’ve got a whole chapter about Amazon where you’d meet with a friend who sort of says, I don’t use Amazon because of a whole host of reasons, which I don’t want to turn this into a why Amazon is bad podcast.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:39  But there’s lots of things about Amazon that we could question as being good for us, good for the planet, good for other people. And I know that I even had an incident recently where I was like, okay, that’s it. Not only should I not do I not want to use Amazon for what to me are moral reasons, but now they’ve really pissed me off and it was something stupid I bought like a Neutra blender or something from them, and it was like the second one that broke. And the first time they said, just throw it away and we’ll send you a new one. The second time I thought that’s what they wanted me to do. So I just threw it away. And then we got into this whole thing and I was like, I have been a customer of yours for 25 years. Plus, the amount of money I have spent with you is and I’m on the phone with someone is mind boggling. Just give me the 39.99 whatever it is, refund, like any sane human, would look at this relationship as a customer and go, that’s worth keeping.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:39  And they didn’t. They wouldn’t. And I was so frustrated just by the principle of it that I was like, all right, that’s it. No more Amazon, Which lasted all of about five days. Right where it just. And then of course I’m like if I can buy it somewhere else I’ll buy it elsewhere. But things that I only seem to be able to get there, I’ll get there. And of course then that sort of erodes and before you know it it’s kind of back to the same old, same old with it.

Vauhini Vara 00:11:07  Exactly. Yeah. And I think, I mean, one thing I like about the, the one you feed parable is the way in which it emphasizes personal choice, because I think a couple of things are happening here. These companies have become so entrenched that there is an extent to which there are strong incentives for us to use their products. You know, the, the, the, the shelves at Walgreens are a lot emptier now than they were previously because fewer people are shopping at Walgreens, right? And so if I need to get the special contact solution I use for my rigid gas permeable contact lenses.

Vauhini Vara 00:11:49  I can’t find it at Walgreens anymore. Right. And so the most natural thing is to turn to Amazon. That said, I continue to feel and insist to myself and to others that we do have choice in the matter, right? Like, we can try to make the effort to decide to approach this a different way. And you know, it’s not a spoiler to say that in my book, I get to the end of my book and I’m still using all of these products I’m critiquing at the same time. What’s not on the page is the fact that I have been engaged in this process of trying as much as I can to divest myself, and it’s an ongoing process, and it involves some failures and some successes, but I think that that effort is worthwhile.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:40  Yeah. What I was struck by as you were talking and I’ve been struck by in my relationship with Amazon, is the word convenience, and how convenience has become an unstated value for so many of us that, like it, ends up being prioritized over other values of mine in an unstated way, but it has somehow become this thing that is expected, needed. Maybe it’s the pace of life. I mean, I think there’s a whole bunch of factors, but a lot of the things that you’re talking about, it’s the convenience or the time saving ropes me back in.

Vauhini Vara 00:13:20  Yeah. And I think, I mean, I think this is tied up with the sort of broader economic history of the United States to where it used to be, a country where our identity was tied up with a lot of different things. And now, as fewer things are made in the United States, we end up having this role, this sort of like our primary economic role is the economic role of consumers. Right. And so everything gets oriented around that, including antitrust law, which in the past was about all kinds of different things, and now is very much about well, as long as the consumer is doing better than they were in this arrangement, than they were before this company came along, we have to admit this is a positive outcome, and that disregards all the other negative outcomes that can come from companies becoming bigger and more powerful.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:39  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 00:15:43  The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to oneyoufeed.net/overwhelm. That’s oneyoufeed,net/overwhelm. Let’s explore some other areas where your relationship with technology feels ambiguous, where you’re sort of like, well, I actually really benefit this, but I also there are reasons I don’t want to do that. So Amazon is, for me, a big one. I feel like I’m perpetually wrestling with this one. What else is there for you that falls into this kind of category?

Vauhini Vara 00:16:22  Google’s obviously an example, right? Because my my Google searches are improved. My own, my own catalog of my life is improved by the fact that Google is collecting all this information about me. One can argue that’s debatable, but, you know, that’s that’s the argument I’m making. But this is true of all kinds of products. I mean, I use social media and when I use social media, I am speaking to algorithms rather rather than human beings in some ways.

Vauhini Vara 00:16:55  I’m speaking in a way that is different from authentic human to human communication, because of the role of those algorithms in mediating what gets shown to people and what doesn’t. And yet the fact that social media exists and that I’m able to use it, plays a big role in sustaining my career as a freelance journalist, where I need to develop an audience of my own, who knows about my work. I need to not rely on outside publications to publish my work. because, I’m working in a very fragile industry. And so, you know, that’s that’s another place where it comes up. Another one that we haven’t talked about yet is AI, obviously. And what I find interesting about AI is that we read a lot about all the ways in which AI can make things faster and easier, and yet the jury still seems to be out on whether it’s actually making things faster and easier or not. There was this recent study where they asked a bunch of computer programmers, experienced programmers, to use, AI models to help them in their programming, and these individuals thought that they were saving a bunch of time, like their self-reported time savings was significant, but the sort of objective time they were taking to do their work was actually measured.

Vauhini Vara 00:18:21  And it turned out they were losing a bunch of time. So it was actually taking them longer to do their work when they were using AI than when they weren’t. So that’s a really interesting one, because I think with certain past technologies, like, like Google is a decent example or Amazon, the benefit is a pretty clear and legitimate benefit, and then it has to be weighed against those costs. But here, I think even the benefit is a little is a little iffy.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:47  Yeah. I mean, AI is obviously another big one to go into and one that produces a whole variety of feelings and emotions. Yeah. And let’s come back to AI for a second. But I want to I want to pivot for a minute because as we talk about AI, you can’t talk about AI without talking about open AI. And you did a profile of Sam Altman, the founder of open AI, a number of years ago. But more broadly, you really talk and show in this book how most of these big technology companies start out with a certain idealism.

Vauhini Vara 00:19:23  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:25  You know, Google’s Don’t Be Evil as the most prominent example, but but OpenAI too has, you know, started with a really, you know, a real premise of, of AI safety and, and all of that. And you show how almost all of these companies over time ended up getting getting co-opted into moving away from that value.

Vauhini Vara 00:19:46  That’s right. Yeah. I mean, I think as human beings, we’re often driven by our own intellectual curiosity and passion, I think, than by a desire to make a bunch of money. Right. The problem with technology companies is that they tend to be really, really expensive to build. And so if you’re the Google founders in the mid 90s, or if you are Sam Altman of OpenAI in the mid 2000, the first thing you need to do if you want to pursue this intellectual passion project that you’re so excited about, that you think can change the world, is to go out and find some people who are going to give you the money to build it.

Vauhini Vara 00:20:29  And those people are investors. And those investors certainly surely have their passions, but it’s their job to put money into a venture so that that grows into more money. And so you end up in a dynamic in which whatever the sort of intellectual or philosophical or moral or ethical goals were behind this project of yours, it immediately it very quickly becomes bound up in the goals of these investors and who become the part owners of the company. Right. And so this isn’t like just some kind of abstract situation. It’s literally the people who own the company get to determine the goals of the company. And if that goal is to make more money. There you go.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:15  Precisely. And even if you are, you know, the founder, the CEO, if the the people who own the majority of the company think that you’re acting in some way, that doesn’t further the company making as much money as possible. You can absolutely just be removed. And so it’s this really tricky and weird situation. I mean, I think we all wrestle with these things to different degrees in our lives.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:40  You know what? What trade offs are we willing to make for money? But you’re right. I think it’s the nature of technology companies being so expensive. Right. Like, I was able to build this, you know, little tiny business that I have by myself without getting investor money because it’s a little tiny thing, right? Yeah, right. But I, you know, had I gone out and gotten somebody to say like, oh, I’m going to put $1 million in the one you feed, it changes things, right? You know, I worked in technology companies, software startup companies early in my career. And I saw very clearly what VC money did to accompany. You know, and yeah, it was mostly not good.

Vauhini Vara 00:22:22  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:23  It was it turned out mostly not to be good.

Vauhini Vara 00:22:25  Yeah. And I don’t I mean, I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to say they’re the same thing, but I in some ways I think the situation that these, that these corporate founders find themselves in is not so dissimilar to the situation we as users of these products find ourselves in right where it’s not as simple as saying, listen, I have ethical principles that I need to stick to their end up being these competing interests.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:52  Yeah, well, I think that that sort of motivational complexity is such a key element in life that we don’t often talk about in lots of different areas. Right? Like, you know, a lot of my work is in how people change and learning to recognize what the motivational poles actually are, and being able to be honest about what they are is so important, right? In order to actually find a way out. But we tend to not do that. We tend to try and say like, all right, I’m going to I think I should do this. So that’s what I’m going to think about. That’s what I’m going to talk about without recognizing there is a lot pulling us in the opposite direction.

Vauhini Vara 00:23:34  Yeah. And I think I mean, I’d be curious about your thoughts on this, given your expertise in all the many interviews you’ve conducted on this question. Right. Of like how people change. But, you know, it seems to me that one of the challenges when we use these products is that the benefit that we get feels really immediate and really tangible, and all of the costs and consequences end up feeling quite abstract and intangible. And so the benefit, even though it’s relatively small and one could argue that the cost is enormous, the benefit ends up feeling to us like it’s bigger or more meaningful or more actionable.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:14  Yeah. I mean, as humans, we are, we are not good at this thing. I think the, the technical term in psychology is, well, I guess it’s also the term that you would use in money, but I think they call it delay discounting. Maybe, maybe they call it something different. But it basically means I value things that have that have any delay on them less and less and less. Yeah, right. Because I just.

Speaker 4 00:24:37  Very relevant.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:38  Yeah. And I think the other one is that a lot of these things that are bad are happening to other people or might happen at some juncture, and they’re far removed.  I’ve been thinking about where rereleasing an episode with Peter Singer probably will already come out by the time you did this, but when I read Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, it shook me up and it has kept me shook up for years because he he poses a question and he basically says, imagine you’re walking down a road. I might not I may not get this exactly right, but this is close. Or at least what’s stuck with me. You’re walking down a road and there’s a pond right there, and there’s a child drowning in it. If you did not go and save that child, you would rightly be considered a monster. You would think yourself a monster. What is wrong with me? How on earth did I not go save that child that was 12ft away? But there are children dying all around the world. All the time that we have the means to help write. I have the means today to save children’s lives that I am not saving. And I don’t even mean like I have to donate every last dollar I have.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:46  But I could do more. And that the logic of that has haunted me. Yeah, and I think that that’s a little of what we’re talking about here. Like if the the people whose lives were work practice lives, I got to see them come home every day from work at Amazon and feel, you know, they’re still on they’re still on public assistance because they don’t make enough money and they feel demoralized by what they do. And they’re they’re tethered. Do all these things I know, quote unquote. No, they’re still remote. And that remoteness makes it I think is the is another I don’t know what the term for that Peter Singer pri as a word for it, but that remoteness is another thing that makes it very difficult to act in accordance to our values, because the thing is not present.

Vauhini Vara 00:26:38  Absolutely. And I think that’s built in to global capitalism as it exists now. Right. And we were talking earlier about the role, like this role that we have as people living in the US of consumers, how that’s sort of our primary role and a thing that makes that helpful, the thing that makes a thing that makes it easy for us to focus on things like convenience and low price and usefulness, is that all of a significant amount of the cost is borne by people on other continents who we will never see, whose lives we don’t know about.

Vauhini Vara 00:27:13  And that’s true when it comes to the labor cost. And it’s also true when it comes to the environmental cost.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:18  Right. There’s an argument, though, that I mean, the capitalist argument is that we are creating jobs that wouldn’t exist at all otherwise.

Vauhini Vara 00:27:30  Yeah, that’s the argument. and, you know, I think I, I recently read Bill Gates’s memoir and, in a lot of ways, I think I view the world differently from somebody like Bill gates. But what I find pretty compelling is the frustration of people like Bill gates that for all of our when when we criticize capitalism and technological capitalism, this globalized system that we’ve created for ourselves, we don’t spend a lot of time talking about the significant decrease in poverty, in mortality rates as a result of global capitalism and the role of technology in global capitalism. And I think it’s a really fair point.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:35  It is interesting because if you look at so many of these measures, we would consider progress. The trends are clear. You know, more women being educated.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:46  Number of deaths in childbirth. The literacy rate, the poverty rate. I mean, you look at all of this stuff and you’re like, okay, from one perspective, more people are better off than they’ve ever been. And and I think that’s the key word. And it’s not always that simple, because what comes along with perhaps a higher literacy rate is also perhaps the undoing of a culture that supports people in a certain way. Right. We’re taking our measures of what success and goodness are, and we’re then putting them on the world as a whole. Yeah, but I do think there is there is good news in a lot of this, but I don’t think it’s the it’s the unquestioned, good news that certain people would posit. But I think so many people think the world is getting worse. And I think it’s nice to have some counterpoint to that, because I actually don’t think the world is getting worse. I think by most measures, the world for most people is getting better. It may be getting worse for a certain group of people in a certain place, mainly us Americans, who are like, what the hell is all going on when the rest of the world has been living with that sort of chaos for, you know, for, for all of time.

Speaker 4 00:30:01  Right, right.

Vauhini Vara 00:30:02  Yeah, I know I agree with you on that.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:03  Let’s talk a little bit about the negatives to this. We haven’t really put that fine a point on them with with Amazon. We did we talked about, you know, labor laws and you know, the factories where things are produced and the way, you know, drivers here are treated. And you know, there’s obviously the income inequality where, you know, less people have more and more of the wealth. But what are some of the other. Would you say problems with? Let’s just take a couple. Let’s not go to AI yet. But but you know, Google, Facebook, Instagram. You know, like what? What are the other costs for us as people that we’re not seeing.

Vauhini Vara 00:30:42  Yeah. I mean I think there are a number and they can be difficult to talk about. But something I think about, I think in part because I’m a writer, is what how communication changes depending on who we’re talking to. And so human communication has always been good. Human communication has always been used for communion, for liberation, for good. And it has also been used by those in power to further accrue their power and further accrue their wealth.

Vauhini Vara 00:31:16  And so communication has always been a complex thing. What we have now, because companies like we interact with companies like Google and meta and Amazon, in part through our use of text, is this world in which we have this new audience when we’re speaking right? So when I search for something in Google, I’m formulating it in a certain way for Google. When I’m posting on social media, I’m posting in a certain way based on what I know algorithms favor, right? I may be using emojis more than I otherwise would. I might be including a picture of a cute pet in my post when I otherwise wouldn’t. Right. And so the way in which we communicate ends up being deeply influenced, and maybe one could argue, corrupted by the fact that any time we’re communicating, if we’re using one of these platforms, we’re communicating to other human beings, and at the same time, with the same sort of communication act, we’re communicating to a big technology company’s algorithms, which is changing the way we talk.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:25  Right. And it’s really very, very subtle.

Speaker 4 00:32:28  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:29  You know, it’s often very subtle, but but it is absolutely true. I started this business a long time ago, 11 years ago. I’ve been I’ve been doing this podcast 11 years. And how I used to be able to use social media as a way of promoting this podcast doesn’t work anymore. And I have a really hard time. Like maybe this is a benefit of being a little bit older is that I don’t I don’t want to do it the way that it needs to be done today, which is to the detriment of the business. There is unquestionably detriment to the business, right? I could go out on Instagram and post a hundred profound thoughts that will get far less interest than, like you said, a picture of my puppy, you know, or post a picture of. Lola died three months ago, but I’m I’m getting through it, you know, like and I just it’s not me and but and even with like podcasting I think more and more it’s I you know, I call it becoming YouTube ified, right? Like, you’ve got to be sensational enough in what you say to drive the algorithms.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:33  And I agree with you 100% that it’s, it does change the way we interact. And you look at like something like Instagram, as I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to travel outside the country a little bit the last few years, which I hadn’t really done in any of my life before this very much. And what I’m struck by as much as anything is the Instagram ification of everywhere I go. That common, like coffee house look that we all love, you know? But it’s everywhere. I mean, I couldn’t tell you the difference in I mean, you can find places, but a lot of places are. I’m in Lisbon, Portugal. I’m in Amsterdam, I’m in Paris. I’m. I couldn’t tell you which city I’m in based on those places.

Speaker 4 00:34:18  Right.

Vauhini Vara 00:34:18  I was reading the other day that in Barcelona, there are so many tourists as as we’ve all heard in Barcelona that they’re creating some kind of plaza with these, like Instagram backdrops where people can take their pictures with the Sagrada Familia, the famous.

Speaker 4 00:34:36  Church.

Vauhini Vara 00:34:37  In the background, so that they’re not all crowding in front of the church. And so essentially, like the actual public landscape and infrastructure gets changed for the sake of how people communicate on social media.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:51  Yeah. I mean, I was in Barcelona and I’m not Christian, and I went to Sagrada Familia because I don’t know, you just here, like you kind of have to go and it’s the thing. And I was just extraordinarily moved by it as a building, as what it did and how it does it. And, and yet at the same time, like you said, I mean, all around is just selfie taking, which, of course, I mean, I’m taking a picture in there, too. It’s I’m not trying to cast aspersions, but it does change the very nature of the places that we’re in. I mean, so there is an effect to all of this.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:27  On this topic you wrote. You know, our subtle self modification according to technological capitalism’s norms is so pervasive that certain types of performances have their own names, Instagram face, TikTok voice. And then you go on to say it recalls w e d voices description of a double consciousness, a black person’s sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. Of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. And I love that idea of a double consciousness.

Speaker 4 00:36:00  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:00  I was talking with somebody last week, and they also mentioned something. I don’t remember the name of it. It’s the something effect. And it’s because they feel like we spend so much time looking at our own face and what that does. Like, right now you and I are talking and I’m, you know, 90% of my attention, 95% of my attention is on you. But it’s not lost on me that I’m right there.

Speaker 4 00:36:23  Right?

Eric Zimmer 00:36:24  And I do so much of my work in this sort of virtual thing where I look at my face all day long, not overly intentionally, but it’s there, and that even that is starting to have an effect on the way that we we are.

Vauhini Vara 00:36:38  Yeah. Like the just the awareness of yourself as a kind of object, and not even just an object of other human beings gaze like with what Du Bois was describing, but an object of the algorithmic gaze, right? Like the object of these corporate algorithms that have these, whose determinations have these real consequences. I mean, you point out with your podcast.

Vauhini Vara 00:37:06  That the extent to which you can get people to share posts on social media about the podcast is going to have some role in determining how many people are listening to the podcast. Yeah. And that work is important to you. And similarly, you know, I don’t know that I care in the abstract how many people follow me on social media. But it is true that when I have a new book out, or if I’ve written an article that I want people to read, it helps me if I have a large social media following that, I can broadcast that too.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:36  Absolutely. I mean, it ties into your livelihood. I mean, the, the, the, the book deal you get next will be somewhat based on how well this book sells and also based on what does your platform look like? You know, I mean, I’ve got a book coming out and I think it’s a good book and I’m really proud of it and I’m excited about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:53  But I got the book deal I got because of the platform of the one you feed. I don’t think they were like, oh my God, this idea. I’ve never heard of a book idea so good, or this guy is the next, you know, Shakespeare. I don’t think that was, you know, the idea was good enough. The writing was good enough. Yeah, but what moved the needle more than anything was a platform. And I’m sure there are people out there who can write far better than I do, who are not getting book deals like I got.

Speaker 4 00:38:21  Sure.

Vauhini Vara 00:38:22  Well, I bet it’s going to be a really good book. But also, you’re right.

Speaker 4 00:38:25  You know, it’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:26  Gonna be a great book, and I have enough maybe sense of myself in the world to know. Like, I’m not like, you’re a great writer. I’m not a natively great writer. I think I’ve written a really good book, and I’ve. I’ve had people help me who are really good.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:38  And, you know, I feel really I feel far prouder of it than I thought I would. And there are people who study deeply to become writers. You just don’t become good at something because you’re like, I’m going to pick it up. You become good at something because you do it a lot and you practice and it’s a craft.

Speaker 4 00:38:55  Yeah, yeah.

Vauhini Vara 00:38:56  I know that’s true. I one of my jobs is advising and mentoring people who are working on books. And when I first started doing it 5 or 6 years ago, I was very focused on like I thought the quality of the writing was, was sort of like the only thing that you needed, right?

Vauhini Vara 00:39:11  And now there’s this baseline, you know, in order for me to work with someone, there has to be this baseline. But I recognize far more that when it comes to getting an agent and selling the book. These external factors, like how many people follow you on social media, do play a significant role.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:27  Yeah, there’s a term called I don’t know if you’ve heard it called audience capture. And it speaks to this in a way. It doesn’t mean you’re capturing audience. It means your audience captures you, meaning you begin to you do something. If you’re a creator of any sort, you do something and you get some response. It gets some people to pay attention to you. And slowly, what that audience wants, if you’re not careful, is what you become.

Speaker 4 00:39:54  Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:56  And and oftentimes it narrows and narrows and narrows. You know, you’re a multifaceted person who happened to share. This is a silly example, but who happened to share about the plants you love? And now all of a sudden, you’re the plant person.

Speaker 4 00:40:09  Yeah, right.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:10  And, because we’re playing the algorithmic game.

Speaker 4 00:40:15  You know. Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:16  You could spend a lot of money hiring people whose whole role in life, the only thing they do is know how to manipulate that algorithm to your benefit. And they’ll come in and say, here’s all the things you need to do to try and please the algorithm, which is a really dispiriting way to go about things.

Vauhini Vara 00:40:36  And we’re essentially in that process. We if we’re not careful, we essentially turn into products ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:42  Yes. 100%. Yep. I’m going to take us in a completely different direction, and then maybe we’ll come back around to AI, because the place I would like to go is this is a book about our relationship with technology, but it’s also a book about you, your life. It’s a it’s a memoir. And there’s a significant portion of it is about your sister. So I’m wondering if you could share, if you’re open to it, sharing a little bit about that story, your sister. And then I’d like to explore all of that sort of through the lens of technology also.

Speaker 4 00:41:12  Yeah.

Vauhini Vara 00:41:13  So when I was in high school and my sister was in high school. She was two years older than me. She was diagnosed with this type of cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma. And, it was a really serious form of cancer. And she started treatment right away. And so when she was in her junior year of high school, I was in my freshman year, she, you know, went into treatment where she would be in and out of the hospital for weeks.

Vauhini Vara 00:41:39  And then she went into remission and got better. And then it came back again. And then she went into remission again and got better and went away to college at Duke. I went away to college at Stanford. And then she got sick again, and she passed away when when she was in, in, in college and when I was in my freshman year of college also. She was my only sister. She was my older sister. We were really, really close. She was the person who taught me a lot about how to be a person in the world. and so it was it was a really significant.  Loss for me. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:13  So walk us through a little bit. I’m sorry about your sister, and the way you write about it is her. And the relationship is really beautiful and how even that that led to further downstream effects in your family, like it precipitated an unraveling of many things.

Speaker 4 00:42:32  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:34  Talk to me about how that intersects with technology in this book.

Vauhini Vara 00:42:44  So, you know, I.Think something I started using the internet when I was in middle school in the mid 90s. I’m what they call an elder millennial. I was born in 1982. So, that’s, you know, that’s where I am demographically. And I think, you know, when you’re coming of age, when you’re a teenager and you’re going through difficult things, it can be hard to talk to other people about it. I mean, for me, I was really worried about my sister, but I didn’t want to worry her by talking to her about it, and I didn’t want to worry my parents by asking them all my darkest questions about it. And so I went to Yahoo, which was the most well-known search engine at the time, and started asking it questions about what was going to happen to my sister, what her prognosis was. And then my sister passed away many, many years later, just a couple of years ago. I write that profile of Sam Altman of OpenAI and start to learn more about the technology they’re building and end up getting early access to this AI model that is a predecessor to ChatGPT.

Vauhini Vara 00:43:53  And the way the model works is you type in some words and press a button, and then it kind of finishes the thought for you. And when I started playing around with that, I was like, You know, I really have a hard time talking about my sister and her death and my grief. This thing says that it can write for me when I’m not able to write. Maybe it can communicate on my behalf. So I hadn’t noticed this. It hadn’t occurred to me until very recently, but I think that’s sort of part of the same phenomenon, the way in which, like these products by big technology companies seem to be safer than other actual human beings. which is really insidious. But I ended up like going to this language model and asking it to to write about my sister’s death and my grief.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:41  You go through in the book, sorry, you give it a sentence and it, you know, spits something out. Then you give it a little bit more and it spit. And those of us who use AI to some degree may be getting used to its strangeness, but seeing it in that way, in that book, the way you did it, is just I had another of those moments.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:01  Like, what on earth.

Vauhini Vara 00:45:04  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:05  Is this, you know, it’s such a strange thing.

Vauhini Vara 00:45:10  It is? Yeah. I mean, what was weird to me is that at first, you know, the first sentence I wrote was when I was in my freshman year of high school and my sister was in her junior year. She was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma. That’s the name of the cancer she had. And then I pressed the button, and the first thing it spit out was, like, quite generic. And then it ends with this line that was like, she’s doing great now, which is the opposite of what actually happened to my sister. Right. Like there could be nothing further from the reality. So then I deleted all that. I kept my initial line, and then I wrote more myself. And I kind of did that process over and over. And the thing that was interesting to me is that the further along I got in this process, the more material of my own that I gave to this model, the closer it seemed to get to generating text that did seem to have some relationship with actual grief, with actual loss, with actual sisterhood.

Vauhini Vara 00:46:09  Right. And there were some Lines like the lines that it generated. Like many of them were. Were ridiculous and, you know, nonsensical. But then some of them were very poetic sounding. For me as a reader, I was able to read meaning into them. And the reason I phrase it that way is that the language model itself wasn’t trying to do anything in particular. It didn’t have doesn’t have consciousness. Right? It wasn’t like trying to write about grief. It just was generating language. And then I was making meaning from that language. But I was able to make significant meaning from it.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:47  Yeah, I think that’s the one of the strange things about it is how it can write in ways that make it seem very intelligent, very sensitive, very poetic. And it’s gotten that by basically stealing. That’s one word for it. Or gathering all of the world’s knowledge. Right. And so in many ways, it is a reflection of us. What I was looking for is I had a guest and I cannot remember the name of their book now, but it was a book where one of their parents had died and they they had like a seven year old child and they weren’t quite sure how to talk about death with their child.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:25  So they started asking AI about how to do it, and it turned into a long spiritual conversation where it was, you know, you could tell what AI was pulling from. It was pulling from the Bible and the Dow de Ching and the and, you know, the baga de vida. And I mean, it’s, you know, and it’s, it’s synthesizing all that and in ways it was, it was remarkably good at what it said. So it’s just such a such an odd thing. Yeah. You’re a writer. And so I think, you know, those who create content, maybe the ones who are most directly spooked by AI, although I think everybody is, you know, might might do well to be spooked to some degree. But you describe in the book both your revulsion at the idea of it and your curiosity and that your curiosity had won out. What’s your relationship with it like now?

Vauhini Vara 00:48:16  You know, one thing I will say about that experience of writing about grief and asking trying to ask this technology to produce language on my behalf, is that ultimately what became obvious? And maybe, maybe it should be, should have been obvious from the start, but was that this technology was clearly incapable of expressing something about my reality because it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t even a human being.

Vauhini Vara 00:48:47  It was a machine, right? and so ultimately, even though there was all this language it generated that I could read meaning into when I communicate. And I think this is not just because I’m a writer, I think it’s because I’m a human being. When I communicate, the gratification I get from that communication is from having made the effort of communicating myself. And it sort of does nothing for me if a machine does it for me. I mean, it doesn’t feel that different from like using a magic eight ball or something to produce words.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:19    Yeah, I think that’s true to an extent. But as you mentioned, when the more information you gave it, the more it began to create something that was like your experience. And my experience has been a very similar phenomenon. The more I give it of me and my thoughts and what I felt, the more it can create something that in some ways approximates me. Now I think it’s much more useful for for me, I find it much more useful to have it ask me questions.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:56  Yeah, right. You know, again, as somebody who’s not natively a great writer, it was a really useful tool to be like, ask me questions about X, Y, and Z. And then I would start answering those and and that, you know, that turned out to be really helpful for me. It was like having a collaborative partner. So here’s convenience again. We talked about convenience earlier. For you as a writer, you recognize that the value in writing often is the wrestling with the words themselves.

Vauhini Vara 00:50:26  Exactly. And to be clear, you know, I thought this AI model over time started to generate texts that seemed to say something about about grief, about loss, about sisterhood. But it was none of it was about my experience specifically. It didn’t feel like it was saying something about my experience. and. Yes, exactly. I think being a writer, maybe I’m especially attuned or I especially find value in being the one to express it myself. but then that brings up this other question, which is, you know, for me as a writer or for you as a podcaster, Our livelihood depends on the people who are ultimately choosing to read my books or listening to listen to the podcast.

Vauhini Vara 00:51:14  And so that raises this question of like, if an AI model could hypothetically generate text in the style of my writing that, you know, ended up creating a plausible text that could compete with one of my books, or if an AI model could use your voice, right, you can generate a podcast that, competed with your podcast. Would people find it compelling? Would people pay for that? Would people listen to it? Would people read the book? And I think that’s where the jury’s out.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:47  I think we’re a real interesting inflection point there, because you could train an AI model on my voice, and it would sound more or less exactly like me. And I’ve done 800 episodes so you could train it on how to interview like me. And my guess is today with the a technology, today it would be 75% as good as what I do, which is deeply disconcerting. And I asked myself that question about who who would care and who wouldn’t. That there’s a human here. Yeah, there’s studies around AI as a therapist, and the ones that I’ve seen seem to point towards this, that people will generally rank an AI therapist as more empathetic, listens to them better.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:35  They they like it better up until the moment that they know that it’s an AI therapist, at that moment, the whole thing crumbles.

Vauhini Vara 00:52:44  That’s really interesting.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:45  But I don’t know that five years from now, ten years from now, that holds true in the same way that like kids who grow up with AI, I think there’s going to be a certain percentage of people who are going to say, I want authentic humans. That matters to me. But will most people I don’t know. And that is deeply disconcerting over time that if a machine can do the thing that a human does as well as the human does it, do you need the human right? By a certain logic, now there’s a humanist logic that, you know inside is bristling at every bit of that, of course, but I think it’s a I think it’s an interesting thing to wonder what this all looks like in five years. I mean, I feel so completely uncertain what five years is going to look like and in, in a way that I never have before in my life.

Vauhini Vara 00:53:38  Yeah, I mean, I. One thing I find interesting about that question is that it brings us back, in some ways to the conversation about choice and agency and the whole. Right, the whole subject of of the parable in some ways of your show, which is like to acknowledge that we do have agency, even when it at times feels as if we don’t. And I think we’re at this really interesting inflection point with AI where I was looking at a I think it was a study from Pew recently that said that I think it’s something like 36% of adults in the US have used ChatGPT, and this was like from 2025. So it was it was relatively current. And then that figure surprised me, because if it seems in the zeitgeist, as if this technology, this product is like so much more deeply entrenched than it actually is, but it’s not. And I think, you know, if sometimes feels as if the way in which our culture moves is, sort of like happens in a way that’s divorced from our intentions or our will, but in reality, like we make choices as individuals, as communities, as societies to create the world we want to live in.

Vauhini Vara 00:54:58  And so I’m interested in sort of pausing in 2025 and saying, okay, well, like what is inevitable? What’s not inevitable? I think most of the times, like so much more, is not inevitable than than is inevitable because we don’t know what the future holds. And a lot of it depends on the choices we make. And so I think we could decide now to define a podcast as something that a human podcaster produces with human guess. And we could decide to define a book, a novel, as something that a human novelist writes for human readers. and that way, you know, regardless of how the technology changes, regardless of the extent to which the technology can convincingly sound like me or sound like you, we as humans have drawn a line in the sand saying, here’s what we consider acceptable, here’s what we’re interested in, and here’s what we aren’t.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:00  Yeah, well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. I think you brought us kind of all the way around to where we started and left us with a message of hope that we have a say in, in the direction this all unfolds.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:12  Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the book. I’ve enjoyed your various writings, and I appreciate the subtlety and the nuance with which you’re writing about these things.

Vauhini Vara 00:56:21  Well, and I appreciate that about your line of questioning, too. So thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:25  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.

Elise Loehnen 00:00:00  When envy is made conscious and when we start to use it as a GPS, it’s a very powerful connector to the soul.

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 there. Good, wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:02  How much of your life have you spent trying to be good? For me, that question has shaped so many choices over the years. It shapes how I show up as a podcast host, as a friend, how I show up in my relationships, even how I speak to myself on hard days.But after my conversation with Elise Loehnen., whose new book is called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, I started to question something at the heart of every episode of this show. We talk about feeding the good wolf, but maybe the real challenge is to become a whole wolf, not just a good wolf, today. Elise made me rethink what goodness can actually cost us, how much of ourselves we leave behind when we chase it. We dig into the moments where envy can be useful. The roles we inherit and the stories that keep us stuck. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Elise, welcome to the show.

Elise Loehnen 00:01:55  Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:57  We are going to be discussing your book, which is called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness A process for Reclaiming Your Full Self. But we may also talk about your Substack, your podcasts. You have all sorts of great things out there in the world. But before we get into any of it, we’ll start in the way that we always do with the parable.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:15  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 and your life and in the work that you do.

Elise Loehnen 00:02:49  Oh, Eric. That is so incredibly rich, because that’s, I think, a parable that perfectly encapsulates, particularly in the last five years, all of the work that I do, which is how do we recognize that both wolves are present? You cannot deny the presence of the wolf that you do not like or does not affirm your identity or ego, right? Which I think for most of us is particularly as a woman.

Elise Loehnen 00:03:21  My first book was all about the way that women are conditioned for goodness, quote unquote, goodness. And so we want to disavow that bad wolf, right? And pretend that it doesn’t exist. And it goes into our shadow and it is nipping at our heels. And so all of my work is about both of these wolves are present and at the table, and they’re both essential pieces of our wholeness and what it is to be human. And you cannot deny any part of yourself. Our job is to integrate, to tame that wolf, right? Not to eradicate it or destroy it. And I grew up in Montana, so I know all about what happens when you destroy wolves and what that does to the ecosystem. So the ecosystem collapses.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:13  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the things I love about the parable. I mean, the first is just the obvious choice. You have choice. Choice matters. Right? But the second one is that we all have this inside of us.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:25  I like that normalizing aspect of it. Like, yeah, of course you do. Of course you have parts of you that are, you know, quote unquote greedy or quote unquote lazy. And you really take this on in your last book and in this book, these things we call bad are energies that we can learn to use in a skillful way. And I mean, right in your title of your book. Right. You’re kind of right away saying like, hey, let’s move away from just goodness the good wolf and towards wholeness, which is is both wolves.

Elise Loehnen 00:04:59  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:59  Tell me about this idea of wholeness over goodness.

Elise Loehnen 00:05:03  Yeah. So I when I wrote my first book on our best behavior, it’s the superstructure of the book is a is the Seven Deadly Sins. And I write about them as this punch card of goodness. It’s a secular book. I was not raised in a religious household. And yet I realized, and I do sort of this excavation of history in the book and explain how these sins came to in some ways represent sort of this, the rejected parts of the ego of a good woman.

Elise Loehnen 00:05:36  But they really map to how we are expected to behave and perform our goodness in the world, and to remind people of the sins they are. Sloth. Pride. Envy. lust greed, gluttony and anger. And when I thought about the way that I was controlling myself and performing this goodness, I’m such a good mother. And I’m so caring and selfless and I. I don’t have anyone because I subjugate everything I want to other people’s needs, and I keep my body so disciplined and small and constrained. And I don’t talk about money because money is base and unspiritual and I’m desirable but never desiring. Eric, I know how to be sexy and visibly appealing. But I’m not sexual, right? And I’m never upset about anything that’s really like what it is to perform this idea of goodness. And after I wrote this book, I see a Jungian therapist. Many of my good friends are Jungian therapists. I love the work of Carl Jung. And one of my friends said to me, I don’t know if you were conscious of this, which is hilarious, but you have written a book about the cultural shadow of women and everything that women repress and suppress and then project onto other women.

Elise Loehnen 00:07:06  Because we refused to own these qualities in ourselves, we refused to be gluttonous or greedy or lustful or angry, right? Or lazy. And so that was a big for me. And it was the impetus to do this follow on choosing wholeness over goodness, because the book is really about balance and how these are our internal GPS points. This is these appetites, desires, instincts show us what we want. They they tell us what’s important to us. They outline our boundaries with other people. And when we disavow them and pretend like they hold no sway. Because we’re so good over here. We’re good wolfing. They run our lives and in an unconscious ways. And so I am much more interested, as I’ve come to relax my own grip on what it is to be a good woman. I am much more interested in wholeness and getting close to my fear, and getting close to what I want, and getting close to my anger rather than pretending like it. It doesn’t exist in me at all.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:21  Yeah, I think that there’s certainly cultural things for women 100%, and I think many men also have these.  I mean, these were these were deadly sins for everybody, you know, and one of the things that I have sort of myself wrestled with are similar things about I’m very comfortable being good and, you know, smart and dependable and I mean all these things. And I find it difficult to tweeze out. It takes a lot of inner work for me to tweeze out something like, let’s take something like kindness. Yeah. I think it’s a core value of mine. And I think it’s a it’s a personality. It’s a part of how I’m wired up. So there’s the good. And when am I performing? When am I doing that? Because to not do that would cause me to be seen in some way that I’m not comfortable with. And that gets really tricky when when these things are so close together, at least for me, I have found those always to be. I find that an ongoing excavation.

Elise Loehnen 00:09:36  Can we stay with this for a minute? Because I think it’s so important and I and I’m, I haven’t really gotten the chance to talk to many men about my work.

Elise Loehnen 00:09:44  I think that instinctually they think that I’m going to be blamey or. Sort of shaming of of men, which isn’t at all what, what the work is about. and I write about sort of how women are conditioned for goodness, men are conditioned for power, and that the reputational harm that we levy at women, that she’s a bad mother, bad friend, toxic coworker that is so destructive, destructive, right? To say if someone says about me publicly. Elise is like a horribly mean person, that’s devastating potentially to me and my livelihood even. Or that’s how I would perceive that as an existential threat. I do perceive it as an existential threat. So it’s so interesting that that to you also feels rigidly defended. That’s one of my things, is like, I can’t have anyone say that I’m unkind. even though I’m sure I know, Eric, that there are people who don’t like me. It’s taken me a long time to even admit that because I was so scared of that truth, right? Isn’t that funny? It’s hilarious.

Elise Loehnen 00:10:52  And when someone confronted me on that and said, you don’t really think that, like, everyone holds you in the way that you want to be held, which is that you are the super kind, loving person. Like, are you delusional? and that was so threatening. So I’m so curious about this for you. Like what? When you get the fear underneath this idea of, like, I’m a kind, I’m a hard wired, kind person. And I have no doubt that you are. And I’m sure that there are moments where you’re not kind. Right? Because you’re a human. Yeah, but what does that feel like for you?

Eric Zimmer 00:11:26  I would say it feels sort of, like you said, mildly, existentially frightening, because I think we get cultured in lots like we can talk about culture as a whole, but then we get cultured in specific ways, specific places. So for example, at 24, I was a homeless heroin addict and I got cultured in AA after that for a number of years.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:52  And AA is, you know, saved my life twice. But they start talking about character defects, right? They start talking about selfishness being the root of your problem, which I actually kind of agree with and. Right. And then I move from there into spiritual circles, and I start reading Buddhism and I start and I now I’m getting cultured in another way that your emotions, you should have them under control. And so, yeah, I think to me those things feel sort of existentially frightening, even though I totally recognize that as a man, it’s different than it is for a woman. But I think there’s these, these smaller cultures that can have a really strong influence even when the bigger culture might look a certain different way.

Elise Loehnen 00:12:44  Yeah. And I think, yeah. Saying like, this is men and this is women is obviously highly reductionist. And I really don’t want to be an essentialist. And in the book to I write about and this is, I think, a better fit honestly for, for all of us and a really important distinction that gets like, I don’t think it’s woo woo.

Elise Loehnen 00:13:03  Some people think it’s woo woo, but like, I’m really talking more in some ways about the archetypal energies of femininity and masculinity divorced from gender. Right? Yes. And that ultimately Eric and Elise are these whole balanced humans who are equally, maybe not at every moment of the day in their feminine and in their masculine. They’re in their their masculine being sort of structure, order, truth, and that external drive in the world and the feminine being, creativity, nurturance, love, care and that internal holding and that we have those capacities equally. Yep. And that it’s important for us to express them both. And I think men, the way that we’re conditioned women are conflated with femininity. Right. And that they’re supposed to hold that energy only and entirely, and that men, conversely, are conflated with masculinity and that they are supposed to hold that entirely and that that masculinity is power and that femininity is goodness. And in reality, obviously, we need men more men like you who are fully also in their feminine.

Elise Loehnen 00:14:22  and I’m a very mask. I’m very comfortable in my masculine, maybe more comfortable, but yeah. So I think that that’s where you start getting into these really juicy conversations where we’re both we’re all grappling with these ideas of goodness and power. Power is also getting a really bad rap for good reason. But how do we actually hold it in a healthy way?

Eric Zimmer 00:14:44  Right, because power can be power over other people. But power can also be an internal type of power. It can be a it can be a self-efficacy. It can be a belief in my ability to drive outcomes. In my world, it’s not only a power over other people kind of thing, even though that’s how we tend to think of it. But it’s an but it is an it is an energy. And as you were saying that about masculine and feminine, I was also thinking about one level before earlier condition for me, which was that at like 15, I got really into punk rock music.

Elise Loehnen 00:15:20  Of course you did.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:21  And a lot of that music seems aggressive, but there is a definite, at least in the bands that I love.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:28  Like, you don’t want to be like those guys. You don’t want to be like those typical Idiot. And so all of a sudden, you start defining yourself as an opposite of something, which is, I don’t think, usually ever a good way, a good way to go about it. Right? Not at least in the long term. I mean, I think there’s pendulum swings often, but but yeah. So I think it’s a I think it’s an interesting question. I do think learning to allow both of those energies their place and finding out what your balance sort of naturally is.

Elise Loehnen 00:16:04  Yeah. Do you know the Enneagram? Are you an Enneagram type nine?

Eric Zimmer 00:16:10  Yes, I sure. Well, look, I.

Elise Loehnen 00:16:14  I guess you are giving yourself away.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:16  This will play. This will play.

Elise Loehnen 00:16:18  Me Enneagram type nine, who has a lot of things in common with you.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:21  So this will further make me clearly a nine is that I feel like any test I take, I’m a little of everything.

Elise Loehnen 00:16:29  Yes, that’s very nice.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:31  Which is nine. Right. And so yes, 100%. You’ve got me.

Elise Loehnen 00:16:34  I got you.

Elise Loehnen 00:16:35  What are you. Yeah. No, I’m a six.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:37  Okay.

Elise Loehnen 00:16:38  Sixes and nines. I think we’re the most common, but.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:42  Is that true?

Elise Loehnen 00:16:43  Yeah, I.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:44  Think that I did.

Elise Loehnen 00:16:45  Not. Three sixes and nines are quite common, but. And nines are very hard to type because, as you just said, they see themselves in everyone. And you. All you want is that wholeness and that harmony and sixes. Because we’re so context driven and we see everything through sort of that lens of fear. we are like, well, I could be like this in this situation and that in this situation. So we’re both very hard to type and mutable in that way. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. I mean, I really love a nine, I have to say.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:23  Well, here I am.

Elise Loehnen 00:17:24  I’m always like, let’s get you in your body.

Elise Loehnen 00:17:26  No need to numb, no need to dissociate, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:30  Yep, yep. That has been that has been a big part of the of the process for me. For sure, for sure. All right. So let’s move on a little bit. And I want to talk about a concept that I’ve heard you write about. I guess I haven’t heard, I’ve read you write about on Substack and is in the book, and it’s this idea of above the line, below the line. What does that mean?

Elise Loehnen 00:17:55  This is such a good and helpful tool that so Courtney Smith, who’s a friend of mine who’s actually an amazing Enneagram coach, worked on this book with me. And this concept comes from Conscious Leadership Group. And it’s this idea that we live our lives mostly below the line and we’re driven below the line, because fear is the baseline reality for most of us, even if we, I think speaking of Enneagram, we all have our mechanisms and strategies for trying to get away from fear. But fear runs our lives in many ways that are somewhat invisible.

Elise Loehnen 00:18:34  And when fear is present in our system, we go below the line. So when you are below the line, you see yourself as being at the effect of the world. The world is happening to you, which is inherently disempowering. And when you are below the line, you are typically in what’s called the drama triangle, where there are heroes and villains and victims, and you are very busy when you’re below the line figuring out who is in those roles, right? Creating, driving towards certainty, who is to blame, what needs to be fixed, who’s suffering? How do I get? How do I resolve the situation below the line? And most of us spend most of our time below the line. It’s just a function of being human. Now, when you are able to recognize that you’re below the line, sometimes you can get above the line. And when you’re above the line, you are in a creator space. You see, the world is happening for you, by you, through you.

Elise Loehnen 00:19:39  You see that you are participating in your reality and and that, not that you’re again, you don’t want to shift below the line and saying like, I’m I’m to blame. But it’s more about like you recognize that you are responsible for your experience and that you have power to affect your life. And you’re not looking again in that drama triangle way to say like, this is the problem. You’re the problem. You’re you’re being hurt. You’re the oppressor. You’re the oppressed. it’s a different frame and it’s much more creative, actually, and empowering to say, oh, I can actually affect the world. I can change the world. I can engage with the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:41  I love that you used three different framings, as you said. You could say the world is happening for you. And then what were the next two that you said? Through you and.

Elise Loehnen 00:20:51  You and by.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:52  You. By you. Yeah. Because that phrase for me, I just can’t get there like, and I find this a lot like I, I’m like, I kind of have to move neutral ish. Right? Yeah. Nine. Right. Of course. you know, for me, I have a bunch of reasons why I why that challenges me, but I can get to sort of through me and to a certain degree by me. Meaning I am absolutely integrated into this whole thing, and I am just a part of everything that’s happening. And sometimes there are things that are happening that are good, and sometimes there are things that are happening that are bad. And that’s being a human.

Elise Loehnen 00:21:33  Yeah, I, I’m with you on the for you because I think when we get to a really evolved place with our experiences where we’ve done a lot of work and you’ve obviously had some really hard experiences, it’s I think a lot to ask of people immediately to be like, this is happening for me. I really recognize that, like, I’m supposed to be sleeping on the street corner right now. maybe now, you know, you can say that that happened for you, but I think it’s too much to ask on the regular, you know, that we’re like, yes, this terrible tragedy really happened for me.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:11  Yeah. My issue is not so much that because I can’t see that, like, I mean, many very difficult things in my life are were remarkably important in what happened. And I would say on some level, I’m grateful that I’m a heroin addict. I mean, I would go that far. Like I’m grateful that that’s the way things kind of went for me. I don’t think everybody has to get to that point. It’s more that there is that the world is being arranged in such a way for me versus right. It centers me in a way that I’m not entirely comfortable with. Well, there you go. I’m playing to type.

Elise Loehnen 00:22:53  I get it. You are, you are. I know it’s like you’re the biggest piece of shit that the whole world revolves around, right? Like, it’s that paradox that I think so many of us hold. Yeah. Reminds me of that story of, like, this Hasidic rabbi who keeps two notes in his pocket and one is like, essentially like you’re a speck of dust. And the other says, like, this world was created for you. And that he sort of throughout the day is referring to one note or the other to just write himself. And that’s like, that’s so life to be. Yes, both. To quote Father Richard Rohr, praying for your daily humiliation and rightsizing and to feel enough sort of natural hubris or healthy narcissism that you are like, my life counts and matters and I can change things. Maybe not for everyone, but I can have a positive impact on the world. And so finding that balance where you, you know, speaking of power and what we were talking about earlier and the way I think we’re watching what feels like kabuki theater at this moment in time of people who are just drunk and inflated, so inflated and distorted and just watching it, it’s like a one of those hoses that’s completely out of control, right? Yeah. yeah. It’s like, wrap that up, like, you know, and it’s just it obviously is like, devastating, implications.

Elise Loehnen 00:24:30  But so it’s that balance of, like, I’m important, I’m special, and we’re all special. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:36  Right. There’s a there’s an Indian mystic, Nisga’a dada. I never can say I’m terrible.

Elise Loehnen 00:24:43  I’m with you. I can’t pronounce anything. I can read anything.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:46  Oh, good. I’m glad we chose this. The a career where we have to talk. It’s. I’m constantly exposed on this. I’m like, it has three syllables. I don’t think I know how to say it, or.

Elise Loehnen 00:24:55  It’s really helpful to people that we can’t see it or.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:58  Or. I know what it means. I’ve never heard it aloud. Like, I think readers find that a lot, you know? Anyway, this guy said something along the lines of, you know, wisdom tells me I’m nothing. Love tells me I’m everything. In between the two of my life flows.

Elise Loehnen 00:25:17  I love that.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:18  Yeah. Which is sort of the same thing as the rabbi with the two notes. It’s both those things. You know, I’m incredibly special, and I’m not really that unique. Yeah. Let’s move into the book for a moment. And as you mentioned, the book is laid out by these things that are traditionally considered the seven deadly sins, but that you would frame as perhaps energies within us. That is that how would you powers?

Elise Loehnen 00:25:47  the Enneagram holds them as energies. I think energies is the right. I would say energies. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:53  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this. And I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control.Download the free guide. Now. At oneyoufeed.net/edbookand take the first step towards getting back on track. 

Before we get into those though, there is in the book a sort of core process that you apply to all seven of these, and we’re not going to get through seven processes and seven sins. That’s 49 things we would need to get to, and we’re not going to get there. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about these key tools, though.

Elise Loehnen 00:27:05  Yeah. So there’s this. The way that we set it up is that there’s this core process that you can apply to any story, and it doesn’t have to be a story related to one of the sins. It could be any story in your life, but that it’s the seven tools that make up this core process. And then each sin has its own. We’re calling them expansion moves or shift moves. Tools that you can use that are specific to the body or money and feelings of scarcity and influence or anger. Scripts for saying no.

Elise Loehnen 00:27:35  Just like there’s a ton. Everything I’ve learned from being a podcast host and writer is in this book. I don’t know how to calm myself down, Eric and restrain myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:46  So I say same problem in my book. I mean, I was like, I know that, like, I should be like, I should, I should really narrow this probably could be narrow down, but I’m like, I can’t, I mean, I did I, you know, I narrowed it and yeah, yeah.

Elise Loehnen 00:28:03  Yeah. yeah. No. My editor, when she asked for this, I think she was expecting a journal with some prompts and blank pages, and I was like, here’s a 345 page book. but it’s actually it is. You can work so that you can do both.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:19  It has both. Yes.

Elise Loehnen 00:28:20  Yeah, it has both.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:20  It has both.

Elise Loehnen 00:28:21  Yeah. And so the core process really hinges on this idea that when we are constructing our personalities and figuring out who we are in the world and how to show up for approval and love and all of these external markers of success, we start telling ourselves stories about who we are and how we need to behave.

Elise Loehnen 00:28:43  So the central premise of the process is built around identifying a story and making it conscious, and stories as distinct from facts, because many of us think that facts and stories are the same thing. So a fact is something that can be captured on a video camera. Eric and Elise are having a conversation on a podcast. The story is everything else.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:07  So the story is Eric’s.

Elise Loehnen 00:29:09  The.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:09  Best.

Elise Loehnen 00:29:10  You’ve ever had.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:11  Stupid things. Yeah. So yeah.

Elise Loehnen 00:29:13  This I’m failing. Everyone’s gonna hate me.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:16  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Elise Loehnen 00:29:17  We have a million stories, right? Like in your own life. the easy example is a fact. Might be that my husband walks into the house and doesn’t acknowledge me. And then the stories that I start telling myself, he’s mad at me. I’ve done something wrong. He had a really bad day. He lost his job. We’re getting divorced. You know, it’s just crazy, right? With the mind does to make meaning of a simple fact.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:42  And that is such a foundational thing, I think.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:48  Yes. Learning to disentangle a fact from a meaning or a story from a from a truth, you know, and it’s amazing to be able to do it.

Elise Loehnen 00:29:58  Yes. And to see what you are capable of. We’re incredible creators, and this is how we make meaning. These stories structure our whole lives. Culture is a story. Gender is a story in many ways. All of it is story. A country is a story. Being a parent is a story. And I, you know, I tell myself all sorts of stories about how much my kids need me.

Speaker 4 00:30:21  And la la la la.

Elise Loehnen 00:30:22  Story, unfortunately. Story. I don’t know that that’s true. So this is the core thing is using fact versus story to start as a practice, to start generating the stories that you have. So if we’re talking about sloth, for example, which is this idea that women are sort of, I think many of us, so we can just stop talking about it. As women, there’s always doing that needs to be done to be take rest as lazy.

Elise Loehnen 00:30:47  I have a this is a big one for me. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:51  Me too.

Elise Loehnen 00:30:51  Yeah. So this one of my stories, by going through the facts, by doing this process of fact versus story, I came to understand that one of my stories is I’m the only one who can do it right, Eric. So I should do it all. And then when you take that story. So that’s a story that I work and you take it through the seven step process. The goal is that you start to make it so visible to yourself, and you start to. Through these tools, you recognize the underlying fear that drives that story. How far that story has gotten you and why you’ve ascribed to it so intensively. I can attribute a lot of my success in life to that story. It’s true. It’s been helpful to me. It’s also been totally deleterious. And I, I have structured all of my relationships to reinforce this story to myself. So one of my favorite parts of this process is a tool called Teach the Class, where you take your story.

Elise Loehnen 00:31:52  So another story for me is if I accept money from someone, then they own me. It’s another story of mine. I have a lot of stories about my body. If I, you know, I’ve gained £15 in the last five years. That’s a fact. One of my stories is, if I don’t get myself under control, you know I’ll be. I’ll be giant. This is probably a story that’s very familiar. Like I’m totally out of control. I’ll never be. I’m. I’m done. So then you take those stories, and this is, I think, tool 5 or 6. In the process, you’ve done a lot of work to understand the fear that’s driving that story. You teach it. You teach a class on it to a women’s college, a bunch of 20 something women to make sure that they also have that story. We want people to do these practices because want it makes it really visible to yourself what you’re up to. And then it also you recognize the way that you’re transmitting these stories to the people you love and to younger generations, and what you’re modeling by being someone who’s the only one who can do it right.

Elise Loehnen 00:33:00  So you should do it all. And when I teach that class to a bunch of 22 year olds, I’m like, you pick a, you do everything really fast so no one else can do it. First you say, and then no one knows how to do it because they’ve never done it before. So they don’t know any of the processes or the protocols or the contacts. So then they have to ask you and just reinforcing that you’re the only one who can do it. Right? Right. When you believe the story, you get to be the only one in control of everything. And that also means that you get to do everything, so you get to perpetuate it. When you believe the story, you don’t delegate at work because, man, someone could take your job or be better at it than you, so you make sure they don’t even have a chance to shine. Right. Like as you start scripting it and we provide all these exercises, when you’re scripting this curriculum, you’re like, holy bananas.

Elise Loehnen 00:33:50  Look at what I’m up to and what I have created in my life that I am then enslaved to and committed to upholding. Because if I don’t do that, I have to face my fear, which is for me. And that story in particular is that no one would love me. People love me because I’m so useful and I do everything for them, and I’m always of service and I make everything convenient. And absent that, like, why would my husband be married to me? Why would anyone like me? Because my whole ego and personality has been structured around being a person who is useful, and that is hard medicine. But now that I know that, I can start putting that story down and relaxing it.

Speaker 5 00:34:40  And letting my husband answer some school emails.

Elise Loehnen 00:34:43  And we’re changing the dynamic of our relationship rather.

Speaker 5 00:34:48  Than blaming him for my own story.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:52  Right, right. So I want to stay in here, but a question comes up with what you just said because you just said, you know, my worth comes from being useful, right?

Elise Loehnen 00:35:02  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:03  And for me, I actually think being useful is an actual value. Yes I have. Right. And so so this is the this is that tweezing apart process. We talked about how much of this usefulness I’m doing is because I, because it’s a value of mine. And how much am I doing it. Because I am hiding is that I mean, how do you think about that question?

Elise Loehnen 00:35:32  Well, I think that the story that I put down and took up in its place is I am more powerful and in greater service to the world when I can accept support. And the place that I got to was that I am fearful of accepting support because I don’t think I’m deserving. I’m worried that absent that utility, like I would cease to have a purpose or a role in people’s lives. So it’s like finding that line between my greatest joy is to serve and I our work. Right? Your show. My show. Like, I love giving that as my service to the world. And it’s like.

Elise Loehnen 00:36:17  It feels like my deepest dharma. Right? It is. It feels so good. I love the taking care of the details of people’s. It’s it’s soothing to me to, like, do that. And I can do that without feeling so committed to the rigidity of this story. And I learned this in some ways from Courtney, my co-author, because when we first taught this retreat, we taught a retreat that became this book. And she showed up. I was like, we’ll just go and like, be with these women and it will be amazing. And she showed up and had created this core process. And I was like, I have never experienced, professional support in this way. I have always been the person doing this for other people? Yeah. And it was so moving, Eric, for me and so fun. And I just got to be myself and be in the room and make it fun for people. And she had created all this structure and support, and I was like, wow, this can actually be far more powerful than me being like, I’m just going to do everything myself, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:37:25  Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:26  Absolutely. That sounds wonderful.

Elise Loehnen 00:37:29  Did that answer that question, though? Because I think it’s really important. It’s like when when that gift becomes like an enslavement, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:37:37  Right, right. And I think these seven key tools, the core process is sort of how you start to delineate that. Yeah.

Elise Loehnen 00:37:45  And choose it consciously. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:47  And choose it, you know, choose it consciously. And you know, there’s another thing that and I think this maybe comes with with more time or more more awareness. But I also sometimes can tune into. Do I feel like I’m feeling compelled? There’s something a little jagged about it. And there’s something a little. It just feels pushed. Versus is this something that feels right? And it’s it’s actually very subtle, but I feel like I’ve gotten better, at least at, at tuning into that.

Elise Loehnen 00:38:24  And I bet it’s through bringing your body online and into some sort of alignment. Yeah. And saying like, is this what we call it in the book? Is this a full body? Yes.

Elise Loehnen 00:38:37  Is this a full body? No. How does this feel when I run it through my body? Does my energy go up or does my energy go down? because similar to you, I found myself compulsively responding. Yes, yes. Even though I was like, I don’t want to do that. And as it would approach, I’d be like, I don’t want to do this, and I’m angry that this person asked me to do this, even though the responsibility is on me to say thank you for the opportunity. No. Thank you. Yeah. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:09  Yeah. And the one I find one of the hardest things about that. I remember I had a coaching client at one point and she was constantly saying yes to things, and we said a rule which was, you cannot say yes to anything. All you can say is, that’s a great opportunity. I will get back to you. And I think that was really important for her because I think something happens. I have this happen. Somebody asked me to do something.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:36  And on if I just take it on its own, I’m like, that sounds awesome. But I have to take it in the context of everything else in my life, right? It’s not a thing that exists out there on its own. It has to exist in my actual life. And that takes me a little bit longer to be like, all right, hang on a second. That does sound amazing. But do you really want to fly back from London and immediately get on a, you know, get on another flight to Las Vegas? I mean, and then I start going, oh, that’s actually okay. This all in principle, this sounds like something I want to do, but in reality, you know. But but that energy of like, oh, that sounds great. You know, will sink me every time if I’m not careful.

Elise Loehnen 00:40:22  Yes. So there are two tools in the book about this. One is, yes, like the pause. Just let me get back to you.

Elise Loehnen 00:40:29  That’s been essential for me to a 24 hour. I need to sit with this because I get excited. Everything sounds fun. I want to help people, I want to show up, etc.. Yeah. And then I also wrote a full page of scripts for saying no because I would find myself side skirt, you know, side skirting, being angry at the person for asking, ignoring. Not responding, ghosting. and with these scripts, there’s an accountability measure of, like, you have to practice. You have to sit practicing. No. in fact, we have a whole tool about that’s called the no diet, where you just have to say no ritually and habitually for a week as a practice. Yeah. Because it’s so hard for for us. but, yeah, these scripts for essentially acknowledging that. Thank you for thinking of me. This is so exciting. I am overcommitted. Please ask me again. I would love to be considered. I do have ten variations. just because it’s so common.

Elise Loehnen 00:41:34  And I found myself at a loss for what to do. Yeah. And then I would get into these lengthy explanations, and, I mean, it was a mess. It was a mess, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:46  Yep. But but it actually learning to do it and and do it that way is actually really a Your kindness? Yes. I mean, it’s good for you, I get. I mean, it’s good for us, but it’s a kindness. Like I would much rather somebody that I know that I have a little bit of a relationship with to say, sorry, can’t do that. Then disappear. Right. Or, you know, not know how to say no and and avoid. And now everything’s weird, you know, just a simple like, yeah, I’d love to, but I can’t like, great, you know, 98% of the world. Well, I’m not gonna I’m not going to categorize that. A lot of people will just be like, okay, thanks for letting me know.

Elise Loehnen 00:42:26  Know clarity is kindness. And I think.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:29  That’s a great line. Clarity is kindness. Lovely.

Elise Loehnen 00:42:32  It is. And yeah, and I think if you put yourself on the other end, your experience is exactly that. You’re like, thanks for letting me know. I can move on and ask someone else. Yeah. I’ve also found now that I’ve been actually doing this practice, that people do come back to me, I because I would also get that hit of FOMO like, oh, what if that had been amazing? Saying maybe I needed that financially. And I found that actually people do return or something comes in that’s a better fit. It’s weird how the universe conspires.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:16  The other thing is, if you don’t respond right, the way that is often taken is they don’t like me. They don’t want to do anything with me. They’re not interested in me. Whatever that is, that’s usually the least helpful way if you’re on the asking end to interpret it. Like, I just sort of assume, like if I don’t hear from somebody that I thought would be the sort of person that would normally reply to me, but I’m not going to badger them over this thing, but I’m also not going to be like, oh, I guess that relationship.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:45  I just feel like they’re probably busy. And then I’ll think about them a few weeks or a month or two later and I’ll be like, hey. Thinking of you again. You know, just as if you know. As if nothing was weird.

Elise Loehnen 00:43:55  Right? Right. Totally. No, I think it’s actually, I think part of what happens, at least I can speak from my own experience, is that we’re so terrified to of hearing know that we struggle to say it or to lay down a boundary of any kind. And then when you actually start practicing saying no, and you in turn build your tolerance for hearing, now you’re like, oh, this is fine. Actually, this is fine. This is not world ending. This is not the rejection of all rejections. But I think for whatever reason we have, I don’t know if it’s a new thing. Probably not. But, but maybe in the world of hyper connectivity, it is more present than it used to be. Right? There are more requests.

Elise Loehnen 00:44:43  But I do think that building that tolerance for It’s really a setting, a boundary. And obviously, as we know from the the culture boundaries are hard for people. There’s a lot of interest in setting boundaries. Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:58  Yes, they are exceptionally hard. They sure are. Just a couple more things on this core. Core process. The tool number five is, you know, what do these stories get you owning the payoffs and costs of our unconscious stories. And you alluded to that a little bit when you were talking through some of your stories. But I think that’s a really useful thing to think about too, is like, what? What am I getting out of this? And I think that’s a like, I, I write a lot about change and, and how we change. And recognizing that ambivalence is really important. Yeah. Recognizing like, okay, I actually do kind of want to do that even though I don’t want to do it. Yeah. And I am getting something out of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:44  It’s sort of like with addiction, it’s not very useful to just throw the whole thing off as, like, a bad trait. Yeah, right. It’s because there was a reason you would destroy your life over something like that. You were getting something from it. Now it was no longer worth the trade by a long shot. But to pretend that you don’t need whatever that thing was. And then once you do that, you can be more skillful in how you choose to meet that need.

Elise Loehnen 00:46:21  Yeah. Yeah. And I think addiction is a really ripe example of this. I think that, it’s a bit like Marie Kondo. There are these, like. It’s like thinking your socks, you know, sometimes these. We just outgrow these stories, too. Or, we wear them out or they’re no longer useful. But often these stories and the ways that we structure our personality are lifesaving and are essential for navigating the world and creating structure and safety. As mentioned that story, I’m the only one who can do it right, so I should do it.

Elise Loehnen 00:46:58  All has gotten me really far. Now its costs are too heavy. It’s too hard for me to keep maintaining and feeding the story. It’s time for me to put it down. But it was only through this process that I really realized, like, oh, I’m committed to this. Can I commit to not having this story, or can I or can I say, I’m going to make this conscious and commit to it even more? I think, and I’m sure this has been your experience, and you can’t really tell someone when it’s time to put a story down too. But often we find, and this has happened at retreats where people will come and it’s a bit like the story Olympics, you know, where they’re like, this is my story. And you’re like, that is a hard story. Stories of betrayal and loss and just really difficult things. Even story, you know, stories of addiction. Right. And what can happen. And again, there’s no point. Someone has to come to this realization on their own.

Elise Loehnen 00:47:55  You can’t force it. But some people are not ready to say, you know what? Like this story is, these shoes are too small for me, and I no longer want to be the person who is defined by their husband betraying them and walking out on their family. Or I no longer want to be defined as the person who had cancer or who had an addiction, an active addiction. So, there comes a point, I think, when when people are like, oh wait, this is heavy baggage. And I, I can continue to blame everything on this story or use this as a crutch or use it as a reason, and it might be a valid reason. Again, I’m not suggesting that it’s not. Or I can say, all right, I got to be flexible here. I gotta, like, choose something else.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:45  Yeah, I think about this a lot when it comes to things like, diagnoses, mental health diagnoses, addictions, identities that like, there’s a point for many, many people where those things are extraordinarily useful for a time.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:01  Yeah. Until all of a sudden they’re not right until all of a sudden they’re not. And at that point, I think the word you used is one I really like, which is flexibility. Can I pick up this story when it’s useful for me, and can I put it down when it’s not useful for me. Right. Right. Can I see it as a as a thing that helps me orient and make sense out of my life? Okay. That’s great. And can I see when it’s not right in this particular situation? It is a flexibility is a is a key element I think.

Elise Loehnen 00:49:32  Right. Like when you, Eric, are in a situation where, opioids are on offer, let’s say you’re passing a kidney stone, right? Like in that moment, the story I have a an addiction to opioids is a very useful story, right? For you to keep yourself safe. But when you are like, I can’t get this job because of my addiction, it’s not useful, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:50:00  Like, precisely.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:01  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s why I am like like Enneagram. Like I’m like, well, I like Enneagram. I like these personality things up to a point, right? Because then I’m like, I don’t I don’t want to define myself that way. It’s useful to a certain point to see my tendencies. Yeah, but I don’t want to limit myself and see everything through that lens, which again, I get is a nice thing to feel. But it is that that ability to just be flexible and recognize and I use that word very specifically tendency see because I think we have tendencies and it’s good to know what our tendencies are, but that’s that’s what they are. They are not like, you have to be that way. You can only be that way. You will always be that way. It’s that you left, left unguided. That’s kind of where you’ll drift to. But you can choose a different destination.

Elise Loehnen 00:51:00  Now, what I’ve come to feel about personality systems like that, which I love, obviously, or astrology or any of the human design or any of these mystical systems or personality types, particularly when they’re paired with coaching or with therapy.

Elise Loehnen 00:51:19  I think that they’re incredibly useful. And I’ve I have friends who are both who are, you know, therapists who are astrologers or Enneagram people who coach. And I think they’re really helpful because they allow the therapist or coach to triangulate off of type or tendency, as you said, in order to actually address what’s present in a way that is slightly less confrontational and direct. But I think it’s really helpful to say like, well, Eric, as a nine, your tendency is to dissociate and nom, and this is a trait of most nines, right? Like this is where this is the addiction type on the Enneagram. And it only goes so far. Right. But it gives them, I think, an opportunity to sort of contextualize what’s happening for people in like a we context, like in something that’s larger than them, so that then you can actually like get close to what’s present and it’s not as charged. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Eric Zimmer 00:52:20  It totally does make sense. Yeah. I don’t want to ever hear my horoscope.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:25  I don’t ever want to hear a psychic reading I don’t like. Even if you came to me and you’re like, I’ll give you this $25,000 package of, you know, all the best psychics in the world. I would say keep going down the road for someone else because I don’t even want it in my head. Yeah, like I don’t believe.

Elise Loehnen 00:52:42  In predicting the future either, for what it’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:44  Worth. Yeah, exactly. That’s that’s precisely it. Yeah. Because I would be like, that’s all nonsense. Except for, like 2% of my brain is going to be like, oh, shit, you better watch out for X, Y and Z, you know? And I just don’t want that, you know, I want that 2%, you know? I don’t know, all for me.

Elise Loehnen 00:53:01  I know a lot of psychics and mediums, incredible world class ones and mediums I think can be so incredibly life affirming for people who are in distress. But I feel like I have never heard anyone, any of these world class psychics and mediums predict the future.

Elise Loehnen 00:53:20  One. I don’t think that they would. It’s not responsible. And to there’s free will, you know, it’s like they can see sort of a panoply of of possibilities. But I don’t think that they would know. I don’t think they see necessarily beyond that veil, but I think they can be really interesting in terms of contextualizing and telling you what’s already happened to you in a way that you’re like, wow, that’s weird. yeah. Yeah, I’m not into. I don’t want anyone to tell me what’s going to happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:48  Yeah. So I probably have a limited view of what that that world is like, because I tend to think of it as.

Elise Loehnen 00:53:54  And I’m just kidding.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:57  You’ll guide me into into in the into the strange lands.

Elise Loehnen 00:54:01  Woo woo! You out. All right. I like it all. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:05  Let’s do.

Elise Loehnen 00:54:05  It. I’m a cafeteria queen of everything.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:12  So now I’d like to move into a couple of the sins. If we get there. And the first is envy.I think this is a really interesting one. So? So talk to me about envy.

Elise Loehnen 00:54:23  I am just stating. I really want to hear how this shows up in your life, because I sort of posit that envy is the gateway sentence to all the other sins. It is. I think the source of all the women on women hate that we experience in our culture. And originally, the very beginning of this journey, I wanted to write a book entirely about envy. It was how I came to honor best behavior because I was like, this is it. Envy is our unconscious. Envy is, spinning women out. And I will say that when I talk about all of my work, that is what every woman wants to invariably talk about. So this started many, many, many years ago. I was interviewing Lori Gottlieb, who wrote Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is a great book about therapy. And she made this very small aside. She said, envy shows us I always tell my clients to pay attention to their envy because it shows them what they want.

Elise Loehnen 00:55:34  And I could not get this out of my head. For two reasons. One, the first reason was that I had this visceral going back to the idea of the two wolves. I had this visceral feeling about envy where I was like, oh God, I envy never. Like I would never. I don’t envy anyone. Gross. So of course I was like, oh, God. Flagging, flagging for therapy, follow up. And then the second thing was was very sad for me, which is this idea that envy shows you what you want. Someone has something or is doing something that you want for yourself. I was like, well, what do I want? I don’t know, I have no idea. I could not tell you what I wanted. And that was really sad. And so I kept thinking about this. I was like, okay, if envy is this mechanism by which you can figure out what you want. What if I reverse engineer it? Because what happens? And this gets into shadow.

Elise Loehnen 00:56:35  But I think what happens with envy for women in particular, but maybe also for you, is that because I think it’s so bad when I start to get this like feeling of envy, when someone is doing something that I want or has something that I want, I realize that I would repress it and suppress it and then project it and make whoever was inspiring my envy bad. And so I realized that was the process and that I could reverse engineer it. I could unwind it to figure out who I was envious of and what I wanted. And I did this. And this won’t surprise you. This is maybe eight years ago. I was the chief content officer at goop, at the time co-host of the podcast Ghostwriting Books. I had ghostwritten, I think probably 11 books at that point. I’d never written under my own name. I worked at a company where we didn’t have bylines I love hiding behind other people and I noticed that I was would say things like are like, why do people think her book is so good? I don’t understand how that’s a New York Times bestseller or I think she’s a, you know, annoying.

Elise Loehnen 00:57:45  I don’t like her as an interviewer, she annoys me, etc. and I was like, there we go. This is not about this writer or this podcast host. This is about me and what I want. And these women are holding up a mirror and knocking on my soul’s door and saying, pay attention to this. I am doing something or I have something that you want. Now go get it. And so when envy is made conscious and when we start to use it as a GPS, it’s a very powerful connector to the soul. And I think when I observe our culture and I hear women, and again, I spend more time with women maybe than you do. And I hear that sort of irrational. I just don’t like her. She rubs me the wrong way. Who does she think she is? That that instinct. I need to put her back in her place. She is too big for her britches. She is a tall poppy in the poppy field and envy Venn diagrams, I will say with pride and with greed because of scarcity.

Elise Loehnen 00:58:52  Because we also have this feeling like if she has this thing, there’s only room for one. So in order to have this thing, I need to destroy her. These things all conspire together for a lot of what I, what I think we see in the culture, which is like taking visible women down based on reputational harm and just destroying them and then showing up for their comeback tours. Always. But that’s the mechanism. And so I think as women, when we look around and we are invariably sad about what we haven’t accomplished in the world. And we want to blame men, and we want to blame the system, and we want to blame patriarchy. And some of that blame is deserved, I think. But a lot of it is us. We are. We’ve internalized patriarchy and we’re enacting it on each other. We’re policing ourselves and each other and striking down women who dare to be seen and who are going after what they want and are avatars of possibility. Right. But we wouldn’t allow ourselves to do that.

Elise Loehnen 00:59:54  We wouldn’t let ourselves get away with that. And so we project and then we destroy. So I think envy, if we could work with our envy honestly and recognize, like I’m deprecating her because she’s making me feel bad about myself, it’s not actually about what she’s doing. It would be incredibly transformational, I think, for women, and I don’t I don’t know. My experience in talking to male therapists who work with men Specifically is that envy is very different. It’s much more overt. It’s much more actionable for men. But what has been your experience?

Eric Zimmer 01:00:32  I would say that everything you’ve said has some some elements in it for me. I certainly have gotten a lot better at realizing when I don’t like a man, which would be, I don’t know, 75 to 95% of them. not Joe. Joe. I love you, Joe. Chris. Chris is editing. No, no. I love it. Is that oftentimes there’s an envy component of it. I see them as being something or having something that I don’t when it’s there.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:13  And so I’ve gotten a lot better at sort of recognizing that. And I certainly recognize when I don’t when I really don’t like someone, I have to really look like, okay, what’s going on here? Yeah. You know, like, I’ll just, you know, I’ll be transparent. Andrew Huberman, it’s very easy for me as a gut reaction to dislike Andrew Huberman. There is no good possible reason on Earth. I barely know anything about him. But he’s been extraordinarily successful as a podcaster. He looks to me like the typical sort of macho man. And I’ve heard a couple vague rumblings about him. And so it’s very easy for me just to be like, yeah. And so for me, the work is like, okay, there is envy there because you want to, you know, you would love your podcast to be huge and b you don’t know anything else about it. Like that’s a, that’s an irrational dislike. I don’t want to use the word irrational. I will say that it’s not a well-founded dislike.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:17  Now as far as envy pointing us towards what we want. For me, I have to be careful here because, yes, sometimes envy does show me exactly what I want. And I think, like many people, I can be mimetically driven into wanting things that aren’t actually what I want or aren’t actually good for me.

Elise Loehnen 01:02:40  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:40  Or are things that are sort of wired into me that maybe are instincts that I don’t want to let run wild, right? And so for me, it’s it’s a little bit of yes, I agree, I always when I, when I feel it, it’s sort of a good time for me to go. Okay. Interesting. What’s going on?

Elise Loehnen 01:03:00  Do you think that envy is memetic? Because I think that and I love that you brought this up. I love Rene Girard’s work, but I feel like envy is singular and that when you actually if you said to your friends, like, are you envious of Andrew Huberman? Most of them would be like, no, I think mimetic desire is more like contagious when you’re sort of on Instagram and you’re like, yeah, of course I’m going to be compelled to want that thing.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:25  I think you’re right. But then I think that thing lands in specific forms. So, for example, I have had a long dislike of television commercials, a deep dislike. And the reason is I am f ING susceptible.

Elise Loehnen 01:03:41  I love it.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:42  I am absolutely capable of sitting there watching, being perfectly content with my life, and seeing a bunch of beautiful people on a beach drinking a beer and me go, God, my life sucks. Right. Like I it works on me. So that’s an example of how I’m feeling. Envy. Yeah. It’s not at anyone in particular. It’s just that people who are beautiful and are on a beach and are carefree. Yeah. That’s not me in any way, shape or form really. Yeah, but it pulls on something. It pulls on something that feels relatively primal, though. Also, which primal can be good, I think because it points us towards real things. But I also think part of our job is to evolve beyond just that and examine it.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:25  So I do think for me, envy can be memetic because yes, humans specific to podcast, but you could ask any, you could ask it probably any man, and he could point to whoever in his field is further ahead of him and say, oh, if I just was up there, then I’d be happy. That’s what I want is to be up there. Yeah, but up there isn’t anywhere on, on one level. Right. So again, it tells me something about what’s important. I want to do better, but it also has me doing things like counting podcast downloads is the most important thing.

Elise Loehnen 01:05:07  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:08  It’s funny, it’s not for me. And yet it’s an easy success metric. And of course it means money and all. All these things get get tied together. So yes, I do think at a base level. Yes. Envy for me has been very useful to look, you know, and what I actually find more actually a little bit more useful is who do I admire? And what is it about them? Because there’s a little bit of envy mixed in there a little bit.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:38  I suppose that, for me, helps me both tie what I want with what I value. Maybe a little closer together. But I think figuring out what we want and what we want versus what we value. And, you know, sometimes I think a lot of this work is for me has been about wanting better things. It’s been about wanting things that actually have a chance of satisfying me, actually have a chance of leading me to happiness versus what at first glance, seems like would do it.

Elise Loehnen 01:06:12  Yeah, no, I think that’s really important. And I think that with anything. Right. Like even thinking about Andrew Huberman and podcast success and I have so many thoughts about Andrew Huberman and wrote like a series about him that went, I mean, like, let’s be relative with the term, but like when a little viral before the New York Magazine story came out about him. But my my concern with him, it ended up becoming a four part series is more that he doesn’t interview. He’s gotten slightly better, but up until that point he had only ever interviewed eight women.

Elise Loehnen 01:06:47  It was a general piece about the lack, the dearth of female experts that are highlighted amongst him and Peter Attia and Tim Ferriss and and how they’ve their ascension and podcasts land has drowned out the voices of women and that women are sort of unconsciously subscribed to their shows, not realizing that they’re talking about the research that has been done by women.

Eric Zimmer 01:07:12  But they don’t have the women on.

Elise Loehnen 01:07:14  They don’t have them on. And to the point where it’s like, you see, Andrew Huberman, who has a PhD in the optic nerve, and Peter Attia having a four hour conversation about menopause, it’s like bros, come on. I mean, it drives me crazy anyway. But I think that what you’re saying too, is so important, which is there’s sort of what we want and not want can’t be an object. It’s not a destination. Life is a process. Right. So it’s a it’s just another GPS point. It’s like an indicator of there’s something here that is pulling you forward. So what is it and why and how do you use that intelligently rather than denying it.

Eric Zimmer 01:07:56  Right, right. Like someone who’s been a mentor to me is Jonathan Fields and Good Life Project. Yeah. And Jonathan, you know, when I started, he’d been doing a podcast for a few years. He was a few years ahead of me. He’s always been a little bit like, you know, he just keeps going. And I I’m sort of, you know, following along behind. But it’s been a useful one for me because I admire Jonathan. Yeah. I look at Jonathan, I’m like, okay, that’s what I want to be. Yes, I do want more success, but I want it on those terms. That’s the way I want to do it. That’s the, you know. And so again, for me, that’s why I think looking at who I actually admire is a is a useful thing versus who I might just envy. And the other one is that I think, and we need to wrap up because we are way over time. We’ll go into a post-show conversation if you have a few minutes.

Eric Zimmer 01:08:44  But I also think that envy pulls on insecurity. I feel like envy pulls on my insecurities in ways that if I’m not careful, I’m now I’m responding to something I think I want because it’s triggering something I don’t think I actually am or I have. I think a ton about desire. Yeah, because it’s hugely important. It’s the energy for everything. And yet it can lead us in. You know, as the Buddha has clearly pointed out, left unchecked, for me, it’s problematic. I will say that. And yet I want its energy.

Elise Loehnen 01:09:23  Yes. Yeah. That’s beautiful. And I think for all of us, whether we desire things that could kill us or not. I mean, I’m sure we all do in some ways, right? Like, we’re all on the spectrum. But yeah, it’s part of it, I think is like this part of you is feeling tender and unloved and, needs care. And but I think we also have to titrate that. Right? Like, there’s only so much work that we can ever do at a time to integrate all of those parts of ourselves.

Elise Loehnen 01:09:57  And we can’t do it in a day, and we can’t do it all simultaneously. Yeah, but yeah, this is life, right? Like you’re doing it.

Eric Zimmer 01:10:06  Yeah, it’s it’s always an ongoing dance. I mean, I think that’s the idea is there’s no there’s no arrival.

Elise Loehnen 01:10:12  Yeah, I know we’re over time. Just to put a note to on what you were saying about who you admire in your mentor. There’s this sticky note that I have on my computer, and it’s from this woman, Chris Schumacher, who’s one of sort of the guides in my life. And it’s that your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it. And these are words to live by. And I think about the Good Life project or what you’re doing, and I think about what I do too. It’s like I want to build something in integrity and a and in wholeness that I can manage that isn’t going to sort of flip me upside down. I don’t, I can’t manage. Andrew, I don’t know if Andrew Huberman can manage Andrew Huberman, you know.

Elise Loehnen 01:10:55  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 01:10:55  I agree 100%. Yes. I think that’s a great quote. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be. Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook. . Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. oneyoufeed.net/ebook. 

Well, we are out of time. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation because I do want to talk about sloth a little bit because given that it sounds like both you and I have, this one is like, you know, I always have to be doing something. I always have to be useful.

Eric Zimmer 01:11:57  I always have to be. I’d love to talk a little bit about that, listeners, if you’d like access to that as well as help support this show because we can always use your help and some other great things like ad free episodes as well as special episode I do each week just for you. You can join our community at oneyoufeed.net/join.. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been great conversation.

Elise Loehnen 01:12:20  Thank you Eric, I have loved it and I cannot wait to turn the tables on you.

Eric Zimmer 01:12:29  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.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:00:00  You don’t want to sit in front of the TV all the time, because then you wouldn’t be living in the world. But sometimes you need to get out of your head and watch Netflix or whatever it is that somebody’s watching these days, and that’s okay. And this idea that we’re all looking for a prescription to do life right is irrational. There is no one way to do this.

Chris Forbes 00:00:27  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 00:01:13  What if Joy didn’t have to wait until things got better? What if it could live alongside the grief, the loss, the chaos? My guest today, Cindy Spiegel, knows this intimately. In a single year, she lost her nephew to violence, her mother at a heartbreak, nearly lost her brother and was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. And in that same stretch of joy, the idea of micro joys was born. Her new book, Micro Joys Finding Hope, especially when Life is Not okay, reminds us that healing doesn’t always come in grand transformations. Sometimes it’s about paying attention just a little bit at a time. One moment of beauty, one breath of stillness. One small act of noticing micro joys align perfectly with this show’s philosophy that real change comes little by little, and sometimes that’s the only way it comes. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Cindy. Welcome to the show.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:02:14  Hi. Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:16  We are going to be discussing your book, which is called Micro Joys: Finding Hope, Especially WhenLife is Not Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:23  But before we get into that, we’ll start in the way 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 always inside of us that are 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.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:03:02  Yeah, I love that parable. And I’ll tell you what it means to me, you know, and it’s simplest form. It’s where we focus. Our energy grows, you know, where we focus our attention and our intention is what flourishes. And we all have the ability to see the same thing very, very differently.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:03:20  And it’s up to us to decide what we want to walk away with, what we want to focus on and what we want to act on. And I think it’s a it’s a brilliant parable, and there’s a reason that it’s so popular.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:29  Yeah. And it aligns very much with the core idea of micro joys, which is even in the midst of difficulty, we have a choice about where some of our attention goes. That’s right. Before we jump into micro joys, though, there’s a big part of this book which is really about the challenging circumstances you found yourself in. So I’m wondering if you could just kind of walk us through, set the stage for kind of what happened and, and where you were and what was going on as this book and these ideas emerged.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:04:05  Sure. Sure, sure. So in 2020, most of us will remember 2020 for different reasons, but all for the pandemic. in 2020, my husband and I were living in Brooklyn, New York. I was speaking on stages.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:04:18  This is at the very beginning of 2020. in front of audiences of thousands within obviously, two months into the year, three months into the year, New York City shut down, the world shut down for Covid 19. for the first few months of the pandemic, my husband and I did what everybody on Instagram told us to do. We baked banana bread, practice yoga, did all the things. and then May of 2020 is when everything really started to shift. And that’s where Micro Joys started to become. on May 29th of 2020, my 32 year old nephew was murdered walking to a friend’s house and a random act of violence. Within three months of my nephew’s passing, my beloved mother, Mama Shelley, passed away unexpectedly. I will always believe it was, at least in part, due to a broken heart within my mom’s passing. And within a month of my mom’s passing, my brother had a stroke and went into cardiac arrest, where he spent two and a half months in the cardiac ICU, again in the middle of a pandemic.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:05:23  By the grace of God, two and a half months later, he made it home to start recovering and healing. And within a month of his coming home, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And all of that happened within a ten month period of time.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:39  Yeah. You also mentioned a lifelong friendship ended, which, boy, that is a big deal. I mean, we might we might tag that on as an afterthought, but some of my lifelong friendships ended. That would be a really, really difficult thing.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:05:53  Yeah. Yeah. That was another loss, you know, and it’s a loss we don’t talk a lot about, which is losing adult friendships. You know, to this day we have not had a conversation. I’m not entirely sure what happened. but all of that happened at the same time. And so I felt like a completely different person than I had ever been up until that point.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:12  Yeah. You mentioned you were speaking on stages and that you were out there in the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:18  And I assume this is sort of based on your really best selling book called A Year of Positive Thinking. So what I’m curious about is how has your thinking about how we work with our inner worlds sort of changed between that book and, you know, where we sit with micro joys?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:06:40  Yeah, it’s a great question, right? Because I did in 2017 publish a book called A Year of Positive Thinking. nothing that I wrote in that book is inaccurate. However, I see micro joys as the nuance to that book. You know when in 2020 I call moments like that those fall to your knees moments right where you look in the mirror and you don’t recognize who you are.  In  2020, in that moment, nothing that I said in a year positive thinking was going to help me. Okay. Right. Not because that book wasn’t accurate or helpful or deserving of the accolades it’s received, but because when we are at our lowest point, you can’t positive think your way out of it, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:07:27  And you almost shouldn’t.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:07:28  You shouldn’t. You have to sit with it. You know, I hate to say should or shouldn’t. For me, I could not. You know, I couldn’t in that moment think my way out of it. And so I needed something. I needed nuance, right. And micro joys. And the way that I described micro joys are these easily accessible moments of joy, beauty, delight that exists in the world, regardless of our current circumstances. Right? So they sort of coexist with our grief, with our loss, with the world as it is. And that’s not something that I talked about in a year of positive thinking.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:03  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I think. In life, there are different tools for different jobs. There are different ideas for different times. There are there are seasons, and certain things work in some seasons. And they and they don’t in others. And my experience of difficulty is that trying to talk ourselves out of it is often problematic, because those things are all very real.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:29  Right. To be walking around all the time. Like things are going great with everything you just described. At least in my life, would be some form of denial and deception. What I love about Micro Joys is and I love the word nuance because, I mean, I guess if I had a brand, it would be nuance. And I love this idea that in the midst of what’s happening, we can find things that are really good. Have you ever heard the poem Relax by Ellen Bass?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:08:56  No.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:56  Can I read it to you?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:08:57  I would love if you would.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:59  I teach this in a in a program I run, and so. And I’ve also done it. I’ve read it to I do special episodes for subscribers and I’ve used it there, but it’s a little bit long, but it’s not too long, and I just.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:09:11  We’ve got time. All right. We’ve got time.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:13  It’s my favorite poem in the whole world to relax. Bad things are gonna happen. Your tomatoes will grow a fungus and your cat will get run over.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:22  Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream melting in the car, and throw your blue cashmere sweater in the dryer. Your husband will sleep with a girl your daughter’s age, or your wife will remember she’s a lesbian and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat, the one you never really liked, will contract a disease that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth every four hours. Your parents will die no matter how many vitamins you take, how much Pilates you lose, your keys, your hair, and your memory. If your daughter doesn’t plug your heart into every live socket she passes, you’ll come home to find your son is empty. The refrigerator dragged it to the curb and called the used appliance store for a pick up drug money. There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger. When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below and two mice, one white, one black, scurry out and begin to gnaw at the vine.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:19  At this point, she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice. She looks up. She looks down at the mice. Then she eats the strawberry. So here’s the view. The breeze. The pulse in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen. You’ll get fat. Slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely. Oh, taste how sweet and tart the red juice is, how the tiny seeds crunch between your teeth. And I feel like that poem is the mirror of your book. That poem is the mirror of your book. To me.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:10:56  That is Micro Joy. And you’ll have to send that to me.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:59  Yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s an outstanding poet across the board. But that that poem is my favorite poem because it speaks to this. Like, I think that’s the way life is. There’s tigers above, there’s tigers below. There’s mice not at the vine, no matter what. Sometimes it’s worse than others. But that’s the basic thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:18  And there are all these wild strawberries and. Right. Yeah. It’s the.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:11:22  It’s that arms. And can we hold both? First of all thank you for sharing that. That was beautiful. And that is the the sort of soul of micro joys it is holding both at the same time. And we live in a culture that doesn’t know how to do that.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:38  Yep.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:11:39  You know, and for me that was really the difference between where I was in 2017, when I wrote A Year of Positive thinking and where I was, you know, in 2023 when Micro Joys came out. Right. I had to live in that, and I could not change what happened, right? I could not change the world as it was. And I wasn’t willing to pretend it wasn’t that way. Right. But in that acceptance. Right. I still deserved those moments of respite, those moments of looking outside and seeing the daffodils bloom, or having that lovely conversation that also existed. And it didn’t attempt to change the world as it was.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:12:21  And I thought what I refer to as micro joys were really these moments of respite that saved me during a time that I really wasn’t even sure I would figure out a way out of. I have, thankfully.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:34  Yeah. So I love this idea. Sometimes the term joy or micro joy I struggle with because and this just may be being a former, like heroin addict. Like when I think of joy, I’m thinking of, like, just like the top the top state, right? So for me, I don’t I feel like I have a really pretty honed capacity to appreciate lots of little moments of beauty and, and serendipity and, humor and all of that around me. But the word joy, I always feel like I’m falling short of it.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:13:12  You know, it’s funny what you describe this sort of euphoria or this dopamine that we think of, right? I think of that as happiness, as these moments of happiness and happiness can certainly lead to joy. But joy to me is embodied, right? It’s a way that we walk through the world, and micro joys lead to living a life joyfully.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:13:34  they are not. It’s not a state of perpetual happiness. That’s not what joy is to me, right? It’s. It’s these. It’s this way that we show up the state of being. We’ve all met those people where you think, what world are they living in? Why are they doing so well right now? but it is very attainable, right? It’s very attainable when we pay attention to those moments that are happening throughout the day, the moments that you are able to pay attention to, like you mentioned, humor or humor. When we are able to be in those moments, that is what leads us to live a joyful life. It is not euphoria. It’s not the constant dopamine hits. It’s it’s a build up. Right? It’s a practice that we create.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:17  Yeah. I love the practice element of it. I’ve got a line here from you that I wanted to see if I could find, but maybe I’m not going to dundun. Are here. It is. Unlike toxic positivity, they require practice, awareness and focus to take root.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:38  I love that that idea of of that. Yeah. I think for me, I have some idea of joy as being like way up there in, in happiness feeling. And so then I often feel, maybe like I’m coming short of it. But I want to ask you also because later in the book, you talk about how with all of this happening to you, you felt like your feelings just got kind of muted and turned down, and that while you might be able to see these little things that were happening, you were having trouble feeling them. Am I saying that correctly?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:15:16  That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. You know, there are two different things, right? There’s the recognition that, wow, that I’ll use this fiddle in my office. There’s the recognition that this is so cool and wow, it’s grown so much. And then there’s the I’ll use the word embodiment again. That real deep feeling in the middle of so much grief and loss. You know, again, I wrote a book called A Year of Positive Thinking.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:15:41  I had built the capacity to see what was around me prior to all of this. Yeah. Being able to embody it all when I was in the middle of it took practice. It took time. It took consciousness. It took me every day making a point to notice and pay attention and be present with that tree in the corner or whatever it was. Because that too is part of loss and grief and moving through challenge. Or, you know, it’s the honesty to say, I don’t feel this right now. I don’t feel this, this big delight in euphoria that everyone’s talking about at this thing, whatever that thing may be. I couldn’t feel anything. I was just a bit numb. And so it took time to build up. But first I had to acknowledge what was and be willing to see the beauty. I didn’t have to feel it yet. I had to simply see it.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:32  Yes, I love that idea because I have wrestled a lot as an adult. I’m far, far better than I used to be with with depression. And my flavor of depression is not. I’m sad. It’s just I’m sort of flat. Yeah. Really flat. So I can look at the tree and be like, that tree is really cool and look at all the amazing things that trees do. And, and, and there is a uptick. But sometimes that uptick isn’t as dramatic. Which is why for me, using the word appreciation is good. Because if I think I should be feeling, if I think I should be feeling something and I’m not there, I’m often setting a standard of what I expect to feel that I’m measuring against, that I am then ruining the very moment I should be appreciating by going, that’s not good enough. There’s a great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin’s walking along and he’s like, here I am, you know, perfectly happy. And in the next moment you see a thought hit him. He’s like, but not euphoric. And then the whole moments ruined, right. You know. And so I think I have the ten, I have the ability to do that to myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:37  Like you should feel more in that moment, you know? Yes. You feel a pleasure. You feel a little bit of delight. But shouldn’t you be feeling. And then, of course, that’s that’s problematic. Which you address also in the book, this idea of just learning to say the way I am is the way I am right now, and I don’t have to improve it or fix it.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:17:59  That’s right. And it’s also why I said before, you know, I try not to say should or shouldn’t write. I shouldn’t feel that way. I shouldn’t think that thing right. Who am I to tell you? Right. Who are you? Who are any of us? Yeah. I think when it comes to loss and grief and whatever that may look like, any sort of difficulty, we don’t need to hold ourselves to standards of what we should or shouldn’t do. Right? What was important to me in that moment was that I sat in that moment. But I also think that for someone else, maybe that isn’t the right choice for them.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:18:33  Right. In that moment. And so all I am asking of readers in micro joys is to notice. That’s all. That’s all you got to do. You don’t have to feel a thing. You don’t have to do a thing. Well, you do have to do a thing. You have to know this.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:47  Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:18:47  Yeah. You know. But but that. That’s it. And it’s the bare minimum for a reason. And that reason is sometimes that’s all we got. Yeah. And the idea that we’re holding ourselves to this false standard is incredibly dangerous, because we’re never going to reach it. And then we’re constantly striving for this thing that is impossible.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:19  I think that that is a really subtle aspect of the I’m just going to call it the self-help industry, as of which you and I are both loosely in, is that I think a lot of us wise up to the fact that always trying to chase things on the outside is a is a strategy that doesn’t work.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:19:40  It’s a trap.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:42  Right, It’s a trap. I think it takes us longer to recognize that trying to chase internal states. Yeah, can also be a trap.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:19:52  That’s right. Which really means just chasing as a trap.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:55  Precisely. Yes, yes. Yeah. I would even say chasing in a certain spirit, because there’s a certain type of chase that is actually enjoyable. And I feel like it energizes me. But there’s a type of chase also that is very problematic.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:20:11  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I often feel like we we have so much access to the Joneses. I don’t know, I’m 47. I don’t know how old you are, but keeping.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:23  Up enough to know the Joneses.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:20:24  Say.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:24  Okay, I’m older.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:20:25  Than we all know. The Joneses. Okay. but we have more access to the Joneses than we ever have before. And in that, it makes it so easy to see what we believe everybody else has and and then feel as though we’re lacking. Right. And so we spend all of our time chasing this thing that isn’t even ours to have to own to, to inherit.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:20:49  And we’re constantly it’s this uphill battle to nowhere, and it’s internal and it’s external to your point. And we have to be really mindful. It goes back to the parable, you know, that that you talked about at the beginning. And what this podcast is, is based on. We have to be really mindful of where we focus our energy.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:06  Let’s dive into this a little bit deeper. How for you, do you work with that internally, which is I want to be feeling more joy. I want to be feeling more happiness. Am I feeling enough of it? I’m assuming as someone who has, you know, you say in the book, sort of, you know, spent a lot of your life trying to become a better version of yourself. How, you know, like moment to moment, day to day internally. Are you dealing with that, being a better, happier version of yourself? How do you talk to yourself through that?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:21:41  Yeah. You know, one thing I’ll say before I answer that is that I don’t do that anymore.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:21:46  I’m not chasing a better version of myself anymore. And I think I talked about that in the book as well, because there was no point in chasing, right, that better version of myself. At some point, we all have to come to this place where we acknowledge that who we are is enough. And so, you know, my answer to your question would be, I meditate every day. I surround myself in beauty, but I don’t do that in the hopes of finding happiness or, you know, becoming a more joyful person. I do that because it keeps me sane. It keeps me creative, it keeps me thoughtful, and it keeps me connected to the world around me. So I’m not actually seeking ways to be happier.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:30  But you are seeking ways to be more creative, more connected, more. I mean, there’s still a there’s still an there’s still something in it. Yeah. Zen Master Dogan is the first one who ever. I feel like really, really pointed this out. And he went to these.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:43  He went to the Chan teachers in, in, in China and said, if I understand you, you’re saying we’re already perfect. The way we are in the world is perfect the way it is. Is that what you’re saying? And they’re like, yeah, we are. And he’s like, but you also tell me I have to do all this practice. Why? There are great answers to it, you know. Yeah, yeah. Because I think it is always a there’s that there’s a little of that tension in it. And, and so even though you aren’t really seeking that, I would imagine that energy is didn’t just like, did it just disappear or is it okay.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:23:14  So so no, the energy didn’t disappear, right? What disappeared was the internal dialogue that I had to be better in some way than I am. Yes, right. That’s not to say that I don’t want to create and continue to create and write and do the work that I do in the world. I haven’t given up on myself, but.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:23:33  But what I have let go of is this need to be better. This constant need to be better than you know. If that person wrote a book, I should write ten books. If this person did this. It’s the Joneses. Again, there’s so problematic.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:47  yes, that’s.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:23:48  That’s what I have let go of. Right. So in meditation and I’m very conscious of sort of keeping being in a space that makes me feel creative and ignited and interested and in many ways rational. but it’s sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s it’s not it’s not an effort to make myself any better than I am. And I think that’s the difference.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:16  What type of meditation practice do you do?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:24:18  Oh, you know, I don’t even know if I have a name for it. I simply sit and set my timer for 18 minutes a day in silence. Yeah. with mala beads that sometimes I use, sometimes I don’t. And I speak to my ancestors.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:30  Okay, well, doesn’t need a name, I just don’t ask.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:33  I’m always curious how people spend their contemplative time. There are so many different little flavors of what you do in that time.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:24:41  So yeah, for for me, it’s it’s really about the sitting and the acknowledgement of something other than myself. And I have had so many folks pass away that at this point, it’s a deep conversation with the ancestors when I begin, and then it’s just quiet.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:56  Is it like a prayer in that way?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:24:58  It’s more of an asking and acknowledging and and asking, okay, you know, whatever it is that I might be seeking, you know, I let’s see, what did I what was I talking about this morning? And I say talking even though I’m not talking out loud. It’s a dialogue inside where I said, allow this day to be grounding. I need your support and allowing this day to be grounding. I might be looking for a very tangible support in something, in writing my next book and doing a specific thing. And I will call to my ancestors, just acknowledging them one by one, and simply ask for help in that.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:25:30  And then I will sit in silence to receive. Now, is anybody physically coming through? No. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:36  That’s not the point, though. Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:25:37  No, that’s not the point. That’s not the.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:39  Point. I assume you needed grounding today because of the vast excitement you were feeling at appearing on the One You Feed podcast was. It really was really hard.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:25:47  So much. I was very concerned that it was going to be too exciting for me to be clear. It is a it is a hot day and this was part of why I needed to be around. Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:58  Okay. I want to talk about another thing that jumped out to me in the book. And you say, when my heart needs healing, I find ways to stay busy. The time will eventually come when I must slow down, stop and sit inside of the heartbreak. But there are also circumstances in which busyness really is the best temporary medicine for what ails us. You also say there will be a time to sit with the hardest things, but the respite that comes from doing instead of sitting is also essential.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:28  This is nuance again. That’s right. Right.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:26:31  That’s right. And this is where you talked about before when you said the word shouldn’t. And I was like, well, I wouldn’t say shouldn’t, you know, because some people would say, you have to face this all head on and you need to do it right now. Yep. Right. I don’t think that’s always the answer. I think sometimes we need to keep real busy and pretend that thing doesn’t exist. But we can’t do that forever, right? We have to start to know ourselves and know what we have the capacity for in any moment. And what I was talking about in that essay was specifically saying, right now, I don’t have the capacity to think about this right now. I have the capacity to paint my living room wall and not pay attention to that. I know it’s waiting for me. I know what’s there when I sit with this, but in that moment, that’s not what I needed. you know. And then there are other essays in the book where I talk about sitting in that moment, you know, sitting in that difficult thing.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:27:26  And I think for, for any of us, the biggest challenges is really knowing ourselves enough to know when we need what we need. And honoring that instead of saying, I should be doing this other thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:38  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. 

Eric Zimmer 00:28:31  That is the art of all of this, which is what you just said. The knowing when we need, what we need.You know, it’s we want answers as to as to how, you know. What do I need? When could someone just please tell me like you need 65% busyness, 25% grief, 12% whatever, right? And that’s just that. That doesn’t make sense. A similar example is our. Our dog Lola passed away not too long ago, and the very first thing we did the next day was we just got out of town.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:28:57  Yeah, yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:58  And we just spent two weeks somewhere else. Now, we knew that when we came home, the home that didn’t have Lola in it was going to still be there. But we were going to be two weeks so long in our grief.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:29:13  That’s right.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:14  Right.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:29:15  And in your process.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:16  And our process. So in a way, if you were a straight just, you should sit in it and face it kind of person. You might label that as running away. I looked it as I looked at it as a skillful way of working with grief.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:29  That’s right. Right. Because it’s not that the grief isn’t. It’s going to make its way through. But for me that just because I remember when my last dog passed, that was the thing, it was like everywhere I looked was where she wasn’t.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:29:42  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:43  You know. So let’s look somewhere and, and again it’s not that we didn’t spend days really in a lot of grief, but there was there was some doing that and I, I’m the same way I find that doing sometimes is a part of my healing.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:29:58  That’s right. And I love that you use the word working or the phrase working with grief. Right. You weren’t running from it. That was your way of working with grief. Right. Coexisting of a list, you know, existing alongside it. That was exactly what painting. You know, our walls look like. In the middle of my grief, I wasn’t running, I was working with what I had, and in that moment, that was the very best way for me to do it right.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:30:21  And I’m sorry to hear about Lola. Pets are our children. Yes. at least for for my husband and I. And the very best decision for you in that moment was to leave. Yeah, right. To work with your grief in that way versus sitting in it. And there is no wrong way to navigate that.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:41  Yeah, I think we often in a, in the, in the self-help culture, there is that sense of you should always face things, you should sit with things, you should always be with things you should be able to be by yourself without needing. I mean, there’s all these again, I agree with you with should is just a generally, you know, a non useful idea. But I find that there are times that it’s like distraction is actually the right tool for the job right now. That’s right. Like I’m stuck in this spiral of thinking, and I can’t. I’ve tried the basic things I know to try and get out of it. And you know what? I’m still in it.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:21  So instead of staying in it, I’m going to turn on the TV and just get out of it. And and that’s fine some of the time. Now, again, as an addict who took my coping behaviors to the furthest extent, I’m aware that those coping mechanisms can become maladaptive. But they’re not bad. Just in a distraction in and of itself is not a bad thing. A lot of the time we can only be on. At least I can only be on in that way for a certain amount of time, at which point I need to turn things down.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:31:56  Most behaviors, thoughts, feelings are that way. They’re not inherently bad. Yeah, right. It’s just we have to know how to use them and how to work with them. You know, you don’t want to sit in front of the TV all the time because then you wouldn’t be living in the world. But sometimes you need to get out of your head and, you know, watch Netflix or whatever it is that somebody’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:14  Watching or someone else’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:16  Yep.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:32:16  Yep. And that’s okay. And this idea that we’re all looking for a prescription to do life right is irrational. There is no one way to do this.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:26  And yet we so deeply want it.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:32:28  Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:29  It’s why there’s a whole lot of five easy steps to X, whatever it is. You know, the crash diet. My first book comes out next spring, and the whole book is kind of around this idea of we we prioritize the epiphany.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:32:45  Say more?

Eric Zimmer 00:32:45  Yeah, well, we prioritize the epiphany, not the fact that that epiphany is going to be lived into by a thousand small choices.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:32:53  That’s right. The process.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:55  And that epiphany only looking back, I talk about a pivotal moment in my journey of getting sober and how if you’re going to film the movie of my life, that’s what you would see. But that moment only makes any sense, has any value or importance because I made thousands of decisions after it. That’s right. That made that like okay, oh, there was a turning point because it wouldn’t have been a turning point.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:18  If I hadn’t done all those things. And so it’s all about this. Like you kind of say, you say it so. Well in that sentence I read earlier, which is practice, awareness, focus little by little.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:33:30  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:31  The book’s called how a Little Becomes a Lot. And it’s basically aligns with micro joys too, right? Like, you stack lots of little moments of pleasure and joy up and look at what happens.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:33:41  Yeah, we don’t like to do that though. Do we.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:43  Know.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:33:44  Like, the work that’s required to get to that turning point, to that epiphany, to that peak? We don’t we don’t necessarily want to do the work we want. You know, I, I talk about this too, in like, peaks and valleys, right? We experience life and peaks and valleys, right? The highest of highs and the lowest of lows. The majority of life is somewhere in the middle.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:02  Yes.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:34:03  And we don’t want to. We don’t want to deal with the middle.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:34:05  We want to talk about the peak. We want to talk about the valley. But the boring stuff, we want to just run right through and we can’t. And that’s when Micro joys to me becomes so powerful is not when we are in the highest of highs or the lowest of lows. So they are helpful there. But we’ve got to start paying attention to the rest of it, because that’s what we have most of the time.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:27  I love that you said that because that is the case. Most of our life is kind of just normal.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:34:34  Yeah, not super exciting.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:35  For a long time. I got this idea. It’s a it’s an idea and embedded in many spiritual traditions and all over the place, which is that you can turn the ordinary into extraordinary by giving it close enough attention. And I believe there’s truth in that. Paying attention. My problem was I was expecting extraordinary. Right. Instead of saying I can make the ordinary more enjoyable, I can make the ordinary a little bit more special.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:01  I can make the ordinary. I was like, oh I, you know, if I’m not turning that, you know, that set of car keys over there into like a glowing mandala in my mind. I’ve somehow failed, right. And it’s a whole lot more prosaic than that.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:35:15  Yeah, yeah. And that’s the part, I think, for so many of us that we struggle with. Right? It’s that day to day stuff, the stuff that’s not extraordinary, the stuff that’s average, the stuff that’s going to get us there. But you know, it’s it’s the boring. It’s the day to day. I feel like that’s the place that so many of us lose ourselves and lose. There’s this real missed opportunity to enjoy those moments when we’re in them. They don’t have to be fantastic. Yeah, right. But we also don’t want to miss them.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:48  Yeah. I have a brain that is really good at always thinking about how to get somewhere else. You know, if I don’t work with it and I don’t sort of, you know, try and choose the energy I’m going to let be if I just let it run on its own, it is always two steps out ahead of me, and it’s just always solving problems.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:09  They could be very prosaic problems. What am I about to eat? What time do I need to get to the airport? What? It’s just da da da da da da da da da da. It just does that. And made me good as a project manager. Doesn’t make me good at doing what you’re describing, which is enjoying those moments in my life. Which is why meditation and spiritual practice and all that has been so important to me, because I really needed it.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:36:46  How did you go from the life you were living before? And I mean this sort of top level to to where you recognized that you needed it.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:53  The benefit of emulating your entire life at 24 and being a homeless heroin addict and being forced into recovery, kind of at death’s doorstep, is I had to in order to get better, to stay sober, I had to start to look at these things. You know, I was in a 12 step program and they talked about a spiritual solution being what you needed. And I after a little bit of time, I realized that my spiritual solution was going to be very different than the conventional one that was on order.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:24  This was a long time ago. Yeah. So I think I just, I was sort of just almost driven there. But then I found that I had a real interest. I had a real and I think it was that I was able to recognize the dissatisfaction that was natural to my brain.

Speaker 4 00:37:44  Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:45  And I, I also then started, I, it became clear to me, like, if I’m dissatisfied intensely enough and long enough, I will go back and start using again. I believe that even today. So part of my job is to, is to really keep that dissatisfaction at a workable level. And then of course, the flip side of that is always the the joy and the happiness and the connection and all of that. And I think sometimes, you know, I think about it from like lessening suffering to enhancing flourishing, like there are two sides of the same sort of thing. Right? But that’s kind of how I got there. How about you?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:38:21  Well, I think for me, you know, I was with a cousin who I hadn’t seen in 20 years the other day.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:38:26  That’s a story for another day. And he said, how did you get so optimistic? And I said, well, I think I was born this way, except, you know, I was born to parents who struggled with addiction. I was born into poverty. Right. Like born this way doesn’t mean we had everything figured out, right? Born this way means, you know, I think there’s always been a bit of me that felt like there was a different way. Even when I didn’t have the proof that there was a different way. And, you know, I think not just similarly, sometimes when we have experienced the extraordinary and I don’t mean extraordinary good. You know, the extraordinary. It gets us to this place where the only way out is to see beyond it, you know, is to see that there is something else that exists in the world. And I think for me, that’s that’s how I became optimistic. Right. I’m also a realist. And you are a realist. Right.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:39:22  We’re not pretending that, you know, you hit rock bottom and everything is up from here. Like, yeah, ish. Kind of. But I do think that. I guess I wonder sometimes why we wait, why the majority of us who aren’t going to be in those situations wait for something to drive us to make these choices? Right. To be mindful. To pay attention. Why do we need that difficult thing to happen?

Eric Zimmer 00:39:49  Yeah, I think I mean, I think it’s just a basic like if you are more or less satisfied with the way things are, you don’t look elsewhere. Now, I do think there is something like I’m very grateful that like my version of addiction is burn everything to the ground in a pretty quick period of time, and I’m actually really grateful for that because I know a lot, a lot of people where their substance abuse problem or their, you know, their substance use disorder, wherever you want to put it, it’s always it’s always on a spectrum from like way over here, like addict to not a problem at all.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:29  Everybody’s somewhere in between. Right. And the people who are closer to the not being a problem than me. It’s easy to stay in it. It’s sort of like a nagging, like a I almost sometimes feel like it’s there’s a term for this and I can’t remember it, but the core idea is sometimes it would be better almost to break your ankle.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:40:51  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:52  Then just have an ankle injury that you towed around for eight years, right. Because if you break your ankle to my to, to the point where making you kind of have to go deal with it.

Speaker 4 00:41:02  Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:41:02  You have to do a thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:03  But I do think there’s a lot of people that find their way here without something, like, really a huge like. You have to change a moment. But a moment, I would argue, is probably most of the people that are reading your book, and the majority of people who are listening to this podcast have a lesser version of I hit a point where life just didn’t feel right.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:25  Yeah, I just noticed that I wasn’t happy or I felt empty or I felt whatever it is not, you know, not the extreme thing. But that’s when they started looking for a different way of being.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:41:36  And I find sometimes it’s much later in life.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:39  100% I think 40s.

Speaker 4 00:41:43  And.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:43  Particularly.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:41:45  50s. Yeah. You know it’s like why did we wait this long.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:49  Because whatever I think because whatever we were doing was working. I see this a lot.

Speaker 4 00:41:52  Like, yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:53  I think a lot about how self kindness is critical to any kind of change and how really harsh self-criticism is a type of fuel. Because if you say to somebody like, well, self, you know, self-criticism doesn’t work. A lot of people go, yeah, it does. It got me through med school. Yeah it does. It got me to be a partner at the law firm. Yeah it does. But what I’ve seen in working with people is that that all of a sudden, at some point stops working.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:21  Yeah. It’s like a fuel that burns dirty and it eventually the engine gets all junked up. So, yeah, it worked fine for a while. And in the same way, like, you might be like, well, it’s fine, I’ll put, you know, I’ll put cheap gas in my car. I don’t really care until ten, 15 years later, you’re like, oh, that probably wasn’t the best idea, you know? Yeah. It’s hard as humans for us to connect action today with consequence in the future. We’re just not very good at it.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:42:50  Yeah, yeah. No, I tend to agree. It’s interesting. Right. Because as we were just talking about that, I thought back to where I was when I was writing this book. And I thought if I had never asked myself a lot of these hard questions, that I find a lot of us wait until much later to ask. I don’t know that I would have come to that place to write a book called Micro Joys.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:43:11  I don’t think I would have recognized Micro Joys, right? You know, like I had to be asking myself the harder questions a lot sooner than you know. When I when I hit rock bottom, when everything seemed to have fallen apart.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:24  Yep. 100%. I mean, it’s I do think one of the benefits, one of the things I like about having had, let’s just call it some form of self-development practice for a long time, is that when the bad moments come, I feel far more equipped.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:43:43  Yeah. That’s right.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:45  That’s not that. The bad moments aren’t really bad. Not that it’s not really hard, but the way I respond to them is a better version than the way I would have responded to them in the past, which a lot of times for me is it just comes down to like, I don’t make it worse. Yeah. You know, like, I just, I, I just don’t make it worse. Which I think when you consider the number of ways we are capable of making anything worse with our brain, not making it worse is actually sometimes a very big accomplishment.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:16  Yeah. Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:44:17  You know, I think you’re right. I think you’re right.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:19  You say in the book, there’s so much magic around when we are clear enough to witness it. And we’ve been kind of talking about this, but I’d love to just ask you, you know, what are ways that we get clear enough?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:44:32  Yeah. You know, I don’t I hate to be a meditation pusher. but I do think sitting. You don’t have to meditate. I my husband, you know, I talked to my husband about this. I’m like, you don’t have to meditate, but you probably should sit and close your eyes for a couple of minutes. I do think call it whatever you want to, but I do think building an internal practice, whatever that looks like for you, you don’t need to talk to ancestors. You don’t do anything. You need to do anything that doesn’t feel comfortable, but I think we do have to reconnect back to our physical self in some way and our emotional self in some way.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:45:02  And I think the, you know, easiest isn’t is relative. But I think the easiest way that we start to train our brains to do that is by spending time in silence. Right. We live in a world that keeps us occupied, where our brains are constantly going, and it’s not until we are able to quiet them, quiet our brain, rather that we are able to open our eyes back up and see things for what they are. And these are things that, you know, it’s kind of like having a windshield and it’s all gucht up, right? We have to we have to clean the windshield at some point. And to me, having a contemplative practice is cleaning the windshield. You don’t have to call it meditation, but you do have to have some sort of practice. The second, you know, sort of key to this for me is having a gratitude practice. And I’m not talking about starting a paper journal where you write it. You can do that. By all means, knock yourself out.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:45:56  But for me, it’s about. Am I constantly thinking about what I am grateful for? Am I acknowledging it? You know, I love a voice memo moment in my phone. You know, I may just make a voice memo where I talk about something that I saw today. but it’s keeping me in that conversation of, wow, this is what’s working. This is what is good. So I’m not constantly being pulled into all the things that I don’t have any semblance of control over, which is what we see on social media every day.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:26  Yep. I do think that ability to just for some period of time, stop stimulating the brain.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:46:33  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:33  That’s it. I mean, it’ll keep it’ll keep running on its own. I’m not saying like I mean, meditation experience for me and for many people is like, it’s not like exactly like the brain quiets, it doesn’t know, but you’re not giving. You’re providing everything that’s happening instead of constantly something being fed into it. And for me, that has been a really important thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:56  And following the idea of sort of micro joys. Also, I think that if we can build these moments into our day, I call them still points, but these just brief moments that happen multiple times a day, and sometimes we need to be reminded to even do them, where even if all we do in that moment is like, what am I thinking? What am I feeling?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:47:14  Yeah, yeah. It stops you in your tracks.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:17  Yeah. It just gives you that little or, you know, the old classic, like, what are five things I can see right now? What are five things I can hear right now? That’s right. If you do that five times a day, every day, my ability to be present shifted.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:47:32  Yeah, yeah. And to add to that, I think doing that once a day is a great place to.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:38  Sure, absolutely.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:47:39  You know the five thing. Do it once a day. Like get yourself used to stopping. Yeah. You know, and and with meditation, I will just say this.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:47:49  I don’t remember the last time. My mind has been fully quiet and I sit every day, sometimes twice a day. I’m not. I’m not sitting to have a quiet mind. So I am with you on that. And I think that’s true for a lot of us.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:01  Yeah. I mean, your brain may quiet some, but even meditation masters will acknowledge for the most part, like, it’s not like it shuts off brain, you know? One school of Buddhism used to call thinking a sense. In the same way that, like, if there’s a loud sound, you’re going to hear it. That’s it. You can’t not do it. Thinking is sort of the same thing, in the same way that a sound sort of just happens and arises. You’re not doing anything. Thoughts just happen and arise. They are they are what the brain does. And so not making them a problem is, is obviously really important. There was something else I thought was really interesting in what you said. You were saying how that these moments are accessible when we’re present, but paradoxically, can also occur as insights made clear only by looking backwards.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:55  What do you mean by that?

Cyndie Spiegel 00:48:56  Yeah, what I mean is, you know, a lot of our life happens, and I talked about the peaks and the valleys and how most of our life happens in between. We’re not going to catch every moment in the moment. Yeah, that that would be great. But it would also be overstimulating, right. So sometimes and I think this is where that contemplative practice is really helpful because we are still thinking in a lot of ways is we can look back and remember something. You know, I think about people who have passed away, pets who have passed away. Right. That recognition, that remembrance is a micro joy and it’s a micro joy, not because it’s happening in this moment, but it’s because we as human beings have the capacity to look back at something that maybe we missed. Right. And to be mindful of it. So these micro joys, again, it would be overstimulating to, to sort of my husband calls it ooh sparkles. You know, when you’re looking around and you’re like, oh, look at that thing and look at this thing.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:49:51  Sometimes we don’t have that right. Sometimes we’re not in a situation where we have that. Where is there an opportunity to look back and remember and think through, you know, and sort of catch up with yourself about the micro joys that you’ve experienced because they’re not always happening in the current moment.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:09  I love that idea. It’s it’s using another human capacity for this. I just had a thought that came up when you were talking about a voice memo and gratitude. I have experimented with something over the last few weeks. It’s the first time I’ve ever really tried it, which is I record myself talking about the things I’m grateful for, and then I play that back to myself, where I hear my voice. There’s something, there’s something. Sometimes I’ve played with this in other areas where I’m like, Having having myself say it to myself.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:50:48  How’s that feel?

Eric Zimmer 00:50:50  I, I like it. Yeah, I like it because it’s my words. It’s me.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:50:57  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:57  You know, it’s.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:50:58  It’s living.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:59  That’s me.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:00  Yeah. Yeah. In the same way that, like, there’s an exercise when it comes to being kinder to ourselves, to imagine what we would say to a friend. Right. And part of the reason I think that’s such a valuable thing is if you really do imagine it, you think about what you would say is that you will find your words, the words that resonate with you. Not not the words that somebody said. These are words you should use to be kind. They’ll be the words that you you actually use to be kind. And as somebody who’s allergic to certain types of language, this is really helpful for me.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:51:33  Yeah. Yes. What language are you allergic to?

Eric Zimmer 00:51:36  Well, I’m generally allergic to abbreviations.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:51:39  Really?

Eric Zimmer 00:51:40  Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:51:41  Say more.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:42  Well, I mean, I’m not sure how important this is.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:51:45  Like very.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:47  Okay. You know, vegetables, calling them veggies. I mean, that’s fine, but there are other ones. There are other ones that I can’t think of right now that I particularly apparently the kids call this breathing.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:51:59  Breathing.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:00  Breathing for abbreviating. Oh, it actually has a term. They call it breathing, which is in itself an abbreviation, which.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:52:07  Yes, yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:08  You know, almost triggers me, I also am I’m also allergic to overly too touchy feely of language for me. For me.

Speaker 5 00:52:17  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just know, like.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:19  What what what word sometimes, you know, cause a little bit of. Not that sometimes that recoil isn’t good. I mean.

Speaker 5 00:52:27  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:28  You know, I, I try and investigate it, but but I do find it’s like affirmations, right. They, you know, the, the the study, the, the, the studies out there seem to be and studies aren’t everything that the affirmations that tend to work the best are the ones that you actually kind of can believe on some level. And so again, you’re using your words. You know, you’re using.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:52:52  So first of all I love that the word veggie is triggering for you.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:52:56  I think that life is good generally if that is triggering for you I think that speaks volumes, which is good for you.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:05  100%, yeah. It’s the problem is how enraged I get. I actually hit somebody with a baseball bat last week.

Speaker 5 00:53:11  Stop it for calling.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:12  Instagram the gram.

Speaker 5 00:53:14  I was like, all right, that’s it. Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:53:17  I think this is this is what matters, right?

Speaker 5 00:53:20  It’s like when we can say.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:53:22  Okay, veggies piss me off. Yeah. Oh, I had a thought about what you said, and I forgot.

Speaker 6 00:53:28  What my thought was. It was going to be a good one.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:30  I’m sure they’ve all been good veggies.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:53:34  All right, I’ve lost it. It’s gone now. It’s gone. Eric, it’ll pop back up when we’re done.

Speaker 5 00:53:39  That will happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:40  Well, luckily, I’ve got a great place from your book to take us, because there were so.

Speaker 5 00:53:43  Many great.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:44  There were so many great places.

Speaker 5 00:53:45  Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:46  You said, after having spent much of the previous year in and out of hospital waiting rooms and unconsciously waiting for phone calls that no one deserves to receive.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:55  My husband and I both have deep gratitude for unremarkable weekend mornings.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:54:00  Yeah. You know, again, that’s the extra. It’s the ordinary, right that we miss out on. I remember even now, you know, it’ll be a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning, and we’re doing nothing. And one of us will look up and go, oh, this is nice. That’s it. That’s all the acknowledgement it takes. But we know what the opposite of that is, right? So we’re not looking for anything exciting here. We’re just looking to not get a call from a hospital that’s like bare minimum. Right. and now several years out from that, you know, it’s now so sort of built in that those ordinary moments feel extraordinary because we know what the opposite is.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:41  That’s so important to be able to recall that.

Speaker 5 00:54:44  Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:54:45  And it was a shitty time, right?

Speaker 5 00:54:48  Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:54:48  Without question. However, that felt sense of that time has created such a deep appreciation for anything other.

Speaker 5 00:55:00  Than that sign. Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:55:01  You know, and I think that’s that’s really important.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:04  Yeah. What I think is an interesting question is how are we able to maintain that as distance from the event happens? You know, how are we able to maintain this there? That line of yours, coincided with something I’ve been watching the TV series The Crown. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. It’s so good because I’m going to England.

Speaker 5 00:55:27  Oh, right.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:29  So I’m like.

Speaker 5 00:55:29  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:30  I kind of want to see the, you know, because it’s not the royal. It’s not the monarchy I particularly care about. It’s all the history that’s spinning around it.

Speaker 5 00:55:37  In that show.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:38  But the Queen says at one point she says, that’s the thing about unhappiness. All it takes is for something worse to come along, and you realize it was actually happiness after all. And like, that’s kind of what you’re saying. Something worse came along and now you realize like ordinary boring weekend mornings are a happiness.

Speaker 5 00:55:58  Fantastic.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:55:59  Yeah they’re.

Speaker 6 00:55:59  Fantastic.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:00  But keeping that I think is the because we are creatures who habituate so easily. Being able. It’s the same thing that any addict faces over long term, which is how do you keep the the, the enough of the pain that came from that experience that keeps you from not wanting to repeat it, and also keeps you in gratitude for the very fact that you’re not there.

Speaker 5 00:56:28  Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:29  You know, and so I’ve been sober 18 years, so I have to work. I have to consciously.

Speaker 5 00:56:33  Work.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:34  To, to be like, okay, Your life right now is so much better. Yeah, than it was. It is so much better. And to appreciate that without it just only being an intellectual exercise.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:56:49  That’s right. You know, I think that we we meaning so many of us, we want to put hard things behind us. Right. I think about times like nine over 11 in New York City. I’m a black Jew, you know, and I think a lot about my own history, kind of.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:57:05  And we will not forget meaning that in many different ways, applying to, you know, all parts of my culture, I think it’s really important that for all of us, we don’t forget. Right? We are in this sort of instant gratification culture where we want to put all of the bad things behind us, sweep them under the rug and just get on with it. But I think there’s such value in not forgetting, in reminding yourself, you know, in my home, I have a lot of pictures of folks that have passed away. My brother, on the other hand, or one of my brothers will not look at a picture of my mom, right? Because he just needs it to be out of sight. For me, I feel like it’s been a gift to be in remembrance of what has happened before, right? Because if I forget, then that ordinary Saturday or Sunday morning won’t matter anymore. So I think really building a culture of remembering and not fearing that we’re going to go back there because we remember.

Speaker 5 00:58:04  Yep, I agree.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:58:06  Really valuable.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:06  I’m the same way. My partner and I differ in this way, but I’m happy to see the the dog before Lola that we put to sleep was called Benzi. I love seeing pictures of BNZ. Yeah, there is a there is a tug on my heart when I do it, but there’s also a joy. Like I like it. I think she, on the other hand, would prefer like, not to, you know, and there’s no right or wrong way. That’s right. But I’m more like. I’m more like you. And she’s perhaps a little bit more like your brother.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:58:34  Yeah, I again. You know, we keep saying there’s no should or shouldn’t, but I do think there is a lot of fear for a lot of folks in wanting to put things behind us.

Speaker 5 00:58:47  Yeah.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:58:48  Fear of going back. Fear of bringing up sad memories. Fear of a lot of things. Yeah. And I do often wonder if we are willing just a little bit to go there anyway, if we would ultimately be better for it.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:02  Well, I think a good general principle. Again, there’s no principle that applies to everyone. Everywhere is that avoidance is often not a great long term strategy. Again, we talked about where being busy can make sense, where distracting yourself but but exerting effort to not feel something again over the long term has a poor track record.

Speaker 5 00:59:27  That’s right, that’s right.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:59:28  That’s right. And yet it doesn’t stop us from doing it.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:31  Oh no no.

Speaker 5 00:59:32  No.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:32  It’s a great I mean, we think it’s a good stretch. It seems like a good strategy.

Cyndie Spiegel 00:59:36  It feels like it in the moment.

Speaker 5 00:59:37  It does? Yeah, it.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:38  Feels like a good strategy. But it is. It is, you know, almost always it is almost always a it turns out to be a problem. All right. So the last thing that I would like to do is ask.

Speaker 5 00:59:49  You.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:50  In the spirit, and your book is in this spirit anyway, but in the spirit of my sort of philosophy of little by little, what is like one thing someone could do, they listen to this and they’re like, all right, this is awesome.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:02  I’m going to do one thing tonight before I go to bed. That would would bring some of what we’ve talked about to life. What would you ask him to do?

Cyndie Spiegel 01:00:11  I would ask them to think about three things within their day that they are actually grateful for.

Speaker 5 01:00:16  Okay.

Cyndie Spiegel 01:00:16  They don’t need to be big. They don’t need to be these giant things. Just three experiences, places people name something. Three things that you are grateful for. And if that is easy enough for you to do, do it again tomorrow.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:30  And are you talking about things that I’m grateful for. Like I’m grateful that I’m employed. Or are you talking about three things that happen that day that we have some appreciation for? Like, oh, I appreciated my my cup of coffee and the way the sun glinted through the trees or either whatever. Pick your pick the one you want.

Cyndie Spiegel 01:00:49  I think it’s your choice, right? The latter really leads us into micro choice. And we’ll get there. Right? But for right now, it’s like I’m grateful I have a job.

Cyndie Spiegel 01:00:57  That’s a great place to begin. Yeah, essentially. What is the easiest or the low hanging fruit for you when you think of.

Speaker 6 01:01:03  Gratitude.

Cyndie Spiegel 01:01:03  Whatever that is.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:05  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at one you. Net ebook. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. One you feed net book. Well, Cindy, this has been an absolute blast. Thank you.

Cyndie Spiegel 01:01:53  Thank you so much Eric. What a treat.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:55  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.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:04  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.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:00  Emotions don’t just happen to us. They’re not fixed or faded. They’re built. Moment by moment. By the brain. Using past experience to guess what comes next. That insight from neuroscientist doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett might just change the way you relate to your inner world.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:18  Because if emotions are made not hardwired, that means we can change them. We can retrain our brains. And that’s exactly what we explore in this episode from her acclaimed book, How Emotions Are Made. We talk about the science of prediction, the body budget, and why taking care of your physical health might be the most powerful emotional regulation tool you have. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Lisa, welcome to the show.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:01:46  Thanks so much for having me on your show.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:48  Your book is called How Emotions Are Made The Secret Life of the brain. I’m always interested in how the brain works and how emotions and the link between thinking and emotion and all of that. And I will say, I was saying to you before the call, your book legitimately is a bunch of new ideas that I have not been exposed to before, and I’m excited to cover. I’ve been a little bit flummoxed as to how I’m going to cover all the great stuff that’s in the book in the time frame we have, but I will do my best.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:18  So let’s start like we always do with the parable. There’s 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 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.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:02:53  Well, I think in the work that I do, the parable. Reminds me immediately of our theory of human nature. And that really comes from ancient Greece. So it comes from, you know, ancient Western civilization. The idea being that deep inside us, we have appetites like hunger and thirst, the desire for sex, and so on.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:03:18  We have emotions which Plato referred to as the passions. And he depicted these as two wild beasts, wild stallions that were controlled by our rationality, which he depicted as a human chariot driver who controlled these wild beasts. And throughout the last several thousand years, pretty much all of our ideas about the human mind, the human brain, human nature more generally, at least in this Western tradition, it have been based on this idea that buried deep inside of us, we have these animalistic urges, instincts, emotions that often lead us to do very bad things. We have also, as humans, this virtuous, rational ability which, you know, at the best of times controls our inner beast and, but sometimes fails to do so. And that’s when we behave very badly. This idea is you can find it in US law. You know, the legal system is founded on this view of the human mind. and you can see it in neuroanatomy, for example, for many, many years, people believed that the neocortex, what’s called the incorrectly, actually the neocortex, the cortex, in the brain was the home or the seat of cognition or rationality and controlled emotion.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:04:51  So for many years it was believed that we had some kind of lizard brain. This is where our instincts live. And surrounding that was a limbic system, what’s called a limbic system, the amygdala, and so on, which is where emotions live. And then surrounding that and controlling that was the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of rationality. And this idea that the human brain evolved in sedimentary layers and that that really the human mind is this battle between battleground, between rationality and emotionality, with emotionality standing in for these animalistic emotional instincts which cause us to do terrible things, and rationality, which is, you know, virtuous. This idea was sort of tattooed on the brain as a theory of or a model of, of human brain evolution, and it’s actually completely incorrect. You know, the human brain didn’t evolve in sedimentary layers. It’s not organized in this kind of tiered way. nonetheless, this is a, you know, remains a really popular view of of how the brain works, both in the popular media and in industry and so on. So the parable is a beautiful illustration of that, I think.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:04  And I think I probably have perpetuated that myth a little bit because of other people we’ve had on the show who share that idea of, you’ve got this animal brain, the lizard brain, the amygdala, you know, blamed for all kinds of things. Right. And a key part of what you’re saying in the book is that emotions don’t live anywhere in the brain. Emotions are. Well, we’ll talk about what emotions are, but but more generally that the whole brain is involved in nearly everything that happens and that neurons are multi-purpose. We use them for lots of different things. You use the term, degeneracy, which is not, we’ll use it to generate youth. That’s not what you mean in this case. What? In this case, what do you mean by degeneracy?

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:06:52  Yeah. So let me just say a couple of things. First of all, the idea that, that we have some kind of lurking inner beast which is controlled by rationality, that model of the brain has been disproved, I would say, in the last hundred years, in the study of evolutionary biology and neuroanatomy, people have known for a really long time.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:07:13  The brain is not organized that way. So this is not just hearsay. This is backed up by a tremendous amount of evidence. An individual neuron doesn’t do everything, but it certainly does more than one thing. and this is important for, as you say, the concept of degeneracy, which I think is a super unfortunate name. I didn’t make up this name. This is an idea that has existed in biology for a number of years, and it’s the idea that any function that is performed in your body or in your brain Can be performed in more than one way. So you might say it’s kind of like there’s more than one way to skin a cat, you know? or, you know, there are substitutions that can be made in recipes to make sure that the recipe proceeds as planned.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:03  And or there’s like, 15 different ways to get to your house. There’s there’s the roads that you take, but there are so many others that will get you to the same place.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:08:11  Exactly. And so degeneracy is not the same as redundancy.

Redundancy is where the same solution, the same mechanism, is built in in lots of different ways. But degeneracy is the idea that there’s more than one way to create a behavior or a feeling or a thought. So here’s an example. In neuroscience, sometimes scientists will breed animals like rats, for example, that are missing a gene. They knock the gene out and they so that the animal doesn’t have that gene, so they can study what happens to behavior when the gene is missing. And in about 30% of laboratory animals that have a gene knocked out, the characteristic that is supposed to be dependent on that gene still appears, which means that there is more than one set of genes for every characteristic. And this is why, you know, in genetics, the study of genetics is is really complicated because you can have a characteristic like height or weight or some personality characteristic, like being really gregarious or really introverted. These characteristics can be highly heritable, meaning they they have a strong genetic component, but no one knows what the genes are because first of all, there are groups of genes that will cause a characteristic, not a single gene.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:09:34  And second of all, there are different groups of genes that can cause the same characteristic. That’s the idea of degeneracy. And it turns out that every biological system that’s ever been studied, from your immune system to your genes, to your behavior and so on. All have degenerate causes, meaning there’s more than one cause for any physical or mental characteristic that you have.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:56  I’m always struck by this idea of nature versus nurture, and how obvious it is that it’s both. And what you’re saying is taking that several steps beyond that very simple idea. And, and it seems to me that all these things that we characterize very easily as two things I suffer from depression and addiction. Right. We characterize them as if they’re this thing, and they seem so complex to me. And there’s so many causes and reasons and, and factors and everything that you’re saying in the book really speaks to that at a even more fundamental level, that not just a problem like depression or addiction, but down to our very emotions themselves, are not this simple little thing. So if emotions aren’t what we think they are, They live at a place in the brain and they are this very specific thing. Then what are emotions in your mind?

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:10:49  Well, it’s not just in my mind.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:50  Let me rephrase that. In your studies. What what have you found from emotion?

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:10:55  Yeah. I think the important thing. It’s a scientific theory, which means. Not that it’s a set of ideas, but that it’s a set of ideas that are backed up by a tremendous amount of scientific evidence. The general description goes like this. Your brain contains a set of networks that you can think about them like they are all, all purpose ingredients. So if you go into your kitchen, you can find flour and water and salt, and you can make lots of recipes with flour and water and salt, you can even make some things that aren’t food like glue with flour and water and salt. In the same way, your brain has these multi-purpose networks that you can think of as basic ingredients for making all mental states, It’s not just emotions, but also thoughts and perceptions and beliefs and memories and so on.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:11:48  And part of what these networks do is they don’t react to the world. They actually anticipate or predict what’s going to happen in each moment. And the reason why this is the case is that your brain is actually predicting. It’s predicting every sight and sound and smell and and internal feeling from your body. It’s making these predictions. They’re kind of like guesses. It’s using your past experience to guess at what’s going to happen in the next immediate moment. And then it uses the information from the world and from your body to confirm those guesses, and then they become your experience or to correct those guesses. Or sometimes when the evidence from the world doesn’t match your guess, you even just ignore the evidence and you just go with your guess and your belief becomes your experience. And some of these guesses are emotions. This is how emotions are made. Basically, some of these guesses are emotions. When the brain makes a guess, it’s not making a single guess. It’s making a whole slew of guesses about what particular sensations might arise in the next moment, and what they mean, where they come from, what you should do about them.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:13:09  In science, we call these guesses concepts. So based on your past experience, your brain is creating concepts as guesses of what’s going to happen next. And fundamentally, your brain is trying to make sense of sensations in your body and from the world with these guesses.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:31  And it’s doing this mainly because it’s far faster and it keeps us safer. And it is far cheaper metabolically.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:13:42  Absolutely. So one of the major constraints on our health, actually, and the functioning of the brain, the evolution of the brain, and so on, is metabolic efficiency. Our brains are super expensive organs, but it’s the most expensive organ in our whole body, takes up about 20% of our total metabolic budget. And it’s really important that the brain function efficiently and also regulate the body efficiently. It’s just much more efficient to guess in advance and correct that guess than it is to react to the world. Engineers know this. This is partly, for example, Netflix works like this. Streaming video works like this, mp3s work like this.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:14:25  It’s just much more efficient to predict and correct than it is to react. And the main thing your brain is trying to do is trying to keep your body’s budget in balance, your body’s energy use in balance. And it does this predictably.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:41  What this looks like then, to some extent means that what’s coming in through my senses, if it meets my predictions and simulations, I may not process it any further than that. So to a certain extent, we’re really not seeing the world as it is. We are seeing it to a certain extent as we expect it to be. Now, again, new information can come through and we can we can do things differently. But this strikes me so much like the the Buddhist or Zen concept of how we never really see anything. All we’re seeing are our concepts of things, and that if you could actually pierce through that to see the moment freshly, it would be a very different experience.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:15:26  Absolutely. If there’s one thing that we can say that we pretty much know for sure at this point, from a neuroscientific standpoint, it’s that we see the world as we believe it to be.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:15:37  And oftentimes our beliefs correspond well enough to what’s out there in the real world. But we can’t just pull back the curtains and see the world the way that it is without our concepts. If we have no concepts for something, if we can’t make a concept on the fly, then we’re experientially blind to that input. So, for example, there are people who are born either congenitally, they have cataracts, or they have some kind of congenital problems with their corneas, for example. So no light enters the retina and can’t make it to the brain. So these people are functionally blind for their whole lives. And then as adults they have corneal transplants or they have their cataracts removed. And so for the first time, light enters the retina, makes its way from the optic nerve to the brain and.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:35  All hell breaks loose.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:16:36  Yeah, so you would imagine that they’d be able to just see, right? Right. They’d see objects. They’d see. But that’s actually not what happens. What happens is they are experientially blind.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:16:47  They see flashes of light. They don’t know what the flashes of light mean. And as a consequence, they have to learn to see. And one fellow that I spoke to who has had this experience, talked about it as learning a second language in a sense. So, you know, all of his senses other than vision. So smell, smell and hearing and touch and even the feelings from his body are all integrated into a unified whole. And then vision stands apart like a second language. So you could think of it like literally learning a second language. In a sense, when you hear a language that you’ve never had experience with before. It just sounds like noise to you. You don’t even know where the word brakes are. You have to learn that, you know, you’re you’re developing concepts. And this is something that I explain in the book that concepts are necessary for our normal experience of the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:59  Let’s talk about the concept of interoception. Did I say that correctly?

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:18:03  You did. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:04  This, more than anything else in the book, is probably what blew my mind more than anything because the thought that emotions maybe don’t live in one place and they’re constructed and they’re complex is certainly interesting, and it doesn’t strike me as completely out of left field. But the way that interoception works and the role that that plays in how we actually feel was one of the most interesting parts of the book to me. So could you explain that process?

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:18:31  I can, I think this is one of the most important aspects of the book, in the sense that you talked about depression and addiction, and there are a number of experiences or phenomena that we have every day in, in human life that are intimately tied to interoception. So here’s the way to think about it. So one set of ingredients, let’s say that your network brain networks make are concepts that you’re important for making emotions and actually making every experience that you have. The other thing though, that those networks do is they control the systems in your body.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:19:09  So you have an immune system. You had an autonomic nervous system which controls, you know, your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system, and so on. You have a neuroendocrine system. So this is hormones that control metabolism and all sorts of other things, and these systems are also controlled predictably by your brain. So, for example, if your brain is going to stand you up before it does that, it raises your blood pressure so that oxygen can get to your brain. If it doesn’t raise your blood pressure in advance of standing you up, you’ll faint, which would be very costly to you. So the way to think about it is that your brain is trying to anticipate what your body needs and meet those needs before they arise. Now, when your brain is keeping your body’s systems in balance, it also has to track how well it’s doing this. And so your body has sends sensory information to your brain. This is what we call interoception.. So scientists make a distinction between sensations that come from the world, which they call Xterra ception, like external to you and the sensations that come from your body, which they call interoception.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:20:34  Now, if you look around the room or wherever your listeners are, they look around. They can see things in very high dimension, you know, they can see lots of detail, color, sharp edges and so on and so forth, shadows, bright light, etc. but your brain is not wired for you to feel the sensations from your body in very high detail. If you felt every sensation that came from every movement of every artery and nerve and muscle and cell, you know that symphony of feeling would never allow you to pay attention to anything else in the world. Philosophers sometimes call this tragic embodiment. It’s what all of us feel every time we have an upset stomach or, you know, a problem with our GI tract, you know. All your attention goes, you know, to the place that hurts and you pay attention to nothing else in the world. It’s a great concept. As a consequence, most of the time you don’t feel sensations from your body in a very precise way. You sometimes can.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:21:41  Like if you run up the stairs, for example, you might feel your heart beating. But the interesting thing is that you’re not. Actually, that’s not so much an interoception, because the reason why you feel it is that your heart is beating against your chest, so you’re not feeling the heart beat itself, but you’re feeling the feeling of when your heart is slamming against your chest wall. so but most of the time we experience the sensations from our bodies as simple feelings of feeling pleasant or feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable or feeling distressed, feeling worked up, or feeling calm. And scientists call this affect. Act. So these simple feelings of affect, when they’re very strong, when they’re very intense, we typically use that as an ingredient to make emotion. But when they’re less intense, they are ingredients usually in other experiences like thoughts or perceptions. So for example, I should say sometimes even intense affect is a perception. So when someone cuts you off on the highway and you you know your experiences, that guy is a total asshole.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:22:50  That’s a perception of the world that is infused with very strong affect. The interesting thing is that most of the time we don’t experience affect on its own. We experience it as a part of an emotion or a part of a thought, or a part of a perception of the world, perceptions of other people, perceptions of food, and many of the illnesses that we have that we suffer from are illnesses Of our body systems being imbalanced and therefore us feeling a lot of distress, a lot of discomfort. And that discomfort can be experienced as depression or anxiety or other types of mood disorders.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:34  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 oneyoufeed net/sms and sign up. It’s free. No spam, and easy to opt out of anytime. Time again. That’s oneyoufeed.net/sms.   Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. 

I found that idea very interesting to go back to Buddhism again. It really struck me. If you look at Buddhist psychologies, there’s this concept of there’s sort of a core underlying feeling feelings, probably not even the right word, but it’s kind of pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about that are in terror. I can’t say it right. Say it for me again interoception.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:24:50  interoception.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:50  Interoception is sending us these basic feelings of of generally pleasant, unpleasant. And when they get a lot stronger, then we start to construct emotion. But a lot of what you’re saying is we get these feelings and then we interpret them. So if I’ve got a stomach ache, I have to try and figure out why I have a stomach ache.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:12  So I’m going to make some guesses. I’m going to try and figure out what it is. I’m going to compare that against previous experiences. I’m going to make a prediction that my stomach hurts because I’m hungry, or my stomach hurts because every time I have to do an interview, I get nervous or whatever the various things are. And I just find that fascinating that we are taking very basic bodily sensations, and those are the cause of a lot of what we think and feel.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:25:40  Absolutely. So the basic message here is that emotions don’t happen to you. Your brain makes them, emotions aren’t your reactions to the world. It’s your brain making sense of your body in the world. Your brain has to guess at what’s going on inside your body, just like it has to guess at what’s going on outside the world. It makes those guesses slightly in advance, and then it’s either corrected or confirmed those guesses, and they become your experience, those guesses, those concepts. Their job really is to make sense of sensations so that you know what caused them and what to do about them.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:26:17  So it’s exactly the way that you described it. You have a dull ache in your stomach. That dull ache could be an indication that you’re getting the flu. It could mean that you’re hungry. It could mean that you’re tired. It could mean that you feel disgusted by something. It could mean that you feel anxious. It could mean that you feel longing for someone. Your brain is able to make a prediction using concepts about what that ache in your stomach means in this situation that you find yourself in, because you’ve had years and years and years of experience where that ache has occurred in different situations, and so it’s able to use that knowledge in order to make a prediction about what is the cause of the ache in this situation. And that allows your brain to plan your behavior in an efficient, effective way so that you solve the ache and get your body systems back into balance.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:32  I just want to encourage listeners, like we have really skimmed over a lot of really fascinating concepts, a lot of really strong science that most of us just aren’t exposed to. So if you’re interested in this sort of thing, I strongly encourage you to get the book because we have really, really skimmed the number of pages and notes I have is staggering for this. So but I do want to turn some of this to like, okay, well, what do I do with this. So we’re going to kind of cut this part a little bit short. But it’s all in the book. I encourage people to to take a look and kind of talk about what does this mean for us. Because emotions for us, At the end of the day, we’re very interested in controlling our emotions or adjusting our emotions. And I want to start with what we were just talking about, which is that how much of this is physical. And it a couple of things I think back to, to recovery in AA. And there’s a phrase in AA halt, don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired. And certainly two of those symptoms, hunger and tired are completely physical symptoms. And yet they manifest themselves as, you know, emotion.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:42  Or they can manifest themselves as emotion very strongly. I know, like if I’m somewhere and I suddenly feel like I really want to drink, it’s most often that I’m either thirsty or hungry.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:28:53  That’s exactly right. And the way that I would say it, I would elaborate on what you’ve said is, is something like this, that every waking moment of your life is simultaneously physical and mental. Every experience that you have has a mental component and a physical component. And once you learn that the boundary between the mental and physical is porous. You can play around with it. You can have some control over how you experience things. Sometimes when people talk about the connection between the mind and the body, they’re talking about it in a mystical sort of spiritual way. In the book, I’m talking about this in a very biologically real way. Right. I’ve explained what the relationship is biologically between the mind and the body, just in the same way that I talk about. Not that everything is a combination of nature and nurture, but that nature can influence, nurture, and nurture can change nature in a very, very concrete, fundamental way.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:29:57  So, for example, if it’s the case that your brain is trying to keep all of your systems in the body in balance. You know, you mentioned body budget. And in the book I talk about how, you know, your brain, you can think about your brain sort of like the financial office of a company. So just like in a company, there are lots of branches and you have to keep them fiscally sound. So a financial office will be shifting around resources to keep everything in balance and keep all the expenditures and the revenues kind of in balance. This is also what your brain does with your body systems. And when your body budget is out of balance, you will feel distressed. You’ll feel uncomfortable. If it’s unbalanced for long enough, you’ll really feel very distressed. This is what stress is actually. Now, you may experience this in many ways. You don’t just experience the disruption of your body budget, you experience distress and your brain is making sense of what this distress is, and you have control over how your brain makes sense of this.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:31:06  So a simple example is many people, when they’re preparing for a test or, or a podcast or something where they’re going to be evaluated. They’ll have some body budget disruption and they will feel activated, jittery. This is actually a really normal feeling, and it means that your brain is actually preparing your body to do something kind of kind of challenging, and it can be a good thing. But most of the time people experience this as anxiety. That’s their automatic way that their brain makes sense of this jittery feeling is anxiety. But you can teach people, to use a borrow a phrase from my daughter’s karate teacher. You can teach people to experience this as getting your butterflies to fly in formation. You know you are preparing for something tough and this is a good this is a good sign that your that your body is preparing for something tough. And in fact, this kind of conceptual version of of this jittery feeling helps people with test anxiety. It helps them pass exams. It improves their scores on standardized tests.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:32:11  In certain cases, it even allows them to finish college when they otherwise would have difficulty doing so. And, this makes a huge difference in their lives. Here’s another example. People who suffer from chronic pain often become addicted to opiates, but if they’re trained using mindfulness meditation to decompose that painful feeling deconstructed into discomfort and distress, they can learn to manage their distress differently without taking the opiates. And they can stop their dependence on, on opiates, because opiates really in terms of pain, what they are, what the opiates help you with is the distress part of pain, not so much the just the actual physical discomfort of pain.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:02  Yes. And hence the highly addictive nature to some. I mean, I’m a former opiate addict, so I’m very familiar with the phenomenon, but we’ve talked about that before on the show. This idea of that pain is really a couple of different things that are happening there. There’s the actual physical sensation, and then there is everything else that you’re calling distress that we sort of layer on top of it.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:33:24  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:26  We make the distinction of pain versus suffering, right. Like pain is kind of inevitable, but the suffering can be you could work with the suffering. So the other main thing that this leads to, and it’s the thing you lead off first with like, okay, I want to feel better. What do I do is take care of yourself, your body and, and and like you say, it’s kind of boring and it’s, you know, it’s not it’s not very exciting and it’s hard, right? It’s like, okay, I gotta eat, right, I gotta sleep, I’ve got to exercise. And and those aren’t. It’s much more fun to, to read a book than it is to do those things. Or it’s much more fun to, to take a pill than to do those things. And I’ve just found out through years of trial and error that those very things for me are what moderate my depression more than anything else.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:34:09  Absolutely.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:09  If I do those things, I’m relatively in good shape.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:12  And when I stop doing them, I, you know, I just start to fall apart. I mean, I just mentally become miserable.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:34:20  Absolutely. And and in the book, I explain why this is the case. If it’s the case that your brain is managing your body system, so it’s managing your body’s budget. And if your budget becomes unbalanced, you maybe make too much of a withdrawal. You start to feel a lot of distress that’s actually really hard to manage. It’s your brain. It’s you’re making it harder for your brain to manage your emotions. So I know it sounds really, as you say, it sounds really boring. I sound like a mother really, rather than a neuroscientist. But the neuroscience here is very clear. If you want to control your emotions better, if you want to be more of an architect of your own experience, then the first thing that you must do is you must get enough sleep. You must get enough exercise, and you must eat properly in a nutritious way.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:35:07  I’m not saying, look, you know, I love French fries and I totally love chocolate. I, I have a heart. I would have a hard time turning down a piece of chocolate if somebody offered it to me. but. So I’m not saying don’t have any fun. I’m saying that, you have to keep your body budget in balance. You have to make sure that, that you’re not running a deficit. People ask me, what’s the one? If there’s one thing that I could do to control my emotions better, what would it be? My answer is get enough sleep. That’s just the evidence is just overwhelmingly clear on this point. That being said, you know, there are still going to be times where, the sensations from your body are going to make strong affective feelings that are challenging to manage. And there are other strategies that that you can. That you can use that I talk about in the book. I think the main thing to realize is that it’s never going to be the case, that you can snap your fingers and feel differently.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:36:08  We’re just not wired like that. That being said, the horizon of control over your emotions is much broader than you might imagine. There are many, many more options that you have than you might imagine. And the book talks about many of those options.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:24  Yeah, you’ve got a line that I love and you’re talking about, you know, you’ve got to keep your you’ve got to keep your body budget in line, so to speak. And you say if they aren’t and your body budget gets out of whack, then you’re going to feel crappy. No matter what self-help tips you follow. It’s just a matter of which flavor of crap and that flavor of crap to a certain extent, is what we are predicting correct? We’re getting these sensations from our body that say, I feel like crap, and then our brain interprets what that means.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:36:52  Absolutely. And it does this very automatically and with no effort whatsoever. It’s doing it really without your awareness. So one thing that you can do to improve the control of your emotions is to invest a little bit of effort in the moment to cultivate new experiences.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:37:14  If it’s really the case that your brain is using the past to make predictions about the immediate future, which become your present experience, then if you cultivate experiences new experiences in the present, it’s like seeding your brain to make new concepts or new experiences very automatically in the future. So that’s one thing that you can do. That’s a strategy.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:39  Another one that you mentioned that I’d like you to explain why it’s important is that understanding emotion and being more granular, being able to describe how we feel in more granular terms versus just bad. Maybe into being able to deconstruct sad or angry and deconstruct even further. You say helps. Why is that useful?

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:38:01  Well, you’ve mentioned a couple of things here that are subsumed under the idea of being granular or precise about how you feel. So creating very precise concepts as explanations. And here’s why this is important. And I should say, there’s a lot of evidence that when you’re very precise about your feelings, it’s very, very beneficial. People are less aggressive, they drink less.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:38:24  They, are better able to manage their behaviour. And that’s because when your brain is making a prediction about what is going on in your body, what that’s going to feel like and what the cause is of those sensations, it’s also making a prediction about what you need to do about it. So if you’re if all you can feel is bad, what does that tell you about what you should do? nothing. I mean, you don’t know. Really? Yeah. However, if your brain is able to make a concept of sadness or maybe even distinguish between sadness and disappointment and dissatisfaction, and that you do something different in each of these cases, then you’re able to precisely act in a way that is going to be most beneficial to you in that situation. And sometimes you don’t want to construct an emotion out of a set of sensations. So when the discomfort that you’re feeling is because you’re hungry, you probably should eat something. It’s not helpful to you if you construct a different experience out of those sensations.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:39:38  If you construct, say, disgust, or if you construct anger, or if you construct anxiety, those are not those are not helpful guides to your behavior because they’re not going to reduce. They’re not going to. Reduce. Let me say it differently. They’re not going to lead you to do the action that would reduce the distress that would replenish your body budget.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:01  Yeah. And you talk about that idea of assigning meaning to to physical sensations. And it’s obviously something we do automatic. I’m curious about your thought as someone who who does suffer from depression and, and does try and treat it a variety of different ways. One thing that I’ve done is I’ve gotten older is I’ve just started to treat it sometimes like the emotional flu, like I’m just like, this happens to me and I’m not going to cause a big fuss about it. I’m going to take care of myself like I would if I was sick, but I’m not going to reevaluate the entire course of my life at this moment. I’m just going to assume that something is physically happening to me, which to me feels like depression.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:44  It feels very physical, and I’m just going to do the best I can with it, but I’m not going to read too much into it or make too much of a fuss about it. Does that align with with what you’re talking about here?

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:40:55  100%. 100%. You have intuited, I think, one of the most important implications of understanding the brain in this way, and that is that when you are depressed or when you’re anxious, the distress is not helpful. When you personalize it, I guess it’s the way I would say it that, you know, for example, my daughter, suffered from depression for some time, and one of the things that was most helpful to her was to understand that, you know, when you feel fatigued and dragged out and miserable when you have the flu. Actually, I did use the flu as the example. you don’t berate yourself. You don’t wonder what’s wrong with your life. You don’t think that you’re a horrible person. You take yourself to bed.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:41:48  You sleep. You take care of yourself. And I think it’s very important for people who suffer from mood disorders to think in a similar way that the distress that you’re feeling is. It is very much physical. There is very much a physical component to every mental. You know, what’s called mental disorder? Every mental disorder that that exists has some kind of very basic physical component. So for example in depression. Depression is is many things. For many people there’s it’s an immune disorder. For almost everybody. It’s also a metabolic. There’s a metabolic aspect to it. Right. There’s something that’s gone awry in your brain’s ability to manage your body’s budget. And as a consequence, you will feel tremendous distress and you might feel tremendous fatigue. and it’s it’s very clear that even though psychiatrists and physicians don’t often think about depression in this way, although that certainly researchers are coming to think of it this way. it’s very clear that that there’s a metabolic component. And if you can attempt to address that just in the way that you would with the flu, you might not always be able to avoid the suffering, but you can certainly shorten it.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:09  Yeah, I’ve come to start to think of it as once I’m kind of in it, the best I can do is sort of accept that I’m there and take care of myself, but I can be very preventative. You can’t. All the things that we’ve just talked about, help me to before I slip into it and once I’m kind of into it, is kind of when I adopt that, like, all right, I’m going to take care of myself the best I can, and I’m just going to accept that this is going to be here and also remind myself over and over, like it’s going to pass.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:43:36  Yeah. I think that, you know, most of us can be very compassionate with ourselves when we catch the cold or catch a cold or catch the flu. We’re not so compassionate with ourselves when we feel depressed, when we feel anxious, when we feel apathy. When we feel super angry about something. Those are the moments when our distress becomes very personal. You know, it becomes about us.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:43:58  And, you know, in much the same way that a virus doesn’t really care who you are, all it really cares is that you have, you know, a good, you know, wet set of lungs. your body’s budget doesn’t really care who you are. it really cares a lot about whether it’s getting what it needs, in a physical sense.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:16  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 for free at oneyoufeed.net/sms.. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. Well, Lisa, thank you so much. We are at the end of time, but I could probably ask you a thousand more questions and maybe we will another time. But I love the book again, I’ll encourage readers.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:57  We’ll have links in the show notes and all that. This book is definitely worth a read. It’s it’s very fascinating. It’s it’s not easy going in certain places, but the analogies you make make it so much easier to understand some of the things. You’ve got lots of great analogies, and I just found it very stimulating, and I found it very nice for me to get some scientific validation of, like you said, a lot of the things I think I’ve sort of intuited or I’ve been taught through recovery or Buddhism or different areas, you know, a lot of those things are sort of there’s a reason now why those things work.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:45:33  Yeah. Well, thank you so much. And I’ll just point out that I also on my website, I have videos that explain some of the more scientifically complex ideas I also have. Blog posts that try to handle some of those ideas as well. So there are resources available to people, and also people can just email me if they have questions too.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:53  Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:53  And like I said, we’ll have links to your book. We’ll have links to your website, all that stuff. So thank you so much Lisa. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:46:00  It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:02  All right.

Lisa Feldman Barrett 00:46:02  Take care. Thanks.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:03  Okay. 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:09  Is it possible that overwhelm might sometimes signal a life filled with what truly matters? My guest today, ukemi awakened. Jeter recently shared a weekend so busy it would make most of our head spin. Traveling hundreds of miles, attending your daughter’s track meet. Leading civic events, showing up as a friend 500 miles in a car over the weekend. But rather than seeing chaos ukemi soar a life brimming with meaning and purpose. In this conversation, she reminds us that when our days feel full to bursting, it might just mean they are filled with things that we deeply value. So if you’ve ever wrestled with the paradox of loving a life that feels overwhelming, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Ukeme, Welcome to the show.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:02:00  Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:01  For those of you who are listening, you cannot see this. But ukemi and I are sitting together in a studio in Columbus, Ohio. She is one of the things that she is  the mayor of Upper Arlington, which is a town that I lived in for about 12 years while raising my boys. So we have the fun of talking in person. We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about her book called Immigrit: How Immigrant Leadership Drives Business Success. And we’ll get into all that in a moment. But 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. Think about it for a second and 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.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:03:01  First of all, like, that is like an incredible parable because I think about it, as you know, I grew up with Christian parents. You know, there’s always the good angel and the bad angel, right? Kind of akin to this. But that that intentionality about the one that you feed, you know, is missing from the very good angel. Bad angel. Kind, kind. Look. So this, this thought that, hey, the one that you feed, the one that you pay attention to, the one that you pour into, is the one that wins. I love that. you know, I, I intentionally have to, given that I’m usually the only or one of few in many rooms that I’ve been in in my life. there’s always just that fear that I have to quail the fear of. Are you enough? Are you in the right room? Are you? Can people understand you? You know, being an immigrant with an accent. And it takes an intentional kind of rewiring to, remind myself that I need to be in that room, that I, To to feed into the idea that I am enough to feed into the idea that I do have something to to contribute.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:04:09  So, yeah, I love that pair.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:11  For people who are listening, cannot see you. When you say you’re sometimes the only one in the room. You mean as a black person? I’m the only one in the room as an immigrant.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:04:20  As an immigrant? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:21  And you’re moving in some extraordinarily white rooms. Upper Arlington is a town is. I mean, I jokingly would call it the whitest place on the planet. I’m sure it’s not, but it’s not far off. I mean, there were things about sending my son to school there that I thought were really good, but one of the things I did not think was good was the absolute lack of diversity that was there. Like, I saw that as a as a big strike in the column for that as a public school system from my perspective.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:04:52  Yeah. And I think most people would would agree with you. That is that is a shortcoming for our city and the reason that we all choose to live in Upper Arlington, I think are similar, right in a ring suburb.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:05:06  The beautiful old 100 year old trees, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:05:10  Yes.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:05:10  The older homes, parks, rec the good schools. So pull any human and those would be factors that would a human would want to live in the community. So the question is, well, how did Upper Arlington become the place that only a certain subtext of humans that want that live there, i.e. mostly white? It’s about only 1.2% of Upper Arlington is black, with a population of about 38,000 people. That’s only if you do the math. That’s only about 600 of us that are black. there’s about 7% that are mixed race or Asian or population of color. So if you’re doing that right, 90% of Upper Arlington is 89 to 90% of Upper Arlington is white. but I it’s not something that I thought about when I moved there. It wasn’t something that I had. The factors that I just said earlier, you know, I wanted the great schools, the beautiful home, the fact that I was close to downtown and it was really my daughter’s experience as the only black kid in her kindergarten class, that heightened for me what that feels like in community, because I usually when I say I’m one of few or one of only in the room I’m talking about in corporate spaces, right? You know, I’ve never understood what that feeling is like in community till I experience it through my daughter.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:36  Yeah. And as a child. Right. You’re an adult and you have ways of processing. Okay? I’m the only person here that’s of color in this room. And I understand some of the reasons why that is. And I’ve done enough work on myself that I don’t take that on board And for kids it’s a different it’s a different story.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:06:55  A five year old child. Yes. They don’t have the words. They don’t have the process. Their kitchen table looks very different, like the home that they return to at the end of the day looks very different. And for my daughter, the words that she had was, mom, can you straighten my hair for school the next day? And in her mind, she thought changing something about the way that she looked was the thing to do to to create belonging. And children shouldn’t have to, shouldn’t have to at five. Think about that.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:29  Right?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:07:30  Right. So the question is what can community do even if your community that’s mostly white. Is it possible to build community where if you’re not white, you still feel like you belong? Yeah, that was a challenge.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:07:44  That was the challenge for.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:45  Me, right? And you talk in certain places about being at a crossroads? Yes. And you call that as sort of a you’re forced to make a decision. Right. Yeah. And so your daughter coming to you like that forces you to make a decision, which is either. Oh, I made the wrong choice. This is the wrong community for us. Time to get out of here, or I’m going to stay here and find a way to make it work. And you chose the latter. What was going through that decision like how were you going through that in your head.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:08:15  Yeah. from a practical standpoint I had just moved 200 miles from Cleveland, so to Columbus. So that was just pure exhaustion from.

Speaker 4 00:08:26  Moving, right. From a very practical standpoint to do this again. I cannot do all of this again. there.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:08:31  Was certainly that. And then the other aspect was we hear this be the change you want to see. Quote from Gandhi. And just philosophy is out there. You know, everyone’s like be the change you want to see. Well, what does that really mean in practice. And what does that mean if you’re going to show your children, be the change you want to see. and so I took that on, like, there’s some things you can’t just write in, there’s some change. You can’t just phone in or, you know, call people on. And that’s what I’ve been used to doing my whole life. Something’s not right. I write about it. I, you know, send an email to the person in charge to share my thoughts, share my insight, share my idea. what about jumping in the arena? That’s really being the change you want to see. And it was important for my kids to see that in in its application, that you can be the change you want to see.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:24  And where did that start? So now you are the mayor of Upper Arlington, which is again, I find no meeting you now. I’m like, well, of course she is.  But before that, right, you’re like, really? You know.  Like, okay.  You know, it’s it’s good. So there’s a there’s a big difference between this moment of your daughter at five and she’s 12 now. So seven years later now you are one of the preeminent leaders in the community. What did the early steps look like for you of saying, all right, I’m staying, and I’m going to embody and bring about some of the change that I think we could have here.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:10:04  The early days really started by paying attention to the environment my daughter was in. So paying attention to her classroom, paying attention to what the playground looked like, paying attention to programming that was available in the community for her to go to and the people that came to it. And the very first lightbulb for me. So this is all happening like October 2018. 

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:10:32  My first Black History Month in Upper Arlington was February 2019. This is about six months after I’d moved to the community. Right. And so I am dropping my daughter off at school in And notice that there if Black History Month is happening in corporate where I was at. It’s not happening in her school. There’s no poster. there’s, you know, you send the Friday notes, the teacher sends the Friday notes at class on what they learned.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:04  Nothing.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:11:04  Nothing had come up. And it dawned on me this even really wasn’t about, my daughter being the only. It was also that other kids were not getting exposure to information or to activities or to learning’s, which kids are beautiful. They don’t understand this. You know, whatever you expose them to allows them to have curiosity, allows them to have conversation. but if you don’t expose them to things that allow them to talk about it, then they just grow up and we hear stories of people finding out in college for the first time of some stat that they didn’t know before that they probably should have known. And so that lack of exposure led me to ask a question of the community.  I went to the Upper Arlington discussion forum on Facebook.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:11:58  And I asked the question, what does our community do for Black History Month? And that post was met with so much curiosity, so much wonder. you know, the community members just even in their own just saying, wait, we don’t do anything. We I thought, you know, became one of those pointing fingers. Doesn’t the library do something? Shouldn’t the city be doing something? Is that the park? Like everyone is wondering who’s doing the thing, right? Right. And didn’t realize that no one. These things weren’t happening right?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:12:28  The library had some book collections at that point. The PTOs in particular schools. Since each school has its own PTO, some toes were doing stuff, but overall no one was holistically looking at the exposure our community members got, and so that’s kind of where it started. It started with diving in there. and before I knew it, I was serving on boards and commissions within the city.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:12:53  And in 2020, well, 2020, we all know what happened. 2020. not only Covid, but there’s this racial awakening, right? and so by 2021, there was a seat coming up on city council, and I’d only lived in the community three years at that point. And one of my neighbors that had kind of been on the journey since 2019, when I was asking questions on working with different community members and bringing the city its first Black History Month. said, hey, there’s a seat opening up on council. You should run. And it never crossed my mind. And I said.  I first laughed at the idea. Like three years. I have a name like Ukeme, Like. No. Right. No community recognition whatsoever like that. That’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:35  This is not.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:13:39  That. Be the change you want to see. And, the Hamilton soundtrack is one of my favorite soundtracks. There’s a there’s a song on there, the room where it happens.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:13:47  You know, we often think all this, all these policies, all the this impact that we have to feel from things that were done. It all started in the room and, you know, the song is like no one was in the room where it happened, the room where it happened, and I thought, I need to be in the room where it happens. And in order to be in the room where it happens, you got to do the hard thing of running for office and putting yourself out there and getting elected. And so that’s what I did. That’s how it started.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:16  You talk about asking a how question instead of a why question, right? So if we think about you and your five year old daughter, the why question is why? Why are there no black people in Upper Arlington are so few? Why? And and I think there’s also a chance that the why question pivots you towards judgment and anger.  And you talk about how how question pivots you towards curiosity.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:14:44  That’s the concept I talk about in my book, Immigrant, because I think when you’re really leading across difference or in a room with a lot of difference to avoid judgment, to your point, that why question almost puts you on the defense. If you’ve ever tried to ask a ten year old or a teenager why? they’ll just say because, right. That feels feels like I mean, adults do it too. They’re like, right. Because,

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:15:09  It can create that judgment and instant kind of defensiveness.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:15:12  But when you ask, how did you come to believe? How did we it allows people to explain. And actually, you that asked the question to it puts you in a very curious position where you’re really listening to the history or their understanding of what happened or what transpired. and a lot of that happened, through understanding my daughter’s experience. It’s from there. Rather than ask, why did this inner ring suburb city only have 1.2% black. And then the how question.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:15:44  How did we come to be this city? Then you start to learn about the things like redlining. Then you start to understand the things about the socioeconomics. Then you start to, you know, the how reveals this history, what it’s taken for us to get there. And it also it also invites something about how the how question also invites people to be part of the solution.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:06  I was going to say it immediately. There is a pivot towards okay, how could it be different? Yes. Right. What would we need to do for it to be different? Right. I mean, it is a it, it puts you into sort of a solution. And this is an oversimplification, but a guest who’s been on the show a few times quotes Quincy Jones, who says, I don’t have problems. I have puzzles right now. I’m not saying that some of the things we’re dealing with on a grand scale are are puzzles, right? They’re more serious than that. But that pivot. from this is a problem to this is a puzzle.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:43  Yeah. Is that pivot to oh okay. Puzzles have solutions, right? Puzzles. You know, you can you can work on a puzzle when it’s a problem until the problem is gone. There’s it’s just oh sucks –  puzzle, ytou can enjoy solving to a certain degree. Right. It’s just a different framework, which I think is what you’re talking about when you’re talking about moving on those questions.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:17:05  Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, in this instance, for me, what started as three women that believed in me and said, yeah, you can do this, you can run for office. And me having a mirror conversation with myself to face the inner critic and say, yes, you can do this, led to a team of almost 70 people that towards the end of the campaign that helped the campaign in some way and touch the campaign in some way.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:56  How are you finding or how do you get people to be civically involved? Right. I mean, I was not very civically involved when I was there.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:08  I was busy with a career. I was busy with two kids. I just wasn’t I wasn’t real civically involved. And I think a lot of people are. Well, I think if you just look at studies were far less civically involved as a, as a culture than we used to be.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:23  How were these the people that were already kind of showing up to these things? Or was there something that pulled people out? And if so, how did you. Did you have to pull people out or did they kind of come on their own?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:18:34  I and this is one of the big initiatives I’ve worked on on councils, civic engagement, and most of what I’ve implemented has come from how I ran the campaign. Here’s what I realised about people running my campaign and trying to get them involved. You’ve got to understand what they desire to get out of the experience, and you’ve got to make the experience a delightful one for them. I’ll give an example. If you want volunteers to help with Lit Drop, and I don’t know how many volunteer experiences you’ve had, but you show up and it’s unorganised and you haven’t, like specifically cut out. The sheet and said this is your section, And we don’t give them 500 things.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:19:17  We give them the 50 that you’re hitting today. It’s only going to take you two hours. We kind of outline for them exactly how it’s going to go. So I talk about that being.

Speaker 4 00:19:26  Delight.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:19:26  The volunteer experience. And then they go do it and they’ll be back.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:19:33  Because you made it so seamless and so easy for them to be involved. So I’m always critically thinking about in order to get people to engage. You got to meet them where they are. So sometimes we were doing these was block parties or meeting at coffee shops. We’re not creating or plugging into existing events. We’re not creating a whole new thing for them to just say, oh, another thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:54  Another thing to do. Yeah.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:19:56  You know, you’re kind of figuring out a way to integrate that experience into things that they’re already going to be at or that’s existing. And I’ve done this with our boards and commissions in the city because we need new ideas and we need people to serve on those boards and commissions.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:20:12  So it starts everywhere from our recruiting process. How do we talk about our boards and commissions? How do we talk about how it ties in? That’s perhaps the purpose piece. People that ended up working on my campaign understood the purpose of what we’re trying to do, and they had, like, grounding language about how we’re going to conduct ourselves. It was going to be fun. It was always going to be positive. We don’t bash on the other candidates on this campaign. So everyone is tied by purpose to start with. And then second thing, like I said, is like after you’ve you’ve shared what you would get from the experiences recruiting in a way where it’s easy and understandable. Don’t have a 20 page application to be a volunteer, it needs to be three questions. Yeah, right. Right. Figure what that is.  That is the same thing even in government, even in, like serving on a thing like a big board and commission. Then invite them in for the interview so that that’s a big piece is like, how do you really think about very much like a customer service.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:21:07  And I’ve probably been in corporate too long. But I think about I think about civic engagement as how do you delight that volunteer in your experience.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:15  What was your corporate career in before?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:21:17  So I have worn many hats. I started my corporate career as a mechanical engineer.  I was a project engineer and I traveled around the country. I liked to tease with my kids, but it is true. Literally, I was a toilet paper engineer so I worked on paper products, specifically toilet paper, and my task was to make it softer. I’ve never felt more validated of my toilet paper experience than Covid. When everyone was running around to pick up toilet paper, I knew that I could make it if I needed to. So I was like, I was not worried. I was like, I know how to make it and make it softer. That too, you know. So I started I started my career there. I did that for almost a decade. and I went to law school, and then I graduated law school.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:22:05  I was a non-traditional student. graduated law school, came out, did intellectual property. So I worked in private practice as an intellectual property attorney. the third grade understanding of that is I helped companies protect their innovation and their brands. Right. And then I went in-house. And that’s kind of how I came here to, central Ohio. Columbus. I was in the financial and insurance tech industry, and that’s how I came in, and I worked in-house in corporate as an attorney and did that for a few years and then ran for office, and now I’m at OSU. I’m an administrator and a professor. 

Eric Zimmer 00:22:43  So is being mayor not a full time position?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:22:46   Not in Upper Arlington. It’s not some cities. It’s a full time position. Not not in Upper Arlington. We what we how our form of government is, is we have the seven person elected council, and then we hire a city manager. And the city manager is the executor.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:00  Yeah. Okay, so you did make a new career change.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:23:04  I did make a recent career change. Yes, I went into academia, so. Okay. Yeah, it’s been fun. I do global education, so most of my programs are the international programs for the law school, Moritz Law School at OSU. 

Eric Zimmer 00:23:18  I have a bunch of questions about being an IP lawyer that have nothing to do with this show. So I’m going to just set those aside and move forward. But I was having a conversation with a young lawyer about IP law. me anyway. 

Eric Zimmer 00:23:35  You had a recent LinkedIn post where you shared something which was basically your weekend. Tell us about your tell us about your weekend. A recent weekend.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:23:48  Oh my goodness. It’s always it’s crazy I think.I think the one I posted on LinkedIn, it was I was down in Cincinnati.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:54  which is about two hours from ours.

Speaker 5 00:23:57  Yeah, two hours from Columbus. And then I had to get back up to Springfield.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:24:01  For my daughter’s track meet,  which that took an hour and. 15 minutes to go from Cincinnati to her track meet. Watched her track meet. Enjoyed her track meet. Cheered her on. She did fantastic place. Went back down to Cincinnati for.

To finish out the rest of the program I was there for, which is Leadership Ohio. And we’re traveling around the state to learn about different parts of the state. Went back down there, came back from there to Columbus. had a friend’s baby shower. I was teaching a webinar that day, so I had to be on for that. Just so by the time I got to Monday, I was. And then, then after that. So then I was in, Mansfield, Ohio. I left Columbus, went to Mansfield, and then Mansfield back. I put like 500 miles in my car.  That that weekend. like almost ten hours driving, right? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:57  Like ten hours in the car.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:25:00  getting to all these things. it sounds insane. Because you look at your weekends. Like. Well, why are all those things scheduled in one weekend? You know what? You’d have some critics say that. but it’s just the season and the reality of the life that I’m in right now. And I kind of had to look at that weekend and take it for what it is. I was a mom, I was a civic leader, I was an educator. All the things that are important to me, I was a friend. All the things are important to me. were part of that weekend. Yeah. And so I couldn’t knock it for being this hectic, unwieldy. Why did everyone schedule everything in that weekend? I just had to figure out a way to stretch my bandwidth a bit. Yeah, so I could be there and enjoy all those things. yes, I was wiped. By the time I got to Monday. but I was grateful that I could do that, and I was able to.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:56  Yeah, I loved it. partially because we just launched a new course called Overwhelm is Optional. And the core idea is exactly what you’re saying, which is that for most people, their lives are as full as they want them to be. Yeah. Like there’s moments where you’re like, gosh, this is too much. But everything you’re doing is of value. It’s important to you. There’s a lot of advice of like, just slow down, do less. Oh, and that used to feel frustrating to me when I would hear it because I’d be like, well, but I don’t really want to or I can’t mean I can’t. I mean, I would give up something I value in order. I would have to act against something I value in order to do it. So if you can’t reduce the amount, all you can do is reduce how you relate to it. And that’s what I loved about your post, is because you did that work of relating to it instead of I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:48  You related to it from this point of these things are all valuable to me, and I get to do them. And you know what? The cost of that is? A little frantic ness and tiredness. But I’m okay with that.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:26:59  Yeah, I oh, I love this course. When can I sign up? You know, to tell me more. No, it’s it’s great teaching because I think we’re living in an era of no say no. And like, you get to control your life and do all these things, but we don’t give the flip side of that. Yes, you get to control your life. And if you want to fill it with things meaningful, sometimes that does mean overwhelm.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:27:26  Yeah, yeah. You know, but you’ve got to look at it from the lens of I’m grateful that I get to experience all these things and it will land better. Yeah. Even if you’re just a little bit tired, it’ll land better for you.I think attitude is everything.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:38  Yeah, it was when  my boys were teenagers that I had the insight of. I was complaining about taking one of them to one practice and another to another practice on the other side of town. And I was in that I have to do all this and that. I just had the thought. I was like, no, I don’t.  I don’t have to. There’s no law on the books. It says, I got to take my kid to soccer practice like I’m choosing to. And why am I choosing to? Yeah. Oh, I’m choosing to because I think it’s good for him. He like. I mean, now now I’m back in the driver’s seat of my own life, and I’m and I’m and I’m realizing that the things I do are choices. Yeah. And that makes such a big difference.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:28:17  Yeah. I love that.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:19  Yeah. You tell a story about having a Joey. Yeah. In your life. Tell me, who’s Joey?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:28:25  Joey is my first boss.  My first corporate boss. Right out of engineering school. Just a fantastic gentleman. Actually. I start Immigrit with a story about Joey, because I remember when I was interviewing for jobs, and I still cannot remember to this day who it was. It probably was someone in our career office that had said, you’ll have a lot of opportunities. I mean, you’re female mechanical engineer. Like at that point, 2004, like, there’s not a lot of girls in STEM and everyone’s trying to get it, get their hands on one. So you’re going to have a lot of opportunities. How are you going to pick it? Well, one thing you should consider, and I would consider it like the big thing you should consider is how well you relate to who your manager is going to be, your direct boss. So if anything, yeah, you can get the fancy company titles. but I would go for the boss and I thought it was a really great advice, and it’s one that I give to my mentees now to very, very early on in your career.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:29:28  I think who you get as that direct manager, your sponsor, your mentor, your advocate is is that boss. And for me, that person was Joey and I picked. How did I become a toilet paper engineer? I thought I was going to go to mechanical engineering school and end up working on German cars. That was my dream. I loved German cars. I wanted to like, design and build them. I ended up as a toilet paper engineer because when I went into the interview and had an opportunity to interview with Joey and knew he was going to be my direct boss, we just had great rapport, great conversations, and I chose that opportunity and it worked out really well for me. as an immigrant, there’s also just different pressures in terms of, proving yourself to be able to stay and contribute to the economy of work in the United States. And much of that proving yourself comes in. The visa processes, the work visas that you have to get. And Joey didn’t know very much about the process, actually.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:30:33  But what he knew is that I was worth keeping, and he was willing to listen to what it was that we had to do. How how to position me. Because you get three years into the and you have to get your work visa. You have to. There’s a process where your company has to show of all the people that interviewed you, why why it was you. Most companies don’t want to go through that. They’re just going to be like, you’re not that great, okay, we’ll just go with it. If it causes us less work, you know, causes HR less work, they’ll go with this. But he was willing to go that journey. and so it solidified for me. Why tell my mentees now that that first boss in the career that you believe you want matters? Yeah, matters. They’ll give you the opportunities. They’ll advocate for you. Rooms that you’re not in and they’ll guide you like you know. Joey would  tell me that’s not that important at all. You didn’t do that. Right. And we’re young and moldable enough that it’s important to have that honesty right off the bat, because it becomes less and less so the more you go in your career. Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:41  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 oneyoufeed.net/sms and sign up. It’s free. No spam and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s oneyoufeed.net/sms. Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:32  It’s interesting. I got to see my Joey about two weeks ago, which is rare because he lives in Austin, Texas. Yeah, and it’s possible. I’ve never talked about him on this show. Amazingly so I’m excited to be able to. His name’s Charles Fry, and I, you know, at 2025, I was a homeless heroin addict. I got a job sort of in the tech business, customer support. But but this was the first like, big job that I had sort of landed was with him in this small organization. And it was him. Yeah, yeah. And then it turned into we became part of a startup and, and and I remember I thought I was going to be a network engineer because I could study for it. I had never been to college and I could study and you could get these certifications, and I got them all and and and we. We started this new startup company said, I want you to go over and do this thing called integration work. And I said, I have no idea how to do any of what you’re saying.  I trained to do this. I want to do this. And he said, no, you know, you would be an okay network engineer. You could be great at this. And I said, I still sort of argued. And I said, fine, okay, I’ll go do it for three months with the agreement that after three months I can come back and do this. And he was dead. Right. And it changed the whole direction of my career completely. I never would have had the career I had without him seeing something in me that I didn’t at all, and believing in me and putting me in roles that I. We were startups, startups. You do this, but you end up in roles you have no business being in now. But thankfully I, you know, landed on my feet. And it really, you know, was was what guided my career until six years. Today is actually the six year anniversary of me leaving my full time job to do this podcast. Hi everybody, Happy freedom day!

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:34:25  That is incredible.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:26  Today is the six year anniversary. Yeah.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:34:29  Now, what was the decision? See, I’m going to turn this into my podcast. All right. Yeah. How did you arrive? That’s very brave. I mean, how did you arrive? There’s. There’s the safety net. Yeah. Of having a full time thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:40  Oh, yeah. It was tough. I, you know, about three years in. So I’ve been doing the podcast while having a full time job. This is the busy time I was talking about. Yeah. I’ve got a full time career that’s going well. I’ve got kids. I’ve got a podcast that’s going well. I got a mother who needs medical attention. Like, my life is full and I don’t. I don’t want to give up any of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:02  So. But about three years in, I started to dream a little bit, like, maybe I could do this full time. Like, this could be my career because I had started a solar energy company. I think as I went on in my career at first was like, can I make any money doing anything right? I’m a homeless heroin addict. I never went to college. Like just can I make any money doing anything. And over time there was always that. But it started to become a little bit more of like. Can I really enjoy what I’m doing. But. And then it was like, can what I do have what feels like a bigger meaning? Yeah. So I started a solar energy company, and that solar energy company went about five years and it flopped for a bunch of different reasons. And it was in the wreckage of that that I started doing this. Yeah. And I realized, like, oh, I love doing this. And so about three years I started dreaming, like, maybe I could do it full time. And I was out of startups at that point. I was in a corporate, big corporate job doing really big software projects and starting to finally make real, real money.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:58  Like, you know, you get to be, what am I if I was ten, ten years ago, you know, mid 40s? Yeah. Like when you’ve done it long enough that like throwing the real money at you. and ironically, there was a point where they said they like, they hit a point where they’re like, if he leaves, we are screwed. So they gave me a bonus to stay for a year, which turned out to be the thing that sprung me.Because I was like okay with that bonus and some savings I can go.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:36:29  I can do this.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:30  And so yes, it, it did feel it did feel risky. I mean, my, my, my boys weren’t at home, but I was on the hook for paying all their college. I mean, I still felt like I was nervous, but I felt like I had a plan, and, It’s worked. Now, I don’t make the kind of money I made then. I mean, I’m not making that kind of money that I did then. Still, I mean, I don’t regret the.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:55  And I don’t regret the decision. Right. Like, you know, I would go spend three weeks in the UK coming up because I can. Yeah. You know, because of this thing. So. But yeah, it’s funny that we got to talk about Joey. So thank you Charles. Which six year anniversary. That’s how I ended up with the stupid haircut.

Speaker 6 00:37:14  Because then you’re finally. You’re like, I’m not in corporate. I can I can do.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:17  My one year anniversary. I was like, I’m gonna go get a stupid haircut. I’m gonna go get a dumb haircut that I wouldn’t have gotten in a corporate job, and I’ll shave it off tomorrow.

Speaker 6 00:37:27  And it stayed. Well, this is your brand, you know? Now, you guys. Yeah, yeah, it’s become the. Yeah. Well, all right.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:33  Back on topic with you, though. So thank you for the little detour. I do want to talk about the book a little bit.  In the book. You talk about a core idea which is shifting the perception people have from the immigrant struggle to immigrant leadership. Talk to me about what immigrants bring. It’s special.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:37:56  This is a great question, because I think most times when people think about immigrants and immigration, they think about that journey on the boat and they have to learn the language and all these things, and they forget that these are people. We’re not a monolithic group by any means, but they’ve left what is familiar. To start anew. There’s some critical skills that it takes to start new.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:38:25  That perhaps people, some people even have a taste of that just moving out of their parents house or moving to a new city. You probably get some taste of you got to be adaptable.  It’s going to be unfamiliar. You’re going to be throwing a bunch of curveballs. How do you adapt to those things without going under? That’s one. There is a resourcefulness that it takes. I don’t care whether you’re the Prince of Persia and you have $1 million or you have pennies. But when you are in a new system, you got to learn the system. You got to figure out. Again, if you are a millionaire, you got to figure out what? What bank do I have to put this money in that gains interest? All of that stuff, all of those skills, takes resourcefulness.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:39:07  And it requires you to build new networks. And again, they’ve got to be resilient. And I talk about it as kind of like resilient. Plus because we think about resilience and we think about this concept of bouncing back. There’s no bounce back for them. It’s not like they can bounce back to where they came from. It’s all bouncing forward.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:25  Bouncing somewhere new.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:39:26  It’s bouncing somewhere new. It’s bouncing every every setback that they have. The bounce back means that they’re they’re springing just a little bit forward.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:39:35  Right. All these things and then grit because you’ve you’ve made that journey and you’re committed to seeing it through. Right. And so it’s like all of that is what I coin immigrant like that adaptability, that resilience, that resourcefulness, that grit. That’s immigrant. That’s the aspect of the immigrant experience that I think we fail to talk about or understand. And it really it translates to how they work, how they are as talent in the workplace That we miss.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:29  You talk about how I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but how very underrepresented they are in our leadership structures.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:40:38  Yeah, 3% of fortune 100 CEOs are immigrants. Meanwhile, 50% of fortune 500 companies were built by immigrants. Think about every household brand that you know of. Google. Levi’s, AT&T. All of them. all started founded by immigrants and immigrants and not leading this. I like to say in some of the research that I that uncovered from the book, we’ll see, immigrants in kind of what I call technical leadership or functionally technical leadership.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:41:13  So your chief technology officer is likely an immigrant from India. Right. But you don’t see them with broad levels of leadership. And we’ve got to ask ourselves why. Yeah. And I say this in the book, too, when we if I was to ask anyone, what are you what is the skill set that you think a CEO needs or leader at a high level, needs adaptability would come up. Markets are going to change. We need someone that you know can can perform under pressure. Can Bob and we even they would say that resilience is their secret. All these qualities that I talk about in immigrant, you’re going to say we want that in a leader. And here and the wonderful thing about these skills or the the interesting about these skills is not stuff. You can go to Harvard Business School and learn. You’ve got to live.

Speaker 7 00:42:02  Adaptability doesn’t just come to you. You got to live through situations that requires.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:07  More than it is knowledge.

Speaker 7 00:42:08  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:09  Right.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:42:09  Oh, I love that.I love that frame. That’s exactly it. Yeah. It’s not. It’s not a textbook learning. You’ve got to live through these things. Yeah. And here’s a population. Again, we’re not a monolithic group by any means, but here’s a population that I can pick up on without even knowing. The full story can tell you that they’ve lived these things. They’ve lived these qualities time and time again. So why are we missing that in our recruitment and our talent elevation and getting them to to leadership roles?

Eric Zimmer 00:42:40  You talk about giving a commencement speech back at your alma mater. Yeah. And one of the things you talked there was you were telling students to confidently go off script. Say more about that.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:42:56  there’s a lot of scripts that we’re kind of dealt in, in life, and I didn’t I didn’t necessarily write about this, but everyone knows it. You know, you you go to college, you get this degree and you work that path, right? You don’t rock the boat, right? You do as you’re told.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:43:13  The that’s generally the script that most people are told in life is success, especially on the on the corporate path and or to climb the corporate ladder. These are the things that you do. In fact, you kind of see it in even in professional development courses that you take within the company like get this skill, do this thing, do this thing, and then you go up another rung on the ladder. Yep. The problem with that advice is for most immigrants. And I’d I had to learn this myself. You don’t get the luxury of living life exactly on this script, whether it be the immigration process, whether it be the fact that you have to get a visa for something, whether it be how you prove yourself, sometimes you’ve you’ve got to bop and weave. It cannot be, that straight path that you dreamed about for yourself and using that wisdom in my life. Part of why there was the pivot from engineering to law was that I’d like, had worked out the possibility of my work visa.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:44:16  You only get it for so long, six years, and then you got to do another proving of yourself. And I was I was tired of that. And I said, you know what? I’m going to go back on a student visa and build another path and see how I’d. So I had to be flexible enough to let go of these dreams or this, this script. And it took confidence to say, figure it out before, I’ll figure it out again. And I was talking to a class that had just come through the pandemic, and so they were very anxious about what was going on for the future. And it’s like you’ll be less anxious if you weren’t too worried about script, if you could just figure, how can I confidently like, navigate whatever life is throwing at me? Going off script, that was the commencement speech I gave, Given the time that those students were in and graduating into. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:08  And I think it’s never been more true that that path doesn’t exist in the same way that I used to.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:17  I had a conversation with my son a few weeks ago, and it was the first time in my life that I felt almost like I had nothing to offer him in the way of career advice, literally, because I was like, anytime up until like a few years ago, I’d have been like, well, you know, I mean, I wouldn’t I don’t know what you should do. I don’t, but I can offer some guidance and some ideas and some. And now, particularly with I, I’m like, I really don’t know. Yeah. I really don’t know what what jobs. I just don’t know. Maybe that’s part of getting old. Maybe you just eventually maybe everybody hits this point where they’re like, wait a second, I don’t understand this world. But but I feel like this is, you know.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:46:00 There are no traditional paths anymore. Yeah. And I think that’s what we’re picking up. And it’s more prevalent, now more than ever. But there’s something about this generation, too, that, that I’m enjoying is that they realize and I say this, I recently said this to a bunch of early career folks.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:46:18  We’ve been taught to, like, audition for our lives, where it’s like, oh, previous hopes for this thing apply for this job, and it’s time to start authoring your own life. You want something like figure out how you get the opportunity and do it. And this generation, something magical about this generation is that they figured how to make money outside of corporate. Because really, what kept us on the path or what kept us auditioning is who was going to be paying our paycheck.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:50  Yes, 100%. Yeah.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:46:53  And so there’s, there’s more freedom now to offer the path that you want off of the life that you want. And so. I say. I say to people, the life that you want is about how brave and how courageous you’re willing to be to get it. And that’s always been true. But it’s more prevalent now that people can actually do that, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:47:16  I want to talk about an idea of bringing your whole self together.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:47:22  Yeah.Authenticity is about the story. The short coded word.  I have a very complex relationship with with that word authenticity and bringing your whole self to work because, I mean, the way I think about it, sometimes you’ve got a code switch to bring yourself to work. You’ve got to there’s some level of survival that it takes. I think you’ve got to be culturally intelligent in reading the room to understand what parts of yourself you bring to work. Yeah. You know, it’s a cute phrase to say “bring our whole self to work.” But once you go into a room, you can tactfully decide. This is the part of self that I can I can bring fully. Some people call it code switching, some I call it being clever to say this is the part of me that this room needs right now. Right. It’s not always trauma dumping. It’s not always sharing your pain. I think bringing your whole self to work is really about how do you use a part of you, or a story within you to build a bridge or build a trust in that room? And sometimes that’s not your whole self. It’s just a part of yourself, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:48:33  It also assumes that there is this fixed self that you could drag around to all these scenarios. Right? And that’s not the way we are. No. Like I’m different with you than I would be different with my partner Ginny tonight than I would be with my son. And that’s not because I’m inauthentic. It’s because there’s no like, I’m not this monolithic thing. I’m a shifting, and that’s life. And so being wise and skillful about that, I think makes complete sense, and I am certainly one of those people that realized as I brought, quote unquote, more of myself to work. Yeah, I did better in the relationships that I was able to build with people. But but that was within certainly within some constraints. Yeah, right. It was certainly within some like, here’s a fruitful time to share a little bit more than I might. Hey, you know what? This meeting is probably not the time. Yes. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:31  You know, and again, I don’t think that’s. I don’t think that’s inauthentic. Being someone you’re not, that’s inauthentic. Showing different sides of who you are is just skill.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:49:44  Bingo. You got it. That’s. Yes, that’s exactly it.  Yeah, that’s exactly it.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:49  I love you know, what you said was authenticity is not a vibe. It’s a skill. Like that. I think that really speaks to it. We talked earlier about turning towards situations with curiosity. And you describe your freshman year of college where you just moved here from Nigeria and someone asked you what did they ask you.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:50:17 It was it was  Martin Luther King weekend. And I was asked, what does Martin Luther King Junior mean to you? And I froze. And it wasn’t because I didn’t know who Martin Luther King Junior was. It was that I grew up in Nigeria. I’m a black African. We didn’t have the civil rights movement impact us, or our history or our learnings.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:50:46  We learned of him as some kind of historical figure that did something. and I can still see this all playing out, because the steps of the library in this reporter, because it’s I mean, the camera is in my face as a journalist and kind of motioned on. and I remember saying, blurting out that he doesn’t mean anything to me, but I know who he is. And I went back after that, and I was talking to my roommate about the situation in this expectation that just because I’m black, I should know black American history. I’ve since learned it over time. I’ve been here for 20 plus years.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:27  Because now you’re in America. It makes sense to learn it here in America, but not in Nigeria.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:51:32  Not not in Nigeria. and I remember her saying to me, well, you should learn because when I walk into a room, no one picks up intersectionality first. They like they don’t see that layer. What they see me as is a black woman. And I will never speak for all the experiences of black America because I’m not a black American, but I understand it now because I’ve taken the time to to learn it.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:52:06  and, I mean, I write about this in Immigrit and that’s, that’s really the work of cultural intelligence, as I understand who people expect me to be in rooms, and I can correct them. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t understand because I haven’t learned versus that dumb experience that I had. Like dumbfounded when like when the reporter came up to me. Can I take a beat? Pause. I’m remembering because I know I’ve written on two different things. There was that. And then there’s the did you grow up in a tree scenario? The one? That’s the one. Okay, I was thinking about that one, too, because I read the Martin Luther King one and I talk about.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:40  I can I can make this all work. So let me bring us into it. Eric Zimmer 00:52:46  So that is a great story. There’s another story from college that I can’t. It’s when someone said something so outrageous to you and and how you handled it then and how you would handle it now.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:52:57  Oh my goodness. Okay, this that’s the way you’re talking about. To go back to like my first year in America, there are a lot of stories. Maybe I’ll do a book just on its stories. But, this particular one asked whether I grew up in a in a tree in Nigeria, and I was so like, shocked and offended. I mean, I’m young. I’m shocked, offended about the question. I’m like, what the hell are you talking about? And I’m kind of like this sarcastic individual. So I retorted, yeah, right next to the American Embassy. Because, I mean, if I grew up in the tree, that means the diplomats that come here from America also live.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:53:39  In the same situation that I did. But what I didn’t understand at the time that I blurted that out is what the media shows about Africa and what it shows about how we live, and it doesn’t show the full story. There’s a quote by Chimamanda that says, the problem with stereotypes is not that they’re not true. The problem with stereotypes is that it’s not the complete story, right? So more than 20 years in here, I probably would have invited that. I would have shown a picture of how I grew up. I probably would have invited a very different conversation. Exposure showed them that, yes, those things are there, that there’s people that live in mud houses, there’s people that live in in treehouses in Nigeria. It’s not that it’s not true, it’s that it’s not the complete picture. And so approaching that with validating some of what they knew and adding to their knowledge. Right. And then opening up the opportunity for them to be curious about asking me more, it’s probably a better way to handle the situation.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:51  Yeah, I love that idea about stereotypes, you know, because when you bring up stereotypes, you’ll be like, well, stereotypes are, you know, they’re there for a reason. Yeah. Like, well, yes. And to your point, but it’s just it’s just focusing on one aspect.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:55:07  Yeah. We can’t make up a whole story.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:09  Of of people, and people are so much more. And all situations are so much more complex than that. But I just thought the way you wrote about this was, was really gracious. People don’t know what they don’t know. You know, to say one is old enough to know better assumes they’ve been exposed to better, right? Yes. how can how we respond can matter more than what was asked? And that’s that is a that is a position of strong agency.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:40  Right. That’s a position of strong agency to say whatever is whatever’s brought to me. Could be ignorant, could be done. But the way I respond to it is more important, and I don’t know that a lot of people feel that way.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:55:55  Yeah, there’s some kind of a wisdom that has that comes with time, I think. And as we become a more global world and what I, what I mean by that is before when people came to America in the 1800s, they had to be on a boat.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:56:10  They traveled a long time. There wasn’t a lot of exposure. Now people can get on a plane. Right now, people have the internet where they can.See although worlds. Right. But it still doesn’t erode. And why I use that phrase to to say you’re old enough to know better doesn’t mean it’s still just because we now know see,  different things we’re exposed to different news doesn’t mean that we’ve been exposed to it doesn’t mean we’ve had the opportunity to have a conversation about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:40  Yeah, exactly.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:56:41  You know, so what I say even. This happens to a lot when I see people spiral out on conversations online and that it’s of that position. Well, I mean, this is 2025. They should know. They should have seen. They should have. It’s like you don’t know what sections of the internet they’re on. You know, what they’ve seen or what they’ve been exposed to, and they’ve certainly never had a human conversation on it. They’ve probably just been in like chat rooms talking about this. So here’s your opportunity. When they have that point of contact with you to to have a different conversation.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:15  Yeah. And I think that that idea goes both directions. Meaning someone may have a lot of ignorance about our situation or may have a lot of ignorance about, you know, say, a particular group’s situation.  But oftentimes the people on the other side of that don’t understand that person’s situation. And it seems like that person’s situation is better. But unless you’ve grown up, just to take an example, right, you could have someone on the left who’s very multicultural and thinks that’s the way to be. And you have someone on the right who’s not right. A lot of people that I’ve talked to, particularly in particular, I see this in the coastal areas. They have no concept at all of what it would like. Would it be like to grow up in a tiny town in the middle of Ohio? They don’t understand what that world looks like at all. And so there’s this demanding that that those people understand the other world, which they should, but there’s no understanding back to what that world is like. And it’s a different world. You know, and I think I like what you said about never having had a human conversation about it, because it’s one thing to see it on TV.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:34  It’s another thing to encounter anyone, a human who’s living that way or has lived that way or has. Those are very different things.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:58:43  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:45  Yeah. But I just really loved that how we respond can matter more than what we asked. You know, because I do. As I said, I think it’s an agency thing, and I think it’s always been a big value of mine, which is like, I don’t want to just return what’s gift given to me. Like, I want to decide who I’m going to be. I’m not going to be who you who you expect me to be. Right. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:11  And the simplest example, the time this first came to me was when my first wife and I split. And it was really painful. My son was two and a half. She left me for a guy who was in AA. It was a very. I was angry. It was really angry. Yeah, but I just had this moment where I was like, but I want to be towards her the way I want to be based on my values, not based on what she did. And and again, I don’t say that because I’m like this high minded person. I mean it because it gives me puts me back. You talked about being an author. It puts me back in the author’s seat. When you respond that way.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:59:48  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:48  You’re in the author.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:59:49  Seat. Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:50  Here’s who I am, regardless of who you are, Within reason. Right? I mean, you know, someone.

Speaker 8 00:59:56  All human at the end of the day.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 00:59:59  I mean, these are the things we can control, right? We can control our response.We can’t control what we’re asked. Right. And so if you look at it in that perspective, you can control, you know, our response. We can control what we do.

Agency I love that for agency. It’s yours to to to figure out. And I think if more people understood the power of their agency, we’ll be better off.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:21  I want to ask you a question. This kind of comes all the way back to being the first black mayor of Upper Arlington. Yeah. About being in a situation where you find your daughter at five one. Just straighten her hair. And it would be very easy to be angry about the systemic injustice of colored people in the United States. Which I think there’s a lot of reason to be angry. Right? And there’s. And there’s a lot of reason to believe that it is the way it is. It may not be right, but it is the way it is. And I’m controlled by those circumstances. And I find there’s this really challenging middle ground to find which is I am the way I am because of the circumstances that exist in the world. And I’m entirely my own, just my own creation. And I don’t, I don’t know that we’re either of those things. Yeah. How did you sort of because you sort of to me threaded the needle.How did you know to do that? What did you have to say to yourself to get there?

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:01:18   So for me. It was about the children. there’s a there’s actually a Ugandan parable about this. Like, how are the children? Threading that needle for me was about how my daughter and my son would move in society. How would they? How would they move in rooms? How would they move in at the park? I didn’t want them to feel like they were less than in any regard because of their skin color. They’re five and two at this point. That innocence of seeing the world as it is. We all are humans. We all can play together. We all get to go to school. We all have the capacity to learn. This is the dynamics almost are the same things that happen on the gender front of things like how do women check out a STEM? Like at what point? And it’s because of this repeated saying, oh, women are not good at math. Oh. Like, yeah, you don’t want to stop putting. I didn’t want that to be put out for my kids.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:02:33  So was easy to thread that needle where it’s like, well, mommy is going to figure out how do other people relate to you? How do other people understand your world? And I remember when I was campaigning, I would say to people one simple task, and it’s always one, one task that I asked people to do today. Look at your mum. Think about who you went to dinner with, people you had in your intimate spaces. If you didn’t have a black person or person of colour that you invited over to your house for dinner, you need to expand your circle.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:03:03  Because our children learn more from those very intimate spaces. If you can’t have someone over. My daughter has never had the luxury of not having people of different colours and races in our house for dinner or her playdates, but there are some families in UA, that have never had a black person over to their house that have. Never had dinner and invited, you know, friends.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:28   So how do those people expand their circle? Because for a lot of those people, it’s not because they don’t want to.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:03:32  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:32  It’s because it’s because there’s 30 of you in all of Upper Arlington.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:03:37  Right?

Eric Zimmer 01:03:37  I mean, you’re booked. Your dinner dates are booked.

Speaker 8 01:03:41  I know, I know exactly what you mean. Well, do you seriously?

Eric Zimmer 01:03:45  I meanI think that’s a real question. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:48  Of that. I think a lot of. Yeah, well minded people who are in sort of the white enclaves to a certain extent. How do I expand that circle in a way that is authentic? Not me going to hunt out my token black person.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:04:02  I know right? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:04  It’s a this is a genuine question.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:04:07  And that that for a lot of people is the challenge. I get that question a lot because yes, what ends up happening is the the burden and the task is on me. I have to be at all the things and, you know, be the face in all the rooms and, you know, make all the connections. I think it starts with playing in the spaces that you are. So at the workplace, you know, what do you have on teams? What do you have? Have there intentionally going to activities that you just really wouldn’t go to the Lincoln Theater here in Columbus, brings in some incredible artist and black artists. And look at those rooms. Find things you genuinely aren’t. Think about the art that you go. View. Think about black artists. Think about black musicians. Think about books that you generally wouldn’t have read. Read a different experience. Those things are the things that expand even for your children.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:05:04  Think about the books that are on their bookshelf. This was actually really where it started with with Harper in her classroom. It was like, look at all these books on the bookshelf. Start with there. Start adding different books to this bookshelf. Here’s a list of other black childrens author. How cool would it be for your child to read and see different animation, and see a different way that they do? Dinner or different celebration? Diwali or whatever that they celebrate and think, oh, why did they cook beans and put a penny for New Year’s Eve. Start that question. Start those questions. And it usually starts because they’ve been exposed to something different. And then from there, you you find the people that you do community with. Yeah. It takes some intentionality. If you are going to want to expand your circle, Fo me, I don’t have to do much right. That is what I’m surrounded by. But I get it on your on the other side. You have to do a little bit more work right than I ever have to do.

Eric Zimmer 01:06:03  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. 

You and I are going to continue this in the post-show conversation because I have more that I want to do here. Listeners, we’re out of time. Listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show conversation as well as all the others. AD free episodes, a special episode I do for you, and the good feeling of supporting a show that matters to you. Go to one you feed dot net. You kami. Thank you so much. This has really been fun.

Ukeme Awakessien Jeter 01:06:57  Thank you. That time flew by. It’s been a pleasure.

Eric Zimmer 01:07:00  Thank you so much for listening to the show.

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