Podcast Episode

In this episode, Elissa Epel explores how stress can speed up aging and what you can do about it. She explains telomeres, which are those protective caps on our chromosomes, shorten with stress and poor habits, speeding up aging and disease. She also delves into the science of how thought patterns, diet, and even our response to daily challenges can literally change our biology.

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Key Takeaways:

• The science of telomeres and their role in cellular aging.
• The impact of stress and lifestyle choices on telomere length and overall health.
• The relationship between genetics and environmental factors in health outcomes.
• The concept of “inflammaging” and its connection to chronic inflammation and aging.
• The influence of diet on telomere maintenance and inflammation.
• The bidirectional relationship between depression and telomere shortening.
• Strategies for reframing stress as a challenge rather than a threat.
• The importance of mindfulness and social support in managing stress.
• The potential risks and benefits of telomerase and its role in telomere health.
• The significance of making intentional lifestyle choices to influence aging and well-being.

Elissa Epel, Ph.D. is an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging and a best-selling author of The Telomere Effect, and now The Stress Prescription.  She is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, at The University of California, San Francisco, where she is Vice Chair of Psychology and directs the UCSF Aging Metabolism Emotions Center. She studies how psychosocial and behavioral factors, such as meditation and positive stress, can slow aging and focuses on climate wellness.

Connect with Elissa Epel  Website | Instagram | Facebook | X | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Elissa Epel, check out these other episodes:

How to Shift Your Emotions: Moving from Chaos to Clarity with Ethan Kross

Small Steps to Happiness: The Science of Mindful Living with Laurie Santos

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Episode Transcript:

Elissa Epel 00:00:00  I really like to focus on what we can do now, today. And that’s all we can control.

Chris Forbes 00:00:13  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  We know stress ages us. But how? Exactly. Doctor Elissa Apple has spent years answering that question down to the ends of our DNA. Telomeres, which are those protective caps on our chromosomes, shorten with stress and poor habits, speeding up aging and disease.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:18  But the good news they’re also responsive to the way we live. Today, we’ll dig into the science of how thought patterns, diet, and even our response to daily challenges can literally change our biology. Her book, The Telomere Effect offers a roadmap to healthier, more intentional aging. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Alyssa. Welcome to the show.

Elissa Epel 00:01:43  Thank you so much, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:44  Your book is called The Telomere Effect A Revolutionary Approach to Living younger, healthier, and Longer. And it’s a fascinating book to me because really, a lot of it talks about how the choices we make emotionally about our thought patterns and our lifestyle. Directly affects our biology in a very clear and measurable way. So we’ll jump into that in just a moment. But let’s start like we normally do with the parable. There’s a grandmother who’s talking with her granddaughter, and she 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:29  And the granddaughter stops, and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start us off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Elissa Epel 00:02:45  I think it’s profound. I love it that your show is titled after it. It just reminds us of how much of our life experience is Constructed by us, how much control we have over choosing what we experience. So, you know, whether it’s internal things, negative or positive thoughts and feelings and experiences or things that happen to us, we all have bad and good all the time. And this question of what are we going to choose to focus our attention on is just so critical, can’t be understated, because where we decide to put our attention is what we experience, what determines how much we’re going to remember positive or negative experiences, and of course, build on them and capitalize on them.

So it just says so much about really our our psychological power to choose our story in a way.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:52  Yeah. And your book is really fascinating because it talks about the implications of choosing that story and what that looks like. There’s a great quote that you say early in the book from a researcher by the name of George Bray, and this really gets to kind of what you said in the intro about things aren’t necessarily fixed. We have a tendency to think of genetic traits as being like, well, I have this genetic trait. And his phrase was genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger. And that environment is not just our physical environment, but but our mental environment as well.

Elissa Epel 00:04:26  Absolutely, exactly. It’s just so easy for us to feel that our health is determined for us, you know, by our family history and by our genes. And what we know is that at least 50% of the variance in whether we die early, whether we get sick early from this or that is our behavior. And of course, what shapes our behavior. Much of that is our psychological experience, our or volition and taking a step back from that. It’s our social environment, our neighborhoods, our relationships. So there’s all these factors that we can try to shape to be, you know, a better life for us and for those around us that we have control over. So we control our aging much more than we ever thought we could. We we can see how people’s different experiences on a daily basis are associated with some of the biological aging that they undergo.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:26  Well, let’s jump into the book in a little bit more detail. What is a telomere?

Elissa Epel 00:05:31  So people like to think of telomeres as the tips at the ends of their shoelaces. So if you think of those plastic eaglets at the ends of shoelaces, and you think of your shoelaces as the genes, the DNA that makes us who we are, and then at the very tips are these protective caps still made of DNA, but not not jeans. And it’s very these caps are very important to protect our genetic code from any damage from fusions.

Elissa Epel 00:06:01  And as our cells divide, these protective caps get shorter and shorter. So there’s something that happens to all of us with age, which is telomere shortening. And when they get to a critical shortness, the cells become old and they cannot divide any longer, and they tend to become pro-inflammatory. So they not only can’t do whatever job they were supposed to do, like fighting infections. We’re talking about immune cells, but then they start wreaking havoc on our health by secreting inflammation into our blood. So we really want to keep telomeres long and sturdy and stable throughout our lifespan. And the good news is that while that genetics determines some of how long our telomeres are, it looks like our lifestyle and social factors and nutrition, all of these factors are also shaping our telomere length.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:53  Telomere is the correct pronunciation. Is that it? Yes. So it sounds like a longer telomere is a better one for us. And that that there’s lots of studies from reading the book about different things that cause us to have a longer or shorter telomere, and we can talk through what some of those are.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:12  But one of the things I thought was really interesting in the book was it says that it’s been suggested that telomere length may be the holy grail for cumulative welfare. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Elissa Epel 00:07:23  Yes, that was an animal researcher. Doctor Bateson titled that, as you know, part of his paper. And it was just such a provocative thought. And then it turns out there’s some data to support that. So what telomeres are associated with so many different factors in human lives, all the exposures that we’re exposed to from our environment, from chemicals, our social environment, our psychological state, our health behaviors. and they all kind of add up to shape the rate of how quickly our telomeres shorten. And when we think about, you know, can we take a person or an animal and measure their telomeres and what does that tell us about their life history. And you know, it’s hard because telomeres are affected by so many things including genetics. We can’t make really accurate direct predictions. But in general, we can look at the telomere length of a person and find that it’s associated with their history, their kind of cumulative history of adversity, all of the really difficult things that happen to them.

Elissa Epel 00:08:31  And, you know, there’s a few studies on this. Now, even a stronger effect is what happens to us in childhood. It turns out to be really important in shaping our telomere length as adults. So, you know, it’s a critical period of growth and vulnerability. So we really want to protect children from toxic stressors like poverty and violence and neglect, because those are the factors that really imprint on telomeres. Now, Doctor Bateson was asking about animals and animal welfare and suggesting, why don’t we apply this to animals and really look at the quality of their life? You know, especially those who are we control their environments that they grow up in, and they could be in factory farms, it could be in more humane conditions, and their telomeres might tell us a clue of their welfare.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:16  So this is not science that’s kind of out on the edge. This is pretty well known robust science. You wrote the book with Elizabeth Blackburn, who is a Nobel laureate. So this idea of telomeres and their length and how that affects our overall health and the things that can improve those. This is pretty robust science, right?

Elissa Epel 00:09:36  It is robust. I can tell you where there’s questions and controversy too. What’s robust is that there are so many studies showing that the length is predicted, the length matters. So in midlife, for example, shorter telomeres statistically predict getting diseases of aging kind of across the diseases, earlier cancers and exceptions. So it turns out for some cancers, longer telomeres put us at more risk of these cancers. There is a question of, well, is this just kind of a factor that, you know, changes with age, like so many things in our body, or is it causing aging? Is it really a mechanism? And so that’s been a question for a long time. And now we know that it is definitely at least a small causal part of our aging. And we know that from these genetic studies we call them Mendelian randomisation studies. So people who have the genes for longer, telomeres are less likely to get early heart disease or Alzheimer’s dementia.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:37  Got it. I’m stepping way out of my knowledge zone here. But do telomeres have anything to do with whether or not genetic mutation occurs?

Elissa Epel 00:10:46  So it’s a good question. And most of us have common genes for telomeres. They might be, you know, code for short or long. Telomeres. But they’re they don’t make a big difference. And then there are some people who have these rare genetic mutations that cause them to. Have very short telomeres. So, you know, maybe half the amount of telomerase, the enzyme that protects telomeres as normal people. And so we have learned from those very sad genetic conditions that people do tend to develop some, you know, pretty severe health problems like bone marrow failure. And they tend to die much earlier in life, and they tend to transmit very short telomeres to their offspring. And one thing that’s so interesting is that while they might transmit the genes, the mutated genes to some offspring, other children don’t get the mutation, but they still inherit the short telomeres. And what that means is that we don’t have just genetic transmission, which always occurs, but we have an epigenetic or direct transmission of telomere length. If Mom and dad have very short telomeres, it appears that’s passed on through the sperm and egg to what the child ends up with.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:25  Let’s talk briefly. You mentioned it earlier. Talk about the role of inflammation, both in our overall health and then how that ties to telomeres.

Elissa Epel 00:12:34  So inflammation is really important. We think that it’s one of the major kind of highways of aging of how our bodies age. So when we’re cut we want to have a big inflammatory response to help us heal. But what we don’t want is a slow drip of inflammation in our blood as we age. And we call that inflammation aging. And that’s what happens when our tissues get old and we call them senescent. They start secreting these inflammatory factors and that builds up. It comes from fat and, from immune cells, from bone. There are many tissues and cells that start secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines. So when this builds up, it’s feeding all of our body and organs and tissues. And it’s creating a fertile ground for diseases such as cancer.

Elissa Epel 00:13:25  So we want to be doing things to reduce inflammation like having an anti-inflammatory diet. Now that sounds fancy. And if you look at what’s anti-inflammatory, it’s simply this. It’s a whole food high fiber diet. It’s like the Mediterranean diet versus eating a lot of things like red meat, processed meat, soda, a lot of refined carbs. Those are going to be promoting inflammation in our body.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:53  It’s always interesting to me. There’s so much noise about diet and so many different approaches and all that, but it seems like there are a couple key principles that everyone agrees on, like eat less processed foods and eat foods that are closer to being whole foods. Then there’s some variations beyond that, but at least that seems to be consistent.

Elissa Epel 00:14:14  I could not agree more. I think that everyone is confused. And you know, we’ve got some real issues in nutrition research and one is conflicts of interest. If you look at the different sides battling, you often have food industry funding the side that says sugar doesn’t cause disease, etc..

Eric Zimmer 00:14:31  Yeah, I agree it is. It is confusing. I just I always like when I can find a point of common ground among a bunch of different positions, because then I can go, okay, well, that I can at least probably, you know, count on to some degree.

Elissa Epel 00:14:45  And I think, you know, these nutritional basics that you just summarized so well. They add up across whatever we’re looking at. We know it’s this you know, it’s this high antioxidant, high inflammatory diet, let’s say Mediterranean diet that causes less of a glucose and insulin spike. So when it’s less processed, we have a better, more stable metabolic response. This is the response that’s better for the heart. It’s better for the brain and it’s better for the telomeres. So it lines up very nicely to be a strong, consistent story about biomarkers and early aging, as well as diseases of aging. These are all fed by the high glycemic, high carb high meat diet. And the opposite can help prevent them.

Elissa Epel 00:15:31  So it is not new. People want the new exciting trend. But really, you know, eating well means going to the store, buying the fresh produce and trying to have less of the tempting, you know, what we call comfort food. Not abstinence, but just less of it. You know, we do these studies trying to help people with our, you know, very understandable food drives, right? We get hooked on the the highly palatable food. And so we use mindfulness skills and we try to help people deal with those cravings so that they can make the choices they want to be making.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:04  Excellent. 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:37  If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one you feed and sign up. It’s free. No spam and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one you feed. Net SMS, tiny nudges, real change. All right. Back to the show. 

Let’s talk about depression. Depression comes up in several places in the book, and you sort of summarize it up by saying the arrow likely points in both directions with depression. Short telomeres may proceed. Depression and depression may speed up telomere shortening. So what do we know about depression and telomeres?

Elissa Epel 00:17:16  Yes, this is a great question. And it just shows the complexity of the mind body connection. How how factors move together. So what we know is that when people have longer depression and untreated depression without antidepressants or therapy, their telomeres tend to be shorter in a dose response fashion. So it looks like depression is causing faster wear and tear on our cell aging. But then we also know that there are, you know, several studies that show that that people at risk of depression before they’re ever depressed tend to have shorter telomeres.

Elissa Epel 00:17:54  So a colleague, Ian Gottlieb, showed this with young girls. They were at risk of depression. Their mothers were depressed. They’d never been depressed. And when he looked at their stress response, they were they had exaggerated emotional and cortisol responses to stress. And they had shorter telomeres already. No depression. And the bigger their cortisol response, the shorter their telomeres. So we know that stress can kind of promote shorter telomeres as well as vulnerability to depression. So it may be that the telomeres came before the depression. It may be that the animal studies suggest that shorter telomeres in the brain and the campus put the rats at risk of depression. And when they can boost up the hippocampus with telomerase, they’re more resistant to depression. So there’s all sorts of bidirectional pathways. And just to to add an even another wild card. In one recent study, when researchers compared people with depression to people without depression, so cases and controls, they found that the people with depression were more likely to have this gene that causes short telomeres.

Elissa Epel 00:19:01  So all of a sudden now we’re looking at, you know, possible genetic predisposition to have short telomeres and to have depression.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:10  Interesting.

Elissa Epel 00:19:11  It’s a complicated web. And I think, you know, these are hard to parse out in humans. We need to study people, you know, in a in a sense, kind of across the lifespan and the next generation, and look at the genetics at the same time as we look at their actual telomeres.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:27  Yeah. And we’re going to transition now into talking about what things people can do that can help increase telomere length. And interestingly, they’re the very same things that people would do to deal with depression, to deal with anxiety, so it may be a little chicken and egg. But the good news is we don’t have to have the answer in order to do the things that are beneficial. And so the thing that I think is so fascinating about this, a lot of the concepts that we’re going to talk about in a minute here are going to be things that we cover on the show fairly regularly, and reminders are always great for these things.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:04  What I loved about your book, though, and I think this this one line really sums it up. It says we can change the way that we age at the most elemental cellular level. So everything that we’re about to talk about are really good strategies that we’ve also seen in studies that are truly working at a cellular level. And I think that’s such an interesting thing to take these these ideas that we think, well, that works, makes my mind better, makes my mood a little bit better, and recognize that we’re really able to measure these things, the effect of them at a true biological level. So let’s start with something called the challenge response. Can you tell me a little bit about what the challenge response is and how that helps?

Elissa Epel 00:20:49  Sure. So one of the areas of research that we’ve been doing that that looks at the acute stress response is trying to look at how people approach a stressful situation in different ways. And a natural, evolutionary based way is when we feel our survival is threatened.

Elissa Epel 00:21:09  Physical survival, survival, our physical survival is threatened, or our social survival if our ego is threatened and we feel like we’re going to be embarrassed, humiliated, or fail. This triggers a threat response in the body characterized by high cortisol and kind of the autonomic nervous system. Vaso constricts those patterns of reactivity. If we have them over and over, over time, they are causing more wear and tear in our body. They’re making us more vulnerable to stress induced Diseases of aging. So what? The kind of antidote to that is, of course, we’re all going to experience stressful events, little ones and big ones. And what we can do is try to respond with a good strong stress response and recover quickly. And that profile is going to be related to slower aging. Now how do we cause our stress response to recover quickly? Well, think about, you know, number one, when you approach a stressful event, you want to remind yourself that the stress response is your friend. It helps you cope and it energizes you.

Elissa Epel 00:22:16  And it, you know, helps you problem solve better. So just those thoughts of rethinking the stress response in a positive way can help our body have a more helpful stress response. We call it the challenge response. Stronger cardiac output and more adrenaline than cortisol. So we want to have a positive challenge response. And then once the stressor is over, it’s very easy to ruminate about it. We call this thinking. We continue to think about it long after it’s passed. That keeps up the stress response, but we can actually try to notice that we’re ruminating and let the situation go and have a quicker psychological recovery, which leads to a quicker physiological recovery. So just, you know, close up, looking at your stress response, you know, how are you feeling? You can cope with the situation. And once it’s over, can you help it end with a crisp ending? You know, take a walk, get social support. do something to cut down on rumination. Now there’s other things we can do to boost our stress resilience.

Elissa Epel 00:23:19  Like exercise, like getting enough sleep. These things are actually related to less rumination. So ruminative thinking is a natural habit that many of us have that we can kind of notice and try to nip in the bud more than we do.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:36  Ruminations an old friend around these parts.There are a couple of these that fall under the category, in my mind of perspective, of getting a different perspective on things, which I always think is so helpful. And one of them is called linguistic self distancing. Can we talk about that.

Elissa Epel 00:24:21  Yeah. That’s research by colleagues of mine as Eric and Ethan Cross. And so what they’ve shown is that when they bring people into the lab to kind of relive a stressful situation, if they help them take perspective on the situation, the person, the person actually looks much more stress resilient so they can do visual distancing. They can watch the situation on a movie screen. They can do linguistic distancing. They describe and replay it, talking about their responses in a third person, very analytical way that actually reduces their emotional response.

Elissa Epel 00:24:58  Gives them perspective. They can do time distancing and they can ask themselves, is this situation really going to affect me in five years? Usually the answer is no. So while it seems like a crisis at the moment and our body’s responding as as if our survival depends on it, when we remind ourselves that we are this really in the big picture doesn’t make a difference, right? And we shouldn’t sweat the small things. This helps people rapidly recover from the stressful situation. So it’s helpful just to kind of take a step back and, you know, realize it’s not about avoiding stress. Stress is inevitable. We all are going to face challenges that are unpredictable, that come up at different times in life. And it’s really about coping with it in a way that doesn’t amplify the stress in our mind and continue it the whole day, even while we’re, you know, sleeping. We can be more kind of vigilant and aroused. And really, there’s always the next moment when we’re not coping, when when an immediate crisis is over, when we can find peace in that moment and we can be finding, you know, joy, even though we might be dealing with a terrible chronic situation.

Elissa Epel 00:26:11  So there’s always momentary relief and momentary absorption into the moment that is so important for our bodies and respite from chronic stress.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:22  Yeah, I love the time distancing. You don’t even have to go out to five years. I think a lot of times I’m like, will this matter in five hours, five days, five weeks? And in a lot of cases, I’m getting upset about something that in five hours I probably won’t remember. Like being stuck in traffic or other things. So time distancing is a great one. And what you were saying there about the stress response reminds me of some studies I read where it’s not so much the stress that’s the problem, but what we think the stress is going to do to us also. So our belief in what stress does has some of that. And that gets to the challenge response. Instead of thinking, this is awful, I’m stressed and boy, it’s going to have so many bad effects on me to look at it as, okay, this is, as you mentioned, priming my body or or getting me focused and and even that thinking of it differently just lessens the impact that it has.

Elissa Epel 00:27:14  Yeah. Exactly. It’s beautiful.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:16  Is there anything that you think we should talk about before we wrap up. We’ve got just a few minutes left and I want to make sure if there’s anything that you want to cover that I get that in there.

Elissa Epel 00:27:27  Eric, I would love to hear from you. Any reflections on the parable and what that’s like, to hear different interpretations and sound bites of it every day over time, and how you think it relates to this book.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:43  Boy, you turn the tables on me.

Elissa Epel 00:27:44  We’re good at that.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:47  You’re not supposed to answer a question with a question. I think is the phrase. That’s interesting. The way I think it relates to the book is kind of, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, that, you know, the parable is about making choices. To me, it’s heart. And I think the reason it’s a parable is because it you hear it and you almost immediately understand it on one level, what it means. You’re like, oh, it means that I have to make choices and decisions.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:11  What I do with my, you know, my thoughts, my behavior and my emotions. To the extent that I can work with those things, I should. And I think the part of the book that I loved was that you’re covering a lot of the same ground as far as the things that you do to work with your thoughts, your stress, your emotions. But I really love when it’s that concrete ties it back to biology? And I also love that a lot of what you’re showing is that these telomere lengths can be modified. So we’re not just if I just if I have shorter telomeres doesn’t mean that I’m.

Elissa Epel 00:28:48  Doomed.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:49  Right? I’m not doomed. I can actually do things in my day to day life. I can I can choose to feed the the good wolf. And that will improve those telomere lengths. And so that we have a choice in what we do. And not only do we have a choice, that choice actually makes a difference.

Elissa Epel 00:29:07  Beautiful. You said it so well. That is a huge theme of the telomere story.

Elissa Epel 00:29:13  And you know, and how our aging is so malleable. Lots of people like to know what their telomere length is. And and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t know how, you know, the tests aren’t necessarily that accurate yet. and I’m the I’m the type of person who I don’t really want to know mine because I know where I’ve been and they’re probably short, and I really like to focus on what we can do now, today. And that’s all we can control. And so really, even if someone has very short telomeres because they’ve had a lot of childhood hardship, that’s not worth measuring them to see that. Because what matters is that what they do today can be changing up. That system can be increasing, the telomerase can be reducing the oxidative stress and the inflammation. These are things we can control.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:02  Yeah that’s a great point. I was going to ask can people measure their own. But I agree with you in general I don’t think that’s a particularly useful approach. It’s much more about what can I do now to improve that situation. Although it would be great to see a lengthening over time so that you knew that what you were doing was having an impact.

Elissa Epel 00:30:21  Right? Right. And I think eventually we might get there with more, you know, accurate and frequent measurements. And that would be, you know, if someone is starting a, you know, a pretty intensive program for health improvement in some way. It would be an interesting experiment to look at. Pre-post.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:41  Yep. Yep. Exactly. So one final question. You’ve talked about telomerase. Did I say that one right.

Elissa Epel 00:30:47  Close telomerase.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:48  Telomerase. All right. As a chemical that helps. And is there treatments that we think are forthcoming.

Elissa Epel 00:30:55  It’s a good question and I don’t have a good answer. We just don’t know enough yet. We do know that at least from observational studies we know that telomerase tends to be higher. Well, for example, smoking decreases it. And being physically active increases it. And we know from a few intervention studies that it looks like we can boost the telomerase with mind body activities like meditation and qigong.

Elissa Epel 00:31:24  And so that’s super safe. And no side effects there. And then there are supplements on the market, and they just simply haven’t been well tested by unbiased parties for any long-term periods. So it’s just a little bit of a question mark about what the risk benefit ratio is of those kind of over-the-counter products to increase telomerase. And the risk is nothing to take lightly, because if you have too much telomerase, if you’re prone to cancer, and if a telomerase supplement could kind of push you over that threshold, then you are more at risk of cancer. So it’s a possibility, as all I’m saying.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:06  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 one you feed.net/sms. No noise, no spam.Just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. 

Well, thank you, Alyssa, so much for taking the time to come on. I’ve. I loved the book, and I’m glad we got a chance to sit down and talk about it.

Elissa Epel 00:32:44  Thank you so much, Eric. Wonderful questions, and hopefully something I’ve said is helpful to some of your listeners.

Speaker 4 00:32:50  All right.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:51  Take care.

Elissa Epel 00:32:52  Take care. Thank you so.

Speaker 4 00:32:53  Much. Okay. Bye bye.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:54  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. Sharing 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:25  One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

In this episode, Victor Strecher discusses purposeful living and strategies to align your values and actions. Vic shares his imperfect journey back to meaning and to living for what matters most after losing his daughter. He explores what it means to be purposeful versus just having a purpose, how energy and vitality play a role in living out our values, and why purpose isn’t just for the privileged.

Key Takeaways:

• The significance of purpose in life and its impact on well-being.
• Personal experiences of loss and grief, particularly the impact of losing a loved one on understanding purpose.
• The distinction between values, purpose, and meaning, and how they interconnect.
• The role of energy and vitality in living a purposeful life, including factors like sleep, mindfulness, and nutrition.
• The concept of mortality salience and its influence on identifying core values and priorities.
• Practical methods for discovering and articulating one’s purpose, such as the headstone test.
• The accessibility of purpose for everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status.
• The relationship between purpose and happiness
• Encouragement for self-reflection and intentionality in daily life to align actions with personal values.

Victor J. Strecher is a professor and director for innovation and social entrepreneurship at the
University of Michigan School of Public Health. He has published over 100 articles in scientific
journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of
Preventive Medicine, and Nature Neuroscience and coedited the book Oncology: An Evidence-
Based Approach. He is the author of Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything

Connect with Victor Strecher:  Website | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Victor Strecher, check out these other episodes:

How to Create a Life Strategy for Meaningful Change with Seth Godin
How to Shift Your Emotions: Moving from Chaos to Clarity with Ethan Kross

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If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon!  Click here to learn more!!

Episode Transcript:

Vic Strecher 00:00:00  Sleep, presence, activity, creativity, and eating or space. It’s just a simple moniker that I use. Did I give myself space today? Did I sleep? Was I present? Was I active creative? Did I eat well? And after a while you can become your own researcher.

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

Eric Zimmer 00:01:09  Today’s guest doctor Vic Strecker, author of Life on Purpose, lost his daughter Julia and in his darkest hour found himself paddling into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:22  Not sure if he would ever return, but what happened next wasn’t a miracle cure. It was the beginning of a long, real, and often imperfect journey back to meaning and to living for what matters most. In this episode, Vic and I unpack what it means to be purposeful versus just having a purpose. How energy and vitality play a role in living out our values and why? Purpose isn’t just for the privileged. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Vic. Welcome to the show.

Vic Strecher 00:02:00  Thank you. Eric. Really looking forward to this.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:03  You have a book called Life on Purpose. How living for What Matters Most Changes everything. And an app called purposeful about Building Purpose. And so we’re going to talk about how important purpose is, how to build it, how to find it, how to not get overwhelmed. That’s a big question. But before we get into all that, we’ll start, like we always do with the parable and the parable. There’s a grandchild who’s talking to their grandparent, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:32  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, 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.

Vic Strecher 00:02:58  Oh, man, it’s such an amazing parable, Eric. And I’ve heard other people’s interpretations of it on your show, and I really enjoy listening to that part for me. I guess I don’t want to judge the bad wolf too much, because I think that we do live with this good wolf and this bad wolf inside us. But I often look back to evolution to help guide me in thinking about why people do things that we don’t understand or may think are bad, versus doing things that we think are good. And we have different parts of our brain that have evolved that may make some of the things and behaviors we engage in seem bad.

Vic Strecher 00:03:41  And, you know, we might even call that hedonic. You know, maybe really focus on a part of the brain that relates to our reward center. Like, we may eat too much ice cream all the time or Engage in, you know, addictive behaviors, heroin addiction or alcoholism or many other things. And this is our reward center. And we might say that our reward center is related to immediate gratification, immediate rewards. Well, that was evolutionarily developed. I mean, you know, when we’re cave people, we probably smelled that roasting Mastodon and went, awesome. Roast Mastodon I love this.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:19  It’s not by chance that we have these things in us.

Vic Strecher 00:04:22  Yeah. No. And, you know, even Aristotle talked about it in his famous book, Nicomachean Ethics. You know, his big question always was, what makes us happy and what is happiness? And he said, well, there are probably two forms of happiness. One is hedonist happiness, where, yeah, we’ve got this immediate pleasure, whether it’s great food or great wine or great sex or great vacations or whatever those things are.

Vic Strecher 00:04:47  And he said, that’s okay. He said, we all have that. It’s all part of us. We love those things make sense. And yet, if that’s all we are. It’s like an I’ll quote him. It’s like we’re grazing animals. And while we all like to graze, he said there’s something much bigger. And that’s being in touch with our inner Damon. This true self or true God or angel that lives in us, whatever you want to call it. The Greeks called it the Damon. And he said, eudaimonia, the root word being Damon. Being in touch with that makes you truly happy. So I view those as the good wolf and bad wolf. We live with both of them. We can live with both of them, in fact. And one might be much more hedonic and focused on immediate rewards. But if that’s all we are, we are like grazing animals, and we want to be something bigger. And that’s what Aristotle talked about.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:41  I love that interpretation. And as I think about purpose in relation to the parable, I think there’s two things that go into feeding the good wolf, which to me is just shorthand for living a good life or not shorthand, but, you know, story form of leading a good life.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:58  I think there’s two parts, and one is knowing even which wolf you are feeding in any given moment. And then the second is the ability to do it. And without some degree of purpose, or at the very least, values that cohere in some way. It’s really hard to know. It’s really difficult to judge a situation where you’re like, well, what should I do? Should I do this or should I do that? And I found that some degree of purpose and values helps us make that decision. What I’d like to do before we go too far into this is is hit a couple of words and have you sort of talk about what you mean when we use them? The first would be the word I just used values. The second would be purpose and the third would be meaning. And these things are often interchanged with each other and they’re related in some way. But talk to me about how you think of these three words.

Vic Strecher 00:06:51  Thank you. Well, they are related, but they’re different.

Vic Strecher 00:06:54  And I want to touch on something. You just said that we’re often conflicted. We have different values, which we all do. As we were just talking about, and I view almost our behaviors and our emotions as being the branches of a tree. And if we go up one branch, it’s really like, let’s say, for example, we’re really exhausted. We’ve had a hard day, and the first thing we want to do when we get home is have a cocktail. And, you know, we might go, that’s great. And yet we have two kids who really want to play with us. They got home from school and they want to play with with their, their dad. And they’re going, dad, please play with me. And I want a cocktail too. If I have a strong purpose, I’m going to know which branch to go up, because as soon as I go up one of those branches, it’s going to be more difficult to jump across the entire tree to that other branch.

Vic Strecher 00:07:43  And as soon as I move down that branch, there will be other branches that open up that kind of unfold. If I go down the cocktail branch, the next branch might be another cocktail, of course. And the next branch might be sleeping on the sofa or kind of vegging out in some way and ignoring the kids. And the other way might be playing with the kids, maybe walking around the block or playing little football or whatever with the kids that you’re going to do, and that moves into other branches. And even without any judgment, you might say, well, you know, I might have a purpose which focuses on one branch or the other. One of the things we find in in neuroscience and my colleague Yuna Kang, who is at the University of Pennsylvania, when we did this research, looked at purposeful people, put them into MRI and compared them against people who were not purposeful and basically gave them messages that would induce conflict. And she found that there’s a part of our brain, a region of our brain that really gets more blood flow when it’s very conflicted.

Vic Strecher 00:08:46  The purposeful people didn’t get that blood flow. They knew what to do. They were not conflicted. So what you bring up right up front is we’re conflicted all the time. Purposeful people, though, know what to do. And you might say there is a bad wolf of drinking and drinking and drinking more. Well, one might say that. Or maybe there’s a good wolf that says, I’m going to play with the kids. I’m actually not going to judge that. I’m just going to say whatever your purpose is, is something that developed with you over time. Now, you may grow really tired of the purpose that’s drinking and drinking, and it may not be good for you in the long run. In fact, we have found that we have found that certain types of purposes are really not good for you in terms of depression down the road, more anxiety down the road, even illness, physical illnesses.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:37  So let’s get back to defining those words, because I think very few people would think of the drinking that they do after work as a purpose.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:46  They would think of it as a hedonic desire. Yeah. You know, and I think your point about conflict is, is real. I mean, there’s a reason that, you know, the show is what it is. It’s because that conflict I understand very well, and I think that we face it all the time. We face conflicts between what we want and what we value. We face conflicts between even things that we value. It’s it’s it’s there to me. It’s part. It’s part of life. But having something to steer by helps. So okay. Definitions.

Vic Strecher 00:10:15  When I think about purpose, I think about really a self-organizing framework of my goals. And it’s built around my core values. So my core values, those are the things that matter most in my life. In fact, if if I’m wondering what is a value that I have, you might even open your smartphone. Look at the wallpaper, the first thing you see, and that might be a core value of yours. Maybe it’s your dog, maybe it’s your spouse.

Vic Strecher 00:10:41  Maybe it’s your kids, your grandkids. Maybe it’s a work of art. Maybe it’s actually a saying or quote. There are a lot of things that you might end up valuing very deeply, but it might also be, you know, a glass of wine there. You know, this bottle of wine that you had and thought was awesome or this beautiful, you know, person that you think, oh, that would be, you know, a great trophy spouse for me, whatever. You know, there are hedonism and there are eudaimonia values that we all have. And the question is, do I create purposes around those hedonic values, or do I create purposes around these eudaimonia, or what I might even call self transcending values? Am I just completely focused on self enhancing values, my attractiveness, making a lot of money, having fame, all of those things? Or am I more attracted to things like love and compassion, kindness, things like that that are transcending Ending myself. Yeah. So I believe that you can have purposes that could go in either direction.

Vic Strecher 00:11:48  Okay. Other researchers disagree with that. Not all other. I mean, some agree with what I’m doing, what I’m saying, but some say no. A real purpose is a transcending purpose. I’d say, well, not everybody has a transcending purpose, but they certainly have a purpose to become rich, for example, or to be, like, inebriated a lot. I mean, that’s it sounds like a weird purpose, but I could see people’s purposes moving in this direction. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:15  I think it’s in how you define it. I mean, certainly when I was an addict, it wasn’t exactly a chosen purpose. But if you looked at my life, all of my energy went there. And I think about this a lot because there’s there’s two schools of thought here. One is that how you spend your time? Shows what you value very much.

Vic Strecher 00:12:36  Feeding it, as you say.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:37  And I think this is where we just are probably differing on terms a little bit. Right? Because I think that you can value something and not have the skills or capacities to live into it.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:50  So I may really value my son. And yet every day, every night after work to use your example I’m having the cocktails. And it’s because in my framework in my view of the world, it’s because I don’t have the skills and tools to live according to my value. So it’s not that I value alcohol. Exactly. It’s that I’m in the grips of this hedonic desire. So for me, I would sort of call that desire or hijacked desire.

Vic Strecher 00:13:18  And that’s okay. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not opposed to that either. I think that what you’re talking about is the difference between having a set of core values and a purpose and being purposeful. Okay. So being purposeful means that you are aligning yourself with your core values and your purpose. This, and it’s simple enough to say, oh, I have written out a statement of my purpose. Great. Now I can go to Disney World. Well, no, it’s a matter of having a purpose. And actually we have found that writing a statement really helps.

Vic Strecher 00:13:53  It really builds strength around that, that purpose. And people almost always the purpose is that we read and I’ve read literally tens of thousands of purposes. They’re almost always self transcending. There’s something big. And then the question is do you live into them? And that’s something that I try to help people do because it takes energy to live into this purpose. You can say, I want to do these nice things. I want to one of my purposes, for example, Eric, is to teach my students as if they’re my own child. And this came from, you know, the passing of my own daughter. And when that happened, I it changed my life. But to do that, since I have hundreds of students, you know, it’s hard to treat every one of them as if they might be a child of yours. And so what I try to do is take better care of myself. And I’m a professor in school of Public Health and School of Medicine. And my job is to help people stay healthy and and engage in these behaviors. And I find that probably the most motivating way to do that is to help people find a stronger purpose and direction that motivates change.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:25  I love that distinction between having a purpose and being purposeful. That’s a handy little way to think of it, right? Because yeah, you can have a set of values or purposes that you simply can’t live into. And we’ll get to this later in the conversation where you give some some ideas about not only how to define the purpose, but how to live into it. But I’d like to pause here for a second, because the book opens with a scene of you on Lake Michigan, and you just referenced your daughter’s passing. So I’m wondering if you could sort of tell us that story and how you got to purpose being kind of your life’s work?

Vic Strecher 00:16:05  Sure. And to be honest, I never really thought about purpose in my own life or other people’s lives. I never thought it was something that you would want for better health, necessarily. I was helping people manage their stress or quit smoking or change an addiction or, you know, manage their diet better or whatever.

Vic Strecher 00:16:26  And that that was my focus. I’m a behavioral scientist, and I help people think more about the future and their own possible selves in the future and try to take better care of themselves in doing so. My daughter was born healthy, and then she caught a chickenpox virus when she was six months old out of the blue. And you know, most people get that. It causes a fever and a rash or something for a day or two. This virus attacked her heart and it actually destroyed her heart. And her only hope was to get a heart transplant. And she became one of the first children in, in this country, in the world to get a heart transplant. And she wasn’t the first. But, you know, in that early wave and we didn’t know what would happen to her, but we decided that we would not knowing. And her chance was probably about 50/50 that she would make it to even six years old. And when she got this heart transplant, we sat around our dinner table, what I like to call the gathering Place as a family.

Vic Strecher 00:17:25  And we said, well, what’s a good life? You know what would be a good life for Julia? And we decided if she could have connections. If she felt like she belonged not just to this family, but to other people and connected with other meaningful activities endeavors. In other words, living a big life. And so we helped her live a big life. She needed another transplant when she was nine, it turns out, and she almost passed away at that time. I write about that in my book, and then she ultimately did pass away when she was 19. She wanted to be a nurse in getting her second heart transplant. She really fell in love with nursing. She thought of all the people really cared about her so deeply. It was nurses and she wanted to be one. She wanted to give back. And so her first semester we were on spring break. We decided to take her and her older sister to the Caribbean for a break. She was always cold because her heart didn’t work all that great, and she turned to us one evening as she was going back to her room and she said, I’m so happy, dad, that I could die now.

Vic Strecher 00:18:34  And we thought it was just a very positive thing. And I don’t think she knew she was going to die. But those were her last words, and she passed away of a sudden heart attack that night. And when that happened, you know, of course we grieve. And I’m sure you’ve done podcasts around grieving and in that process. But I remember we went to a therapist and it was a marital counseling therapist as well as a grief therapist, and I came in being the smart professor and I, you know, said, well, Miss Therapist, I you know, I’ve read the stats on this, 80% of families who lose a child break up and I don’t want to break up. And she kind of laughed gently and smiled and she said, well, you know, Vic, 50% of couples break up without this happening. Well, you’re right, but she said, but if you start judging the other person’s grief, you will you will break up. So if you say you’re grieving too fast or too slow or not big enough or not small.

Vic Strecher 00:19:31  You have to allow a person to go on their journey, and you have to do that independently, but also connect with one another. And so my wife, who’s a sculptor and a and a gardener, did more sculpting and gardening and stayed in Ann Arbor, where we live. I went to northern Michigan, to a cottage on Lake Michigan, and started eating and drinking myself to death. Basically, I started just drinking all the time I was eating. I just lost control because I didn’t care. I just simply didn’t care. I was nihilistic, it didn’t matter. I had no purpose and people were almost like, not. I was like in a castle and they were knocking on the castle wall, please, you know, and they were sending me books and everything. And, you know, one morning very early, I had a very, very vivid dream. And I woke up at five in the morning from this dream. It was I had read some poetry from the Persian poet Rumi. The night before.

Vic Strecher 00:20:31  And it said. Your dreams at night. Have secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. It is a beautiful poem. And I read through this poem and I thought, wow, that’s amazing. And that morning, then at five in the morning, I wanted to go back to sleep because I had a vivid dream with my daughter Julia in it, and she was saying goodbye to me, and I wanted to go with her, actually, because I didn’t care. And I remembered the poem and I woke up and I hopped out into my kayak, and I still had my boxers and t shirt on from sleeping. And I know that’s too much information, but I just jumped into this kayak and started paddling out into ice water like a Slurpee. I mean, it was incredibly cold outside, like probably 40 degrees. And if I’d fallen in, I would have died for sure. I didn’t wear any sort of life preservation, and I just kept paddling out at least a mile and towards two miles when the sun came up and when the sun came up.

Vic Strecher 00:21:28  I don’t know how to explain this as a scientist. I felt my daughter in me. I don’t know how else to explain this, but I felt my daughter in me. And I felt Julia saying, you’ve got to get over this, dad. And I wasn’t like, you have to get over this. It was like, you have to get over yourself. Your grief. Because if you don’t, you’re going to die. And I was thoroughly contemplating continuing on to Wisconsin, which is 84 more miles. And of course, I wouldn’t have made it. And I didn’t care because as beautiful morning, it was still dark. But when the sun came up, I realized I had a choice to make. And it was this really amazing thing that suddenly here, you know, I met this crossroads in my life thinking about either you know, my life will end or my life is going to have to change significantly. And here my daughter visits me. Turns out to be Father’s Day. I didn’t even realize that until I’d come back.

Vic Strecher 00:22:26  And I did come back, and I just looked down on myself and started saying, Vic, you have to fix yourself or you’re going to die and you have a choice. You can do that if you want. You can die if you want, but if you don’t, you’re going to have to change. And that’s what your profession is, how to help people change. So I just simply kind of instinctively pull the sheet of paper out and start writing down the things that mattered most to me my family, of course, our older daughter Rachel, our friends. But right away, in line three, I wrote down my students and I called the university almost right away. When I wrote down my students, I said, of course that matters so much. My research does, but my students matter. And so I called the university and said it was so nice that you gave me this semester off, and maybe even next semester of teaching, because losing your daughter is a hard thing, and I am understanding that now.

Vic Strecher 00:23:22  But it’s not the advice that I need. The advice that I need is to go back and teach, and I’m going to do that, and I’m going to teach every one of my students as if they’re my daughter. And it completely changed my life. I don’t even know how to express it. It suddenly it was from darkness into sun. And I started teaching with a vigor and a passion and a love for my students that I’ve never experienced before. And I got it back a thousandfold from my students. That was the most amazing thing. and I started doing research about this idea of purpose, and I luckily I know some wonderful neuroscientists. I know some people who would do what’s called epigenetics research and all these amazing researchers and start connecting with these people. Ethan Kross, for example, this wonderful psychologist, I know you’ve had him on your show. One of the most important ways of coping with stress is to look down on yourself and try to fix yourself. Talking to yourself in this third person, he said, what you were doing is exactly what I recommend.

Vic Strecher 00:24:29  So this changed my life.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:31  Obviously there is heartbreak at the center of the story, and then there’s a couple of really beautiful things in it. I think it’s really beautiful that your daughter got to go happy like that. I mean, what a gift. I’m not saying that your daughter going as a gift. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying within that.

Vic Strecher 00:24:51  I know exactly what you’re saying, Eric. And it was a gift. It was.

Speaker 4 00:24:54  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:55  And then secondly, this idea that you were able to see your purpose and and sort of rededicate yourself. One of the things that I think a lot about, though, is the nature of stories like that and then the, the messier reality of what it looks like moving forward. And so I in my book, I talk about a moment where I made it. They told me to go to long term treatment, I said no. Then I made a decision where I said yes and my life changed in that moment.

Vic Strecher 00:25:29  Was that an epiphany? Did you have some sort of sudden realization?

Eric Zimmer 00:25:33  Did you? I had a sudden realization that I was going to die or go to jail for a long, long time.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:38  I mean, yeah, it was.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:41  And that moment, however, would be worthless if it weren’t followed by a thousand moments of making the right choices. And I’m curious for you, like, you’re still deep in your daughter’s grief, so I’m assuming that, yes, you now had a purpose. It energized you, and this was a difficult period of time to go through. I just always want listeners to kind of have an accurate view of of what things are like, even when you have sort of an epiphany like that.

Vic Strecher 00:26:12  So true. Eric. And it does now I’m going to shift to being purposeful, because as soon as you start saying, I’m going to teach my, you know, students as if they’re my own daughter Julia, or I’m going to do X, Y, or Z as a husband or a family member or friend or a communitarian or any of those things that become, you know, self transcending purposes in your life. You go, wow, I could relapse really fast.

Vic Strecher 00:26:41  And unless I start thinking about what it’s going to take to do that, and there’s this amorphous concept called energy or vitality that probably is one of the most important elements of our lives. We don’t talk about it enough, don’t think about it enough. We don’t use it as outcomes in our research. We don’t say, what gives you more energy. But of those studies that have looked at that, we know that sleeping better gives you more energy. Being present or mindful meditation gives you more energy, physical activity, oddly enough, you think it drains you of energy. It gives you more energy. At the end of the day. Try walking around the block, you know, and you’ll have more energy afterwards. Creativity. Try making a haiku after this podcast. Just whip off a haiku for a loved one. You will have more energy. And then finally eating well. Eating carefully. Not eating monster meals at one point in time and getting sloppy. But maintaining a certain amount of glucose through the day gives you more energy.

Vic Strecher 00:27:42  So sleep, presence, activity, creativity, and eating or space. It’s just a simple moniker that I use. Did I give myself space today? Did I sleep? Was I present? Was I active creative? Did I eat well? And after a while you can become your own researcher. So we’ve actually taken this and extended it into this application called purposeful and purposeful actually looks at this in a much deeper way and helps you become more purposeful over time by taking on new areas. We call them growth areas, but these are areas that you might want to grow in that give you more energy and vitality. That in turn help you become more purposeful because it’s not just about having purpose, although that is important.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:30  The energy thing is, I think, so important. It is really one of the things that I see most often in myself and in people I’ve coached and people have been through our programs, is that when there is no energy, it is very hard to be purposeful, whatever that purpose is, and it can also be very difficult.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:54  The challenge and I love space. I agree with all of those things, and I think that’s a great acronym and kind of defines the way I try and think about my days is that even some of that requires energy to even do some of that. That’s sort of the cruel paradox, you know, it’s like the old, you know, for me, exercise is the best thing I know to do for depression, and yet it’s the hardest thing to do. When I am, I am depressed. Yeah, but this energy is so important because lack of energy leads very often to failures of what we will colloquially call willpower. I want to circle back to that, perhaps later, because that’s sort of a deep thing I think a lot about. But we can just use it in a general sense, meaning the ability to make the right choice at the right moment. Energy is is critical in the ability to do that.

Vic Strecher 00:29:45  In my book Life on Purpose, I devoted the second half of the book to space. Each of those I put a chapter in for each one, because I thought it was so important that it’s not just about finding your purpose, although that is not simple for everybody, and it’s something I hope we can talk about. How to find purpose, yes, but being purposeful, bringing your best self every day, being aligned with your purpose, those are such important elements of living, frankly, a happier life. You know, we talk a lot about happiness. I’m sure you talk about it a lot on your podcast. But, you know, happiness is not necessarily sipping martinis on the beach every day or playing golf every day, or having a trophy spouse or all of those things being wealthy. Those things, after a while, start petering out. That 400th round of golf is far less important, or that amazing meal you just ate becomes kind of rote after a while and you start complaining more. This is what Aristotle was talking about. But being purposeful, having a purpose, and living to that purpose actually has been shown so clearly to make you deeply happy.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:15  Let’s get into finding purpose. And again, that is a big word. You know, people like life’s purpose. And when I hear life’s purpose, I very often, particularly before I knew more about breaking things down into little pieces, I would hear that and I would think about it for a second. I would get completely overwhelmed, and I would just disengage and and go, do whatever. So talk to me about how we can take this question that is really big. It’s an important question. And how can we deconstruct it into something that the average person has time and energy to do?

Vic Strecher 00:31:55  Okay. So when we ask people and we’ve asked literally tens of thousands of people, do you have a purpose? Do you have a sense of purpose? And if you have a purpose, can you write it down? Actually. And people, 60% of people can write down their purpose. Usually it sounds like a hallmark card. You know, I want to change the world, I want to.

Vic Strecher 00:32:15  You know, a simple phrase. You know, I’m going to fly like an eagle or whatever. That, to me, is not a purpose. A purpose to me is. It’s really helping you organize your goals in your life. And when you think about organizing your goals in your life, you think about different domains of your life. So maybe we start with domains. Which domains are important to you? So maybe your family domain is important. It is to most people. Maybe your work where you spend most of your waking hours is important to you. And if it’s not, maybe you can figure out how to create more purposeful work in what you do. And by the way, you know, if you if you watch, you know, this this show called Dirty Jobs, it’s all about that. It’s all about finding purpose. No matter how dirty the job is, how horrible it is. So you don’t necessarily have to be a doctor or something to have purpose that you can have purposes.

Vic Strecher 00:33:09  I believe in almost any job in your life. So I believe in work purpose. That’s very important. You could have a community purpose. And also maybe you have a personal growth purpose yourself. So think about different domains. Once you’ve thought about those domains, you might start thinking about the things that are most important within those domains. You might think about people who rely on you within those domains. You might even think about your legacy within those domains. In other words, what would you want said at your memorial service or carved on your headstone if you were to die around different domains? Do you want to be the richest person in the cemetery? Most people don’t. But if you want to be remembered, Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, said we should all be good ancestors. I love that phrase because maybe thinking back 200 years, people are walking by your headstone and going. That was an awesome person. Oh my goodness, look at that person. That leads to greater purpose. So what we call mortality salience in psychology.

Vic Strecher 00:34:19  Do you want to you know, and most of my students, when I have them, think about what would be in their memorial service. They go, oh, no, I don’t want to do this. It turns out to be a fabulous way to start thinking more carefully about your purpose in life. But who relies on you? What causes do you care about? What do you wake up for in the morning? Those things energize. They create more energy as well. So it goes both ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:43  Yeah. That memorial exercise is a really powerful one. And interestingly, I interviewed somebody I don’t know a couple months ago. Sawhill Bloom, I believe, who added a spin to it that I had never heard, which was also imagine who the people are in the front two rows, because that points to who’s most important to you, right? I really like that. The thing about that exercise that’s so powerful is if you do it, you do get a much clearer sense of what’s important. It’s difficult.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:14  Mainly, my experience has been because most people come up against the fact that the person, what they want said about them at their memorial and what people would say about them today. There’s a gap, and that gap is painful. The gap is painful, but that knowledge is where, you know, we talk about energy, right? That’s where the energy comes from. The energy comes from in many ways going, oh, I want to be over there. I’m over here. This is important.

Vic Strecher 00:35:40  You said something really interesting from this other person you were interviewing, who’s in the first two rows at your memorial service. I want to also add who is sitting in the very farthest back, like who’s standing against the wall? Who just came in? Who who knows? They don’t know anyone there, but knows that this person who died touched them in such a deep way, and they’re not connected to anybody else there, but they really this person touched them in some way. It’s one of the most remarkable things that I find in my work right now through my book, Life on Purpose or through the app purposeful.

Vic Strecher 00:36:21  When I get emails from people thanking me for changing their lives. And I’m sure you get that as well. And it may be from India, it may be from some other place around the world, and that’s the person in the very back. Or if it’s out in a cemetery, a person standing by a tree but not part of the crowd just going, I’m here because that person touched me so deeply.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:43  Thank you for taking the time to do that, because that is an interesting element of the the mix, right? For you, you’re wanting to treat each student as if they were your daughter. The vast majority of those people are going to pass through and disappear out of your life?  That doesn’t mean, however, though, that you didn’t have some positive impact on them. And so I really like that framing sort of both. And I think that actually brings up a value tension that a lot of us can get into. Right. And that value tension is there’s the people closest to me who deserve want and, and sometimes clamor for our attention and time. And then there might be some purpose that’s out there reaching all the students. And I think those are two values that often come into a tension that many of us feel a lot.

Vic Strecher 00:37:43  I’m so glad you brought this up, Eric, because think about these values in concentric circles. My inner circle might be my family, and when I ask people about purpose a lot and what their purpose is, very often they’ll just go, my family, of course, you know, I want my family and their kids and their kids and their kids to be well off. And so that’s where I’m giving my money and that’s why I’m working. That’s fine. I know opposition to that. But what about those people who start extending it out to people who may not even know them to the disadvantaged, continuing to go further and further out? I mean, if you even read the Bible and read about the Good Samaritan, you know, the Good Samaritan stops next to a person who’s been beaten up and robbed and naked and, you know, puts this person on their donkey walks, you know, walks the donkey over to an inn, pays the innkeeper for a night there, clothes him, feeds him, and never knew who he was.

Vic Strecher 00:38:43  I mean, you could go further and further in this concentric circle to that person on the side of the road. What would you do even if you met an alien who was beaten up like a true alien from a different planet? Would you pick them up? You know, that’s what E.T., in a way, the movie. ET is all about. And it took a child to accept ET, but they had to hide, ET from the parents and all the adults because they would be afraid and probably kill ate. So I.

Speaker 4 00:39:12  Love this.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:12  Quarantine period though. Might make sense, but what I think a quarantine period might be warranted a kind quarantine. I’m not saying you kill E.T., right, but I might be like, hey, I’m gonna. I care about you, I’m interested in you, but I’m going to let you stay over there for a little while while I gather some information.

Vic Strecher 00:39:32  Make sure you don’t destroy the world.

Vic Strecher 00:39:35 But you know, this. Idea of gradually moving out in concentric circles of the things and that matter most.

Vic Strecher 00:39:41  And after a while, you realize that the things that matter most are actually not things. They’re people or they’re living things that you can help support. Maybe it’s pets or other things. How far do you move out in that? To me, those are some of the most interesting people that I meet.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:59  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow. Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom. A short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite sized practices you can use the same day. It’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at oneyoufeed.net/newsletterr. That’s oneyoufeed.net/newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:50  So what’s your purpose? You’ve given us one part of it to teach every student as if they were your daughter. Is that the the whole thing or do you have do you have more to it than that? And if so, would you be willing to share it?

Vic Strecher 00:41:02  Yeah, of course I have a personal purpose, which is to continue to grow, but also to have fun in my life. I don’t want, you know, I don’t want purpose to seem like it’s it’s kind of not fun because part of this is having a lot of fun in my life, and I enjoy my life. I have a hedonic side to my life, and I don’t shy away from that. I don’t apologize for it. I love those nice things as well. Good food or, you know, wine or whatever. Those things are. At the same time, as Aristotle said, I don’t want to be a grazing animal. I want to do things bigger than that. So I want to be a communitarian, and I pick certain causes that I really am very, very deeply involved in and work on.

Vic Strecher 00:41:49  Many are with seniors, so I’m very active with senior populations very active with student populations. And I love those groups. I want just generally in terms of life, to help people get out on the dance floor of life. And that may sound weird, but I think back to when I’m in this eighth grade sock hop, I’ll never forget this. And I was a very shy person, so I was always a wallflower. And the idea of a wallflower is you’re just standing on the side of the wall, and you’re waiting for somebody else to ask you to dance. But they’re waiting maybe for you to ask them to dance. So you’re never going out on the dance floor. And finally, I’ll never forget in eighth grade, there was this song that came out. It was, Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein, and it had this great guitar riff and. I just loved it. And it was like one of the first electronica pieces. And as soon as it came out, I thought, I love this song, I really want to dance.

Vic Strecher 00:42:46  And so I got the courage to ask this girl to dance, and we started dancing in the middle of this giant electronic riff. And I’m like, dancing like this. My eyes are rolling to the back of my head. And I’m spinning around. Kind of. And I opened my eyes and the entire dance floor. Everybody is circling me. And the girl I’m dancing with says. Are you okay? And it real. And it was very embarrassing, obviously, at the time. But now I realize that’s part of my purpose to get out on the dance floor and dance your dance and not care what other people say or think. And if they think that you’re having this seizure, well, maybe, you know, that’s your own joy that you’re expressing. And as soon as I learned that about myself, that I should stop caring so much about what other people think and care about what I think, care about my core values, and live authentically to that, my purpose deepened. And it does involve many concentric circles that go way, way out helping people.

Vic Strecher 00:43:49  And it involves working very hard to develop and maintain energy. I’ll turn 70 this year and I just feel, you know, we’ve we’ve done research asking people, what’s your age? And then what is your perceived age? What do you how do you feel? People with strong purpose, on average, feel they are six years younger than their actual age. And we recently did research looking at what are called epigenetic clocks. And our epigenetic clocks are looking at how our DNA actually expresses proteins that are positive for you or negative for you. Does it cause these proteins cause inflammation or are they antiviral proteins and things like that? And we found that people’s biologic or epigenetic clocks are much longer if they have a strong purpose. And the fascinating thing about that is these epigenetic clocks, many elements of them may well be transmitted to two year offspring, two year children, which is really strange. I never learned that in high school, but our epigenome may well many parts of it may be passed on to our offspring.

Vic Strecher 00:45:00  That is incredible. So what I’m doing in my own life, and trying to build from the tragedy of our daughter may hopefully benefit my offspring.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:10  So I want to come back to finding your own purpose. You’ve got an app purposeful and so people can check that out, which I assume guides you through finding a purpose as well as living into it.

Vic Strecher 00:45:22  Yeah, they can go to purposeful IO and they can get a free trial of this. It’s for a month. I mean, just try it, see if you like it. But yeah, people, we have found significant reductions in depression and anxiety, improvements in your ability to manage emotions, just, you know, working with Ethan Kross, this great psychologist, we’ve really found some improvements from that.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:46  Assuming someone doesn’t do that. We’ve talked about finding, you know, values from a list. These would be things like kindness or compassion or justice. we’ve talked about the headstone test as a way of sort of thinking about what you want people to say to you.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:02  another is to identify people you want to emulate. pick a guide is what they call it an acceptance of commitment therapy, which is also can be a very helpful one. And then it says to assemble all this into, you know, identify goals that matter across the different domains, assemble all these valued goals into an overall life purpose. And that’s where I’d like to spend a couple minutes, because there’s a lot swirling around there. Right? I can be like, all right. These five people are important to me as well. Or the listeners of the show and the students that come through my program. I value all of that. I value compassion, I value this, I have a goal to do that, I right, there’s all this stuff. And part of what I think gets overwhelming for people is that before we know it, we’ve got so many things that we value that we can’t end up valuing any of them. Right. We used to say in project management, if everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority.

Vic Strecher 00:47:01  Great point. It’s a great point.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:02  And so how does someone narrow this down to a statement that can, as we talked about in the beginning, can orient them when the they’re facing the two wolves or their various decisions? I’m not a believer that you’re going to write a statement and you’re suddenly going to know what to do at every juncture in your life, like life, it just isn’t that simple. But we can have something that’s orients us a little bit more. How do we go from all these various methods into something that looks like a purpose that we can write down and try and live by?

Vic Strecher 00:47:31  I love your question, by the way. Thank you for asking it. Often we can have what I call purpose conflict, where, you know, you have lots of purposes and they can clash with one another. This is where self-reflection comes in. Frankly, there’s a part of the brain that we look at when people are considering their core values. And that’s the part right behind your eyebrows.

Vic Strecher 00:47:54  It’s called a ventromedial prefrontal cortex. We have more of this than any other animal. It’s part of the prefrontal cortex. And we have more of that than any other animal. By threefold I mean it’s large amounts of this. It’s a very modern, very human part of the brain. It relates to decision making and reflection. But the interesting part is part of that ventromedial prefrontal cortex is also it’s also associated with the self. Who am I. And so the self reflection is true self reflection. It’s asking this question who am I? You might even go deeper than that if you think about this metaphorically as the roots of the tree and our behaviors, our emotions are the branches of the tree. The roots of the tree may be our core values, which develops into a purpose, which moves into and defines what the branches are going to look like. But you may go even deeper than the roots of the tree and say, what’s feeding that? Is it toxic? What’s feeding your values? Is it influencers who are telling you by this or by that? Or who’s wearing what? Or making sure you’re keeping up with the Joneses, whatever those things are? Is it toxic? Is it nourishing? Is it very helpful? What is that? It could be a religion for some people.

Vic Strecher 00:49:14  It could be a philosophy. It could be, for example, a stoic philosophy or an existential philosophy. So what are the things? It could be your family that’s feeding this or friends, people who you rely on, people who are are wonderful mentors to you as you are implying here. so I’d like to go back to that element. What is the reservoir that’s feeding into these values? Because once you have those values and it’s very strong. And then the tree starts straying over somewhere. There’s a tendency not for the root system to shift underneath the tree, but the tree to rebound back over the roots. That’s called, by the way, in psychology, cognitive dissonance. We tend to rebound back to where our core values are. So making sure those core values are rooted in something that’s nourishing is very important. I hope that’s not too vague, and I’m happy to get into greater specificity about that if you like.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:14  I don’t think it’s too vague, but okay, I have a way. Let’s try and let’s try and firm this up just a little bit in one particular thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:23  So let’s say that I take the headstone test right. And I imagine what I want people to say would I then. One way of establishing a purpose would be to take those basic statements and put them into one coherent statement that I then try and live by.

Vic Strecher 00:50:42  Yeah, I think so. So in this headstone test, it could be what’s on your headstone. It could be what what people say at your memorial service. And this is something my book talks about a lot. So if people say this was such a generous person or this was such, this person was such a kind person, or this person got me thinking in a new way, or this person who died made me a more curious person. I always brought up questions then, you know, in thinking about that, it’s almost like when you’re writing a book. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in writing my book, Life on Purpose, was write your book review. Now write you know what you’d want book reviewers to write about your book now, because it shapes how you want people to think about what you want people to think, and what you want people to feel about your book.

Vic Strecher 00:51:32  Well, you can do that with your life as well. So you pick through these different pieces and say, is that something I want? Do I want to help make people more curious about life? And if you say yes, then you go, okay. I now have a purpose. That is something that I’m going to do. And I’m going to start figuring out how to become purposeful, to help people become more curious. So you work through that. And that’s leading a life of great purpose.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:00  Yeah. You know, for me, I have two sort of orientations that go. One is I just have a general it’s sort of just like a life sort of rule that I try and take, which is to leave every person, place or thing better for me. Having been there than before, I.

Vic Strecher 00:52:16  Got a great purpose.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:17  It’s just very simple. And again, it’s not like I do that all the time, you know. But it’s a it’s an orientation. And then the second is I just have sort of three words.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:26  You know, kindness is one, curiosity is the other. And health is the is the third. And there’s a lot of things tucked under them. Right. So when I look at kindness, I’m like, okay, well, that includes my son being kind to my son. You know how I treat other people. There’s a lot of stuff under there. Under curiosity is like my love of adventure and my love of learning and my. But when I, when I sometimes am at a place where I’m like, okay, I can’t decide what to do, I sort of say, well, what would these tell me to do? And then health, mental and emotional and spiritual health. So oftentimes that’s what I’m sitting on the couch. I don’t really feel like doing anything. I don’t feel good. And I’m what should I do? I look at those values and I’m like, oh, okay. Well, health tells me get up. And so for me, it’s those, those sort of three words.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:15  And then that one statement that that act as general steering devices.

Vic Strecher 00:53:22  I love that, you know, when we talk about people who tend to lean forward, you know, they’re going to still be blown over backwards. You know, when I say I’m going to teach my students as if they’re my own child with hundreds of students, just as you say, many, many, many of those students will go by. And maybe not like me or not feel

that I help them in that way, or go through and never tell me that that, you know, I changed their life in some way. One has to accept that and it’s totally fine. It’s an orientation, like you said, and being more intentional as you wake up. That’s something that I try to do in my intervention work. It’s something I hope my book helps people with. Something I hope our app helps people with. when you wake up in the morning, you very often look at the weather, say, what’s the weather going to be like? And you say, oh, okay, it’s going to rain, so I better wear a raincoat.

Vic Strecher 00:54:17  But do we wake up and go? I need to be inspiring today, or I really need to be thoughtful today, or I need to be very calm today. I need to be certain things. And you map that back to your purpose and you say, okay, this is a really important thing for me to focus on and that focal area, then I may need a little help. I may need a tip or two, or maybe I don’t. Maybe I just know I better really focus on my meditation this morning. But maybe I need to learn a new meditation. And that’s why we have built the things that we’ve built to help people make those kind of changes, to be purposeful every day, to bring their best self every day. Not that they will succeed, but that’s the intention. And as you say, the orientation one has. I’m going to I’m going to throw this out to I’m looking at that awesome hairdo that you have this mohawk, and I’m just going to throw this thing out, that I have a feeling that you also are a person who wants to express themselves in a creative way, in an independent way, and say, I’m my own person. I’m not going to let other people judge me. This is who I am, and I’m working on building. I’m a sculptor. I’m not a sculpture,. I’m not a sculptor. I’m a sculptor. And I’m sculpting myself in a way that I want to do that because this is my life and it’s no one else’s. And I have this brief period on this planet. And here’s what I am working on. And it’s a never ending process. Am I off base in that?

Eric Zimmer 00:55:50  No, I don’t think you’re off base. I don’t think a lot about expressing myself at this stage in my life. It just. I’m just doing.

Vic Strecher 00:56:00  You just have an awesome mohawk.Though, dude.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:01  Well, okay. Well, here’s the story on the Mohawk. Some listeners will have heard this. If I was to let my values list go a little bit longer, one of the ones that would be on there very close is, is freedom in one way.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:12  I mean, freedom, like, you know, we all mean it, but I mean it more specifically, which is freedom from. Nah, we used to say bondage of the self, which is thinking about myself all the time, but that also translates into freedom in a lot of different ways. I value it. And the Mohawk came about. It was one year after I left my my. My previous career in software and had been doing the one you feed for a year full time and I thought, well, what can I do today? You know, like, how do I celebrate this? And I thought, I’m just going to get a stupid haircut that I wouldn’t have gotten any time in the last X number of years, because it just might have been a career limiting move. Maybe, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have done it. And so I went and got a mohawk, thinking, I’ll get it, and tomorrow I’ll cut it off. And now, something like five years later, I still have it.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:59  So to me, it’s sort of like the Freedom Hawk, right? It’s the it’s the symbol for me of this freedom that I’ve worked really hard to kind of carve out.

Vic Strecher 00:57:10   That’s great. I love that expression of freedom. What you’ve just said, and it tells me a lot about you. It tells me more about your purpose, about what you value, what you try to live to every day. So. Yeah. In other words, I guess what I’m getting at to is sometimes finding a purpose might involve asking friends more about what or acquaintances, what they think about you, and getting that 360 feedback.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:38  One of the complaints that is often lodged in today’s world towards things like purpose or meditation or personal growth, is that it is only for people who are essentially wealthy enough to have time to do it. And you sort of take that head on in the book. I’m not saying that, of course, wealth doesn’t contribute to the choices we have. I mean, all those things have an element of truth in them.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:11  And something like purpose transcends well beyond that. So share with me your thoughts on that.

Vic Strecher 00:58:19  Yeah. You know, Viktor Frankl is one of my true heroes. He went through three concentration camps in World War two. He lost his family. He was a camp physician to prisoners. So one of the reasons he was still alive was that he could treat other people. But he also was a great observer of human beings. And he found that people who lost their purpose would tend to get sick, and then they would die, and it wasn’t as much the other way around. They wouldn’t just get sick and then lose their purpose and die. They would lose their purpose and direction, and then they would just, you know, without any direction, they would start going away. And he started talking with Abraham Maslow a lot. And Maslow has this famous hierarchy of needs where, you know, very basic safety and shelter or things like that, moving up through support from other people, moving to this concept of self-actualization.

Vic Strecher 00:59:15  And, you know, Maslow talked about peak experiences and things. And Viktor Frankl said, you know, actually having a sense of purpose is at the very basis of our needs. It’s essential for our needs. And I tested that out with a good friend of mine from Uganda who created teach for Uganda. He actually grew up. They called him and they called many people like this an Aids orphan where his parents died of HIV. And as a kid, his grandmother raised him. His grandmother actually walked and bussed him 300 miles to Kampala, to the palace of, you know, the person who runs the whole country and knocked on the gate basically and asked for an education. And eventually, I think it took about a month for him to finally see the wife of the president of Uganda. And basically he’s by himself, he’s five years old and he’s going, I would like an education. And he got an education. And from that he created teach for Uganda. I asked James Earnhardt Way, that’s his name.

Vic Strecher 01:00:19  Wonderful, by the way. Wonderful cause, wonderful charity. Teach for Uganda. But I said is purpose is just for people who have everything else. And he laughed. He said, I know you people in the West may think that, but purpose gives poor people hope. It’s essential for people who have nothing else. It’s the thing that people need. you might even argue in a bigger way that purpose is essential for life itself. Life exists until it doesn’t and you die, and then entropy occurs. Entropy is, you know, suddenly, you know, the dissolving of all the, you know, of all the elements of your body. And what purpose does is keep all those working. It keeps them all together, whether you’re a paramecium or an amoeba or you’re a human being. purpose and purpose is at different levels, obviously, but purpose is what keeps us alive. it’s absolutely fundamental, I think. Absolutely. It’s not just for rich people. And I’ve talked to many, many wealthy people about their purposes, and that’s great.

Vic Strecher 01:01:24  One thing that’s surprising is how many wealthy people don’t have purpose, or have a purpose that’s been so hidden and so focused on making money or those hedonic things that they’re terribly unhappy people, and you go, oh, you poor, unhappy, rich person, how can you care about that person? You understand that? But at the same time, you have to realize they’re very unhappy because they don’t have this transcending purpose. And you meet a lot of people in all walks of life who have tremendous, transcending purposes. And regardless of their circumstances, they can be happy people. And I think they improve their lives through this, too.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:00  Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to spend a couple more minutes in the post-show conversation, and we are going to talk about miracles, God, and the afterlife. which is a fascinating part of your book. And watching you as a scientist wrestle with some things that seemed unexplainable. So we’re going to head towards that.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:23  Listeners, if you’d like access to this conversation as well as ad-free episodes, a special episode I create each week just for you, where I present a teaching a song that I love, a poem that I love. And if you’d like to support the show because we can really use it, go to one you feed, join. Vic, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you.

Vic Strecher 01:02:47  I so appreciate talking to you as well. Your questions, as I’ve heard in other podcasts of yours, are very deeply educated, informed, thoughtful, and fun to answer. So thank you. I felt like I wanted to interview you as well.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:06  Well, maybe another time. Thanks, Vic.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:11  Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action. My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:33  Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed. Net newsletter. 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. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

In this episode, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, discusses how to escape the goal trap by embracing curiosity and using “tiny experiments.” Most advice about self-improvement assumes you know where you’re going, but what if you don’t? Anne-Laure suggests that’s not a flaw, it’s actually the starting point. Her new book, Tiny Experiments, offers a way to explore change without chasing outcomes. In our conversation, we talk about curiosity as a guide, how to stay engaged in uncertainty, and what it means to choose persistence.

Key Takeaways:

• Importance of curiosity and exploration in personal growth
• Conducting small experiments to challenge the status quo
• Embracing uncertainty and learning from emotions
• Distinction between passive and active acceptance of challenges
• The concept of “field notes” for self-reflection and observation
• Understanding and labeling emotions to reduce anxiety
• Addressing procrastination through curiosity and exploration
• The iterative process of growth loops and adjusting one’s trajectory
• The significance of taking actionable steps in the present
• Developing mini protocols or “pacts” for personal experimentation

Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, former Googler and founder of Ness Labs, writes to 100k+ about evidence-based ways to achieve more without sacrificing your health – a topic dear to her after trying to schedule a life-saving surgery around her corporate calendar to avoid letting up on her goals. She’s been in Forbes, Refinery29, and Entrepreneur, and her new book is Tiny Experiments.

Connect with Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Website | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, check out these other episodes:

The Power of Visualization to Achieve Your Goals with Emily Balcetis

Why We Stop Noticing What Matters and How to Feel Alive Again with Tali Sharot

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If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon!  Click here to learn more!!

Episode Transcript:

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:00:00  You actually don’t need to overhaul your entire life in order to reconnect with curiosity, with exploration, with being open to uncertainty, with those liminal spaces. You just need to conduct very small little experiments where you question the way you’ve been doing things, and you try a different way of doing those things.

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  Most advice about self-improvement assumes you know where you’re going. But what if you don’t? Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests that’s not a flaw. It’s actually the starting point. Her new book, Tiny Experiments, offers a way to explore change without chasing outcomes. In our conversation, we talk about curiosity as a guide, how to stay engaged in uncertainty, and what it means to choose persistence. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi and Laura, welcome to the show.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:01:48  Thank you so much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:50  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your wonderful book, which is called Tiny Experiments How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed world. And I mentioned that I have followed you online for a while. You’ve been writing for years and I’ve always found what you do really interesting. So I’m glad we get to have this conversation. Before we get into the book, though, 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  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.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:02:48  I find it fascinating because it is kind of based on the idea that some emotions are inherently bad, while others are good. And I think that any emotion is just data. It’s just a signal from your brain trying to communicate something. And so I agree that you should not feed the ones that are going to make you feel worse, but you can still learn from them. And if you start being curious about those different emotions that you feel, including the very uncomfortable ones, including the ones where you might have a little bit of shame around them, you can actually learn a lot and grow a lot, I think.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:27  Yes, yes. As you were talking for the first time, something crystallized in my mind, which was that we talk about them as emotions, greed and hatred and fear, and they are. But there are also ways of acting. And the distinction there obviously is you’re going to have all kinds of emotions. It’s what you choose to do with them. Right? It’s it’s which ones do you choose to say, all right, I’m going to work with this in my little container. And which of these am I going to project out into the world? And I think that’s where the more conscious choice and the ability to pause comes in.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:04:06  Absolutely. This is fundamentally the difference between living a conscious, intentional life versus living a life on autopilot.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:15  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The place I want to start is entirely selfish for me. So it’s this. You have often talked about ways of managing all the information that we come across. I think you might call it gardening. Digital gardening. Am I and I’m curious.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:36  I’ve used, I mean, all kinds of tools Evernote, notion, roam, research. Right? Like, right now I’m looking at roam. It’s it’s the best book prep way I know how to do things. And AI is upending all of it. And I’m curious what for you Have there been any new tools that you’ve been like, oh wow, this is this really changes the game in the way that I organize information that I’ve got and put together.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:05:05  I still use room research to capture all of my information and knowledge, and anytime I’m reading something, I want to save information. But it’s become more of a quick capture tool for me and a way to connect with different pieces of information. I do a lot of my thinking in 1 or 2 different AI tools these days, because I feel like I can actually have a conversation with the information, you know, in a way that you can’t quite do it with a note taking poll. I’m going to share one fun tool that I discovered recently that was created by Stanford University.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:05:40  That’s called storm. And the way it works is that you ask it about any topic you want, and it will create a custom Wikipedia like page for you around this topic. And what I love about it is that you can basically create your own rabbit holes to fall into.

Speaker 4 00:05:58  It’s like we need more.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:06:00  Yes, exactly. But instead of pulling into random ones, you’re pulling into your own highly curated rabbit holes. And so that’s an AI tool that I found incredibly helpful. It’s fun to use, and it’s a way to be more curious and creative at the same time.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:16  Yeah. Because I think, listeners, I promise this is just going to go on for another minute or two. Then we’ll get into the rest of it. But I’m sure all of you, all of us think about what do we do with all the information that we get? How does it become useful to us? And, you know, roam is a tool that was intended to sort of connect disparate ideas on its own.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:36  And I don’t think it fully realizes that promise. but I think I at some point, I mean, already to a certain degree does and can. The question is, how do you expose everything that you’re thinking about and consuming and reading to I so it can make connections that you don’t see. And I think that’s the question I’m still trying to figure out.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:07:00  And that’s the problem at this stage, is that although for a lot of the the pro versions of these tools, you can actually connect them to your documents and your drive. So you can do that. We are still currently at a stage where you need to prompt AI and ask it questions in order for it to do something useful for you, and so it is not necessarily going to help with the kind of emergent knowledge and exploration where you don’t know what you don’t know. And so in that way, to me, it is still more of a thinking companion that is helping me explore things I’m curious about versus doing a lot of the thinking from you, which it cannot do right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:40  No, it cannot do, although at least for me, if I ask, hey, I’m giving you 3 or 4 different things here. Find connections between them that I may not be seeing and it finds connections. Now, some of them are garbage, right? I mean, they’re not any good, but every once in a while I’m like, oh, wow, okay. I treat it sort of like you do, like as a thinking companion. It’s just I just assume I’ve got a really smart and incredibly smart person next to me that will be infinitely patient with all the questions I want to ask it, you know, and away I go. So anyway, okay, now let’s get into the book. The heart of the book is about how our way of thinking about goals up till now is not the best approach for us moving forward in today’s day and age. Share why that is so.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:08:35  I describe the types of goals that we’ve been using so far. The traditional way of doing goal setting as linear goals and a linear goal is a goal that is based on the assumption that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear vision and a clear plan.

And then if you work really, really hard, you’re going to get there.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:08:58  The problem, obviously, is that we know that in this day and age, this doesn’t really work because the world keeps on changing. You keep on changing. Maybe in the first place you don’t really know what you want and where you want to go. And so this idea of having a very clear vision of where you want to go kind of breaks down in today’s modern world. So I advocate for replacing this very linear approach that gives you this illusion of control and this illusion of certainty with a more experimental mindset, where you embrace the fact that you don’t really know where you’re going. Things are changing all the time, and maybe that uncertainty is not such a bad thing. Maybe you can actually learn from it.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:43  So you started your career at Google. And you made the decision after several years there, that you were on this locked in path at Google. It was very clear where you were going to go, what you needed to do to get there. You had your blinders on and you were just charging full speed ahead and that for you, that didn’t work right. That wasn’t the right thing. So you left and then you started. You did what you know, everybody does. When you leave something like Google, you start your own company. And so you created a startup and found yourself in essentially the same boat again. Right? It’s just, you know, it’s your boat this time, but you’re still pointing in one direction, going as hard as you can with the blinders on. And from there, you then launched the next phase of your life, which has been a lot of different things. A question I have for you is, how does this idea that we’re going to explore more in the book around these tiny experiments and a curiosity based, you know, exploration approach work for people who don’t do something as radical as you did or as I did, like leaving a career to, you know, mess around out here in the, you know, in the media world or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:59  I’ve got a career goals. I’m in an organization. I’ve put I’m putting my time in, I have somewhere I think I want to go. But I also recognize, you know, the blinders are on and I’m not I’m not growing. I’m not learning. I’m bored. I’m, you know, how do we take your model and and put it into that?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:11:18  Yes. two things. First, I don’t think, looking back, that I had to leave Google in the way I did, where I was just like, I’m done, I’m going to do something different. And now I’m going to build my startup. And I’m very aware that, unfortunately, this is a very common discourse that we get in the media where people say, quit your job, do your thing, follow your passion, which I think is actually quite dangerous and I was quite young at the time, and so I thought that’s what I had to do. So that’s one thing. Don’t necessarily do what I did and I don’t say in the book, and I never say do that because I think it’s actually quite risky to do something like this turned out to be okay for me, but it’s not always the case.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:11:58  One thing. The second one is this is why the book is called Tiny Experiments, because you actually don’t need to overhaul your entire life in order to reconnect with curiosity, with exploration, with being open to uncertainty, with those liminal spaces, you just need to conduct very small little experiments where you question the way you’ve been doing things and you try a different way of doing those things, and where you stay very open to whatever the outcome is going to be. So instead of having that linear goal where you say, this is what success looks like and I need to get there, instead, you start from a hypothesis. You ask yourself, come. I think this might work. I think I might enjoy this. I think this could be interesting. What kind of tiny experiment could I design around that question, that hypothesis, so I can find out. And if it turns out that it’s not for me and I don’t like it, that’s not failure. That’s just data.

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Eric Zimmer 00:14:00 That’s how this podcast started. I had a solar energy company that ended up failing, and I was back in the software world doing consulting, and I just got the idea to do this thing. And so I just did it. And without a whole lot of thought. I mean, once I had the idea, then I put work in steadily, you know, a little bit. But there was there was no expectation that this was anything more than, let’s try it and see if we like it.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:25  And when I was doing coaching work with people, sometimes we would do exactly what you said, which is they would think they want to do x, Y and z. So we would start doing x, y and z, and then they would find out that that’s not what they wanted to do. And that in some ways feels like a loss. And it might be if it’s been this cherished thing you’ve thought you wanted to do. But ultimately it’s freeing, because now you can point your energy towards what is actually for you. And I just love the idea of tiny experiments. You know, just try something. I always think about this idea of, like, if you’re standing at the edge of the woods and there’s a path going in and about five feet down, it curves and you’re like, what’s around that path? What’s around that path? You’ll never know. By standing at the edge of the woods. You only know by taking a few steps in. And that’s, I think, kind of at the heart of your book.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:15:16  I love that, and I love how you mentioned how freeing it is, because that’s why the subtitle of the book is How to Live Freely in a goal obsessed World. It’s really the idea that once you free yourself from all of those what ifs that you treat in more of a paralyzing way, where a lot of people might think, oh, what if I changed jobs? What if I did that thing differently? What if I explored a different city, a different way of of being and of living? But because they see it as this very big change, they end up not exploring it at all. Yes. And there’s always, always a tiny, more experimental version that you can explore this question and actually find out. And as you said, if it turns out this is not for you, you’re actually freeing up mental space, creative energy that you can direct towards something else.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:07  Yeah. My partner and I, we live in Columbus, Ohio today, and there were reasons that we had to remain in Columbus up until about a year ago. And and now we’re in the where do we want to live? We could live anywhere in the world dilemma, right? And so part of our process, though, is just like, let’s go somewhere that is on the list for a couple of weeks, and most of the time we end up just crossing it off. Nope. Nope. Nope. We’re overly picky. I think that’s probably part of the problem. And there’s no right answer, which is I think the other thing that ties into kind of your book is that I think we get paralyzed because we think we need to make the right choice, the right decision, when that’s not really the way reality works.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:16:53  Exactly. And very often this obsession we have with making the right decision actually gets in the way of ultimately making the right decision, because we’re not allowing ourselves to iterate.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:06  Yes. Okay. So you recommend or you talk about in the book, going from this idea of linear goals to growth loops. Describe a growth loop.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:17:16  So if you keep on conducting the exact same experiment without learning from the data you’re collecting, you’re just going to go in circles.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:17:25  A growth loop is when you take the time to reflect on what you learned, and you adjust your trajectory based on all of these lessons that you had from the previous cycle of experimentation, and for each cycle, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t have that fixed destination, but you can trust that you’re going to grow. And this is why they’re called growth loops. Each loop you complete, each time you ask a question, you say, I’m going to give it a try, and I’m going to learn from this trial and then decide what to do next. I’m going to grow.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:01  The next thing in the book that ties to this is this idea of, instead of goals or habits or New Year’s resolutions or huge projects that we make pacts. It’s pacts, not like pacts of wolves, but pacts just for listeners. So there’s not not not confusion. What is a pact?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:18:26  A pact is a mini protocol for personal experimentation. It’s a very simple format that allows you to design tiny experiments, and it’s based on exactly the same format scientists used to design their experiments.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:18:42  So if you think about an experiment, you only need to know two things. And then obviously giving you a very simplified version of that. But you need to know what you’re going to test and the number of trials. That’s basically all you need to have. The essence of what the experiment is going to be a packed very similarly is deciding what action you’re going to explore for what duration. And so it follows this format for better. And so it follows this format I will action for duration. So for example I will write a weekly newsletter for six weeks. I will meditate every morning for one month. I will meal prep every Sunday for two months. I will action for duration. And this is a pact. I call it a pact because it is really a commitment. It’s a commitment to complete the experiment, to perform that action for that duration, and to withhold judgment while you’re conducting the experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:49  Yeah. There’s so many things about that framework that I really love. You talk about. It needs to be actionable, using current resources rather than like elaborate preparation.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:01  And one of the phrases I’ve always loved, and it’s been attributed to everybody from, you know, Snoopy to to God is something like use what you have, do what you can, you know, with what you have. I’m butchering it, but that’s it basically, you know. Yeah. And I love that idea of doing what we can with what we have right now. Right. Versus because how many of our dreams get deferred by when X when I have this, when I have that, and I think it’s so important. And I love this idea of time bounding it because you’re not making a commitment for the rest of your life. I’m a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic, and we had a concept of one day at a time, which is an extreme time bounding, but it’s an extreme problem when you’re first trying to to come out of addiction. But it’s a way of not getting overwhelmed by the fact that, like, is this really the right thing for me to do for the rest of my life? What am I going to do when I get married? What about like, all these things? You just go, well today.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:07  And I love that idea because the pact does that on a more reasonable level. But it also allows you, since you’re committing for a period of time, to find out about it, because meditating for two days, you don’t have enough information to make a decision about whether meditation is for you or not. But that’s where most of us live. We live either like I do it and I if I don’t get immediately good feedback, I give up. Or I chain myself to the idea that I have to do this thing forever. And I love that you’re you’re painting this middle way with these pacts.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:21:43  Yes. And, what are you talking about? Reminds me of of habits where I find it fascinating and a little bit crazy that so many of us decide to commit to new habits for the rest of our lives without having ever tried them before. And so I also think that having this experimental approach and saying, I’m just going to do a tiny experiment first, as you said, it’s going to be short enough that you can actually do it long enough that you can actually collect data.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:22:17  And it’s a way to figure out, is there anything I might want to turn into a habit that I can try it first? And it’s not because everybody around you, all of your friends, are raving about running, for example, that this is something you’re going to enjoy. So you can give it a try. Yeah. And then if it doesn’t work, it’s okay. There are so many other forms of healthy body movement. It doesn’t have to be that. And so you can try something different. So I think it’s also allowing yourself to figure out what actually works for you. Instead of copy pasting what the imagery is saying is good for everyone.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:54  Yes. And it keeps you pointed in in a direction long enough to be useful, because that’s the that’s the opposite of the commitment to everything is I just bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce between lots of different things all the time. So what you’re saying is having a long term goal way out there doesn’t make sense in the same way that it used to.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:15  And there’s lots of things that happen when we do that. And having no direction is also a bad idea, right? And so I’m a I’m a big middle way kind of guy. It’s one of my, you know, it’s part of my brand, I guess. And and this is such a middle way approach.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:23:33  Yes. Very often in the middle way is actually a pretty good answer. And, and I think in this case, that is that is the case long enough that you can figure out what works for you and short enough that you can actually do it. And as you said, having a sense of direction, but also not having the illusion that you actually know exactly where you’re going, precisely.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:56  You know what you’re going to do for a period of time. And you talk about it also being continuous, involving repeatable actions. Right? That’s again, back to the the book I’m writing. You know, how a little becomes a lot, right. It’s that that sort of thing. So I love this pact idea. I want to ask about field notes. Tell me about what field notes are and how you use them and how they’re useful in this overall framework.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:24:26  A question I often get is how do I even come up with an experiment that’s interesting to explore? And how do I make sure that this experiment is something I’m actually curious about, and not something I’m copy pasting from other people around me? And so for people who ask me this question, I recommend a little exercise that I call self anthropology because I invite them to pretend for just one day that they are an anthropologist, but with their own life as the topic of study. And so what does an anthropologist do? They go and they study a new culture, and they know nothing about this culture. And so they have no preconceptions, no assumptions. And they take a notebook with them and they take field notes, observations, again, no judgments. They’re just taking notes and asking questions like, why are these people doing these things like that? Why do they care about that? Why does this thing? Is why is this thing so important to them? You can do the same thing with your own life.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:25:28  Asking yourself, why do I spend my time like this? Why do I use my energy like that? Why do I care so much about this? Just like an anthropologist taking little field notes and asking yourself, why are things done the way they are in my life currently? No judgment, just observation. Those observations I guarantee you I’ve worked with lots of people using this little tool. I guarantee you you will notice things that you’ve been doing in a certain way just because. Because routine, because habits, because that’s the way things have been done around you, whether it’s in your company business or in your personal environment. And when you start questioning the way you’ve been doing things, when you know how things are, you can start imagining how they could be, what could be different. And this, this is the seed for a tiny Experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:21  What I love about your field notes. I love the idea in general, and I think many of us have heard some version of this, which is you’ve got to be reflective or you, you know, keep a journal or.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:32  And so I was like, well, what does she mean by field notes? So I went out to your Nest Labs website, and I looked up your field notes, and I found an example of field notes. So I just want to read a couple of these to listeners, because this is different than the way I imagine being reflective. 10:04 I’m going to finish the first draft of the Combinational Creativity article. 10:46 I fell into a Wikipedia black hole again. Who knew so many inventors got killed by their own invention?  I didn’t read that clearly until now.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:05  God. That’s good. I just lost half our listening audience. They’re going to be like, whoa. Okay, I got to check that out. Chris, my editor, I guarantee you 100% is just not going to edit now until he looks at it. How many inventors got killed by their own invention? 1145 made good progress. Need to get ready for my workshop. I’m not going to go through all of these, but hey, between the public speaking and getting VA, I feel like I’m starting to increasingly value investing in good tools and systems.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:34  So it’s just these it’s not this grand sitting down and puzzling out everything that’s happening and trying to make meaning out of it all. It’s, as you say, it’s observational notes about what happens during the day. What did you do? In what ways did you not do what you thought you were going to do? How did you feel as you were doing X, Y, or Z? And I just think this is a great approach, an easier way to approach being reflective than sitting down and having to puzzle out meaning.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:28:05  Yeah. And the reason why it works so well for a lot of people is that a lot of the, the reflective tools that people recommend require you to sit down every day for month or for the rest of your life again, to do this. What I like about this little exercise of field notes is that whenever you feel a little bit stuck, or whenever you feel like you might want to do things differently, or if something is not quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it, you can do this for just 24 hours, 48 hours at most, and you take those little notes throughout the day, and then you look back at them and you will see patterns emerge.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:28:41  And so it’s also a form of reflection that is very action oriented in the sense that you’re capturing these observations. So you can then decide what to experiment with. But it works for people who haven’t really had success with maybe daily journaling, morning pages, those kind of formats. It’s a little bit more surgical where you can do it four hours, 48 hours and you get what you need out of it, and then you go on to experimenting.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:23  Do you have any recommendations for how people could remember to do these? I think that’s the for me, I feel like I would take without consciously designing this. I would take one field note at the beginning of the day, and I’d take another at the end of the day, and that would be it. It would be all the in between where I forget to do it.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:29:41  That’s the key word in between. So the idea of having timestamps was actually inspired by an existing journaling method that is called interstitial journaling, because you’re actually right in between. And so the technique, and that’s why you only do it for 24 hours or 48 hours, is that you write something every time you switch tasks.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:30:02  So anytime you go from one thing to another, or anytime you notice you’ve been off task. So that’s why you have one in here where I’m on the Wikipedia rabbit hole. So and that’s it. And so if you just apply this I’m switching task. I write one line, or I noticed that I haven’t written in a while because I’m actually doing something else I should not be doing right now. You write something. That’s it.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:24  Wonderful. There’s so many more things in this section that I could talk about, but I want to move on to the idea of disruption and uncertainty in our lives. Certainly there are big and little disruptions that we all go through. Right? The big disruption is you lose your job, your relationship ends, or you have several of those things happen. What Bruce Feiler calls like a life quake. So there’s those. But then there’s also just smaller disruptions. And then there is, in many cases, a lot of uncertainty that we exist with. Tell me how you think about working with those things.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:31:07  For me, the most important step and the first one before you do anything, when you’re faced with that kind of uncertainty or disruption is just to understand that the instinctive response that we have, the response of fear and anxiety is completely normal. And that from an evolutionary perspective, our brains are designed to reduce uncertainty as much as possible because this is what helps with survival. And so removing a little bit of the self-blame that we might be experiencing when we have fear and anxiety and when we say, why am I reacting like this? I shouldn’t be able to feel in control. I should be calmer. I think it helps to just accept the fact that it’s just your brain trying to do its job, and it’s completely okay. Once you’ve done that, then you can start actually applying some of the more practical tools that will allow you to actually deal with disruption.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:02  So you talk about moving from a response one to a response two I think that’s what you just sort of alluded to there. But but talk to us about how so?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:32:13  When you think about any kind of disruption, they have two kinds of effects on you.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:32:19  The first effects are subjective. They’re your actual response. As I say, fear, anxiety, worry not feeling in control. And so it’s important to start with these. For this there is a tool psychologist called effective labeling. And it’s a fancy word. Psychologists love their jargon. But really what it means is just naming your emotions. It’s really putting a name on the emotion. And that could be I’m scared again. I’m worried. I’m stressed. I did not include that in the book because it’s so easy to find if you look it up online, but there are lots of those emotional wheels that you can use if that’s helpful for you to name those emotions. For some people, a bit of journaling can be helpful, but that’s the first part. And there’s research showing by when we just name those emotions where we just label them. We already reduce a lot of the anxiety around that, and a lot of the negative impact that it has very often is just a lot of the anxiety is around not really knowing what we’re feeling.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:33:26  So that’s the first step, which is dealing with the subjective experience. Once you’ve done that, and only once you’ve done that, you can then move on to the second step, which is dealing with the objective consequences. And you can only do that if you’re in a state where you’re calm enough that you can actually look at what is happening here. Again, what’s quite interesting is that sometimes we try very, very hard to fix whatever problem is happening, when in reality doing nothing is the best solution, which is very hard to admit because we’re in a state of panic and we feel like we need to feel in control.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:07  So I want to ask you a neuroscience question. And it is really about whether an oversimplification that I tend to think about makes any sense. And it’s basically similar to what you just talked about, which is that when the more emotional parts of our brain, the limbic system or the the the fight or flight system, I’m not quite sure the best way to refer to it, but when that part is super activated, it takes resources away from the prefrontal cortex, where we’re able to think through and come up with creative solutions and put things in perspective and and do all that.  Is that a reasonable oversimplification of the way things work?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:34:52  It’s slightly different, and I think it’s helpful actually to make the distinction.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:34:58  So the problem mainly comes from the fact that when the amygdala is over activated, it also reduces connection with the prefrontal cortex. And so it’s actually okay to experience stress and anxiety if you’re also still connected with your prefrontal cortex that is able to recognize that anxiety for what it is and to still make rational decisions. And so it’s not so much that it’s taking energy from the prefrontal cortex is that it’s really just not listening to it, and almost like shutting it down and making all of the decisions. And so to me, that’s why the reason why I make the distinction, and I always try to really communicate it in this way, is that it is not about shutting down that amygdala response, because, again, it’s such a natural, deeply ingrained response. It’s a survival response. It’s more about reactivating that connection with the prefrontal cortex so you can see it for what it is and still make rational decisions, even though you will still feel a little bit of anxiety.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:03  So that’s sort of the effective labeling then that’s what that is intended to do. Right. It’s connecting. It’s reestablishing that connection. And however, what I find interesting, though, is that in some cases, when the emotional activation is really, really strong, I guess it’s the same thing you’re saying. What I have also found is that in addition to something like effective labeling, that sometimes some sort of somatic practice, whether that be movement or self-soothing touch or there’s I mean, there’s a lot of them that that also helps. And the way I’ve thought of that is it turns down the, you know, over activation back there so that that communication can start happening.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:36:50  In both cases, what they have in common, affective labeling and any kind of somatic processing practice that you have is that you’re not trying to repress the emotion, you’re not trying to solve anything. You’re reopening that door, Actually, you are letting the emotion with a somatic practice. You are, in effect, letting the emotion move through your body.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:37:12  And with affective labeling, you’re recreating that connection with your prefrontal cortex. And this is why those practices work, because you’re not trying to shut down that emotional response. You’re accepting it. You’re integrating it.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:26  Yeah, I really love that because emotions don’t just shut down. It doesn’t work that way. I mean, I’ve often said that like, I feel like in any situation there are like a few different things. You, you know, you’ve got thought, you’ve got emotion, you’ve got behavior, and emotion just doesn’t have a lever that you can grab and pull, as my experience thought does. Right? I mean, I can’t stop what pops into my brain, but I can I can work with it. And behavior has a lever also. So those are the things that I that we have to use because we can’t just turn off the emotion. It just doesn’t work that way.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:04  Yeah, absolutely. And, we can actually learn a lot at a cognitive level from our emotions if we decide to listen to them and, to work with them.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:17  And so, as you mentioned, there is the somatic processing that we can use if the emotion is very strong. And so that’s a way of processing it. But if we feel like we’re in a state where we can do that, actually being curious about your emotions can be incredibly powerful as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:35  Yes. Curiosity seems to be the, the the wonder drug that I, you know, keep hearing about again and again and again. But it makes sense. It makes sense. Let’s talk about since we’re talking about neuroscience a little bit, let’s talk about the neuroscience of procrastination.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:55  Yeah. So it is actually related to what we were just talking about. And when we’re procrastinating Fascinating. There is actually this lack of communication happening in between your prefrontal cortex and the more emotional center. So let’s just go back to what is procrastination in effect? Procrastination is not doing the thing that you feel like you should be doing. And what happens when you procrastinate? You blame yourself. You feel like, why am I not doing this thing that I should be doing? And so it’s the opposite response to what we’ve just described, right? You’re not curious about the emotion.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:39:33  You’re not curious about the procrastination. You’re just blaming yourself. And so in this chapter in the book, that’s really the question I ask. What would it look like if instead of having this response of self-blame and shame and trying to push through using willpower whenever we’re procrastinating, we actually looked at it with curiosity instead. What would happen if we just ask, hey, hello procrastination, what are you doing here? What are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to communicate to me? And I share a very simple tool in this chapter that people can use to have this conversation with their procrastination. So the tool is called the triple check. And what you’re asking is where is my procrastination coming from? Is it coming from the head? Which means that there is a resistance at a rational level where you don’t think that you should be working on this in the first place? Is the problem coming from the heart, which means that at an emotional level, you don’t feel like this is going to be fun or interesting or exciting, or is the problem coming from the hand? Which means that although at a rational level, you think like, yeah, I should do this at an emotional level, you feel like this looks like fun.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:40:51  At a practical level, you don’t believe that you have the right skills or the right tools or the right support network in order to complete the task.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:01  Yeah, I’ve not heard that framework and I love it. I think about this question a lot, which I mean, we can call it procrastination, but the question I think about is a little bit broader, which is why do we not do the things that we think we should do? And obviously the first problem is in that sentence, right. Should we need to be clear on why we’re doing what we’re doing and be doing the right things? Because if we’re not, then everything’s going to be challenging. But I’ve always broken it into two sort of components that I think you’re you’re deconstructing into a third. And the first is sort of structural, like, do I know what what the very first thing I should be doing is like, my tendency is I put something on the task list, like do taxes, which is like a 12 step process, right? So have I deconstructed this thing to a small enough thing that I know what the right thing to do is, is my environment set up and structure.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:58  You know, like there’s a lot of structural things that we can do. But then there’s the moment of doing. And in that moment, I’ve referred to it more as emotional, which is there’s something that’s happening in your I think you’re calling it mind and heart, right? There’s some thought process you’re having or doubt or fear or whatever that that is happening. And I think part of the benefit of at least trying the structural method is that it gets you to a point where you are at a choice point, because then if you’re at a choice point, you can explore what’s happening. If we never if we just if we stay out in vague civil right and things remain vague, we never get to really zone in on. We ask big questions like why do I procrastinate? Instead of why do I procrastinate this thing at this time?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:42:51  Yeah, and I love how you’re really focusing your attention on this thing at this time because you’re already in problem solving mode. When you do this, you’re also decoupling your sense of self-worth from the fact that you’re procrastinating.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:43:08  And this is really the most important part is really again, seeing that, yes, it’s almost as if, you know, instead of saying, I’m procrastinating, saying procrastination is happening. Why? I’m trying to figure out.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:21  Yeah, yeah. And you talk about the Buddhist parable, the second arrow, right where like the first arrow is, we’re procrastinating. And that has its own suite of problems that come along with it. The second arrow is that we now feel bad about procrastinating. And if we think about the discussion we just had, one of the things that I think that that self-blame and that self-criticism does is it stirs up the emotional energy and then breaks that connection that we’ve talked about or lessens, that connection. And so it’s why why Curiosity is so useful because it turns again, turns that emotional temperature down. And one of the things that I always think about this too, is like, I think about this stuff as like a puzzle. People tend to be like, I’m just the sort of person that procrastinates or I always procrastinate, or why do I always do this? Or I’m always going to be this way.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:16  And I look at it more as we just haven’t arranged the various pieces in the right way that works for you. And I just think that’s a much more optimistic and hopeful way to look at things.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:44:27  Absolutely. And just a kinder way as well. More self compassionate way.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:32  Yes, absolutely. You talk about a listening failure in that chapter. Is that what you mean about that disconnect between the the the prefrontal cortex and the more emotional parts of our brain? Is that the listening.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:44:42  Really.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:44  One of the parts of the book that I was telling you before we hit record that really caught my attention heavily is around acceptance. I mean, I write a lot about acceptance in the Wise Habits course that I’ve taught. We have a whole module on acceptance, but I’d never come across the framework that was in a in a study that labels it this clearly which is active versus resigning acceptance. Help me understand what those two terms mean.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:45:15  So you will hear a lot of people say that whatever happens, they they accept the situation.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:45:21  What scientists found is that there are actually different modes of acceptance that we have in difficult situations. One of them is the one that I think most of us think about when we say, oh, I’m just I’ll just accept whatever is happening, which is the resigned version of it, which is very passive and where you just, you know, you accept whatever is going on and you know, it’s going to have negative consequences and it might be a bit challenging and difficult and you’re just waiting for it to to go away. Hopefully whenever it does the active version of acceptance, active acceptance is where you actually accept that there is a problem. There is a challenge that’s completely fine. You’re not going to, you know, rude on it or the like, there’s anything wrong with with you or with the way you’ve done things, but you’re also going to try and shape what happens next so you can accept what is right now and also actively say, okay, that’s the current situation. This is fine. It doesn’t mean I don’t have any sense of agency in terms of shaping what might happen next.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:46:33  And so this is the active form of acceptance, which is linked to better mental health, better well-being in general. And so which is the one that you really want to practice whenever you’re facing a difficult situation?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:44  Yeah, I love that listeners will be probably we’ve heard this a thousand times, but how can we hear too much about this? A question that I think sits at the center of our lives, which is, you can call it the Serenity Prayer, you can call it Epictetus Doctrine or Control. You can call it Stephen Covey Circle of Concern and Influence. It’s all about recognizing what you can do something about and what you can’t. And it just occurred to me that engaging with that question in an honest and heartfelt way is active. I’m actually really thinking about, okay, what can I do here? Is there some influence? I may not be able to control the outcome, but I can have an influence, or I can work on how I’m going to respond or what I’m going to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:28  But even the process of getting into that, that framework of the Serenity Prayer is an active form of acceptance. Even if you come out the other side with the okay, I don’t think I have much choice here but to work on acceptance.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:47:44  Yes, exactly. And another step to this, which can be really interesting to explore and very empowering. Also is asking yourself what am I best placed to do in this situation? Me with my experience, my knowledge, my current situation. What is one thing that I could do and that might be more difficult for someone else to do, but that is something that is easier for me to do. And so not only you reconnect with your sense of agency, but again, it’s very empowering to think and to feel like you can actually do something very unique that only you maybe can do.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:22  Yeah, I mentioned I was in 12 step programs and and there used to be a page in the AA Big Book. It used to be page 449. It’s changed now because there’s multiple editions.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:32  This is 30 years ago, probably, but people used to say and people used to always say like for 49, man, you need to do for 49. They get bumper stickers with for 49. Well, on page four, 49 was the phrase acceptance is the answer to all my problems. And it used to drive me crazy because I was like, no, it’s not. No, it is not. It is the answer to some problems, but for many problems, the the actual answer is that there is something you can do and will be you will feel better when you do. So I’ve always been sort of, you know, against the active resistance, you know, and one of my core like life strategies is if I’m worried or upset about something, I try and just say instead of sitting here and being worried and upset, what what little thing can I do that makes that situation better? Like, what thing can I do now instead of spending the energy worry, and what thing can I just do this minute? And I always find that when I turn some amount of my energy and attention to, to solving the issue, if it’s if there’s something I can do, I feel better, you know, because I’m back in a place of agency to some degree.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:49:47  And it’s a very powerful question, too, especially if you decouple the outcome of what you do from what you actually do. Right. Yes. It’s the idea that you can just do something. And if it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t change the situation, you’ve at least done something. And very often, just as you said, doing something, going from being stuck in paralyzed to being in movement again is enough to feel better.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:13  Yeah. Like I remember in the past when I didn’t manage money well at all, and I would start to get stressed about it because my main problem was I just didn’t open any bills. I just let them pile up. This was back before electronic bills, right? And I’d let them pile up. But just going and opening the bills helped, right? It wasn’t that it solved the problem. I still owed the money, but it was a step. I did something right. And so I think that speaks to what you’re saying. You got to it’s not about the outcome.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:44  It’s about something in us as humans that feels good when we don’t avoid our problems. But we do something where we where we face them to the best of our ability in whatever little way we can.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:50:57  It goes back to that balance, that middle ground that you described earlier in the sense that human beings don’t really well with full stagnation when we do nothing. There’s also, on the other end of the spectrum, when we start having this kind of hectic mess running around because we’re anxious. And so having this intentional kind of, again, active acceptance where you do something not running around like a headless chicken, panicking because you’re really worried about what’s going on, but also not being completely stuck, paralyzed and doing nothing. This middle ground is the healthiest reaction you can have.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:37  Yes, I, I agree. Tell me about steering sheets.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:51:41  So when you’re done with an experiment. You’ll probably ask yourself, okay, what’s next? The steering sheet is a way to answer that question. So there are three different routes that you can take when you’re done with an experiment.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:51:56  The first one, which I think is quite interesting how a lot of people resist that option, is to just keep on going with your experiments the way you’ve been doing it, because if it’s working, why not keep going? And I call this option persist. And I chose this word very intentionally because I feel like it is persistent. It requires a little bit of courage in today’s society. You say, I’m not going to scale this up. I’m not going to go bigger. This is working for me. I’m just going to keep going as it is. So option one persist. Second option pivot. That is when things are kind of working. But you feel like it’s not perfect yet. So maybe you’ve been doing daily meditation in the morning, but you feel like it’s hard for you to do it in the morning. Do you want to go for another cycle of experimentation where you do it during your lunch break or in the evening? And so you tweak things, and this is where you can actually, if you want, scale up, scale down, change the parameters and try something slightly different.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:52:59  And the last option is pause. And I call it pause, not quit because you might want to come back to that experiment in the future, but it’s really just acknowledging the fact that based on your current circumstances, your current priorities, your levels of energy, your other commitment, whatever it is at this moment in time, this experiment is not working for you. And so you can just park it away, put it on the shelf, and perhaps go back to it in the future. But for now, you’re going to pause it.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:31  I love it, I love it. That’s a great way of thinking about it. And you made it alliterative to the three P’s.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:53:38  Oh yeah, I did work on that.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:40  Yes. I think his authors were always like, all right, I gotta I gotta tighten this idea up a little bit. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. As I told you before, I thought your book was outstanding, and it opened things in me that I hadn’t seen before, which is rare in my line of work.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:00  So thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:54:02  Thank you so much for your amazing questions.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:05  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. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

In this episode, Taylor Jacobson discusses the hidden cause of procrastination and how to finally move forward in your life. He explores how transformation rarely feels graceful, how repressed emotions shape our behavior, and what it takes to live a life true to your inner compass. It’s a vulnerable, grounded conversation about fear, reinvention, and creating space for what you actually want to give to the world.

For the first time in over three years, I’ve got a couple open spots in my coaching practice. If you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader feeling stuck in scattered progress or simmering self-doubt, this might be the right moment. Through my Aligned Progress Method, I help people move toward real momentum with clarity, focus, and trust in themselves. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at oneyoufeed.net/align.

Key Takeaways:

• Importance of experiencing and releasing emotions for personal growth
• The concept of safety in productivity and its impact on focus
• Overview of Focusmate as a solution for procrastination and accountability
• The role of community support in overcoming distractions and enhancing productivity
• The significance of vulnerability in seeking help and building connections
• The principles of behavior change, including commitment and accountability
• The relationship between emotional well-being and productivity
• The challenges of transformation and the necessity of aligning with one’s true self
• The exploration of intuition and discernment in navigating emotions and decision-making

Taylor Jacobson is the CEO and Founder of Focusmate (www.focusmate.com), a virtual coworking community with a mission to help everyone do their best work. Thousands of people in 193 countries worldwide sit side-by-side, via video, to keep each other company, cheer each other on, and hold one another accountable. Taylor is a passionate voice on creating soulful work and workplaces and has been featured in The New Yorker, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, and more.

Connect with Taylor Jacobson:  Website | Twitter | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Taylor Jacobson, check out these other episodes:

How to Overcome Procrastination with Tim Pychyl

David Kadavy on Getting Started

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Episode Transcript:

Taylor Jacobson 00:00:00  We don’t want to be walking around, you know, getting pissed at every driver on the road. That’s a really unpleasant way to live. So the antidote to that is like learning how to really fully feel and release the depth of those emotions.

Chris Forbes 00:00:20  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 a 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 00:01:05  What happens when the thing you built no longer feels like it’s yours? For Taylor Jacobson, founder of focus, Mate.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:13  The answer wasn’t to push harder. It was to pause, reflect, and begin again. In this conversation, we talk about why transformation rarely feels graceful, how repressed emotions shape our behavior, and what it takes to live a life true to your inner compass. It’s a vulnerable, grounded conversation about fear, reinvention, and creating space for what you actually want to give to the world. I’m Erik Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Taylor. Welcome to the show.

Taylor Jacobson 00:01:47  Hey, Eric. Great to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:48  It’s a pleasure to have you on. We’re going to be talking about a variety of things today. We’ll be talking about your company that you’ve built called focus mate. We’re going to be talking about spirituality. We’re going to be talking about focusing routines, all kinds of different stuff. But before we get into all that, let’s start like we always do with 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:15  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 and looks up at its grandparent and says, whoa! 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.

Taylor Jacobson 00:02:40  Well, I just got chills in my body listening to you tell that, even though I know it obviously thought about it. What it means to me, you know, is like, good and evil are not these abstractions. They are our experience of ourselves in every moment. And I think evil is just the expression of fear. And we all have fear. You know, it’s a it’s human nature. And then on the other side of fear. You know what is there? There’s different words for it. But you could say that’s.

Taylor Jacobson 00:03:15  Love or kindness or truth. I’m a fan of that is kind of the opposite of. Fear or the opposite of ego. So I think it’s just it is a moment to moment discernment and effort. For each of us to feel the kind of, reflexive or autonomous nature of our fears and the patterns that those have cultivated in us, and to just resist them, one tiny little choice at a time, and to find that what’s on the other side of that is this intrinsic goodness that wants to be expressed.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:53  I love that and I’m going to put a pin in coming back to truth, because I think it’s a big word for you, and I want to make sure we get to it. But let’s start by talking about focus, mate, the company that you’ve built. And I don’t want to spend a ton of time here, but I’d like to know a little bit. First, maybe you could describe for people what you do and then secondly, why you built it.

Taylor Jacobson 00:04:15  Yeah. Thanks for asking. So yeah, just really tangibly, what is focus made? Let’s start with what problem we solve. You know, a lot of us are, let’s say, distracted or have a hard time taking action on the things that we most want to be in action on. Very universal experience. So I started focus mate to help really myself first, but to help other people to be in action on the things that matter to them. And I can talk about how that’s evolved. But yeah, simply put, we create the opportunity for you to meet up with one person, one partner or group of people to keep each other company and hold each other accountable while you take action on whatever it is that you want to be in action on. And so after this, I could set up a focus mate session because I want to write a blog post and I could get matched up with you and you want to edit a podcast episode. And so we share our commitments to what we want to work on, and we might write those down actually, and post them in the chat interface.

Taylor Jacobson 00:05:16  And then we hang out there on video while we work quietly together. And, it’s really an experience of not just accountability but also camaraderie, you know, and I’ll say structure to like it really helps us to have some kind of definitive start point and also end point for things. And so it’s kind of this very light touch in all those ways. And I think people are surprised by how much those things can impact you. But it’s enough to have a very transformational and often life changing impact on just your ability to do the things you want to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:48  Yeah, I first heard of your organization through a coaching client of mine, and had used it as a way of. Kind of, like you said, procrastinating on things he could show up. Book a focus mate session and log in and, you know, have somebody there now. The first thing that a lot of people, when they hear that think is like, I’m just going to meet a complete stranger that I don’t know and feel anxious about that talk about why and how people get past that.

Taylor Jacobson 00:06:15  Yeah, so that’s totally the right question. In fact, because so much of the power of focus, mate, is actually in the experience of feeling safe and being with other people. It’s a facet of how our nervous system works, actually, that we can’t really reach optimal sense of embodied safety alone, or if we’re too isolated too often. And so one of the reflexive responses that our nervous system has to being around somebody that is not presenting a danger that feels safe to us, is it actually helps to calm us down, help us feel grounded and to help us focus. And it has an impact on even blood flow to the brain. And, you know, so a direct impact on our ability to focus. So all of that is to say feeling safe is really critical. And so having those thoughts go through your mind, you know, and to be evaluating, am I going to feel safe with this other person? And even the word stranger I think connotes danger. I think that’s kind of what we mean when we say stranger is like, I don’t know if this person is safe.

Taylor Jacobson 00:07:17  And so focus me. We just put a tremendous emphasis on our culture and on creating safety. So the culture of focus is really the opposite of kind of hustle culture or grind culture, which might seem counterintuitive for a quote unquote productivity company. But I believe in my experience, is that when we’re in that headspace, we don’t think as clearly. And the ways we work, even the things we work on, are not as true of expressions of ourselves, and our work isn’t as creative, so on and so forth. So there is a bit of a leap of faith when you try anything new. And I would say almost universally, what people find is it’s like this really magical soft landing of safety and warmth and acceptance, and it’s a declaration of vulnerability to join, focus, mate, to say, you know what? I’d rather admit that I might be better off getting somebody else’s help than continue to struggle, because it’s more important to me to to follow through on this thing, to be who I really want to be, than it is to try to muscle through or or tell myself the story that I can do it on my own.

Taylor Jacobson 00:08:26  And we really strongly reaffirm that in every touchpoint of your experience, so that when you experience other members of the focus make community, it really is a lot of encouragement, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of like wherever you’re at, wherever your starting point is, is okay, you know, and we’re also working on ways to give you preferences over who you get to work with as well. So, you know, one of the examples is gender based matching. You know, some people just would feel safer working with somebody of their own gender, for example. And if that’s you, that’s fine.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:58  And so when someone logs on, it’s not like you’re spending this time chatting with another person. There’s a little brief introduction and then it’s kind of to work. Right.

Taylor Jacobson 00:09:07  Yes. We say about 60s, you’re saying hi, you’re being friendly, but it’s really, you know, smile and then ask the other person, hey, what are you up to? What are you working on this hour? And then you get to work within 60s.

Taylor Jacobson 00:09:18  And then at the end, it’s similar, you know, a chime goes off and you’re just checking in. How’d it go, Eric? You know. Okay, I got distracted for a minute or so, but I got back to it, and I’m really psyched about my progress, how to go for you. And so it’s it’s very, focused.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:33  What led you to create this product?

Taylor Jacobson 00:09:36  It really came out of my own huge struggles. You know, I’m going to say, with being who I knew I could be or being who I wanted to be. And my whole life I’ve always been interested in, let’s say, personal development. But about ten years ago, I almost got fired from a job and I chose to leave that job instead of getting fired, basically. And it was just very demoralizing. And it was really a result of me not I was working from home and I just couldn’t I couldn’t hack it with that kind of isolation, lack of accountability. I just couldn’t do it.

Taylor Jacobson 00:10:08  And leaving a job like that was very demoralizing and also humiliating for me. And so it just kind of cast me into this dark place. And I got a lot more serious about how do I get unstuck, you know, what do I need in order to bootstrap myself to a better place of being somebody I want to be? And so I just by and by, got more and more passionate about all the things I was learning and sort of realizing I could use all this struggle to help other people. And, and it was years later that I really stumbled on this technique. But when I did, it was just so life changing for me that it clicked really quickly, that there is an opportunity to help other people as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:51  Yeah, I mean, right off the top of my head, I see several core behavior change principles embedded right in focus. Me. Right. Like, no, when you’re going to do something, okay, you commit to a session that tells me I’m doing it at this time.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:06  Know what I’m going to work on? You know, knowing what I’m going to do. I talk about it with coaching clients as just basically like, we want to be specific. Like what, when, how, where any bit of ambiguity in those things is terrible for procrastinators, right? They can become roadblocks. And so with focus made immediately, I know when I know where I’m going to be in front of my computer, I know I’ve decided what I’m going to do in that period because I’m going to articulate it to someone else. The other big principle there is that we just tend to it’s just a facet of human nature. We’re often more accountable to others. You know, knowing that somebody is going to be sitting there without a partner if I don’t show up. You know, enables me to try and make it to the session. Although maybe they wouldn’t be without a partner because you’d rematch them. But the point being, I’ve got an accountability there, and I think you guys keep track of accountability also, right? And if you make sessions and you don’t show up, there is some penalty for that over time, right? Maybe penalty is not the word you would use.

Taylor Jacobson 00:12:08  Yeah. I mean, we’re really like a carrot, not a stick kind of culture. Yeah, that’s one way to put it. We’ll basically just say, hey, it looks like something came up. Yeah. That’s okay. We’re not judging it, but we just. If you have another session after that, we’ll kind of freeze your account so that the next person has a partner and sort of say, hey, just kind of wave your hand and say, hey, I’m back. I’m okay. Yeah, re-activate your account. And, you know, and we trust you. And that seems to work better than the stick approach. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:38  Got it. That makes sense. So let’s move on from the product and let’s talk about focus. So you know the goal of focus mate. And the problem you were solving was an inability to I would say it would be maybe an inability to get started and then actually focus. You know, you’re sort of solving two things there. But get started.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:02  Focus mates, a clunky name. Talk a little bit to me about how you think about a getting started on a task. You know, for people who procrastinate. Let’s start there and then we’ll move to focus after that.

Taylor Jacobson 00:13:13  How I think about getting started on a task.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:15  Yeah. Like if somebody’s a procrastinator. Obviously focus mate is sort of your best answer for, you know, how to work through that. But do you have any other suggestions or ideas?

Taylor Jacobson 00:13:25  Yeah. Well, just taking a step back. Like I think that procrastination is an expression of feeling unsafe. And I’ll explain that a little bit more. But like we are so perpetually stressed out and and from a nervous system standpoint, in fight or flight, you know, when we’re distracting ourselves, it’s kind of this expression of that constant low level agitation or anxiety or whatever you want to call it, but stress. And we might think of fight or flight as like, oh, I stepped into traffic and I like got a huge rush of adrenaline.

Taylor Jacobson 00:14:05  But actually a more common experience of fight flight is much more subtle. It’s just stress, basically. Or it’s rumination or, you know, like waking up early with thoughts about work or something, whatever it is. And when our body is in that state, we can’t focus because our body is is basically preparing to either fight or run. It’s optimizing for one of those functions. So there’s a lot of agitation. There’s a lot of energy to act, but it’s not focus. It’s not calm. Right. So we’re really bad at slowing down and being like, okay, what do I really want to do with my time? And then doing that thing because the blood flow is not even in your brain, you know? It’s just it’s just moving you and it’s kind of grabbing for things. It can help to really numb that unwanted feeling. But what we really need is to slow down and feel grounded. And from that embodied, safe place, what naturally is going to arise is, is a more authentic desire than Netflix or snacking or whatever myriad things we do from from a procrastinating place.

Taylor Jacobson 00:15:12  So that’s sort of indirectly speaks to what I’m talking about. But yeah, with getting started, I do think that addressing that experience in our bodies can be really important. So when why is a morning routine such a popular thing? It’s because when we say morning routine, we’re not doing things that stressed us out. We’re basically morning routine is doing things that ground us, and even things like just brushing our teeth or drinking a glass of water. It’s having a slowed down experience of ourselves that that actually signals to our body. I’m safe. And so from that place we’re able more easily to get started. And something like focus, mate. You might still feel a little bit of that agitated energy when you show up, but the commitment, as you said, like the accountability to show up, you’ve got to schedule a time that might be enough to get you over the hump as well. Right. And then once your butts in the chair, you’re already slowing down. Now there’s a person there. They’re helping you feel grounded to reflecting on what you want to do.

Taylor Jacobson 00:16:14  So it’s sort of easing you into a into a safer space. But it doesn’t have to be focused, mate. You know, it’s it’s really how do we ground ourselves? How do we slow down, how do we set the intention. And so it’s starting to feel slower and safer in our bodies. And then how do we just get ourselves over the starting line to start that thing as well?

Eric Zimmer 00:16:31  And so you’ve got a line that I heard recently. It was design a life that demands what you want to give. Say a little bit more about that.

Taylor Jacobson 00:16:39  Yeah. You know, that’s something we say internally on our team at focus, mate. And the way that we think about ourselves as a company and our mission is it’s actually not really about focus. It’s about being who you really want to be or being who you truly are. And that starts with our team. You know, we think about serving ourselves on our team before we think about serving our customers. And like how we interact with each other on our team is is kind of the energy that we’re putting out to our community.

Taylor Jacobson 00:17:11  And so we have this mantra internally of that’s what we’re helping each other do, is to design a life that demands what you want to give. That’s kind of one way of thinking about this. And so we don’t have a lot of hard and fast rules about how we work at focus at the starting point, you know, even in interviewing somebody. This really let’s let’s really learn about you and what works for you, and we’ll share about us as well and see if there’s some real alignment there, and see if this is a good environment to support you in designing the life that you want to live, and are the things that we need. The roles, the skills that we need in our team are those things that you really want to give, and it could be tactical stuff to, you know, the times of day that you want to be working. Do you want to be on a lot of calls or is that really not good for your energy? And you like to, you know, just kind of be asynchronous in whatever.

Taylor Jacobson 00:18:04  So that’s where it comes from, you know? And actually I’ll just share briefly like I’m in a very active like reinvention of my own role at the company. And it’s really been enabled by the strength of that conviction and commitment by the entire team, where I was very scared, honestly, to relinquish some of the responsibilities that I had. But I could also feel that I just no longer had the energy to keep like muscling through some of the things that I had been doing since we started the company and the team, and especially our head of operations, who has really taken a lot of this stuff off my plate, was just really adamant, like, we got you, we got this, let’s reinvent this. Let’s design a life that demands what you want to give. And we all have faith that when we do that and when I do that, it will serve the company as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:54  Yeah. I think what’s interesting about that line is two things. One is my experience is no matter what you design to get a life, you demand, there are still things that you don’t really want to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:06  You know, there’s just some measure of that. You know that at least the stage that our organization is right. There’s just things I do that need to be done, and I don’t love doing them. I outsource as much of that as possible. But as you know, you know, early on in a company’s state, you don’t have money to do all that. But I think the other thing that’s really interesting about that is that it changes, you know, we design a life that demands what we want to give and then what we want to give. At least my experience is it can morph over time. And that maybe was your experience with focus mate was early on. You were giving what you wanted to give and then it transformed and you had to, as you say, kind of be willing to try and reinvent. And that word reinvent always sounds lovely, but it’s rarely a lovely process.

Taylor Jacobson 00:19:53  Yeah, that’s such an important observation. Like or transformation. Like, God, I would never wish transformation on my worst enemy.

Taylor Jacobson 00:19:59  It’s like pain, you know? But, yeah, I mean, often the way we come to it is like burnout or something like this where you get in a groove and hopefully it starts out being, you know, you’re doing something that’s authentic, and then you just keep going and you may start feeling some dissonance and you know, the like, the thing starts to rattle a little bit and you maybe you start to get migraines or like chronic pain or like other signals that your body is like, no, this isn’t working for me anymore. For us anymore? Yeah. Unfortunately. Because of. Categorically, I guess we’ll say fear. Like, oh my God, if I stop doing this thing, it’s not going to get done. The company is going to fall apart. You know, for me, it was real. Like, if I tell my colleagues what’s going on for me and that I need rest, everyone’s going to stop working. If I need rest, our culture is suddenly going to become lazy.

Taylor Jacobson 00:20:47  And I’ll come back to that in a second. We have all these stories that keep us from just noticing, like the moment that thing changes, it’s like, whoa, I feel some strong resistance to doing this and like, can I make a shift? But instead we just kind of plow through and then we have burnout or other, you know, or injuries or other things that really force us to a halt and, and kind of force the reinvention on us. But the stories are rarely true, you know. So like in this case, the whole team was like really rallied around. They were like, oh my goodness. Like, you’ve worked so hard and let us take these things off your plate and find out, you know, what’s on the other side of this reinvention for you.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:01  Hey everyone. I haven’t had an open spot in my coaching practice in over three years, but right now I’ve got a couple. But I work best with a certain kind of person. So if you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader and you’re ready to move from scattered progress and simmering self-doubt to aligned action, strategic clarity and real momentum. This might be the right time through something I call the aligned progress method will turn inner alignment into real world r esults so you can grow your revenue, reclaim your time, and finally, trust yourself as much as others already do. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at www.oneyoufeed.net/align

Eric Zimmer 00:22:44 You’re in the startup world, which means you are trying to please a variety of people, right? I guess that’s not just a startup world, right? A companies in general are trying to please their investors, slash shareholders. They’re trying to please their customer. They’re trying to please their internal team. You know, it sounds like your internal team was 100% behind you sort of saying, all right, I’m going to slow down and get some rest. Did you find any pushback from any of your other constituents or stakeholders around that? Because startup culture is very much grind, hustle, macho like, you know, I can work more hours than you can work. Did you find any or have any issues there.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:22  And you’re welcome to say if your investor situations are ones you don’t want to talk about, I get it. So you’re welcome to say pass.

Taylor Jacobson 00:23:28  No. You know, for me, being able and willing to have one truth for all audiences is it’s really like, I think the ultimate aspiration in some ways, I think for like a human being is to feel that peace that comes with being true in all ways, with all people. There’s nothing to hide. So that’s an aspiration. But, I haven’t experienced any of that pushback or tension. And I think it’s because it’s always been a core aspect of our ethos, and even our mission is really about paradigm shift. Like creating a company in a different way and doing it at scale to really model that. It’s possible that you that hustle and grind isn’t necessary, and to show, To find out. Experiment with what happens when you do things this other way. And you know, I imagine that scares our investors sometimes. Just like it scares me sometimes.

Taylor Jacobson 00:24:30  But it’s just like, what are we here for? What is my life for? It’s not to make a lot of money. And so, yeah, the pursuit, it’s not. I really hope not. For me, it’s like the point is to, you know, find out as much as you can, experience as much as you can of your, your soul, your true nature to really, you know, experience that deeply. And so, yeah, how can our work and how can this company specifically for me, be kind of the vessel to further that experiment? And so it’s very authentic for me to say to an investor, yeah, we want to make this as big as possible. And we really believe we can reach, you know, tens, 100 million people or more. And so this can be a great place to put some money to work. but we’re going to do it our way. You know, and I also think we’re at a moment in time where that’s, you know, the kind of gestalt is, is shifting the collective consciousness.

Taylor Jacobson 00:25:27  You know, we’re all like the great resignation happening now. We’re all feeling that inner pull for something different. And so I think that’s also attractive to our customers and to our community. And, you know, when we have an outage or something like this, you know, we had a seven hour outage a few months back, and we were very vulnerable about it and very apologetic about it. We did everything we could to provide alternate resources to people who needed them, but people were also very understanding. And we’re kind of just like, you know, you got this. It’s okay because we’re so actively creating that narrative, you know, in all facets of what we do.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:08  Let’s go back to focus for a second and let’s go back to you said somewhere, our ability to focus is a function of our nervous system state period. And you hit that a little bit. I’d like to dive in a little bit deeper there. And I’m going to start by saying I sometimes feel like we have hit a point where we need a different way of describing nervous system function than fight flight freeze.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:36  I’ve I’ve heard recently flop, which crack cracks me up. I sometimes feel like those terms point towards. And you said it. It doesn’t have to be extreme, but they point towards an extreme. You know, they point towards a very heightened type of reaction. Whereas I think what’s happening with a lot of us is what’s happening nervous system wise is mild but chronic, I guess. First, your thoughts on that?

Taylor Jacobson 00:27:04  Oh yeah. That’s pretty interesting to unpack a little bit. Actually, I’m thinking about it as you say it. Like I do think there’s absolutely a need for a lexicon that resonates with people that, like, feels relevant to my life, right? Because what I would love to see happen is for what we’re talking about here, and what we’ll talk about more in a second. To become common knowledge, you know, for parents and teachers and just everyone, workers like to understand how your body works, how your nervous system works, and what’s really happening. And this extends far beyond focus.

Taylor Jacobson 00:27:40  I mean, the implications for relationships are profound. So yeah. Fight, flight. It’s like, yeah, no, I’m not like, I’m not about to have a fistfight with my colleague. And so you might just reject this as somehow irrelevant. On the other hand, I believe that part of why we are so stressed is that we repress the extent of the experience that we’re having as one of fight or flee. And so we’re trying to here’s a fun example. If you’re experiencing fight flight. Meditation might help you because you’re slowing down your breath. You’re sending signals to your body, basically, that I’m safe. Right. But you might actually have enough pent up fight flight energy that you really need to get it out in a more aggressive way. And I’m a little bit reticent to even use this language. But it’s the truth is that when we’re angry, it’s a kind of murderous experience. You know, the fight impulse is violent. And it’s so taboo in our culture to name that, let alone to allow ourselves to fully experience it.

Taylor Jacobson 00:29:02  And I don’t mean act it out, of course, at all, but to just experience the level of agitation like the directionality of that fight flight energy in us is immense. And I think why we have so much angst is that we’re collectively so repressed, and we don’t have the tools, and also don’t have the kind of shared understanding of what it actually means to release that fight flight energy in a healthy way, like something that I will often do is I’ll I’ll do like primal screaming, you know, and sometimes I’ll do it in a pillow if I’m in a place where that’s necessary. But there’s also a few things that are more liberating for me than, like going up on a hilltop and just like, you know, screaming and in a very literal way that’s vibrating your body and it’s unblocking this stuck energy that’s in your body, you know, if you’re not releasing that, you’re literally just holding tension in your body, you know? And that’s what we’re walking around with when we feel stress, when we feel anxiety, when we are procrastinating, whatever it might be.

Taylor Jacobson 00:30:05  So I’m with you in terms of how do we make this common knowledge through through more accessible lexicon. And on the other hand, part of that is we can’t nice it up and say we’re just going to do all these sweet, gentle practices. There’s actually a need to fully embrace and and feel our anger so that we’re not projecting it in all these sideways ways. And, you know, you can imagine, like the term snide remarks coming up or sarcasm or some of these really low key things that most of us are doing constantly. It’s just like these little pressure valve releases of anger, but it’s not actually a release. It’s a manifestation of this pent up, unexpressed, unfelt fight, flight, energy. And we don’t want to be walking around, you know, getting pissed at every driver on the road and all these. That’s a really unpleasant way to live. So, you know, the antidote to that is like learning how to really fully feel and release the depth of those emotions.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:02  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:02  As you’re talking about that, it brings me right to I feel like one of the fundamental questions we wrestle with here at The One you feed, because it’s a fundamental question I wrestle with, which is what do we do with negative emotion? What do we do with it? Do we experience it? Do we feel it? Do we just really go into it and let it be? Do we work to try and soothe it? Do we try and put it in perspective? I’ll give you an example. The other day I had a busy day. Lots of calls, calls, calls, calls, and I’d been having trouble with the prescription for like four days. The poor pharmacy is overworked. They don’t have enough people. It’s just been very difficult. So I had like 15 to 20 minutes and I was like, all right. It’s a three minute drive. I’m going to go to the pharmacy. I’m going to get there. I’m going to get it. I’m going to leave. Right. And so I’m sitting there and I’m waiting in line.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:55  And, you know, it was supposed to be ready like four hours earlier. I finally weighed in this whole line the whole time, you know. Talk about the sort of fight or flight. I’m like, oh, God, I’ve got a coaching call. I’ve got a client in seven minutes. You know, and and I’m not freaking out, but, you know, I’m feeling that energy build. And I get up there and the guy’s like, yeah, we’ll get that ready for you right now. They had not gotten it ready, even though I talked to somebody a few hours earlier. Then I just had to go, well, I can’t stay. I got to go and I wasn’t going to be able to get back there for another day because of my schedule. Anyway, long story short, I was leaving and I was feeling very angry, you know, anger out of proportion to the situation. Right? Right. So there’s a couple ways to go there, right? One way to go is to go and get in my car and bang on the steering wheel and scream for a while and let out a, you know, a bunch of curse words and just vomit that energy out.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:51  That’s one approach, another approach, and it’s the one that I chose to go with this time. But I don’t always was, I, I really went hang on a second, like, get this in perspective. Like you are an incredibly like privileged lucky person. And if this is the worst thing that’s happening in your life, you need to take it down a notch and recognize, like, hey, there’s nothing to be that upset about here. But that points to two directions, and sometimes they’re compatible. Sometimes there’s a way to do both those things, actually. But I think it does point to particularly as we look at spiritual literature. Right. And we look at spiritual traditions, both those ways and psychological traditions, both of those ways are stressed at different times by different people. And I’m just kind of curious how you think about that. And that was a long setup for that question, but hopefully it’s helpful.

Taylor Jacobson 00:33:43  Such an awesome illustration. Yeah, and I love the contrast between those two approaches.

Taylor Jacobson 00:33:47  So yeah, really glad you shared that. Yeah. You know, it’s an ongoing experiment for me. And I’ve I’ve learned a lot, as you’ve alluded to from like different viewpoints and different traditions. So like I read a book by David Hawkins called Letting Go that is profound. And, you know, his view is basically all emotion is projection. And so the experience that you had in the pharmacy was sort of the world helping to needle some anger that is repressed within you. Right? And you talked about the disproportionate magnitude of your anger. So, you know, perhaps David Hawkins would say that once you’ve released all the old repressed anger, you might not even feel any anger in that situation. It would just be kind of a ho hum. This is what is. At other times, there might be like a very small feeling in your body that you could label like the parts of your body that might heat up or feel tense or something. That’s anger, but it’s just so momentary that it kind of just guides you back to here’s my boundary.

Taylor Jacobson 00:34:49  Like something that didn’t work for me, you know? And then, like Peter Levine, whose body of work is somatic experiencing, right? He talks about how you see dogs that, like a dog will just come in from taking a walk. It’ll come indoors and it’ll just shake, right? It’s like we just went on this excursion. There was different stimuli happening. Now I’m back in my nest. I feel safe. Whatever stress, whatever tension or emotion that dog is holding in its body, it just immediately releases. And that’s the thing that all animals do except humans, is they immediately release that fight or flight energy or that stress, that tension. It’s all emotion. I think all of these things are synonymous in some ways. So the tricky thing for humans is that we have all this stored up tension. And so the technique that you chose in that moment, I would call that kind of a conscious dispersion of the anger. Right? Like, well, I just don’t need to be angry right now.

Taylor Jacobson 00:35:47  But you also experienced the disproportionate, you know, experience of anger, which points to, okay, I have repressed anger and I’d say this is universal, right. So I think the answer is really both. It’s. We don’t have to. We can choose to do the work to unearth these stuck, repressed, suppressed things in our body. And if we do that, then that situation will make you gradually less angry in the future.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:37  Oftentimes I say to people, if you’ve got to choose between taking a perspective and feeling an emotion, feel the emotion first. Let it happen. Let it be. Allow it to be there. Then move into taking a perspective on it right? Then move in to going, okay, you know what? Maybe it really isn’t that big of a deal. You know, like if you’re unsure that order of operations is probably best because then you’re not repressing or bypassing to the same extent. What I think is interesting with what David Hawkins is saying, and I’ve seen that theory a lot of different ways and a lot of different places.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:10  What I sometimes wonder is a couple of things is it bottomless? So I went through this at one point in my life when I was, I don’t know, 30, 30 years old, 32 years old, my marriage split up and I was separated from my son, and I certainly had a role in that happening. But my partner had left me for someone else and I was really angry. It’s interesting because that was a time that I expressed anger a lot. I took up boxing. I was so mad at her. I took up boxing and it was great. And I wrote hateful letters that I destroyed, and I allowed the anger to flow through. So I’ve had some experience with like. And now, you know, a couple of years later, I went from wanting her to, you know, burn in hell to being like, oh, yeah, sure, I’ll come over for Thanksgiving. That sounds nice, you know? Out, so I do. I do agree with that. But at the same time, I started working with a therapist and we started doing inner child work.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:01  Right? That phrase then and now still makes a certain part of me inside cringe. But the idea was, hey, look, the things that happened to you as a child impact who you are today, your emotional reactions today. The way to work through that is to go back if you can and express the emotions that come up from that. And so I spent some time doing that, and then I hit a point where I felt like maybe I had more or less sort of gotten all there was to get out of that. But there seemed to be from her perspective, like you just kept going. And in my perspective, I was like, it feels like I’ve done enough of that, that there’s not enough benefit. As I’m talking this through, I’m realizing that what was happening was I started to realize I didn’t have the emotions anymore. So I had, in essence, sort of worked through them. All right. That was a long way of answering my own question.

Taylor Jacobson 00:38:52  Well, I do think That.

Taylor Jacobson 00:38:54  Thanks so much for sharing that. And like, oh, like my heart goes out to you. But also just like pulling the thread through to where you are now and like going over Thanksgiving dinner. It’s like such a amazing illustration of this. Oh yeah. It’s just like it kind of is bottomless. Like, clearly you might be happy now, but the pharmacy still pisses you off. You know, so it’s like there’s no righteousness in, like, am I going to keep working with my anger, or am I going to just say, you know what, I have really a healthy enough relationship to my anger right now that I want to focus elsewhere. There’s no, like, right or wrong about that. But I think it’s just understanding, like cool. Like at that point in your life, it was getting in the way of everything that you wanted to do and who you wanted to be. And so that that was an urgent priority. And sometimes that’s what life serves us up. Is these like, unavoidable things to heal? Yes.

Taylor Jacobson 00:39:43  Right. Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:44  And then back to our point about transformation and reinvention. Like, yeah, I transformed a lot during that period. There’s no doubt about that. I don’t want to do it again.

Taylor Jacobson 00:39:55  Exactly. And. Yeah. And then it’s just like, I think for me, it’s. Have I reached a safe landing pad where I want to exert my effort elsewhere? Or even things like doing yoga? You know, like if you’re continuing to do. I don’t know if you do yoga, I do some yoga. I’m very aware that the yoga I do is tapping into stuck energy, stuck emotion in my body. So, like, I might be feeling really good, but at the same time, I’m like, I really want to keep feeling better and keep healing more and keep getting my deep seated. We could say inner child fears whatever healed and out of the way so I can experience more of my soul, or true self, or inner freedom, or inner peace or whatever these things are.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:35  So speaking of yoga, right? You are living on an ashram right now. That was, I’m assuming, part of your getting rest from focus, mate. Anything you want to share about what that is, what you’re doing there, what that’s like for you.

Taylor Jacobson 00:40:47  You know, I guess the first thing I’ll say is that it wasn’t just getting rest. It was really going through, in my case, also a breakup last year that just brought up a lot for me, you know? And really, I’ll say the trauma that came up through that experience forced itself to be handled. You know, I spent several months kind of muscling through or trying to do things the ways I knew how, but at some point I just I realized that I wanted to fully commit myself to, you know, we talked about the nervous system that really became my lens, like, what’s the optimal environment to do this kind of work? And, you know, nature is extremely nourishing. Living in community can be really nourishing.

Taylor Jacobson 00:41:34  There’s yoga classes every day here. There’s healthy vegetarian meals cooked every day here. There’s a shared commitment to personal growth here. There’s a lot of ancient teachings that are really profound that we talk about on a daily basis here. So it was really for me was I want to try and experiment in what’s the best. And I sort of joke, it’s like focus mate, for my whole life. Yeah. As opposed to just, you know, a one hour experience. I want to see what this is like, you know, and I’ll say it’s it’s been really a lifelong interest of mine to live in community and sort of experiment with what I feel are more intuitive, healthy ways of living that are just really hard to come by in modern society. So I guess I just I reached a tipping point within myself where I was like, screw it, I’m going to do this. I’m going to try this, you know, for my own sake. But it’s also it’s certainly inspired me and provided a lot of learning in terms of, you know, stuff I want to take out into the world to.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:30  And is it the sort of situation in which you can also continue to work to some extent, or is it one of the spiritual communities that sort of asks you to withdraw from all that?

Taylor Jacobson 00:42:39  Both.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:41  Yeah.

Taylor Jacobson 00:42:42  Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s actually been a really challenging and fun experiment in that regard, because I’ve been really playing with that edge of yeah, there’s a way that they’ve sort of asked me to show up here that adheres to their way of doing things, and yet my commitment to my own inner truth is higher than that. And so I’m really using this experience to try to thread that needle where I say, you know what? There’s been moments where, you know, I skipped satsang, which is, you know, like we all gather to meditate and chant and these things. And I skipped it and I got some pushback. And immediately where my mind goes to is, I’m going to get kicked out, you know? And then I kind of walk it back and I say, well, did they say anything about kicking me out? Or like, am I reacting to reality right now, or am I just creating a fear based story that I can’t live my truth and have it work here as well? And so, you know, this is a thing that we all do in relationships.

Taylor Jacobson 00:43:47  It’s like we’re so scared of abandonment or getting hurt. We’ve run away from the dynamic rather than just saying, oh, let me, let me like try to be true to myself, but in a very loving and gentle way. And so it’s helped that this is a short term residence for me with people I’ve never met before where I can say, all right, I’m really committed to that experiment. I’m not going to run away from this place. I want to be here, but I also want to skip satsang sometimes, or I want to, you know, I have work stuff that I that I want to do. And so how can I be very loving in communicating that rather than defiant or angry or pushing back against them? And honestly, it’s shocked me in some ways how well that’s gone where I, I will say, you know what the really loving thing to do here would be to communicate where I’m coming from and why I’m choosing this, not because I’m asking for permission to do this, but because I want this relationship to work.

Taylor Jacobson 00:44:42  Yeah. Yeah. And then to hear the responses back, that’s like, okay, cool. You know, like I never would have expected that. But so it’s been it’s been really eye opening for me in terms of this is healthy relating.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:54  When you’re there. Is it harder for you to put down work and go towards the spiritual, or is it harder to put down the spiritual and go towards work, or is it just go back and forth?

Taylor Jacobson 00:45:06  Well, to me that’s a false dichotomy.Because I think we have a lot of concepts about what spirituality is that we haven’t directly experienced. And so I think those are just ideas. But to me, the strongest access point that I have to spirituality is this thing that I will often call my inner truth. And to me, that is spiritual, because where does that come from? It’s not something I analyzed. It’s not rational, it’s intuitive. But like, what is intuition? Where does that come from? I don’t know. But to me, there’s a certain like What I would call divinity or kind of, like, inexplicable, higher power that’s at work in all of us.

Taylor Jacobson 00:45:53  That is that voice, your inner compass, you know, whatever it is. And so, to me, kind of the ultimate spiritual practice is I’m going to trust that inner GPS. I’m going to listen to that inner truth right now. And, you know, in spiritual communities, people use the word ego a lot, which I think ego is just it’s the collection of all of our fears and under one umbrella called ego. So when we choose our truth, the only reason it’s hard is because we’re scared to do it. There’s a fear that it’s coming up against, right? So for me, choosing to skip satsang because what’s authentic for me is I want to actually go take a hike up to the top of this hill and do you know, whatever. That’s the truth that’s coming up for me right now. and in order to choose that truth, I have to face this fear that people are going to be pissed that I skipped that song. I’m going to get kicked out. I’m going to get scolded, whatever.

Taylor Jacobson 00:46:49  I’m not going to have a home like all these, all these fears come up. And so how do you conquer your ego? Let’s say to me, the answer is you just choose your truth. Because in the process of choosing your truth over and over again, you’re going to experience fear. And maybe you’ll heal a little bit of it, or peel a little bit of it back, and you’ll see that it’s actually the thing that I was scared of isn’t so scary after all. And in the process, yeah, I think you get closer to ultimate truth. And to me that is spirit. That’s God. To me, the words aren’t so important.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:22  Boy, there’s a lot in there that we’re only going to get to a little bit of before we need to probably go into post-show conversation. I’m trying to pick which part of that I want to grab. Let’s start with this one. You talk about intuition, your inner GPS, that inner knowing. Do you believe that there’s inner characteristics that are true in you that are different than me at the most basic level?

Taylor Jacobson 00:47:48  Oh, yeah.

Taylor Jacobson 00:47:51  There’s a notion I’ve heard at times of the idea of the healthy ego, which is it’s sort of your individuality, your uniqueness. Right. And so one way that I think about this is like all of the experiences that we’ve had, and especially the trauma that we’ve had, deeply inform the gifts that we can give to the world. And when we are living from the fear, we are not giving those gifts. We’re basically just trying to protect ourselves. That’s kind of our full time job unconsciously. But as we heal those things and we tap into those gifts, now we’re tapping into what I would call, you know, your soul or your truth. And I think that true nature is intrinsically loving. Like, that’s just kind of what comes when you’re not scared is we just find that we want to love and serve and give and but the way that we do that sometimes it’s like has the same shape, the same outline as our trauma, same outline as our fears. So like, let’s say it’s, you know, the shape of your handprint.

Taylor Jacobson 00:48:56  It might start out being all fear and it’s an expression of fear. But as you heal those things, it’s like now the light is coming through, but the light is coming through in the same shape, because your unique gift is a function of your history with addiction or that traumatic breakup of your marriage, or or these other things that have helped you become who you are. I think of that the same way as like, you know, a fish and a dog are not the same thing. They’re occupying what Bill Plotkin calls their unique eco niche. They don’t have the same problems that we have in doing that. But yeah, it’s like when we’re really being true to ourselves, we’re occupying our kind of correct role within the oneness of all things.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:38  It’s a nice way to say it. And I would say, you know, our traumas and our fears may be one of the major shaping forces of that role, but I certainly think everything that happens to us shapes us. And I think obviously we’re clearly shaped by some genetic capability.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:57  There is a unique creation here that is Eric, and it is informed by everything that has ever happened to me, good and bad. It’s informed by the genes that I got. It’s informed by all those things. And then I do believe this is a Zen idea. Emptiness and form form an emptiness, right? That emptiness is pure potentiality. It’s the it’s the energy underneath everything. But then it pops into form based on all sorts of things, you know, echo niche, all these different things. So I think we’re kind of talking about the same thing, and that there are versions of me that are truer to essence the more I’m healed.

Taylor Jacobson 00:50:36  Yeah. Beautifully put. I hadn’t heard some of those kind of Zen concepts, but it really resonates.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:40  Yeah, you should look into, you know, the ideas of of form and emptiness, though I think they’ll really resonate. They resonate very much with what you just said before I started talking, which is that idea. All right. We’re going to wrap up.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:53  You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation because I want to talk about how do you know whether to trust your intuition? A former drug addict like me is hesitant to trust strong inner feelings because, you know, I had pretty strong feelings that were coming from inside me that destroyed me. And so I think, you know, how do we know what inner voice to listen to, which inner voice to trust, to think we’re going to pursue that in the post-show conversation, listeners. You can get access to that and add free episodes and all kinds of other great things by going to one you feed dot net join. Taylor, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s really been fun.

Taylor Jacobson 00:51:33  Oh, yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. This is awesome.

Chris Forbes 00:51:37  If you’re enjoying the podcast, check out our weekly bit of Wisdom newsletter. Every Wednesday, we send a short email with practical insights, reflections, and takeaways, often featuring past guests. It’s a great way to stay inspired and support the show  Sign up at one. Net.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:57  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. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

In this episode, Sarah Gormley discusses the quiet pain of self-loathing and finding the courage to fac. it. Sarah had it all – a thriving corporate career, success, admiration. But beneath was a quiet, relentless self-loathing she couldn’t shake. In her memoir, The Order of Things, Sarah shares the profound turning point at 40 when she finally asked, is this how it’s going to feel forever? She unpacks why therapy isn’t linear, how grief can deepen gratitude, and the freedom that comes when we stop performing and start genuinely living.

Feeling stuck? It could be one of the six saboteurs of self-control—things like autopilot, self-doubt, or emotional escapism. But here’s the good news: you can outsmart them. Download the free Six Saboteurs of Self-Control ebook now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook and start taking back control today!

Key Takeaways:

• Journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance
• Importance of mental health and therapy
• Struggles with self-loathing and emotional challenges
• Impact of grief on personal growth and gratitude
• Relationship dynamics and self-worth
• Caregiving experiences and their emotional complexities
• Navigating grief while supporting others
• The role of compassion in healing
• Tools for managing negative self-talk and thought patterns
• The interplay of environment, genetics, and personal agency in shaping identity

Sarah Gormley is a writer and art gallery owner living in Columbus, Ohio. Her debut memoir is called The Order of Things. Sarah’s undergraduate degree from DePauw University reinforced an early love for literature and writing, while the heavy sprinkling of liberal-arts fairy dust taught her how to analyze and
articulate a clear point of view. She rounded out this foundation with concentrations in marketing and operations from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Today, Sarah owns a contemporary art gallery, Sarah Gormley Gallery, that operates from the belief that original art can be a source of joy for everyone and actively eschews pretense of any kind. She
opened the gallery in 2019, twenty-five years after her Grandma Cameron gifted Sarah with her first piece of original art.

Connect with Sarah Gormley:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Gormley, check out these other episodes:

How to Tame Your Inner Critic with Dr. Aziz Gazipura

How to Practice Self Compassion with Dr. Shauna Shapiro

By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!

If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon!  Click here to learn more!!

Episode Transcript:

Sarah Gormley 00:00:00  The relationship with yourself is the relationship that’s most important, and it informs everything else. Romantically, professionally. My siblings.

Chris Forbes 00:00:16  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 00:01:01  On the surface, Sarah Gormley had it all a thriving corporate career success. Admiration. But beneath was a quiet, relentless self-loathing she couldn’t shake. In her memoir, The Order of Things, Sarah shares the profound turning point at 40 when she finally asked, is this how it’s going to feel forever? In our conversation, we discussed why therapy isn’t linear, how grief can deepen gratitude, and the freedom that comes when we stop performing and start genuinely living.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:34  I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah Gormley 00:01:40  Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:42  Those of you that are watching will see that we are sitting together in person in the studio in Columbus, Ohio that we use. You’re also here in Columbus, Ohio, and they will also see this book, which is what we’re going to be talking about. It’s called The Order of Things, a memoir about chasing Joy. But before we get into that, we’ll start in the way that we always do with the parable. Okay. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two souls 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, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:32  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.

Sarah Gormley 00:02:38  You would think I’d be more prepared after watching some of the others on listening. I think it’s all of our story. I’m hesitating because I’m already getting a little bit emotional. I think probably the most surprising lesson of my life, which I try to capture in the book, is how much we can be in charge of our emotional selves. It takes work, but you can choose to feed the part of you that’s healthy. And I love the parable. And before I even knew you existed, I saw the parable online somewhere, and I sent it to my boyfriend and partner, Camillus, because I thought it was so beautiful and I hadn’t. I’m sure I’d heard it before, but I saw one of those, you know, images online, the perfect quote. And I’d sent it to him, and that was, I don’t know, six years ago. So it’s, it’s incredibly poignant and relevant to all of us.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:46  I love that idea about thinking of having the power to work with our emotional selves more skillfully. Right. I don’t think we can control our emotional self, but we can certainly relate to it and work with it far more skillfully. Before we dive into all of that, why don’t you just give us a brief overview of kind of the heart of the book, what it’s about.

Sarah Gormley 00:04:09  Okay. it’s a memoir. As you mentioned in the subhead, is a memoir about chasing Joy. And so the narrative arc of the book is about my experience when I came home to Ohio after a career in New York and San Francisco. I came home to be with my dying mother. her cancer came back. We knew what was likely going to happen, and I took a year break to kind of, well, a to be with her but be sought some things out for myself, I had been struggling in my corporate career and that sort of the narrative arc, the story beneath the story Is an emotional journey, and I had been a person who my entire adult life, starting in childhood, was, full of self-loathing.

Sarah Gormley 00:05:03  And it wasn’t depression. It wasn’t anxiety. It was just I hated myself. And how that manifested was I was an overachiever, you know, it wasn’t debilitating. Excuse me? It wasn’t debilitating self-loathing. It was motivating self-loathing. So I became a gold star chaser, you know, needed to be smart, skinny, successful. And so I just kept achieving. And what a shock. The more I achieved, the less fulfilled I was. And that’s a pretty frustrating place to find yourself. So at age 40, finally, I found a therapist who’s still my therapist today and my work with him and work on myself. pretty radically transformed my life. So that’s the story beneath the story. And the book includes scenes with my therapist, David, because I wanted to show people what actually happens in therapy sessions.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:04  It’s funny that you say at 40, because I was having a conversation yesterday with a woman who’s an executive coach, and she was saying what she saw consistently in her work was that when people got into their 40s, all of a sudden what had been working for them to get them to the point in their career that they were suddenly started to not work.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:30  It started to be a problem. And I think a lot of it is what we’re talking about here is that I think we can be motivated by striving because we don’t think we’re good enough. And that can be a really powerful fuel. And it’s a fuel that I think over time really starts to gunk up the engine. And when you hit your 40s, you know you may still, career wise, be doing okay. But inside it’s like, I think it’s this critical point habits. It must be maybe some combination of years of that and, you know, the realities of getting older. And I’ve seen that in the coaching work that I’ve done with people. It’s somewhere in that range that, you know, maybe you’ve had enough success at that point that you’re like, oh, that didn’t fit, that didn’t fix the problem. And and instead of thinking, oh, it’s just more success, more success, I think certain people wise up a little bit and go, oh, hang on, let me question the whole paradigm of what I’m doing here, the strategy I’m going after to deal with these internal emotions.

Sarah Gormley 00:07:30  Yes, I think so. I mean, for me, it was 40 sort of a big number. And you think maybe a midpoint of life. And I really just asked myself like, what are we doing? What? And I was in a huge amount of pain. I mean, pain can be a pretty big motivator.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:50  Yeah. Pain is an outstanding motivator, and it’s clear that that pain is still, or the experience of it is still close at hand.

Sarah Gormley 00:07:57  You can laugh at me. I cry all the time and I think, you know, the body remembers. And so I think my body physically recalls how I felt for so long and nobody knew. I didn’t even know. I didn’t know what to call it. I just when I turned 40, I thought, I can’t do this for 40 more years, something. Yeah. And I was terrified to try therapy because I thought, what if a therapist says, oh, Sarah, this is just life. This is how you’re going to feel.

Sarah Gormley 00:08:31  Because I thought, well, then what do I do? Yeah. You know, I was so nervous. And fortunately, I didn’t have to feel that way about myself for the rest of my life. And part of writing the book was yes, to share the story, but boy, I can get myself. I can get in my head a little bit of I probably should have started at 30. What if? And it’s not. It’s not productive to say what if, but my life. I’m so fortunate. I have a blessed, full, lovely life. But if I had not been as terrified to start therapy and started at 25 or 30, who knows? You know who knows, but who knows? It’s okay, but I don’t spend too much time there. But I think if someone reads the book and recognizes themselves and the story, several people have already told me they’ve reached out and started therapy after they read the book, because I took out some of the the scariness of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:33  Yeah. That’s wonderful. Yeah. I think that ability to pivot from internal self-loathing to some form of internal kindness is about the biggest upgrade you can give your life, right? Because the person we spend the most time with by far, of course, is ourselves. And if that self-loathing voice is just constantly kind of going, it’s really lousy in there. Now, I think that becoming kind to ourselves actually allows us to get better at everything that we do. But even if that were not the case, that upgrade inside is so. And it’s so weird because I think, I mean, I did in many ways start this sort of journey at at 25 as a recovering heroin addict. And, and I can say that one of the things that has happened is that that self-loathing is pretty much gone now. But here’s what’s weird is my brain will still fire up this phrase. I hate myself like it just arises. And I’m like, what? What on earth is that? And I recognize what tends to cause it.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:37  Also, I can recognize the situations I’m in, and it’s usually a situation in which I don’t know the answer. Okay. When I find myself in a like, I don’t know what to do or I’m going to make somebody unhappy or something like that, that voice just rises up. Even though at this point it doesn’t have any energy underneath it. It just shows that our patterns get so deeply wired.

Sarah Gormley 00:11:01  Oh my God, the patterns are so strong. They’re so powerful. And I still have the voice. I named the voice Scott Kennedy after the bully in elementary school. And it’s still there, same like. And I say I’m like, no, not today. And yeah, but it creeps up, you know, whether it’s about body or success or, you know, and then I just sort of, I guess now I have the tools to like, I don’t tolerate the voice much longer than like a few seconds at a time, but it’s not totally gone. Yeah. You know, it’s not.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:33  All well, my experience is it won’t it won’t totally go, but it’s a completely different experience. Mostly when I say something like that, or occasionally the other one that’ll fire up will be like, I want to die, or and I’ll be. I just kind of tend to laugh at it now because I’m like, that is an extremely overdramatic that is way too dramatic for the fact that you’re not sure which shampoo to use today, right? Like, we can just we can relax a little here.

Sarah Gormley 00:12:04  Yes. my therapist, David, who I will reference multiple times, but he once said to me, you don’t have to make a pageant out of it. Like, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:13  Like, yeah, that’s funny.

Sarah Gormley 00:12:14  You can just kind of.

Sarah Gormley 00:12:16  Have a conversation. It doesn’t have to be this full blown up thing. It’s just this. I’m like, oh, right. It doesn’t have to be a pageant.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:23  Yeah. The book very early on paints a poignant picture of you sitting in your apartment. I think you’re in New York at this time, and you’re reading books like The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, who’s been on the show a couple times and I think is one of the best writers alive, and a book about depression, which I resonate with very deeply. But you were reading it going, no, not me. So you were reading these books about depression, anxiety, all of this, but none of it was resonating with what you had and what you were able to finally put your finger on was it was this thing.

Sarah Gormley 00:12:58  The self-loathing? Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:13:01  And I consider myself a fairly bright individual. And so I was trying to do the research, you know, because I thought if I could find a book or an article that resonated with me, I would know what to do. Yeah. And I couldn’t find myself in any of those pages. And I still today think that when we talk about mental health, if you say certain words, people are like, yes, that’s a mental health issue.

Sarah Gormley 00:13:30  Suicide, depression, sexual trauma, sexual assault. Yeah. These there are these big categories that are connected to something pretty extreme. And what I’ve found is that there are a lot of us, women in particular, who are carrying around this sort of quiet suffering, often disguised by success, and it’s just not necessary. So, you know, that to me, is one of the reasons. It’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. But it’s one of the reasons I am talking to you today and writing essays for national media because so many people, women in particular, again, when they’ve read the book, approach me and say. Me too. Yeah. Me too. So many, you know. And so again, I think there is help. And I used to think, oh, you just have to ask for help. That’s the key. Now, I think, no, the key is to admit that you’re hurting. And I think a lot of people. Their lives look great on paper.

Sarah Gormley 00:14:38  They’ve got a great job, healthy kids, a supportive family, a great friend group. This is how I felt. What the hell am I bitching about? Who am I to complain?

Sarah Gormley 00:14:49  You have this gratitude.

Sarah Gormley 00:14:51  Spoiled white girl from Ohio. What’s she bitching about?

Sarah Gormley 00:14:53  Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:14:54  And that’s why I couldn’t reconcile that there was, quote unquote, something wrong or something I needed to fix. And when I reframed it and said, I can’t live this way for the next 40 years, I’m in too much pain. Then it became more acceptable to me in my head to ask for help.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:13  Yeah, I think I was, you know, I was fortunate enough at an early age to see a lot of people who are in real pain, particularly in 12 step, like, you know. But as time went on and the main thing I got really interested in have gone really deep in is Buddhism. And Buddhism starts from the place of saying Everybody’s got some of this suffering going on.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:34  It’s the human condition. And and I find that a helpful view of the world because a, I think it allows me to approach everybody. Well, I try, I try to approach everybody from a place of more compassion. And I think it also allows me when something is going wrong or I’m struggling to say like, that’s totally normal. And so of course you’re hurting and the next thing to do is seek some help. So I think that you’re right. For a lot of people it’s I think there are so many. They called it like a journey of healing. And I think that on one hand, I hate that phrase journey. You’re you’re on your journey. I know, you know.

Sarah Gormley 00:16:14  I cringe when I say emotional journey, but it’s what.

Sarah Gormley 00:16:16  It is. But yeah, it’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:18  Apt because there’s I was talking with a friend yesterday who’s a therapist, and he’s been a social worker for years, and we talked about how for many people they think like, if you just ask for help, it just all gets better.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:30  You know, I thought the first time, like, if I just, you know, it was my like, yeah, I’m dying from addiction, but someday I’ll pull a pin, I’ll go to rehab and it’ll be solved. And of course, it didn’t work that way. Eventually worked that way eventually, but I think so. There’s that first part of like, the journey to get to the place where you can ask for help.

Sarah Gormley 00:16:47  Yes, yes

Eric Zimmer 00:16:49  Then there’s everything that kind of happens after. And you make a great metaphor in the book that I’d like to turn to for a second here. And you say therapy is not like hiking the Appalachian Trail. It’s like being a duck paddling around the same pond in random circles. So say more.

Sarah Gormley 00:17:07  Well, there’s an anecdote in the book about going to the therapist when I was in my 20s. Right. And it didn’t go well, but because I went, I also went in with a list of things I wanted to work on. And even with David, who I’m still with 12 years after starting at age 40, I had some, you know, categories of things I wanted to work on.

Sarah Gormley 00:17:24  I’m a very goal oriented, problem solving type of person. Yep. And it doesn’t work that way in therapy. And I wanted readers to know that, like, you don’t get to go in and say, well, I would like to fix my self-loathing. How long is that going to take?

Sarah Gormley 00:17:41  Yes, I know.

Sarah Gormley 00:17:42  And so the right therapist for you will lead you into conversations, revisit topics, ideas, and it’s slow and messy. And oftentimes you leave an hour long session thinking, what in the hell did we just talk about? You know, I don’t know. But over time, you realize that this is what happened for me. I realized I was seeing myself differently. I was treating myself more kindly. And I’m not. I don’t sit and reference specific things about Jungian therapy and archetypes. I mean, we’ve talked about all of those things, and he teaches me. But it’s it’s more of the awareness and subtle shifts throughout the day of how I’m talking to myself and how I relate to other people.

Sarah Gormley 00:18:32  And that’s when I say it’s like swimming around in the pond. Like you don’t know where the little nuggets of nutrients are coming from. It’s just it’s happening because you asked for help, because you’re committed to the emotional work.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:09  So 12 years you’ve been in therapy? Yes. What makes you think you should still go? Like what sustains your commitment to continuing to do it? Intense pain. Intense motivation? Yes. What I see over and over and over with people, and I see it in my own life. When I’m in a lot of pain, I’m very motivated to change it. Things get better and it’s like, all right, good. Now let me go play, you know, wiffle ball or I don’t actually play wiffle ball. I would like to play wiffle ball. If you want to play wiffle ball after Joe, we could get a game going. You get my.

Sarah Gormley 00:19:42  Point?

Sarah Gormley 00:19:42  Yes, yes. Well, two things. And this isn’t in the book, but I did stop therapy for a spell when I moved from New York to San Francisco, because I still had this idea of, like, checklist, fix that.

Sarah Gormley 00:19:56  And so I move out to San Francisco, my father passes away, and I’m kind of in one of the lowest points of my life emotionally. And I emailed David and we got on the phone. He said, I thought I might hear from you again. But the reason I continue with David now is that I still struggle. You know, I still struggle with how kind I am to myself. I’m interested in relationships and how I behave in relationships, and frankly, I want to be a better version of myself. Yeah, and I have found that therapy has helped me. The relationship with yourself is the relationship that’s most important, and it informs everything else romantically, professionally, my siblings and. Yeah, that’s that’s why. Because I think I’ve come I’ve come this far in 12 years. And I’d like to see what else, what else there is, and it really does. You know, I still have my I still make some pageants out of things that don’t need to be pageants, and it really does.

Sarah Gormley 00:21:13  You know, when I speak with him about it, I’m not beating up my boyfriend or, you know, like, I’m not I’m not dumping it on somebody else. So I kind of save certain topics, if you will. Yes. For David.

Sarah Gormley 00:21:24  Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:21:26  We also have something called trickle down therapy. So my friends know about David. Camillus knows about David. And so if I have an idea, I pass on my little nuggets sometimes.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:35  So let’s change directions for a second. The book is, I think, primarily about, at least from my perspective, two core things. One is this idea of self-loathing and how we work with it. And the second is about the death of and the relationship with your mother. Yes. So so tell us a little bit about what brought you back to Ohio and and where in Ohio? You weren’t in Columbus. You were in a small town.

Sarah Gormley 00:22:00  Chandlers ville outside of Zanesville, Ohio, which is where I grew up. Grew up in a family farm.

Sarah Gormley 00:22:06  It’s absolutely beautiful. And so my father passed away in 16. I was in San Francisco at that point, and his death was sad and terrible, but not a huge surprise. He had had, you know, litany of health challenges for the last 15 years of his life. And so then he died in 16 so November of 17. I was at an event in New York speaking. And my sister calls from the emergency room and said, mom has tumors up and down her spine. I was like, first of all, I was like, are they allowed to tell you that? The air like that seemed a little. So yeah. And we didn’t know how bad it was. I think mom knew. And what happened is after my dad died, I think we were confusing some of her symptoms with grief which I’ve heard has happened a lot before.

Sarah Gormley 00:23:00  And so she just didn’t feel well and had no energy. But we thought, well, you know, her husband of 38, 45, I don’t know how many years a long, healthy marriage.

Sarah Gormley 00:23:11  So there I was in San Francisco. My job was not going well because I shouldn’t have been in the role. I left a big job in New York to take a big job in San Francisco. Really? Because I didn’t know what else to do. So I flew. Rather than flying back to San Francisco from New York. I flew home to Ohio and, you know, had a conversation with mom and said, you know, I’ll come home. I think I volunteered. I’ll come home to be here with you. And she said, oh, I’d like that. Which was shocking because, you know, she knew about my big career. Maybe there was some vicarious enjoyment of my big career. You know, and and she knew the job was a little bit in trouble. And so I thought for sure she would say no, no, no. You go back and take care of what you need to take care of in San Francisco. And when she said, I’d like it if you would come home.

Sarah Gormley 00:24:05  I knew I had to do it. It was the right thing to do. Yeah. So? So I packed up and just came home. And in that transition, I committed to myself that regardless of what happened with her, I was taking a full year off of work to reset, regroup, figure out another way to be with myself professionally. And so I came home in November. She passed in February, and I did not work at all for a full year, which it takes a long time to get some of that corporate persona off of you. At least it did for me. Yeah, I had confused my identity with my profession and, yeah, it took a little time.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:56  Which is not surprising if you see getting things right and gold stars is the way you feel good about yourself, right? Like, of course you’re married. You know, you’re taking your career as your identity. Yeah. How long was it after you sort of arrived back home and your mother passing?

Sarah Gormley 00:25:12  was it four months? December? Oh, I got home at the end of November and she died at the end of February.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:19  So you had four months of being sort of in the scrum of caretaking?

Sarah Gormley 00:25:23  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:24  And then that ended.

Sarah Gormley 00:25:27  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:28  I’m curious about that, that latter transition, because I think when you go from like a job like that to another role that keeps you relatively busy, focused and occupied, that’s one transition. But there’s a deeper transition, at least. Maybe it wasn’t for you. But I’ve seen with a lot of people where when that ends, the caregiving ends. Now you’re truly like, yeah, I’m not working. I’m not like, what am I doing with my life?

Sarah Gormley 00:25:56  Well, two things I think I anticipated that. So I’m a little I’m a control freak even when I’m trying not to be. But I anticipated that that could happen. That’s why I set the year timeline.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:08  Yep.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:09  And I said, Sarah, you can’t.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:11  You can’t.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:12  You are doing nothing but be at this farm. Falling in love. Visiting friends. Traveling. This is what you’re doing? You are not working until January of 19.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:27  So I was prepared for it. Yeah, because there is another version of the story. I get asked this a lot at book clubs. Is there another version? Like what would have happened if. And I think the answer is it’s very possible had I not done what I needed to do in therapy and fallen in love with a man in Columbus. To be fair, yes.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:50  That’s a pretty big that’s a pretty big weight.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:53  On that side.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:54  That is a big one. But I could have gone back to New York and gotten another big job. You know, of course, it’s sort of that was in my makeup and the desire to do that because it’s what I knew and felt comfortable doing. So part of the year timeline was also to prevent that. Prevent myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:14  From jumping.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:15  Back in to falling back.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:16  Into the pattern. Right? The patterns are super strong.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:20  Yes, they they are for sure. You mentioned you’re a control freak.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:24  Well, not as bad as some people, maybe, but I have my moments.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:28  Or let’s say that you are.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:29  A control freak who’s getting better.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:31  Can we? Yes. A recovering.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:32  Recovering control freak. I mean, we may get to this at some point, but I think a salient detail in here is that you had anorexia at one point, and the little I know about it is that’s very much a disease of control.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:46  It is.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:47  And so let’s just say you’re well established in control. And now you come up against the uncontrollable. Yes. Which is your mother’s illness which she at a certain point says I don’t want to treat.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:59  She stop treatment.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:00  She stop treatment. So talk to me about the emotional process of coming in with a control mindset and being faced with the uncontrollable.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:11  I’m hesitating because.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:13  It’s a poorly formed.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:14  Question. No, no.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:15  No, because I think there’s like a like there’s a nice, probably pithy way to answer, but the real answer is about mom. I mean she choreographed her death. Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:27  For us I mean for her too. My father died in a hospice facility which is so fucking awful. And she died at her favorite place on earth at the family farm, surrounded by people who loved her. She was pretty lucid until the day she died. And that’s how I could handle it. Yeah. She gave us this gift of dying so gracefully.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:57  Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:58  Doesn’t mean it wasn’t excruciatingly painful. Right. But it wasn’t about control. It was about grace.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:06  And so you learned that through the process, you sort of learn that you can’t control.

Sarah Gormley 00:29:10  You can’t control it. And that is for anybody, any of your listeners who have gone through it. And most of us will go through it. The relationship between grief and gratitude is something that fascinates me, and it starts happening when you’re a caregiver before the end. Yeah, and I think it’s one of the things that makes you able to survive it with the person who’s dying. And that was so beautiful. And also in a way that was not at all like what we experienced with my father.

Sarah Gormley 00:29:43  So it really it really was a gift. And mom made it easier for us.

Sarah Gormley 00:29:48  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:49  It’s amazing how different death experiences can be. I mean, we were primary caregiver for Ginny’s mom, who had, dementia. That is a bad way to go. I mean, it’s terrible. And then my dad died. The same thing in a memory care facility.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:07  For I’m sorry.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:08  For Alzheimer’s. And so there’s just these different ways. but I’m glad that you got to have that sort of thing with your mother where she got to. She got to sort of do it her way in that in that sense, which is really beautiful.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:23  It really was. And, you know, I think I got some of my control tendencies from her.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:28  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:28  So she was trying.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:30  She was she was orchestrating.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:31  She was. Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:32  Yeah. Yeah. No doubt.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:35  The you know, the other part of the book that I think is really interesting is this inheritance of emotional pain.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:45  Of starting to see in your mother some of what you saw in yourself. Talk us through when you started to notice that and what it was like.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:57  first of all, I think to know my mom, to have a little picture of her, I mean, to say she was iconic is almost an understatement. People come up to me who met her 35 years ago for ten minutes and tell me about my mom. She just was a force. She was bright and funny and beautiful and and she had this ability to connect with other people and just love them and make them feel seen and special. And sometimes she was better at giving it away to other people than her own children. So I’ll say that. And I did not know that she was suffering until I graduated from college, and she admitted to me that she had been depressed and was taking Prozac. But before then, I never would have thought that she was someone who was depressed. And there’s a scene in the book where I go have a glass of wine with the psychiatrist who prescribed her Prozac, and I shared with him my experience with talk therapy, and he sort of said to me, Sara, you shouldn’t ever have to suffer like that.

Sarah Gormley 00:32:14  In fact, if you, you know, let me know. I can get you some medicine. And I was a little bit offended, not offended, but I wanted him to understand that I had started healing through the process of therapy. And so when I think about mom and me, mom was hurting and suffering and medicine helped her suffer less. I was hurting and suffering, and working with a therapist helped me suffer less. So there is absolutely no judgment about what helps and what works. but I think, mom, I think she was really hard on herself. She doubted herself as a mother, which she admitted to me. And, I hate that for her, you know? it’s there’s a line in the book. Is it weird to wish something for your dead mother? Right. But I kind of. I wish she had been kinder to herself. Yeah, and we didn’t talk about it a lot. She knew I had started therapy, and she hated that I was hurting. But that’s just kind of as far as we went.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:44  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 one, you feed a book and take the first step towards getting back on track. 

You mentioned that your mom doubted her abilities as a mother in some ways, and that maybe connecting with people on the outside was easier for her. And I think that’s a not tremendously uncommon thing for people who struggle emotionally. In that it’s just much easier to just have relatively surface level. Now, I’m not saying your mom didn’t care about these people and see them, and but you play a role for a very short period of time, and then you go off versus the day in and day out emotional labor.

Sarah Gormley 00:35:12  And emotional intimacy.

Sarah Gormley 00:35:14  Romantically. But, you know, we were of her. Yeah, right. We are a part of her.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:19  I mean, I continue to notice how much easier it is for me to be emotionally intimate with other people versus compared to my siblings.

Sarah Gormley 00:35:30  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:30  Like it bothers me on some level. I don’t I don’t fault myself. I totally get why it makes complete sense to me. And I’ve remained sort of even after having noticed it, even after having shared it with my siblings. We talk about these patterns that run deep. It’s there’s this thing, there was a code of the way you are with your family.

Sarah Gormley 00:35:51  Yes. The code. Yeah, that’s a great word for it. And some of the relationship with my mom was speculating with my therapist. And so I was cautious, especially in the book, not to draw conclusions that I didn’t ever have the chance to talk with her about. Yep, yep. but I will say that once I started looking at her just as a human being and not as my mother strictly.

Sarah Gormley 00:36:25  It’s like once you start to understand why somebody may be the way they are, you don’t have this need for blame. And she was a complex, incredible woman, and she had some flaws. And she had amazing gifts, you know. And so I used up all of my blame on myself. My whole life, you know. And so I don’t have much blame for anyone anymore. It’s like. No. I feel like everyone should write a memoir. And with the power of I. When we meet someone, your memoir should sink in to my brain. How much nicer would we all be to each other if we really knew each other’s stories?

Sarah Gormley 00:37:08  Right. That’s a great.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:09  Great use of AI

Sarah Gormley 00:37:10  Like we would be overflowing with empathy. Yes. And it’s like, I don’t know, it’s. I’m just trying to be nicer to myself and other people.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:21  I agree. And I think those were sort of your mother’s, Yes. Deathbed advice?

Sarah Gormley 00:37:26  Yes. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:27  Be nice.

Sarah Gormley 00:37:28  Yeah. Just be fucking nice.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:30  Now, my mother would say there’s a difference between kindness and niceness and blah, blah, blah.

Sarah Gormley 00:37:34  But yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:34  The point being, kindness goes a long way towards ourselves and others.

Sarah Gormley 00:37:40  And I think once you learn, learn it with yourself. When you learn some self-compassion, I think it just helps you be more compassionate to other people. It really does.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:50  I think it’s a bidirectional sort of thing. That’s been my experience, because I can think back to early in my recovery, and I would see people who had basically done the sort of things that I had done that I felt really bad about myself and I shamed myself for, and I could have compassion towards them, which then allowed me to see. But then that also as it developed in me, you know. So for me, it’s been this sort of bidirectional thing is that, you know, knowing my own self and being kind to myself, but also and it’s one of the things when you study the research on self-compassion, at least the key thing I have taken away from it, if I were to take one line from a whole lot of thousands of studies, it would be treat yourself like you would a friend.

Sarah Gormley 00:38:39  Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:39  Because we intuitively sort of or a child or a small child, because we intuitively have compassion for the people we care about, and we intuitively We can see what they’re not seeing. Yes. And we can’t do it for we can’t do it for ourselves. So that imaginative exercise actually is a way.

Sarah Gormley 00:38:58  It’s a training.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:59  And for a lot of people, I think it’s a back door in when the self-loathing is so strong. It’s a imagine what I would do if it were someone else. Allows me to at least envision a world in which kindness could be a response to.

Sarah Gormley 00:39:16  Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I like the bidirectional.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:19  As we talk about your mother and we talked about meeting the uncontrollable with control type tendencies and how that changes. There’s another theme that I see in the book, and I just sort of noted it down as sort of the the myth of the neat ending. And I think of a scene where people in your town would come up to you consolingly and say, she’s going to a better place, or.

Sarah Gormley 00:39:44  And she’s going to be with the judge. My dad.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:46  And and how frustrated that made you. And I’m always drawn to the thing places where we’re sort of called to hold two things. You know, and and what you’re being held to there and you make it is, you know. How do we navigate the tension there of saying what I want to say, being myself and also letting other people have the thing that comforts them?

Sarah Gormley 00:40:11  Yes. Because they were grieving. They could be right. One of my oldest and dearest friends. The scene in the book. And she calls the night. The night mom decides to stop treatment. And di calls and says, you know, she’s ready. She’s ready to be with your dad again. And I was so pissed. And you know I’m like her body is riddled with cancer right. And she’s dying. So this is why she’s ready to die? Because she’s dying. But I felt this need to be right. And to your point. Whatever people needed to tell themselves to make themselves feel better in the moment. Because she adored mom. Yeah. So it. You know, it wasn’t me at my best. But you know what? I forgave myself because my mom was dying, so I.

Sarah Gormley 00:41:12  You get a lot of love. You get.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:13  A lot of latitude in those circumstances.

Sarah Gormley 00:41:15  Yeah. You can use it for, like, six months after two. Yeah. My mom just died.

Sarah aGormley 00:41:19  Yeah. Fuck off.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:20  It’s a good one. I don’t think I took enough advantage of that after my father passed.

Sarah Gormley 00:41:24  I’d be like, well.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:24  I could, but now I’m. I’m. You know, one of the things that people do is they love to tell neat, tidy stories. And I recognize that I have a very strong bias against that.

That’s not me. And yet I don’t want to disabuse anybody of their neat, tidy story because again, on one level, they could be right and I could be wrong.

Sarah Gormley 00:41:51  No, of course not.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:55  Well, this is a particularly interesting to me because it’s a journey I’ve gone through, and I’ve watched a lot of people in our community go through, which is one where you have a belief in a neat, tidy. Everything happens for a reason universe, and then you lose it. And how hard that can be?

Eric Zimmer 00:42:15  Because if I could believe certain things, I think I would, because I’m a big believer in usefulness. Like. And I think there are certain beliefs that are actually very useful. And I would, I would actually sign up for a couple of them, but I can’t because you can’t believe something you don’t believe.

Sarah Gormley 00:42:31  Correct.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:31  And so how to make sense of a world in which things don’t happen for a reason. That your mother’s death is just what it is. It’s a it’s a painful, sad thing.

Sarah Gormley 00:42:44  Yeah. And painful, sad things happen in life. And we, fortunately, our creatures who have tools to deal with hard, painful things.

Sarah Gormley 00:42:59  And we should be better in this country about talking about death and grief. And I think we’re getting there. I think we’re getting closer. But, you know, I have a group of friends that are now four of us in the club, adult orphans. We’ve all lost both parents. And I was the first to lose both parents. And it is it’s so disorienting. But there are these moments until you experience it. It sounds absurd, but there are moments of the beauty and gratitude, and you also have an opportunity to look at yourself and be proud of yourself, you know, for being a caregiver and being resilient. So I had my experience with it and everybody else will have theirs.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:43  One of the things that also happens in the book, and you alluded to it, is you fell in love when you came back.

Sarah Gormley 00:43:50  Yes. How does that happen? In what universe does that happen except hallmark?

Eric Zimmer 00:43:54  I was going to say, you know, is this The Bridges of Madison County? I don’t actually know that story. I just know it’s some love story that takes place in a small town.

Sarah Gormley 00:44:02  And that’s Indiana.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:03  What happened with you is in a love story in a small town. I’m less interested in all the specifics of that, but I am interested in how you learn to relate to another human being in relationship. As you began to think about working on your self loathing and particularly working on because right along with self-loathing, we’ve sort of talked about it is this I’m as good as what I do.

Sarah Gormley 00:44:33  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:33  And that can be very problematic in a relationship. So so how did the the work in therapy sort of, you know, trying to untangle some of this self-loathing. How did that help you in this relationship?

Sarah Gormley 00:44:50  I’ll say a couple of things. So I had done five years of the emotional work before I came home. There was still more work to do, but I had come pretty far in untangling myself from my job is my identity. The pattern was there, but I recognized it.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:10  Enough that you saw taking a year off was really important. Right. Like you have to have some degree of clarity to understand that, that for you you couldn’t heal that. And while being in it.

Sarah Gormley 00:45:19  And the way that happened was that I started to be kinder to myself. I mean, I’d still struggle to say that I love myself, but I certainly was being kinder to myself and recognizing that I was a person with qualities. And so I back at the farm. I have no job, no home, no car. I had lost one parent about to lose another. I mean, there was for a person who was goal oriented and identified by achievement. I was sort of at the lowest low. Yeah, it was just me. This is what you get. And so unlike every other relationship that I had attempted and failed, in which I ignorantly believed that the right person would make me feel better about myself, I did not have that expectation. I already felt better about myself, which meant that I was probably at least 80% closer to being ready for a relationship than I had been before in my life. And then the timing of it was just crazy. So, so does that answer your question?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:37 It does.  And I assume, you know, as we as we begin to disentangle our worth from what we do, we also, I think, are better able to actually be ourselves. And that happens to be a really, happens to be a really key thing in any good relationship is that you enter it as yourself, which, I mean, it took me a long time to figure that one out. I thought I had to enter as a certain type of person.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:06  Posturing, and then then it’s really problematic. So. Oh, yeah. You know, entering as yourself is a pretty big prerequisite for things going well. It’s been my experience.

Sarah Gormley 00:47:16  Right. I entered fully and truly as myself, even what I would have considered one of my lowest points of my life. And to this day, seven and a half years later, I still feel the most comfortable I’ve ever felt in my life with him.

Sarah Gormley 00:47:32  Yeah, and he knows that. And so it’s not it just works. You know, love is funny.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:38  So what I’d like to do now is go deeper into the process of healing self-loathing.

Sarah Gormley 00:47:47  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:48  Like what sort of things happened in therapy? What things did you learn or what what did what were you taught or what were moments along the way, like, how did this actually happen? To the extent you’re able to put any of it into words?

Sarah Gormley 00:48:02  Okay, well, I’m going to tell you two different things that happen, both of which are scenes in the book, because, again, I included the therapy scene so that people could actually see and feel what, what it’s like. So when I started with David, I told him about the voice, the running voice. I referenced a cassette tape. They don’t exist anymore. But imagine the loop of tape that just never stops running. And the voice, no matter what I did, told me that I was a piece of shit. Not good enough.

Sarah Gormley 00:48:34  Not worthy. Not smart, not funny. Not cute. Not pretty. All day long. No matter what I was doing, I could be in a boardroom, presenting to a CEO. And the voice was still there. You suck. You fucked that up. You screwed that up.

Sarah Gormley 00:48:48  Which is exhausting. Yes. Okay, so one of the things that David recommended is that we give this voice a name so that I could approach it, and he asked me to give it a name, and I was frustrated. I was like, I’m not gonna do so woo, I’m not going to give this voice a name. And then I remembered a kid who had bullied me on the playground, and I said, how did Scott Kennedy, who probably had a crush on me in elementary school, but I didn’t. I beat him up. I held him down and started punching him because he wouldn’t leave me alone, even though I’d asked him. So Scott Kennedy became the name of the voice of the self-loathing.

Sarah Gormley 00:49:26  That was one tool. Yeah, and I still think about it when we have those moments where the voice pops up, I’m like, not today, Scott Kennedy. You know, like it is.

Sarah Gormley 00:49:34  Yep.

Sarah Gormley 00:49:34  And it works. And so that was an example of David getting me to recognize that it’s not my whole who. That it’s this voice and that you can resist. And you can you can challenge the voice. So you pay attention. What does it want? What’s it trying to get from you? And then put him in his place. So that was really useful. The other thing which we hinted at this when we were talking about, how you treat other people versus how you treat yourself. And so David was trying to push me to understand that I am not, in fact, a loathsome piece of shit. And he said, well, how would your friends, how would your friends describe you? And just like I am now, I started crying and he was like, why are you crying? And I have this that amazing friend group from college, and I thought about each of them walking into my apartment, and you know how they would describe me and how they felt about me.

Sarah Gormley 00:50:41  And oh, and it was a very effective way, clearly, to get me to see myself in a different light. And I had to I had to view myself through their eyes. And so again, that was that was an exercise in one of our sessions. And it freed up space in my mind and frankly, my heart for myself to to perceive myself differently. So manage the voice and view yourself more kindly. Yeah, again, none of that sounds like really radical, but those are the types of conversations that I had in the first year of working with him. That started a shift.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:28  Yeah. Well, it sounds, you know, on the surface, simple. And it’s anything but. Right. I mean, it’s extremely it’s extremely hard because I can think of all the hurdles that could come up with that. Like one of them for me used to be so-and-so thinks you’re great, so-and-so thinks you’re great, so-and-so thinks you’re great. And it was like the simple one is, well, they just don’t know me.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:51  But even when I went beyond that and I were like, they do know me, then I all of a sudden start questioning whether they’re really good people, whether they’re interesting people.

Sarah Gormley 00:51:59  What, like, I’m going to trust the guy that thinks I suck. That’s who I’m going to trust.

Sarah Gormley 00:52:03  Yeah, yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:03  It’s this crazy cascading. And that’s why I’m really interested in how this sort of shifts over time, because some of it is working to catch the thought patterns, restructure them, and there’s just an awful lot of that, you know, and endlessly, you know, I always say the good news is you can retrain the way you think. The bad news is, it does take a while, a lot of repetition.

Sarah Gormley 00:52:28  It does.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:29  You know, the book that I’ve got coming out, how a little becomes a lot. That’s how it happens. But there’s another element in there in which you can’t out argue your inner critic. Once a certain debate mode gets engaged, it seems like it’s capable of countering every well, I’m good enough because I’m look, I’m presenting to SEOs.  Look how far I’ve come. And then The Voice just has a perfectly good defense to why that doesn’t matter. Yes. And so there’s another element that happens. And I don’t I don’t know exactly how to put my finger on what it is, but I’m curious, as I say, that if anything comes up in you.

Sarah Gormley 00:53:06  Well, my immediate thought is it’s something about it’s a will, a will to experience a day differently or, you know, you have to have those things can happen. The voices can be they’re doing what they might do, but there has to be a bigger element of this is how I want to experience my life right now. Yeah. And so this is how much room I give you to the noise. I don’t know if that makes sense, but David would probably have a better term for it. You know, and I still have moments. I always say like, look, it’s not like I’m skipping through every day of my life. It’s all rainbows and birds chirping.

Sarah Gormley 00:53:45  You know, just last week, I got hit with something and I was down a little bit down on myself for about two days. But that’s all I can take anymore. I’m like you can get your two days. You got, you got your two days. And now let’s get back to the truth which is you’re capable and you’re bright and you’ll figure it out. Let’s go with that. We’re not going to go into the paralysis and anxiety and fear. Yeah. You can you can feel poorly for a couple of days and that’s about it. And so that is when I say there’s the will and the want to to experience life differently. and that’s been important to me. I don’t know if that’s a clinical expression. I know it’s not, but it is. It’s what you’re trying to answer in your book.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:33  A little bit, but I honestly don’t understand it to be to be completely honest. Like one of the things that, you know, I’ve said before, if I, you know, if I got to meet God, assuming there was one which we’ve sort of covered, but assuming, let’s say I did. The creator of the universe. And I got some I got a lot of basic questions out of the way, like what the hell’s going on? And, you know, one of the questions I would really that has been a personal question is why is it that some people get sober and others don’t? Because I watched people show up in the same treatment centers that I did. I watched them go to the same meetings and I saw them put the effort in. They, you know, it wasn’t, they were just going through the motions. They were trying. Now I have some answers, I have I mean I could give you some answers. Oh it’s about how much support they had or there’s a lot of different factors, but underneath it, there’s this intangible that I don’t understand, which is that. And I think addiction just paints a starker picture of I think it’s a nice analogy for a lot of things in life. It’s just because it’s so intensely focused. And in it there is a certain amount of loss of choice. That’s how it’s defined to a certain degree. And yet the path out is defined by a certain amount of agency and how those things combine. And I think any of us in our healing journeys can there’s that word again, but can look at that and see like, oh.

Sarah Gormley 00:56:01  So in the book, there’s something that David and I talk about quite a bit, and we think of a Venn diagram and we talk about that. People are made up for three components. There is heredity, environment. So there’s the circles cross over, and the third circle is something that’s just uniquely you. Yeah. And all three of those things contribute to who you are and how you show up in the world. So I’m wondering if the third circle, the uniquely you part, is the will I was talking about. And for you, it’s what makes the difference between some people recovering and some people not. And that’s just unfortunately, maybe luck of the draw in terms of what we can do.

Sarah Gormley 00:56:44  And David and I talk about the Venn diagram when I’m still being really hard on myself. He was like, you don’t. Why aren’t you giving yourself the credit for who you are? This. That third circle. And so I can’t answer that, but it might be a little bit closer to what you’re asking.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:03  Yeah. I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of of whether what that third circle is and how does it exist. But I had a conversation last week with a guy who wrote a book about the victim mindset, and he’s talking about something very similar. He’s saying like, there is your environment, there is your DNA, your genetics is the hand that you were dealt, which is a big part of what life is. But there’s another element which is your agency. And the more that we believe in that agency, I believe the stronger it gets. So it’s it’s useful to recognize the ways that the things that have happened in our lives have shaped us into who we are. Up to the point that I think that that begins to feel like I have to be that way, because then agency disappears, agency has to have some belief.

Sarah Gormley 00:57:55  And you’re giving too much power.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:58  Too much. Yeah. You’re not you’re not honoring that that other part. Right. And so it’s the recognition of like, okay, I’m, I’m the way I am based on a lot, you know, like I, you know, I think I come from a family of. It’s very emotionally repressed, depressive. Like, I can look back a couple generations and I think, yep, it’s there. Genetically. Environmentally, all the above. And I have an agency in how much that dictates my overall experience. It dictates some of it for sure. Yes, but it doesn’t all. And that’s part of the reason I also love this idea of little by little, is because we may only have a little bit of that agency at a time, right? We just have enough to keep sort of inching along as, you know, bigger shifts start to reveal themselves.

Sarah Gormley 00:58:52  And the other thing as you were talking that I think about is like bringing stuff up and looking it over. Right. You know, what you inherited, you know, if you take it out and look at it and examine it, you’re like, yeah. Got some of that. Yeah. Got some of that too. Okay. I’m aware of it. And I think just there’s so much to me that awareness and understanding Standing, frees  up acceptance and, then move it along. Right?

Sarah Gormley 00:59:17  Like, yeah, check.

Sarah Gormley 00:59:19  But then I do the thing where it’s like, yeah, not today. You’re not. We’re not doing that. Scott Kennedy today.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:24  Yes. Good old Scott Kennedy.

Sarah Gormley 00:59:26  Scott Kennedy.

Sarah Gormley 00:59:28  Scott Scott, if you’re either Scott.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:30  If you’re listening to this and you lived in Chandlersville a long time ago and used to beat up a blonde girl. We’d like to hear from you.

Sarah Gormley 00:59:42  I got sent home from school. It was bad.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:44  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 once. Let’s make those shifts happen. Starting today, when you feed a book. 

So if you could speak directly to that woman sitting on the couch in New York all those years ago reading The Noonday Demon, what would you say to her?

Sarah Gormley 01:00:36  I would hand her the book. I would say, look, you need to learn to be kinder to yourself. So maybe find find a group, group therapy or find a therapist. Don’t wait until you think your pain is enough.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:52  That’s a beautiful way to wrap up. You and I are going to continue for a few minutes in a post-show conversation, which is available to people who support the show. So listeners, if you’d like access to those post-show conversations.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:03  We also have ad free episodes and all kinds of other goodies. And the really important thing is you get to support a show that needs your help. Go to one feed. Join. You and I are going to be talking about a thing in the book that I really love, which is you talking about how hard it was to be who you were to your parents because you didn’t want them to hurt. And I think that’s a really there’s a lot there. So you and I are going to discuss that. But thank you so much for coming on.

Sarah Gormley 01:01:30  Thank you for having me. It was a real treat to be here in person.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:33  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 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.