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In this episode, Charlie Gilkey explores the ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching and where it meets modern life. What if you’re doing everything right—staying productive, chasing growth, keeping up—but still feeling off? What if the discomfort you feel isn’t a sign to push harder, but an invitation to let go? This conversation unpacks how its timeless insights can help us navigate today’s fast-paced world, including the rise of AI. You’ll discover a grounded look at how presence, simplicity, and inner alignment still matter—perhaps now more than ever—and how ancient wisdom and new technology can, surprisingly, work hand in hand.

The Tao Te Ching is one of those books I keep coming back to. Ancient wisdom, wrapped in poetry, that somehow feels more relevant every year. Like this line: “If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money, you will never be content.“Simple. Clear. Actually useful.I’ve teamed up with Rebind.ai to create an interactive edition of the Tao—forty essential verses, translated into plain, everyday language, with space to reflect, explore, and ask questions. It’s like having a conversation not just with the Tao, but with me too. If you’re looking for more clarity, calm, or direction, come check it out here.

Key Takeaways:

• Discussion of the “Daodejing,” an ancient Chinese text attributed to Lao Tzu.
• Application of Daodejing teachings to modern life and contemporary challenges.
• Exploration of themes such as presence, simplicity, and inner alignment.
• The balance between engagement and busyness in daily life.
• The metaphor of feeding the “good wolf” within us and acknowledging both positive and negative aspects of our nature.
• The significance of flexibility and adaptability in navigating life’s changes.
• The importance of mental health and accessibility to support systems.
• Reflection on the “Three Treasures” of the Daodejing: simplicity, compassion, and patience.
• The role of philosophy in fostering human connection and understanding.
• Encouragement to embrace the teachings of the Daodejing for personal growth and fulfillment.

Charlie Gilkey is the author of Start Finishing: How To Go From Idea To Done. An Army veteran and near Ph.D. in philosophy, Charlie is the founder of Productive Flourishing, a company that helps professional creatives, leaders, and change-makers take meaningful action on work matters. He’s widely cited in outlets such as Inc. Magazine, Time, Forbes, The Guardian, Life Hacker, and more and his work will help you discover the path from the ideas in your head to the actions you take in your daily life and how to go about getting things done.

Connect with Charlie Gilkey:  Website | Instagram | Facebook

If you enjoyed this conversation with Charlie Gilkey, check out these other episodes:

How to Get Things Done with Charlie Gilkey
Embrace the Chaos: Finding Clarity Through Meditation with Henry Shukman (Part 1)

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Episode Transcript:

Charlie Gilkey 00:00:00  You thought you were crossing a frozen river. It thawed overnight. Guess what? You don’t walk across the river anymore. You change your plan.

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 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 00:01:00  You’re doing everything right. Staying productive. Chasing growth. Keeping up. But what if the discomfort you feel isn’t a sign that you need to do more, but a signal to let go? In this episode, my good friend Charlie Gilkey and I explore the Tao Te Ching, which is one of my favorite books of all time, but not as a relic from the past, but as a guide for navigating the speed and complexities of modern life, including the rise of AI.

We talk about how ancient wisdom can live side by side with new technology and how presence, simplicity, and inner alignment still matter. Now more than ever, I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Charlie, welcome to the show.

Charlie Gilkey 00:01:46  Eric, I’m so delighted to be back. I’m a huge fan of the show for many different reasons. As listeners on the show that have heard me talk before know.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:54  We’re going to be doing something slightly different today, which is going to be a conversation between you and me around a book that we both love deeply, the Tao Te Ching. And so this is not really me interviewing you or you interviewing me, but a conversation where we both share what’s really important to us about this book and how it’s going to apply to people’s lives, and a project that I’ve done around it that I think is interesting. So I’m going to read the parable grandparent talking to the grandchild. Two wolves inside of us, always at battle. One’s a good wolf. One’s a bad wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:29  Which one wins? The one you feed. So maybe we can just use that as the place to jump into the Tao.

Charlie Gilkey 00:02:36  I love that because I think one of the core things of the Tao, one of the principles of the Tao that I love the most and why it’s stuck with me for now, 31 years. I started reading Tao early. Right? Yeah. Is, I think, how it would take the one you feed story a little differently is it wouldn’t push the dark or bad wolf out. It wouldn’t say that’s bad. Just choose that. What it would say is there are both. And both can be teachers. Yep. Both are part of our natures. Both can be teachers. And so what you’re choosing in the moment with the Tao and the fluid way that the Tao is about, is what is the lesson, what’s the way that you’re going to use that particular thing as a guide and as a teacher, like one of the verses from the Dalai Ching is, and I’m going to use Mitchell’s version because I’ve been reading Mitchell’s version more recently, is like, I think it’s what is a bad man but a good man’s teacher.

Charlie Gilkey 00:03:33  That’s a paraphrase, right? And so when you look out and you see people feeding the bad wolf or feeding that wolf, what you should focus on is not necessarily them in their actions per se, but like what’s going on in that moment. Is there a way in which that’s acting out something important, but more importantly, what’s happening inside of you that you can choose to be the yin to that yang or yang to that yin.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:00  Yeah, well, the Tao Te Ching is a book that comes from ancient China and is attributed to someone named Lao Tzu. Although the scholarship seems to be out on the point of whether he was an actual human, one person, whether this book was written by lots of different people over different periods. The scholarship seems to kind of come back and forth, and I would say that where I land is we don’t know. There’s an old legend that’s an interesting one, where Lao Tzu worked in a royal court as sort of their archivist or, you know, keeping of all the records.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:34  And he finally got fed up with life at court, and he left on a donkey, and he came to a famous pass between two mountains that was guarded. And as he was about to go through, the guy there stopped and said, wait, aren’t you the one they call the old master Lao Tzu? He says, yes, I am. And he said, well, before you leave the world, like, tell us what you know. And so Lao Tzu went back and wrote these 81 verses of the Tao, and we have that. So that’s the legend. Again, who knows? But the Tao is 81. You could call them chapters, verses, poems, depending on how you want to frame it up. But they are short teachings, musings and poems about what it means to live a good life, what life is about. And so it’s a book that’s really interesting because it’s not a linear book. You don’t pick it up and start and read verse one, and that leads you in this straight journey to verse 81.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:34  I would say it’s more holographic. It circles around itself again and again. You can pick each of them up and just read it alone and it stands alone. And I think the other thing about it that I think probably you and I both love, is that it’s deep wisdom that is wrapped in poetry. So that’s kind of what the Tao is. And out of it, I think people who spend a lot of time with it, like you and I, emerge certain themes that repeat again and again about living a good life. There’s a translation of it that I love by these gentlemen named Ames and Hall. And they say if we wanted to emphasize the outcome of living according to the Tao, we might translate it as feeling at home in the world, which I just love. I think that’s a great summation of what you can get from reading and trying to live the Tao. So you start to feel at home in the world.

Charlie Gilkey 00:06:27  Yeah, I love that. You know, when people ask me about the Tao because I’ll use the word just Tao a lot, right? I don’t necessarily always say dot I Ching.

Charlie Gilkey 00:06:34  Yeah, right. but the way that I think about the Tao is it’s your natural resonance in the world, right? I used to say your nature, but then people would get Western about that, right? Yeah. Just imagine that you had a certain frequency in the world. And when you find and you live according to the Tao and your Tao, what you’re doing is finding that harmony between your frequency and what’s going on. And so sometimes that helps without going to metaphysical, right in that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:06  I actually love that. I think that’s really good because as soon as you say nature, like you said, you start getting into like, what’s my nature? What part of that has been conditioned in nature versus nurture and all that stuff, which is interesting on some level and ultimately sort of fruitless to try and pull apart. But we do recognize that we all have a certain resonance at a certain point that and that’s really beautifully, beautifully said. And the Tao itself, that word Tao is hard to translate.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:35  It’s often translated as the way your own resonance is another beautiful way. And the book comes right out of the gate saying that the Tao that we can comprehend is not the real Tao so that it says from the beginning anything we try and say about what this thing is exactly is going to miss the mark. Another analogy of that word Tao, and what it means that I have always thought was an interesting one, and it’s not an exact one, but I think it, and I’d be curious to see your opinion of it, is that it’s a little bit like the force in Star Wars, right? It’s this thing that pervades everything. You can use the force for good. You can use the force for bad, but it is the energy of everything.

Charlie Gilkey 00:08:22  Yeah, I think that in resonance, they all sort of work. And I think the thing you need to sort of appreciate about Tao Te Ching is letting go of trying to grasp conceptually to what’s going on, because even that first verse and this is a very Western thing that we have, right? It says, so read it again for so I don’t mix translations.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:46  In the interpretation I did. It says the way that can be comprehended is not the eternal cosmic way. Just like an idea that can be verbalized can’t represent the limitless idea.

Charlie Gilkey 00:08:57  So there’s a lot that’s going on with that, right? Because what it is really counter opposing is reality versus our ability to comprehend reality. Right to know specifically. Now, later chapters of the Tao will continually push against this knowing, knowing, knowing. And there’s a way of thinking about it is rational, understanding scientific mathematical way of understanding it. However, what it will always sort of counter pose, that style of knowing is a way of feeling or intuiting. So it’s like you can’t know it, but you can intuit or feel it. You can vibe with it to use that word that’s now popular, right? And so it’s like, we can’t fundamentally understand the force, the resonance, because it’s not a thing that admits to that. But we can feel it. We can experience it, we can intuit it. Yeah, we can be in accord with it.

Charlie Gilkey 00:10:01  Right. And so I think about it this way, not to overuse my resonance sort of thing, but it’s like so much of our suffering, especially in the body of work that I teach around productivity and self-actualization and skill and talent development. It’s like flow in a lot of ways. Sidney High’s concept of flow like, if you’re in flow, you might not know how or why you got there, but you feel it right. It is a very direct experience of that. And the more that you try to figure that out, the more that you try to meet a process that the more you fall out of flow, right? Yes. And in another way, when we look at joy and, you know, one of the two nested themes, which we’ll talk about more explicit acceptance and in contentment. Yeah, like a lot of people struggle with being joyfully happy with what they have. Yes. And they can’t just experience the joy in what they have without having some sort of overlay of why they enjoy it.

Charlie Gilkey 00:11:01  Is it okay if they enjoy it? Like they’ll go into all of that instead of just saying, you know what? This is your resonance. This is what works for you. Right. I don’t like mushrooms.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:13  I don’t.

Charlie Gilkey 00:11:13  Either. Right. If you put mushrooms in my food, then I might eat it. But I’m not going to like it. I don’t have to have a whole scientific knowing. And what’s about my taste buds and things like that. To know that I don’t prefer mushrooms. Right? I would prefer not to have them. I like other things. And when you sort of accept at a certain point that maybe your Tao, maybe your way, maybe that force that you’re attuned to, it’s just a tune that way and it’s okay, right? Then you can start to accept like, oh, I don’t like mushrooms. I don’t have to make a thing about that. I can be content with what I have because I like it the way that I feel is sufficient. And that is such a remarkable thing.

Charlie Gilkey 00:11:58  And sort of our Western tradition, just for the way that you feel that joy that you feel to be enough in that experience of thing. And so I think so much of the Tao is trying to get us to accept that and to get out of this knowing and like, what is that like, let’s let’s break it Taon. This is work for everybody. Why does that matter? Yeah, it works for you in this moment, in this season. And there might be a moment in season where it doesn’t. And that’s okay too.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:26  Yeah, yeah. I love that idea of sort of trusting what arises for you as being okay. And there’s a lot of directions we could go out of what you just said. And I do want to get back to contentment and simplicity at one point. But the book is called the Tao de Ching and de. It’s spelled depending on the translation. T or D is a strange word if Tao, as the way is hard to understand. This one almost to me feels harder to understand because it can be translated as virtue or strength or integrity.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:06  And I like virtue. But I think the thing about virtue is that virtue, as it’s presented to us often in our Western traditions, and particularly in our Judeo-Christian traditions, virtue is something that you have to fight against yourself, right? You have to impose this virtue on yourself. And the Tao is pointing at something very, very different, which is more of what you just said, that when you’re in accord with the way things are virtue arises very naturally.

Charlie Gilkey 00:13:44  Absolutely. You know, Shambhala Buddhist tradition has a concept called wind, horse, wind. Like, you know, the air moving and horses that you ride. And the idea is that when you find your, your dharma, your path, your job in the world, it is like you’re riding on a on a horse in the wind, right? Meaning you’re moving fast and things feel effortless and things like that, and it’s expressing the same sort of thing. The Western traditions will sometimes call this like when you find your calling right things and sort of lean into your calling, things start to move for you.

Charlie Gilkey 00:14:19  So yeah, virtue is not normative in the way that we talk about it in the West of like a moral virtue, right or wrong, right. It is the way that a thing is. And the day or day part of it is closer to an actualization of the way the thing already is. right? Yes. And so it does have that sort of forceful element to it. Here’s how I would describe this. And you get all sorts of metaphors when you deal with Taoist right or people who are inspired. It’s that difference when you’re just like out on a walk going where you’re going and you’re walking at your natural pace, going where you want to go versus trying to walk 5 or 10% faster and throwing off your flow or trying to slow Taon your gait 5 or 10%. So if you’re listening to this listener, like, try it, right. If you’re walking, try to walk just 5 to 10% faster, or try to walk 5 to 10% slower. And you’ll notice how awkward it is actually.

Charlie Gilkey 00:15:16  Yeah, right. And so it’s really more thinking about how can you be moving at that natural pace for you and do that over the long term?

Chris Forbes 00:15:42  If you want to check it out for yourself, you can grab the interactive Tao experience Eric built with Rebind at one UI. Net Tao spelled t o. That’s one you feed net. It’s a really cool way to actually talk with the verses and with Eric as you read.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:03  One of the things that the Tao points to, like any eastern tradition, is the value of presence, of being here now, right? And just as a time of you and I talking, I turned the draft of my book in yesterday. So I have been deep in that, and I think the last chapter is about presence and in it identifying some of the obstacles to presence. And one of them that I identified is busyness. Now, the challenge with identifying busyness as a challenge to The presence is that the vast majority of us are not going to suddenly become less busy.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:41  Right. That’s not a sacrifice most of us are willing to make, and that’s okay. So the question then becomes, and the thing I’m exploring in the book is, how can we be busy but not rushing, right. That rushing is that push. It’s that leaning forward, leaning ahead. And I think we can move through life at a pace. But there’s something about the internal. You know, I like to think of just leaning back just a little bit as we go.

Charlie Gilkey 00:17:12  Yeah. I mean, as someone who’s written about productivity for so long, there’s been so many ways of helping people navigate their own busyness. Right. And so another way of thinking about this, I think when we think about the difference, when we feel engaged versus when we feel busy, there’s a difference enough for people.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:32  Yeah.

Charlie Gilkey 00:17:33  I don’t want to be less engaged with life. I don’t want to be less engaged with my body of work. I don’t want to be less engaged with my clients. But that sort of frenetic juggling multiple things, feeling compressed, not having margin like those aspects of busyness I want to let go.

Charlie Gilkey 00:17:50  And also I don’t want to continue this sort of valorization of being busy, you know, like, oh, it’s a it’s a badge of honor that I’m so overwhelmed. Like, now let’s get out of that. And so obviously, you can tell someone that’s inspired by the diary would want to pick a word like engage like, no, I actually do want to be doing the walking that I’m here to do. Yeah. When it’s time to stop walking, I need to stop walking. Right. But, and that’s great. And I think when we accept that. So when, when you think about whether you’re a creator or a creator professional, when you’re deep in your sort of thing, you don’t want to be less engaged with that, right? Yes. When you’re in your craft, when you’re in your skill, when you’re in your dharma, when you’re in your infinite game. I can use all sorts of words pointing at the same thing. Right? You want to be doing more of that.

Charlie Gilkey 00:18:40  And so that’s why I think to your point, even if we get out of the valorization of busy people, don’t want to be less engaged. Yep. Right. And so what do you do? How do you find that Venn overlap between being present and being engaged? And that’s where the sweet stuff happens.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:58  Yeah, I love that idea. Reminds me of, like, a poem by a guest of the show, Danusha LaMaris, who’s a poet. And in it, she’s talking about this experience of being present. And she says, isn’t this what the mystics meant when they spoke of forsaking the world not to turn our backs to it, only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures in favor of the pines long shaTao, the slow song of the grass. Right. And I think that’s exactly what you’re saying is when we are encouraged by various spiritual traditions or different things to take a step back. It’s not from the world. It’s not from engagement. It’s from. And I just love this thing, the elaborate plots that we create out of reality.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:49  Because what I’m after in any sort of spiritual endeavor is connection, which is just another way of saying engagement. And I’ve thought a lot about this because there’s this whole idea that, like, you shouldn’t work so much or you shouldn’t work so much, and you’ve been a huge help to me in my life recognizing that that sometimes is very true. Right? That sometimes is very true. But what I’ve recognized about myself and you talk about learning your own resonance. I don’t like to just sit around. It’s not me. And I thought for a while that was a problem. Like, shouldn’t I just be able to sit here and chill out? But I am a person who is best, most connected, happiest? When I am engaged with the world, with things that I like. So for me, this has been a learning of it’s okay to fill your time up with things. If those things lead to deeper connection.

Charlie Gilkey 00:20:48  Precisely when we look at sort of the top five things that make people happy.

Charlie Gilkey 00:20:52  And I just wrote a post on this, so it just happens to be top of mind, but in order they tend to be a bottom is playing music or listening to music. Number four is playing. Number three is exercising. Number two is connections with or like being in connection with other people. And number one is having sex.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:09  Heroin. Oh, sorry. Number one is heroin.

Charlie Gilkey 00:21:14  Okay. Clearly, clearly.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:16  Coming in at number six. Crystal.

Charlie Gilkey 00:21:19  Let’s just say that people’s top five are different, but they sort of catalogue commonalities there. Like, if you chose any one of those things. Right? It’s not like if you got to fill your time up with those that you would be disappointed with, those like. And for all of them? Yes, all of them. There’s a limit to how much you enjoy that. Like too much ice cream is a bad thing, right? Yeah. And so we need that variety. And I think when you lean into the, the sort of multiplicity of being human, which is part of each of our Tao, and you lean into that, you will find a natural sort of flow between the things that bring you joy, the things that are teaching you, between the things that help you be present, so and so forth.

Charlie Gilkey 00:22:00  It’s only when we get rigidly stuck on something. And so I guess, you know, while we while we’ve talked about way, way or simply way yin and yang, acceptance, complicity and simplicity day, I think it would be remiss to not call out the fluidity and flexibility that is inherently part of the Tao structure, the doorway of the Tao teaching paradigm, because there is that native ability to. And many verses are about avoiding rigidity and being more supple and being more pliable. And I think where we find so much of our suffering. So I’ll talk about it from the suffering perspective. First is when we become overly rigid, we become myopically fascinated when we get stuck in those human plots. And we think that those plots are reality. That’s where our suffering comes from. But when we’re more fluid and say, you know what? Like, this was my plan for the day. My energy and the time and what’s happening in the world are not in accord with that plan I made yesterday. I need to lift and shift.

Charlie Gilkey 00:23:01  I need to do something different. That’s where we can get out of that story. And shame of like, I didn’t do the thing and, like, you know, something’s messed up with me. It’s like, no, the world changed, right? You thought you were crossing a frozen river. It thawed overnight. Guess what? You don’t walk across the river anymore. You change your plan, right? Yeah. And being able to do that with grace. Not because you just changed your mind or it got hard. But because you were able to see that the conditions of the world, the conditions of the moment have changed significantly enough that it would be out of alignment to try to pursue that course. That is a fundamental teaching that I think so many of us in the West can can learn a lot more of. It’s just being flexible in that way, but flexible without shame. So there’s plenty of people who will be flexible, but they’ll still hold on to the residue of the previous and they’ll still sort of get beat up about it.

Charlie Gilkey 00:23:58  But just being like, you know what? World changed. I’m changing with it and that’s okay. Let’s go.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:03  Yeah. My friend and editor Chris, we’re talking about this. Yesterday they adopted a two year old and his mother is aging and his father is aging. And we were just talking about the chaos of his life where he’s like, I plan to do this. And then he’s home from daycare and I got a call yesterday. My mom is in the hospital and then I get another call. My dad is in a different I mean, that’s life. Like you can’t control that. And the Tao does talk about this idea again and again of being pliable or flexible. I mean, I think of like verse 36 or chapter 36, I never know what what do you call them versus chapter chapters?

Charlie Gilkey 00:24:44  I will usually say chapter. And then there’s a verse like when it when it’s like, yeah, yeah, okay. And then sometimes I’ll say a line, right. Just, just because that is the other thing.

Charlie Gilkey 00:24:53  If we’re about to start talking about Rebind and things like that. But readers, if you’re paying attention to the Tao and you’re trying to read it, I think where a lot of people get mixed up is they try to take the entirety of the chapter and make it all make sense in context versus finding that line or that verse. It’s like, oh, that is the thing that’s going to resound within me all day, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:25:15  Yes, that’s a great way of thinking of it. I keep coming back to it being poetry. But that’s the way I read poetry too, right? I just pulled out a line from that poem by Danushka Lemus. It’s a long poem, but that line, when I read it, I went, oh, okay, that’s me right? Boy, do I come up with a lot of plots right? For the world.

Charlie Gilkey 00:25:35  Yeah, that’s not unnatural with how we think about music, actually. Like if you think about your favorite songs, like. Yes, it can be the vibe.

Charlie Gilkey 00:25:41  Yes, it can be a beat. But all of you listeners, you know of that song where there’s like a line that will stop you in your tracks for whatever reason? Yeah. And that line has the emotional and insightful and attractive gravitas of the entire song. Right. So approach the dial that way. Right. It’s like that line for you in this moment. But trust me, as someone who’s read it over the last three decades, that same line will lose its profundity for you. But there’ll be the next line that actually hits you. And it’s like, oh, I understand that now. Or that resounds with me now. Yeah. And I need to think about how I’m going to cultivate that.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:24  Yeah. In the interpretation I did of the Tao, the chapter 36, the line that talks about what we’ve been talking about is the soft and gentle overcome the hard and the strong. And in the conclusion to the book, it’s just on my mind. Right? I just turned it in yesterday I was writing about how planning is the right thing up until it’s not right, and at that point, changing your plans is the right thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:51  And I think a lot of what the Tao points to, and I think a lot of what wisdom in general points to, is this ability to respond to the fact that life never sit still. We don’t sit still. We’re always changing. Life is always changing. The people around us are always changing. That’s another key Tao thing, right? Everything is in constant motion. And so to think that we can set up a position. A plan, an approach, a tactic, whatever it is, and that that thing is going to be the only thing we need is to be mistaken about how life works and the fluidity, the flexibility that you’re talking about to sort of move as life moves. You know, I think a plan and you’re a productivity guy, right? You talk about plans like you help me with plans and you helped me realize when. Okay, well, that plan isn’t going to work, is it? Or we thought the world looked like this, but now it looks different. How are we going to respond? And to me, that’s what wisdom is.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:16  All right. Let’s try and transition from where we are now into what Rebind is.

Charlie Gilkey 00:28:24  So, Eric, throughout the conversation, we’ve sort of floated through the Rebind project that you’ve done and how that can be a helpful tool to start understanding the Tao, to go beyond knowing that the Tao teaching is there, to maybe being stumped by the Tao Te Ching to actually deeply understanding it. So what is this project? And I’m curious because there are a lot of reasons one does projects. Why did you choose to do this project in this time, especially as you have a book coming, you know, coming forward at the same time?

Eric Zimmer 00:28:54  One of the books that I’ve spent the most time with in my entire life is the Tao de Ching. It’s an ancient Chinese manual for living well that somehow also reads like poetry. Here’s an example of one verse that I come back to over and over through the years. If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money, you will never be content.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:17  That kind of simple truth doesn’t just sound good. It actually changes how you live if you let it. It’s simple, it’s direct, and it hits me harder every year. If you’ve ever been curious about the Tao, or just want some ancient wisdom that actually works in real life, I’ve got something special. I teamed up with Rebind to create an interactive edition of the Tao. I handpicked 40 core verses, translated them into plain, relatable language, and built them into a guide where you can ask questions and get my take in real time. It’s like having a conversation not just with the Tao, but with me too. You can grab it right now at one Eufy store. That’s spelled T. That’s onyoufeed.net/tao if you’re looking for a little more clarity, calm or direction, I’d love to meet you there. 

The Rebind project. I have to tell a short story in order for anybody to understand what it is. So it’s a company that was started by a guy who had a plumbing business.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:22  He sold it. His family business made a lot of money, and he decided what he wanted to do in his spare time was study philosophy. So he went out and got philosophy books and didn’t understand anything he was reading. He had a lot of money, so he turned around and he went like, okay, if I want to learn about Alfred North Whitehead, who’s the leading Whitehead scholar in the world, I’ll call him up and I’ll pay him to tutor me. And he suddenly found that these books made a lot of sense and transformed his life and were powerful. And then he got to thinking, well, that’s lovely for me, but what about everybody else? And he started having these thoughts around the time that I really start taking off. And so he came up with this idea of, let’s take a great book, let’s pair it with a scholar of that book or an expert in that book, and let’s try and see if there’s a way that readers can read that book, but also have their own conversation with that scholar.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:17  So that’s what Rebind is. It’s an attempt to take a great book and allow you to read it, and also ask questions about it and be asked questions about it so that you engage with it more deeply. And so they approached me about doing a book, and I chose the Tao Te Ching. Now, I used a few words a few minutes ago. Great scholars, world leading experts, all of that. None of which would I qualify for as the Tao Te Ching. However, like you, I am somebody who has lived with and beside and tried to live into that book for 30 plus years. And when they asked me to pick a book that I loved that I thought would be good for this, it was the book that came up. So the first thing that had to be done was we needed a translation of the book that was in the public domain, meaning it’s going to be 50 plus years old. All the translations of the Tao that are over 50 years old are very arcane. They’re hard to understand.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:16  There’s a bunch of more contemporary ones, like the Stephen Mitchell or the Derek Lin version that you and I both love. Ursula K Le Guin did a great one, but they’re all under copyright. So the first thing I did was I decided, okay, I’m going to just do my own interpretation of it, and I cut it down from 81 verses to about 50 my selections. And then I spent a lot of time, both with people from Rebind, questioning me, interviewing me, me talking, writing all of this, a bunch of content to go along with it. So now we have this translation. We have all this content, they load it into the Rebind software, and now you go in there, you buy it like you buy a book. Although it’s all digital, you see it on your computer and you can read the interpretation and you and I can have a conversation about it to the degree that, you know, I creates real conversations. But boy, it sure seems like it, right? And this thing is uncannily like me.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:16  I mean, in regards to the Tao, when you ask it questions about the Tao, it responds in the way that I would. It would be a different thing if you did it or, you know, Stephen Mitchell did it, or everybody’s going to have their own interpretation. But this is kind of like sitting down and having me as your tutor, friend, conversation partner about the Tao.

Charlie Gilkey 00:33:37  I love that, and I love that it has that point of view to it. And I don’t know if you knew this, Eric, but actually, as an undergraduate there I was, minding my own business as a junior in philosophy, and I was approached by a psychology professor who wanted to learn more about American pragmatism, which I happen to have been studied a whole lot of. And my professors, he’s like, oh, if you want someone to tutor you on that one, you need to talk to Charlie, okay? So he approaches me and he’s like, hey, I want to learn about this.

Charlie Gilkey 00:34:07  And I’m like, this is the weirdest thing ever. Like, you’re a PhD psychology professor. So why do you want to hear me talk about? But we met, you know, every other week, and we’d read some of the greats from American Pragmatism. And I’d be like, oh, so here’s what you got to go on. Like, I knew enough about psychology and enough about philosophy to really do this sort of thing. And so this was 1999, 2000, right? And also when I taught philosophy as a philosophy instructor, like this is the value of a human or in our age of a digital clone of having some something that’s been taught on the patterns of what that human would teach. Because again, let’s talk about it because because AI Rebind , you know, are really about pattern recognition and recreating those patterns. If you were learning from a tutor, what you would be learning is the patterns that they’ve taught other students or the patterns by which they see that. And so, you know, I’m any good teacher or tutor coach, you know, advisor, you know, a speaker.

Charlie Gilkey 00:35:09  Like when you hear them. It sounds new and original novel again, but if they’re really being honest, it’s like, no, I’ve actually said this 3000 times, right? Yeah. I’m just able to say it in a way that makes it sound new and fresh and apply to you, which is exactly what the Rebind technology does. Right? And what what you’re getting from this book. So yeah, it is like you’re sitting down, you know, playing with it a little bit. I know what’s in it. And it’s like, this is dope. This is one of those ways I wish I could have learned some of the things, you know, some of the great books that, you know, I chewed through the hard way. Like, I don’t know if they’ve got Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, but I read that one when I was like 13 and it kicked the crap out of me, right? anyways, so that’s what you get with the with the Rebind project?

Eric Zimmer 00:35:52  Yeah, it is really interesting.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:54  And there are other rebuilds out there besides me. I mean, Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Deepak Chopra, Lena Dunham. You look at this page of these binders and then I’m on it. I sort of feel like one of these is not like the other.

Charlie Gilkey 00:36:07  You were going to go there, but.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:09  But there I am. But I think what you said there is really important. Because you could just go to ChatGPT and say, teach me about the Tao. And it would. And probably a significant portion of what it said would be correct in the way that we said this thing could mean lots of things to lots of different people. What the rebind thing is doing and why I wanted to do it, was it’s not a conversation with a faceless AI. It’s a conversation to some degree that has my personality and flavor. Now that kind of weirds me out on one level, but I’m a real big believer that, like, technology arrives and it never goes backwards. Right. And so AI is here.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:54  And just like the internet arriving or social media arriving or cars arriving, there are going to be lots of great things that come out of that and probably all sorts of consequences we wish didn’t come out of that. So I just wanted to land on the side of. How can we use this in a good way? What can we do with this that’s actually useful, that we couldn’t have done before and before you couldn’t have had a conversation with me about the Tao, or you couldn’t have it. A conversation with Margaret Atwood about A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens or all these other things. And so I think it combines the, the, the technology in an interesting way, but also keeps a human element. Right. And I think that’s what a lot of us are really afraid of with AI is that it can in many ways replace humans. Now, what I think is very interesting about that is AI, when it seems like it’s replacing a human is just copying humans, it’s taking humans and just channeling them.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:57  But this was a even more on point way of saying like, okay, this is new technology. That’s really cool. but it’s also there’s a person right there with you that, you know, if you’re going to buy my rebind, you’re either going to be interested in the Tao or you’re going to like me in the way that I see the world and people listening to this show, hopefully both.

Charlie Gilkey 00:38:16  Yeah, yeah. I mean, on this one, I’m a moderate techno optimist, meaning I’m I’m not one of those guys that is just like exuberantly pushing all the new technology and how it’s going to change the world. And we don’t have to worry about the bad things, right? I’m not that. However, this is one of the many promises of AI that actually make me excited about it because this is a fractal of tutoring tools. Or is this a version of tutoring tools? And imagine the world’s population having access to someone that can teach them different things. Or maybe someone’s right. There’s a winTao.

Charlie Gilkey 00:38:54  Eric, you, Eric, and the Rebind team may not like me saying this, but there’s a winTao of 5 to 7 years to where at a certain point, it’s going to be easier for anyone to sort of clone the voice of someone else about a given sort of thing. Like, absolutely, that’s an inevitability. So there’s a window. Get Eric while you can now. Right. But imagine being that student in the south of Kenya who lives in a small village, you know, has water, you know, like enough electricity and a cell phone that can actually be learning from the best people or people that they resonate with from around the world. Yeah, right. That’s the key. Unlock that we have here. Yep. And we do need more models of people using the technology in ways that are neutral, positive or positive for us to be able to accept that way and that way, we can see, much like the Tao itself, like, yes, people are going to use these technologies in all sorts of nefarious ways.

Charlie Gilkey 00:39:54  Yes, there are externalities that we need to get sorted and figured out. And it’s also true that people are going to be using this as a tool to enhance human flourishing and understand them, and wisdom. This Rebind project is sort of a drop in that larger pool of, of where we want to to go with this, which is what made me excited about it in the first place, to show up and talk about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:15  I agree, and I think that that is one of the beauties of what this technology can do, is provide people who would not have access to a thing at all, some degree of access, and I think the Rebind is a great example of it. Like if we could all hire a private Alfred North Whitehead tutor to get on a call with us one on one for an hour every week, that would be the best. However, 99.999999% of the world is never going to do that. So now they have a different option. I have this I have this conversation with a friend of mine who’s a therapist, and we talk about eye therapists.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:54  And he originally was like, that’s terrible. It’s an awful idea. It’s and I’m like, well, okay. Like I’m a degrees kind of guy, a middle way kind of guy. It’s just built into my nature. Yes. A very good, competent therapist in person. Best, worst. Suffering deeply from mental illness and being able to get no help in between a very well trained eye that can help you deconstruct your problems better. And I think that’s how I’ve been thinking about a lot of these things, is there’s an ideal world, but that’s not the world for the most part. And so to your point that you’re making about, I think the thing that most excites me about this technology as a whole is exactly what you’re saying. It’s able to bring learning and knowledge to people in a way that far surpasses what we’ve been able to give before.

Charlie Gilkey 00:41:46  Absolutely. And to your therapist point, like robot has been out for a long time. And what it was, is it a text based interface to where you would text robot about what’s going on and help you sort of with some different therapeutic models process what you’re doing and it help people get better.

Charlie Gilkey 00:42:02  Yep. Right. Was it as good as, you know, the world class, you know, mental therapist? No. But, Eric, you know, of some folks who’ve been there. I know of plenty of folks where when you’re in some of those patches, like a solution that’s good enough is way better than no solution at all. Yep. Right. Yep. And in that case, like that means more of us stay alive and more of us can show up with our own Tao in our own way and be part of the human harmony. And who wouldn’t want more of that, right? Yeah. The Rebind project, that’s the this that I’m referring to is a part of that. Yeah, that’s what’s really exciting about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:41  Wobot is very cute, too. I have to say, it’s sort of adorable in its way, but I was having this conversation with somebody recently on this podcast. It was Adam Mastroianni, who’s an online writer, but he wrote a he wrote a post called A skull full of poison, which is his descent into some sort of mental illness slash depression.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:03  And he just wrote about what he found surprising about it. And one of the things that he said he found surprising was, if you want tacos, the whole world will tell you where to get good tacos. Everybody’s got an opinion on where to go get a good taco. But if you need mental help a therapist, you are really stuck. It’s not that they’re not out there. It’s not that you can’t get them all that. However, all of that assumes a certain level of competency and wellness to even navigate that whole system. I guess we’re sort of hitting the same point again. Some of these tools can be helpful. It’s interesting. They’ve done some studies where they asked people to rate an online conversation with a therapist, and it turns out that most people end up preferring the AI version right up until they know it’s an AI version. And then, of course, they prefer the other one. And all that points to is that there is value that can be gained in these things. So now let’s turn back to the Tao for our remaining little bit of time here.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:07  Do you have a favorite chapter now. Like what chapter now is like ringing your bell.

Charlie Gilkey 00:44:15  The enduring favorite chapter is the one about the three treasures . Oh yeah. So the three treasures are simplicity, compassion and patience. Okay. Right. Probably in the 60s, 67. Nice. Okay. That’s the one I come back to time and time again. Just when when I look at people who are thriving, people who are happy, and people who really are on a path that I find compelling. They’re practicing those in certain ways. And also, when I’m suffering, I realize that I’m probably not practicing those.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:54  Signals. What were the three again?

Charlie Gilkey 00:44:55  Simplicity, compassion and patience and compassion comes pretty native to me. So that’s not the one. Well, self-compassion, that’s a whole other story, right? But it’s really simplicity and patience, right? Just because unfortunately, the world does not move as fast as our minds do. Like when I hit publish on something. It may take a minute.

Charlie Gilkey 00:45:18  Yeah, right. turns out other people have their own agendas that are not on my own timeline. So usually my own suffering comes when I’m being myopic about timelines or when I’ve overcomplicated something you’ve probably heard me say in different ways. Like, when in doubt, choose a simpler option. Yeah, right. Because usually that’s the way to go forward. The second one would be the one that’s along the lines of the Tao is broad and plain, but people prefer the side paths. Yeah that’s another one that comes up. It’s like what we need to do is like it’s pretty straightforward. We just need to do it. But like, we’re off over here in these, like, plots and side paths. Like messing around and not actually getting anywhere. Like what happened if we just did the thing? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:01  You know, I may have translated or interpreted that. I suppose I should say. Translation would mean I went to the original Chinese and I translated into English, which is not what I did.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:11  I took 15 or so different English language translations and sort of patch them together into what felt most resonant. I may have translated that phrase you just use there as shortcuts. Right. People prefer the shortcuts for me. Chapter 44 is an all time favorite, and it’s one of the ones that drew me to the book and it keeps me. There are different parts of it, but I’ll just read the last part, which is if you were content with what you have, you can take joy in what is. And here’s the line that kills me when you realize there’s nothing lacking. The whole world belongs to you. I just love that because we think about all these things we need to do in order to be happy. We need to go get this. And when I get that and when I arrange this and this is just saying, well, you could try all that if you want, but there’s a more direct path like you were just talking about. There’s an actual path where you just go, well, let me try and just bypass all that.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:08  Not that it doesn’t have value, but I can if I realize there’s nothing lacking. And the few times in my life where that has truly landed have been the moments of the most ecstatic peace, joy, relief where I just saw truly and completely, there’s nothing missing. This moment is sufficient unto itself. Just this.

Charlie Gilkey 00:47:37  Yeah, I’m with you on that one. And what’s so surprising, but not surprising, is how many of those moments are found when you get out of your head. It kind of goes back to what I was talking about with the first chapter. Right. We’d like if you’re like in your head, like, I could be doing this or, you know, we both have partners that we love to death. And if we’re like, is she happy? And like, what’s going on? And is she content and like, do we need to do that? And you do all that kind of whatnot? You miss actually that moment. Yeah, everything was fine. And what a gift actually to be in a place to where you can let the rest go and be like, this is here because many of us don’t get that or we don’t get nearly enough of that.

Charlie Gilkey 00:48:19  Yeah, right. And so I love that you chose that one. Yeah. There’s so many. You know, if we actually in the community when I do monthly calls, there’s a PF bingo card of things that I talk about a lot. Right. And so it’s like Charlie references the Tao is one of those bingo slots. Right. Because I do it so frequently depending on would be like, well, one of my favorite lines in the Tao is about, you know, being as careful at the end as you are. Yeah, I’m in the beginning. Right. And so it just is one of those things. And I think that’s the beauty because if you read it and you practice it and you cultivate it enough, you can find that moment. You’re like, oh, this is where that line that some guy, maybe guys, multiple guys I don’t know, wrote 2000 years ago, right. Many, many thousands of years ago. It applies to this moment. Honestly. That’s why I still retain my label as philosopher.

Charlie Gilkey 00:49:12  I never stopped being one because I left academia. And my joy was always philosophy for living. Like, how do we take these wisdom traditions, whether they’re strictly on the philosophy side or whether they’re strictly on the spirituality and religion side? And that divide is sometimes very, very tenuous. Yeah, but how do we make them apply to us now? And how do we appreciate that this thing that I’ve been experiencing right now is tied to a feeling and thought that some one 300 years ago was having or a thousand years ago, if you take the Western tradition, some monk sitting in a monastery philosophizing had this very same or very similar experience and was trying to figure it out. Right. And so for me, while many people think philosophy and some of these things like actually distance you and make you super heady following the platonic tradition, for me it actually is a fundamentally connecting thing because it makes me realize that, like this thought, this idea, this belief, whatever it is, is a part of this human orchestra.

Charlie Gilkey 00:50:18  And they had it, she had it, I have it. Which means likely someone in the future is going to have this to. And it’s a thread that connects us.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:29  That’s a beautiful, beautiful line. And I think that might be a great place for us to wrap up. I think the last thing I’ll say is that idea of that line that connects us kind of goes all the way back to the phrase the Tao itself, this line, this thread, this thing that interweaves everything together and beautiful. I love orchestra to human orchestra. Beautiful. Charlie, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on. I always love talking with you. Thank you for helping me share this Rebind project with the world for the first time. And great to see you same.

Charlie Gilkey 00:51:03  Thanks for having me and I look forward to our next conversation and however that thread connects us.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:09  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:18  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, Leah Weiss discuss how to recognize the hidden signs of burnout. She shares how burnout can creep in under the guise of purpose, why discernment can’t be done alone, and how to find your way back to yourself.

Key Takeaways:

• The issue of burnout, particularly in the workplace.
• Personal experiences and challenges related to burnout.
• The importance of recognizing signs and symptoms of burnout.
• The concept of discernment in addressing dissatisfaction.
• Distinction between burnout and compassion fatigue.
• The role of community and support in navigating burnout.
• Factors contributing to burnout at individual, team, and organizational levels.
• The significance of psychological safety and team dynamics.
• The search for meaning and alignment of personal values in work.
• The impact of entrepreneurship on well-being, particularly for women founders.

Leah Weiss, Ph.D. is a researcher, lecturer, consultant, entrepreneur, and author. She teaches Compassionate Leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she created the perennially-waitlisted course “Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion.” She is Founding Faculty at Compassion Institute. She is also the co-founder of Skylyte – a company that specializes in using the latest neuroscience and behavior change to empower high-performing leaders and managers prevent burnout for themselves and their teams. Her first book, “How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind” focuses on developing compassionate and soft skill-based leadership while also offering research-backed actionable steps towards finding purpose at work.

Leah Weiss:  Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Leah Weiss, check out these other episodes:

Embracing Emotions at Work with Liz Fosslien

How to Deal with Burnout Through Self-Compassion with Kristin Neff

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:01:04  What if the very thing that gives your life meaning is also what’s burning you out? That’s the paradox. Leah Weiss found herself in teaching compassionate leadership at Stanford.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:16  Working with organizations inspired by the Dalai Lama. Doing the kind of work most of us dream of. And yet she was falling apart. In today’s conversation, we unpacked the silent erosion of self that can happen even when everything looks right on the outside. Leah shares how burnout crept in under the guise of purpose, why discernment can’t be done alone, and how the small act of knitting helped her find her way back to herself. This episode is a map for anyone wondering is it me? Is it the job or is it the world we’re trying to survive in? I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Leah, welcome to the show.

Leah Weiss 00:01:56  Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:59  Yeah, I am happy to have you on. As we were talking before this interview. You were on the show almost four years ago to the day. It was just kind of interesting that we talked at this time and amazing that it’s been four years. So I’m really happy to have you back on.

Leah Weiss 00:02:15  I’m really happy to be here and continue this conversation. We started many moons ago in a very different climate that we’re in today.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:24  Yeah. And our basic topic is going to be oriented around the idea of burnout, you know, workplace burnout primarily, but we know it extends well beyond the workplace. But before we get into 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. 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 second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d love to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Leah Weiss 00:03:10  I think in terms of how I hear that in my life, one of the ways that this really resonates with me is acknowledging the degree to which we’re influenced and shaped by our surroundings, and that we want to be thoughtful about that.

Leah Weiss 00:03:27  I’m a parent of three young children, and so we talk a lot about the navigation of being a friend to people who need support, who are in distress, but also understanding what you need to thrive so you can be that friend. And I think one nuance I would say when I read this parable again in advance of our conversation is it really caught me these words good and bad, AD, because I think the way that I tend to think about this is tendencies that pull us in directions that are connective, supportive, conducive of compassion or fear based scarcity. And I don’t know that labeling them as good or bad helps us in actually navigating these currents that we all have. So it’d be interesting to talk that through. And then for the other side that you asked about in my work, how does this influence how does this relate? I think I spend my time now working within companies, helping to set up teams, climates of courts in the storm, within organizations that are navigating a lot of change and even often toxicity.

Leah Weiss 00:04:47  How do you think about feeding the positive? Not just within yourself, but collectively? So I think that it really does come to the heart of what do you do when you’re navigating things that are problematic, and how do you create mutual support so everyone can move towards the proverbial best selves, healthiest selves, together?

Eric Zimmer 00:05:08  Yeah, I think that idea of good and bad is really interesting. It’s brought up a lot, and I’ve said a lot of times on this show. You know, I’ve always loved the Buddhist phrasing of these things as skillful and unskillful actions. Like, I feel like that speaks to, you know, what we’re really saying more, but it’s kind of a boring story. The grandparents said there’s this unskillful wolf, and he was sent away to corporate training. And, you know, so I thought where we might start is with you and burnout because I think you suffered. I don’t know if this is how you would say it, but you certainly had a case of it. And I’m wondering if you could kind of share what that was like, what happened, and, you know, sort of how you made your way out of it. And I think that’ll lead us then into talking about this more generally.

Leah Weiss 00:05:56  Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to share. I think, you know, for me, what is so interesting, at least from the vantage point of today, is to uncouple kind of what happened externally and internally. For me, that led me to kind of realize at some point a few years ago that I just I don’t want to go on this way. This isn’t how I want to work, how I want to parent, how I want to be in the world. I had just turned 40 when we spoke last time. I think for me, that was actually, you know, some of these symbolic ages I feel like really helped us ask the questions around, am I where I’m supposed to be in my life? And for me, I think what I was seeing was I was working in a way that was not sustainable, that I was missing elements of my children’s life because I was traveling or preoccupied when I was there.

Leah Weiss 00:06:56  I think a lot of what I was hooked by to use another kind of Buddhist psychology term. When I went back to Stanford to work full time after graduate school. Each of us kind of has currencies that we buy into. And for me, this kind of academic research understanding, kind of contributing in that space was so exciting. But also it led me to work around the clock, let go of a lot of what I now know are the signs of burnout. You know, tipping from starting to let self-care go, displaced frustration from work and to other elements of life. And then, of course, like for me, as someone who identifies as a practitioner, as someone who’s trying to work on myself, like I’m sure everybody listening to this podcast can relate to. Spent many years in doing meditation retreats, cultivating skills that it really hurt to admit weren’t working in this environment, and compounded by, you know, living in Palo Alto, one of the most expensive places in the world. Having three children, being a breadwinner for our family.

Leah Weiss 00:08:14  And I think then for me, what I experienced was a very similar to what a lot of people do. One of my mentors was the one who really made me see where I was at, and that often is the case. It’s hard to self-diagnose when we’re burned out. It’s our loved one’s a close colleague who calls us out and says, you’re not the version of yourself. You know what’s happening. So she called me out as kind of the frog in the pot over time, and I really all of a sudden I remember that breakfast viscerally, where I felt it and I saw it. And then, you know, that’s kind of the first step, but that’s also where the work begins. And one of the things I’ve been really interested in is playing both sides of this equation of when do you make decisions around, I need to change my external circumstances, which like, who in the world isn’t thinking about that now with the great resignation? Right. So when do I decide this fit isn’t working? When do I decide this is me? I can quit, I can move, but this is my stuff that’s going to follow me wherever I go.

Leah Weiss 00:09:18  And how do you uncouple all of this and understand what you need to do? So being a nerd, I’d been working in this space of burnout and compassion fatigue for many years, but I started to take this lens more. Looking at the question around how do you think about culture, of workplaces, of our communities and how I had guided so many other people through this question of, am I in the right career? Am I in the right location? Am I living the life I’m wanting to live, and then asking all those questions of myself and letting myself off the hook for like, I can’t expect myself to meditate my way out of this. And what if I allow myself to also come to a conclusion like this isn’t where I want to raise my kids. This isn’t the work that I want to be doing. This isn’t the way I want to be doing it. And let that part of the equation open up, which I think is interesting to look at now because it’s where so many people are, right? Because we can move now and people are quitting their jobs now and there’s other jobs available or that perception.

Leah Weiss 00:10:24  The set of questions. If you feel like this is not my beautiful life that you’re living right now, how do you start to go through that process in a way where you’re not blowing everything up irretrievably, but kind of in a thoughtful way, asking the right questions in experimenting with steps that you’re not going to completely end up regretting.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:44  Yeah, I think that question is so fundamental to so many things. Is this something that I need to change in the outside world, or is this something I need to change inside myself? Is that a little bit of both? And I think this is why I have often said, I think the Serenity prayer sums up so much of what life is about, right? Should I accept this or change it? And the wisdom to know the difference is really the hard part. What things for you helped you or still help you in sorting that question out? You know, how do you go about when you find yourself at one of those points and you’re looking in those two directions? What are some of the tools or ways, thought processes, whatever, that help you find that wisdom to know the difference?

Leah Weiss 00:11:28  I mean, I think there’s always some element of having quiet, some version of of prayer, juju prayer, in my case, meditation, if you will. Like there’s those elements. But I think what I’ve really been leaning into as well, you know, just getting back to like Embodied elements of life, like cooking with my little kids. Walking a ton. Knitting. I’ve been knitting so much. Gardening, like putting physicality front and center and and slowing down to do that and taking when that feels odd, to move back and forth between the pace of ideas and screens and zoom meetings, you know, hour after after hour. And it does feel jarring to be back into bodies and relationships and listening more deeply. And I think even taking that kind of discomfort of transition as an important daily practice has been huge. And just like so many of us, you know, sleep in the last few years with the pandemic, you know, we were already an insomniac world. But how much more so now? and, you know, experimenting with like what happens when I take screens out of the equation when I go back to paper books, when I draw, even though I’m a terrible artist, but I draw because of the process feeling, you know, grounding all the things we’re baking in the world, all the things that we’re like reclaiming.

I think this physicality is kind of shared. That’s been big, big, big for me too.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:10  Yeah, I think the other idea, it’s in the spiritual direction world, and I was trained as an interfaith spiritual director. The word discernment is used a lot. Right. And that’s what we’re kind of talking about. And I’ve more and more become convinced that discernment kind of has to happen in community. It really works much better when I’m not discerning all by myself. When that discernment is happening, by me processing it with other people, obviously the right people, the right circumstances, but still a really valuable part of the process. I want to go back for a second, though, before we move on to you. You’ve got this role at Stanford. You’ve got children. You’re the breadwinner. Your husband still, I think in school and you are doing work that feels monumentally important to you. You are working on compassion research that is sort of backed by the Dalai Lama, right? Like so I mean, you’ve landed in some ways, like dead set into, like, all right, this is it.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:08  And yet there were still aspects of burnout for you in there. Did that make it harder to figure out because the work did feel so meaningful?

Leah Weiss 00:14:19  Oh you’re good Eric. Yes it did. I think it made it harder to recognize it. Even a culture that is a group that’s come together around a shared value with noble ambitions, can still have toxicity and challenge in how to operate and how to function together. That, you know, since that time now I’m well aware, like even if you look at the research, like toxicity and cultural problems and nonprofits where we’re aligned on purpose, they can be pervasive because there’s a sense of you self-sacrifice and you sublimate the how you’re doing things underneath the importance of the mission. And I think I was personally very predisposed to that. And I think that culturally, that is a big part of the experience. And it’s even more painful, you know, and I see this even I do a lot of work in health care these days with the pandemic, when people who are purpose driven, they’re in a line of work because they want to help others, and then they feel divorced in their how they’re executing that work from their core values.

Leah Weiss 00:15:31  I think there is an extra layer of what we’re calling moral injury that happens and disillusionment. Right? Because, yeah, there’s a lot to say about that. And then I think for me it was a lot of self doubt too, and I felt like I was in layer upon layer of kind of worldviews that didn’t align with me as a mom, a woman. You know, academia is not known for notoriously being friendly to women, nor is Buddhist organizational structures. you know, it’s a lot. But I also want to come back to what you said, I think so profoundly this point about discernment in community. And when I went to Boston College for my graduate degrees, that was something that really jumped out at me. Not that we didn’t have community in the Buddhist world that I was being raised in, but I think the way in which it’s understood is really unique and profound. And I think that was something that gave me kind of strength, that amidst feeling overwhelmed, feeling like I’m in my dream situation and it’s not working, but there was access to some amazing people around me, even swimming in the same culture that was dysfunctional.

Leah Weiss 00:16:49  I remember one of my mentors described being in academia is kind of like being in a mafia oriented place, because you have to, like, hook yourself onto the people with power. But if you start getting powerful enough, then you become a magnet for other people who want your turf. And you know all of that. When I first heard, I was like, this is bananas. And by the end I was like, that’s pretty astute. So anyway, the people who are swimming in this kind of dysfunctional toxicity but have their heads on not necessarily just straight, but they have some practice, their grounding in those people that you can come back to to figure out who am I? What does this mean together? Is everything.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:50  One of the books that I’ve spent the most time with in my entire life is the Dao de Ching. It’s an ancient Chinese manual for living well that somehow also reads like poetry. Here’s an example of one verse that I come back to over and over through the years. If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money. You will never be content. That kind of simple truth doesn’t just sound good, it actually changes how you live if you let it. It’s simple, it’s direct, and it hits me harder every year. If you’ve ever been curious about the Dao, or just want some ancient wisdom that actually works in real life, I’ve got something special. I teamed up with Rebind to create an interactive edition of the Dao. I handpicked 40 core verses translated them into plain, relatable language and built them into a guide where you can ask questions and get my take in real time. It’s like having a conversation not just with the Dao, but with me too. You can grab it right now at one you feed store that’s spelled T. That’s one you feed. To. If you’re looking for a little more clarity, calm or direction, I’d love to meet you there.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:10  I want to get to where you are now, and I have some questions about that. But I feel like before we do that, it would be helpful to talk about burnout a little bit more.

What are we talking about? What is it? How do we know when we have it? Like, I mean, I think there’s a lot that we can sort of cover in that area. And then I’d love to talk about how your current experience compares to your old experience and the differences there. So maybe we’ll just start with that very simple question. Like what is burnout?

Leah Weiss 00:19:36  Yeah, burnout is this combination of emotional exhaustion, dehumanization, and a lack of self-efficacy. So those are like the academic words to describe them. And it’s also part of the World Health Organization definition and more plain terms. I think a way to think about it is the emotional exhaustion, that feeling of like at the end of a long day, you just don’t have anything left to give. You can’t hear about another person’s problem. You know, the version of you that wants to show up to others is depleted. The depersonalization goes in both directions. So one of the kind of textbook ways people describe it as like the physician who’s become kind of a cynical, rude, like no grace or tact.

Leah Weiss 00:20:25  They’re just like going to get right to the question without thinking about how does that impact you? So it can be the side of personalizing others, but it can also be de personalizing yourself. And they often happen together. So if I’m treating you from a cynical, kind of dehumanized perspective, I’m probably also thinking of myself in that way and the people I’m surrounding myself with. And then the third part is a lack of self-efficacy. This is, I think, the actually trickiest part for building health out of burnout, because the more burnt out you are, the less you feel like you can shape your environment. So then all the options for where would you change yourself? Change the situation seem impossible because there’s no efficacy. Do you feel like a victim in the world is happening to you as part of the illness itself? Yeah. So you can’t recognize the help that is available to you. So you put those three together. One of the ways I often talk about it that people find helpful is it’s not a binary.

Leah Weiss 00:21:28  You have it or you don’t. It’s a spectrum. And so early burnout often looks very similar to workaholism. Middle burnout is like middle stages when you’re losing your habits of self-care, when you’re snapping at your loved ones at the end of the day, and then later stage burnout. You know, significant behavioral changes, either significant depression or anxiety, loss of hope, complete collapse. There’s physical symptoms that happen along the way. With all of this, when you’re burned out, your amygdala is enlarged. Your like old lizard brain. As people often kind of summarize, the amygdala is bigger in your cognitive resources. Your ability to think and problem solve is smaller. Like literally your brain functionality changes when you’re burned out, which is also really interesting. And then when you think demographically, women, people of color, those of us who don’t have a partner, there’s higher risk. And then in the context of the pandemic, you know, we’ve been seeing mass exodus of women from the workplace. and I’d been really looking into this a lot.

Leah Weiss 00:22:37  And the rates of burnout are much higher, which makes sense given all the contextual factors. Parents are higher than non-parents, women are higher, and so forth. So there’s all these other layers and features of the individual, but also the environment that feed into burnout.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:55  And how do we determine burnout from something like depression or anxiety, particularly if burnout eventually manifests itself in depression and anxiety? Is there any way to sort of tell the two apart, and is it important to tell the two apart, I guess.

Leah Weiss 00:23:11  It’s a great question. I think by the time you’re experiencing the anxiety and depression symptoms of burnout, it would be indicated to get mental health support. You’d be at the upper end of the burnout spectrum. And so you would want to be seeing a professional have the professional do the differential diagnosis between burnout or generalized anxiety or depression. One thing that people say you see in the literature, it’s like, is there a sense of it? It gets more acute in the workplace. Or more acute Sunday night blues.  Or anxiety, you know, so maybe you’re you feel like yourself on your vacations, in the evenings and the weekends, but you see your reactive ness heightened in the workplace. That could be an indicator. But for listeners who are experiencing this kind of depression or anxiety, the upshot is basically you want to talk to a professional anyways and work with them to determine, you know, because it might be that you want to have medication or a certain kind of treatment alongside doing a whole discernment process around your professional context and path.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:25  Yeah. As somebody who has had depression in, you know, different forms for a long time and somebody who may have suffered burnout at different points. The relationship between the two is very difficult to figure out, right? Say like, well, depression often to me looks like what burnout might feel like, which is particularly a lack of enthusiasm of anything that takes energy from me. Right. So it’s like that’s one of its signal things is like, anything that takes energy causes me to be like, no.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:56  Which work gets implicated in, right? Work can be one of those things. I think that question around, you know, how do you respond on off work times is an interesting one. What about compassion fatigue? Because you also say this is not the same thing as compassion fatigue. So I certainly know that is something we’re hearing a lot about. Talk about how burnout and compassion fatigue are different from each other.

Leah Weiss 00:25:19  So the interesting thing with compassion fatigue, and I’m sure you’ve come across this, but I think for listeners, it’s good to kind of lay this out. When you start reading about compassion fatigue, one of the first things that you start humming across is people saying it’s not actually compassion that’s fatigued, it’s empathy. And the reason this is important is basically the neuroscience of understanding how our brains and bodies respond to chronic suffering. We have built into us these. If you remember back to psych 101, the ideas of of mirror neurons and the mother infant mimicry that from the time humans are newborns, they read and mimic the parents facial expressions.

Leah Weiss 00:26:10  So we have wired in these emotional kind of tuning forks. One of the things that has been really interesting with the advances in neuroscience in the last decade is we see that people who are chronically exposed to suffering, if they’re responding from a place of empathy. There’s a tipping point in which, like our brains and bodies, can’t stay empathically attuned. All the time we hit a point of overwhelm and collapse where our compassion then goes away. So that becomes interesting. So let’s say in the beginning, it’s useful if I’m with you, Eric, and you’re talking about a problem that you’re facing. It’s useful that I have this ability to mirror you, to understand and respond. We’re social. We’ve evolved to be like tribal in some way. Mutual support is part of survival. But at some point when it gets Eric times a thousand that I’m surrounded by suffering that I can’t solve, then the pain response in my brain that’s mirroring hits a point where it’s not signaling all the time. It like doesn’t function anymore.

Leah Weiss 00:27:25  When we talk about compassion fatigue, we’re actually talking about empathy fatigue. And then what’s interesting about that is that there’s compassion because it’s different than empathy. There’s a way that we can respond to other people’s suffering that doesn’t get depleted and used up is the thought behind it. And interestingly, this is a thousands of years old intuition from wisdom traditions. Right. Like the idea that you could participate in contemplative support of others emits massive suffering. I mean, there’s so many stories all the way back to wisdom, traditions, canons about people who who did that. So the idea then borrows on what does it mean for us as people to learn to respond with compassion rather than empathy? What is the difference? What is that feel like? How do we train ourselves? How do we train our physicians and health care providers to do that? And then therefore, how do we kind of solve this problem of compassion fatigue. So this is a discourse I’ve been a part of since I was in grad school right after September 11th, studying all the rise of burnout and compassion fatigue in healthcare, in first responders and all of those kind of studies.

Leah Weiss 00:28:43  And I think the implications for us today are fascinating, no matter what our line of work is in the pandemic, all the uncertainty and pain and anxiety that we were all navigating this lens of like hitting a tipping point with that where we can’t engage skillfully anymore. So what does that even mean for me is, you know, a parent navigating schools closed and changes in workplaces and yada yada. So, you know, back to your question of that compared with burnout, the way I would think about it is we need to both from the individual side, train people to understand how to respond with compassion rather than empathy, which in some cases means retooling, taking on, feeling the other person’s pain and having a responsive way of engaging with them. But that has an understanding of a type of boundary in support of both people, the person in pain and the other person. So it doesn’t become dehumanized and cynical, but it has a wisdom of understanding. Me getting overwhelmed by your problem isn’t going to necessarily help you, especially if I’m here to be in a role where you need me to not be crying alongside you about your diagnosis.

Leah Weiss 00:30:08  You need me to hold this space. To be able to be clear.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:13  That’s a really interesting idea there. The empathy versus compassion. And I kind of want to go deep down that hole, but I’m going to resist. But I have one question on it, which is do you find often that people earlier in their career. Start from an empathy perspective. Like that’s what comes most naturally. Then one of two things happens. Either they move into quote unquote empathy fatigue and they become cynical, or they figure out how to do this with compassion, and they move into sort of this wise healer mode. Is that the general path?

Leah Weiss 00:30:45  I think that is a really good way to summarize it. And when you said that, it made me think of I remember when I was in grad school doing my clinical training, I was one of the settings I worked in was a Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, which is headed by this incredible physician who does work with refugees from around the world. Like, talk about someone being immersed in so many unimaginable kinds of pain and trauma on the daily.

Leah Weiss 00:31:12  And I remember walking out of the hospital with him at the end of one of the days, and I was just kind of asking him how he was or how he felt about his day. He just came back to being so grateful to be here. And what an incredible world. What an incredible opportunity. Like he was, you know, coming from that wise healer perspective. And I was the angsty, you know, clinical training, like, overly empathic to the point where it’s probably annoying to be the recipient of for the folks I was working with at that point. I think that’s right. And I think the other thing that reminds me of from the neuroscience perspective is, you know, one of the studies I often talk about in my keynotes is when we brought a group of meditation experts to Stanford, put them in an fMRI machine, had them do compassion meditation and the reward regions of their brain light up, not the pain empathy regions of the brain light up. And I’ve always said and felt like I would love to do the studies where we do this across traditions, right? Like because every wisdom tradition has some version of compassion, contemplative practice.

Leah Weiss 00:32:21  How interesting to see what that looks like as a way to motivate the rest of us to cultivate.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:19  All right. We’ve talked a little bit about what burnout is. maybe some of what it’s not. Let’s talk about some of its causes. And I know that you sort of delineate causes kind of at three levels. I’ve seen in some of your work, which I think is interesting. There’s an individual level. You talk about a team level and an organizational level. And I suppose if we were to take it one step further, we’d say there are societal components also. But walk us through those. What the causes are, you know, kind of in each of those levels.

Leah Weiss 00:33:49  You know, a metaphor that I find helpful for framing comes from the godmother of burnout research, Doctor Maslany, and she uses a metaphor of if you’re trying to understand burnout, what people typically do is analogous to looking at cucumbers in vinegar barrels and being surprised that they turn into pickles. So it’s nonsensical to just look at the individual level, not meaning that there’s nothing we can do as individuals and there’s not contributors, some of which we can address, some of which are intrinsic to who we are.

Leah Weiss 00:34:25  Our demographics. You know, as I mentioned before. So if we start from the individual level, it’s what are our habits around mindset, professional fulfillment? How clear are we on our values? How aligned do we experience our lives and our work with our values? All of that can contribute to burnout or resilience at the group level. Let’s say the team level in a workplace, you know, and this comes back to the profound point you raised about discernment in community. The role of the community, kind of our work, family, the people we spend the most time with interact with the most, you know, kind of back to the parable. Do we have a version of our relationship that is supportive, compassionate? We care about them. We know about their values. We believe that they’re are wanting to support us. We feel that way about them. Or is it the opposite? Do we see them as a threat to our advancement, even survival? Do we not trust them? You know, there’s all these interesting studies about if you have one workplace friend, you’re going to be healthier, more engaged, advance more.

Leah Weiss 00:35:38  If you can build that at the team level, like this microcosm point in the storm that is massive for your resilience and then the broader culture within the organizations we function in. And how do those impact our our values, our ability to be socially attuned to others, our ability to feel like we can do our work and feel like we’re being seen and rewarded all of that. That there’s fairness. Interestingly, like people often hear about burnout and they think working too many hours is one of the biggest precipitates. Actually, one of the biggest precipitates is feeling like we’re out of alignment with our values, or that our workplace isn’t fair. People are rewarded for bad behavior. Or there’s inconsistencies. We talk about being this great culture, but in practice we’re actually like, you know, live and let die. So you can do work at each of these three levels. I spent the first very long part of my career focus on what can you do as individuals? Mindfulness, mindset, framing, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, all really good stuff.

Leah Weiss 00:36:50  But if we start looking at applying even that, like next level to what does it mean to bring your self-awareness into the team? So if you and I are a team with five other people that we can then share, what are our triggers, what are our values, and how do those align with the work that we’re doing together? How can we support each other and how can we even tactically, you know, do things the way we allocate work, the way that we assign blame and credit, the way we help each other actually be off when we’re on vacation. Because that comes down to your team often, like, totally. Do you have a way of give and take? And then at the culture level, there’s so much to do. But it’s tricky because it’s big, it’s amorphous, and it takes a long time. Three years is like what the number that most experts give to a culture change project in an organization. So if you want to talk about bang for your buck, focusing on the team level, I think is the way to go, which is why I’m putting my attention there.

Leah Weiss 00:37:54  Build your community. Build your support. Get that interactive part, but it’s manageable. We, a team of eight, can make a decision today to try something different and do that tomorrow. We don’t need to go get sign in, you know, buy in and approval from a lot of different people and all the alignment and socializing that comes with a culture change project.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:17  Yeah, that resonates with me for a variety of reasons, but one is sort of a middle way kind of guy, right? Between the organizational and the personal. What’s there, the team. Right. But to your point, it’s influencing our organization maybe a little bit, but it’s going to be kind of hard. But we have more influence on the team. And it also addresses some of those issues that are slightly more important than the personal. This gets back to discernment questions, right. You just mentioned, like, you know, if I have teammates who are toxic, right? There are people I know in life who see nearly anybody who doesn’t agree with them as toxic.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:56  Their self-awareness is such that it’s like, if you don’t agree with everything that I think, then you’re, you know, I’ve labeled you as the problem. You’re the toxic person, right? And then the other extreme would be the person who, you know, thinks that doesn’t matter who it is out there. You know, Genghis Khan could be on their team and they’re like, well, I really should work on my ways of relating to other people from a place of loving kindness. Right. And so it strikes me again, as you know, how do we find this middle ground? Do you find that it’s helpful to start with the individual work and be sure that you kind of have that in place? Or is it really something you can start kind of at all levels?

Leah Weiss 00:39:32  You know, when we’re talking within the context of a team, we want to remember that power structure influences. So the team has a manager or a lead, and that person will realistically have an outsized influence on the culture of the group.

Leah Weiss 00:39:48  And what’s particularly tricky is often the folks who are middle managers are at very high likelihood of being burnt out themselves. So there’s trust they’re probably not at the top of their interpersonal game. Maybe they’ve been trained to be a manager, or maybe they became a manager because they were a good individual contributor, but they never, like, learned the kind of art of managing other people’s work, social intelligence, communication skills. So to come back to your question, the methodology that I’ve developed and work with is a combination of the individual and the team. So the individual needs to get back an understanding that they can see of where they’re at with their burnout, their strengths and weaknesses, and not just their burnout in general, but their burnout proclivities and their burnout specifically in this workplace. Right. Which is an important part of the question. We were coming back to you before, how do you determine what’s me? What’s the environment? So having that understanding what’s environmental then at the team level, understanding where’s my team at with respect to burnout? Are we all clustered at the high end of the burnout spectrum? Is it a range? Are some of us in actually like a pretty solid space? How can they help the others? What’s the role of the manager in supporting resilience or contributing to burnout.

Leah Weiss 00:41:15  And then what I’ve been finding a lot of success with is if you take some of this data and share back with a team, hey, Group, here’s where you’re at with your sense of belonging and psychological safety in burnout. So each individual doesn’t have to take the burden of saying, I don’t feel safe here, or these are the ways that this team is not working for me, but you’re laying it back at the group level, but anonymously. So your starting point is the group to address this shared problem that no individual has had to stand up and own or blame the others for. It’s just this is what is in this group. And then giving a methodology within Team Health, there’s four pillars. And based on where you’re at, we suggest you work on the belonging psychological safety component first. Or we suggest you work on structured rest because you’re all exhausted. Nobody’s getting any time off. There are some basic kind of stop gap so you can take rest up and then address, you know, the next and the next.

Leah Weiss 00:42:18  And thinking in terms of the science and behavior change, which is don’t do everything at once. Pick a keystone habit and work there as a group.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:26  Yeah. You just sort of answered a question I was going to ask, which is a lot of discussions about team efficacy these days seem to have boiled down to psychological safety. I’m not that focused on team work or corporate work anymore, but I see that phrase all the time when when people are talking about team psychological safety. And my question was going to be, is that all there is to this? But it sounds like you just identified four pillars that are important psychological safety and belonging being just one of them. The other three you mentioned, I guess R&R, right? Is that just kind of the team culture around what hours we work, how much we work, supporting each other in being able to take time off?

Leah Weiss 00:43:03  Yeah, that’s the most kind of tactical of the four elements and it really is around. Also just having the basic conversations like I’ve got little kids.

Leah Weiss 00:43:12  I live on the West Coast. The hours that I really want to carve out and need to be with my family are this and yours are that. Because you’re in another time zone and this is your life? Like having some structure around those basic conversations goes a long way because people are driving each other mad with the meeting invite. Like, you know, that is my Friday at five, like, but you’re in another time and especially in this global workplace, right? So it’s some of that very tactical coordination or having blocks and processes in place. I’d say slightly more like nuanced. But also important is autonomy. So getting that balance right, which is going to be different for each individual on a team of do you have the right amount of support and flexibility if you’re being micromanaged, that’s probably driving you bananas. If you’re untethered, being told to do things that you have no support or resources for, that’s also really bad. So autonomy is a collective process of resourcing and teamwork. That is so often a big part of what’s driving people into the ground with burnout.

Leah Weiss 00:44:21  You know, they don’t have to be deep conversations, but get some really productive work done on that autonomy place pretty quickly. And then the other piece is awareness, self-awareness, understanding your own values. Understanding basic tools of emotional and social intelligence. But doing that at the team level so triggers, values, alignment, all of that work. And so these four when you put them together you know are really they capture a lot. If you look at the literature and all the different participants have burnout or resilience. So psychological safety super important but not the whole story. And also I think so many people get it so fundamentally wrong thinking like, oh, if we want to build psychological safety, we should all, you know, share really, really vulnerable stories that are traumatic for ourselves. And actually, like when I work with a team to build psychological safety, the starting place often has to be the sanctioning around. Let’s come to agreements around how we want to be together and what we’re going to do when there’s microaggressions and when people deviate, because you can do all the work to share and be vulnerable.

Leah Weiss 00:45:37  But if you haven’t made agreements about how you’re going to respond when someone is getting pushed out of that group for whatever element of their personality or whatever ism is at play, then you can’t build a psychological safety. So that’s also part of I’m like, no, this is not about trust falls and sharing all of our trauma with each other. It’s also like naming norms for like, how do we want to be respected and respect others? And what will we do when those are transgressed to signal that we’re not going to be complicit.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:10  But there’s nothing wrong with the good old trust fall, is there?

Leah Weiss 4 00:46:14  No. I mean, we all. Who doesn’t love a good? Who doesn’t love a good a trust?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:17  That’s right, that’s right. I keep trying to talk Chris into one with just me being there to catch him. But he won’t. He won’t. He won’t go for it.

Leah Weiss 00:46:25  He’s not having it.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:26  No. He’s probably taking lots of notes about, team culture based on this.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:30  I want to ask a question about job satisfaction a little bit. This sort of ties in. And if I’m straying too far outside where you feel comfortable, just say, I don’t know. But I see a lot of people and what they feel is that their work isn’t meaningful. And what they often mean by that is that it’s not directly helping another person in like, say, helping starving children. And so they feel like, okay, I don’t feel like my work is meaningful, and I’m always torn by that, by by sort of going, yep, you’re right. You really should pursue that because that’s the path. Or are there other paths? And this gets back to our question before. Do I change myself? Do I change the situation? But what are paths to make work more meaningful? Assuming that we’re in generally a good situation, right. Generally, like we’re doing work that’s at least like somewhat challenging, somewhat interesting, you know, that can engage us. But the bottom line mission isn’t, say, philanthropic.

Leah Weiss 00:47:34  I love that question. I think coming back to probably work you are well familiar with from a spiritual direction is, you know, the values work getting really clear about values and then taking that from the abstraction and looking for the opportunities to walk the talk on those values. So maybe we’re not working to end world hunger, but one of our core values is around community or compassion and really exploring what are the opportunities within the work I am doing, the people I am interacting with, how can I lean into expressing that value? And then one of the ideas that we talk about in the academic language of extra role behavior. So what are things that are not part of my core job description that energize me, that bring me meaning, that help me feel connected with who I am and want to be? And often it’s a little bit of investing in those. And coaches and managers can really help the people that they’re talking with to identify not just the values, but what are the opportunities. And it’s amazing how many times I’m sure you’ve seen this, that you have someone who realizes they want to learn some skill and service of a core value.

Leah Weiss 00:48:50  They start to spending an hour a week and it changes everything around for them. So this is a place where, you know, in having taught MBA students at Stanford for years, I’m always saying like, don’t look at it like you’re losing time from this person if you’re bringing them alive, then you are doing the right thing, but also doing the smart thing for the business. So look for the values, the extra role behaviour, which means you need to know each other, have real conversations, and have honesty to the point where people can, you know the work. That’s just like they’re always procrastinating. It’s miserable for them. Can you get to an understanding of what that is why that is? And then within the realm of reason, respond.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:34  Yeah. So I want to bring us back around to where you are today. So we described you burnt out at Stanford, you know, overwhelmed. There’s something you’ve talked about that I think is really important here. You talked about how in addition to all that happening, there was an enormous amount of internal criticism of yourself because you felt like based on all the spiritual practice you had done, that you shouldn’t feel this way, that you should be able to meditate your way out of it, or you should be able to, you know, have enough equanimity to handle it.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:05  So take us from here I am. I am in this place of I recognize I’m burnout. I’m overwhelmed. I’ve got all this internal negativity happening. And maybe give us the short version of, you know, how you got to where you are today. And then maybe we could talk a little bit about today, because the thing I’d like to hit today is you’ve gone from one classical place where people can burn out, which is academia, to another classical place where people can burn out, which is the startup world. So I want to talk about that. But but walk us through the change process a little bit.

Leah Weiss 00:50:38  Well, I first have to comment like, I just I want you as a spiritual director. I feel like I could benefit from these conversations is therapeutic. I think you’re really picking up on things about my experience that it’s taken me a long time to. In some of it, I’m still definitely grasping to formulate. Well, long story short, a couple of years ago we came up from California to visit some of our friends who lived in Portland, who for years had all been saying, you guys really need to be in Portland.

Leah Weiss 00:51:10  Like all the things we are hearing from you about as a family that you’re struggling with, like, and just hearing this from two of my oldest friends in the world, my husband’s oldest friend. So we came up and I just had this, like, physical feeling from the moment we got here of just like, decompression. You know, I’ve experienced that in a few places in the world where I’ve gone before that, you know, it’s like a cellular shift when you get off the plane kind of thing. And, you know, I think fast forward to today. I was just talking about this this weekend. I was taking a walk with a very close friend who’s a physician, public health officer and was just saying, for me, it’s so powerful that, you know, the places I’ve lived in the past. and it had my kids in schools, like, I didn’t feel people around me. To the degree that I do now, where there’s so many folks who have similar academic backgrounds or kinds of choices about where they’ve taken their careers.

Leah Weiss 00:52:18  A lot of other families that are like ours, with the mom, you know, working a ton and the dad working a ton to support the family and home. So we came up this weekend, decided, oh my gosh, let’s just jump. Let’s just do it. Our oldest son was starting kindergarten the next year. I was like, if we just do this now, he can kind of come right in the process. So we did. We just moved really, really quickly. And since that time, I’ve seen, you know, so many people in the context of the pandemic do this. It did seem a bit bananas, I think, to some people in our life to just make the change so quickly. But I was like, I’m traveling so much anyways. I can travel down to Stanford as opposed to traveling to go see clients wherever, and then also taking some of the financial pressure off, which sounds ludicrous for someone you know. But coming from California anywhere is less insane. So there was that whole side of it.

Leah Weiss 00:53:13  Now, to your point about the startup world, yes, it’s another kind of microcosm. Less than 4% of venture money goes to women founders, including if it’s a woman in man co-founder. So me and my co-founder, my former superstar student from Stanford, two women, two moms. We are definitely not in a system that is like set up by or for us. But I think this discernment and community, like my co-founder, is one of my dearest friends who I think has more character and integrity and social intelligence than pretty much anyone I’ve ever known, including a lot of like, spiritually well-known figures like, you know, not to overly put her on a pedestal. She’s just a really good person who we can talk about everything together. It’s like my other marriage. And so there’s a lot of stress, but there’s a lot of alignment and values, a lot of ability to have real talk and a lot of shared commitment to the team that we’re building is going to walk the talk. We’re not going to be an organization dealing with team health.

Leah Weiss 00:54:20  That is a hot mess internally. I’ve lived that, you know, country song before. I’m not doing it again. and she has her own version of commitment to that. So, you know, I do feel like I have the right resources in place, but there’s a lot of stress, a lot of frustration. And, you know, also continued like doubt that I’ll have to work through around being a middle aged woman in a role that is not conducive. But I kind of am excited to do that on behalf of like, that’s most of the world. We’re not, you know, and if we can’t build Team health or think about organizational health and perspective of a middle aged parent like, I don’t feel confident that a 20 something year old non parent is going to do it in a way that works for me or anyone I know. So I’m going to lean into the discomfort and hopefully have enough support and clarity about what I need to do from having lived through kind of untenable ness before.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:26  Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:26  Somebody I interviewed recently and one of their books was talking about age. They were talking about patience. But the thing they said, which I thought was really interesting, was they quoted some study where, you know, far more businesses that go on to be, you know, a certain size were started by 50 year olds and 25 year olds. Like, it’s just our cultural lens is, you know, 25 year old startups. But if you zoom out from just Silicon Valley and you look broadly, you go, okay, being 50 or in your 40s are is not an impediment. It can actually be, in a lot of ways, a benefit. You and I are going to talk for a couple more minutes in the post-show conversation, because I do want to go a little deeper into entrepreneurship and burnout because you’re an entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur. I think we could have some interesting conversations, but we’re out of time for the main episode. So, listeners, if you’d like to get access to Lena’s post-show conversation, add free episodes, all kinds of other good things, and the joy of supporting something you care about.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:26  Go to one you feed. Join. Leah, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you again.

Leah Weiss 00:56:34  Thank you for having me. It’s been great to spend time with you and your listeners, and it’s so appreciate the community that you’ve built and being able to visit.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:43  And just in case people are interested in the work that you’re doing with building team resilience, what’s the name of your company?

Leah Weiss 00:56:50  Skylite

Eric Zimmer 00:56:53  Perfect. We’ll have links in the show notes where people can go through and learn about that work if they like. So thank you Leah.

Speaker 4 00:56:59  Thanks, Eric.

Chris Forbes 00:57:01  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 UFI.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:21  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:30  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.

What do a fine dining maitre d. A magician burying cards in a backyard and a toddler looking for Elsa have in common? They all show us that magic still exists. If we’re willing to care more, than seems reasonable. In this episode, Will Guidara, who’s a former co-owner of 11 Madison Park, which was once named the best restaurant in the world, the author of Unreasonable Hospitality and advisor on the hit series The Bear, shares how he transformed a restaurant into the best in the world not through perfection but through moments of radical hospitality. Whether it was sending out hot dogs on fine China or designing hand signals to pour water silently. It was never only about the food, it was about making people feel seen. This is a conversation about joy, about seeing service not as subservience, but as nobility and the kind of creativity that invites connection.

Key Takeaways:

• The concept of hospitality and its significance in various aspects of life.
• Insights from the restaurant industry and the transformation of dining experiences.
• The balance between kindness and excellence in service.
• The importance of making people feel seen and valued.
• The idea of “unreasonable hospitality” and exceeding expectations.
• The role of creativity in building meaningful connections.
• The impact of self-care and generosity in service roles.
• Navigating relationships and managing people effectively.
• The value of criticism as an investment in personal growth.
• The importance of community and connection in fostering relationships.

Will Guidara is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, which chronicles the lessons in service and leadership he learned over the course of his career in restaurants. He is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, which, under his leadership, was named the Best Restaurant in the World. Will is the host of The Welcome Conference, serves as a Co-Producer on FX’s The Bear, and is a recipient of the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award. 

Will Guidara:  Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Will Guidara, check out these other episodes:

How to Connect More Deeply With the World with James Crews

How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection with Charles Duhigg

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:01:06  What do a fine dining maitre d. A magician burying cards in a backyard and a toddler looking for Elsa have in common.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:15  They all show us that magic still exists. If we’re willing to care more, then seems reasonable. In this episode, Will Gutierrez, who’s a former co-owner of 11 Madison Park, which was once named the best restaurant in the world, the author of Unreasonable Hospitality and advisor on the hit series The Bear, shares how he transformed a restaurant into the best in the world not through perfection but through moments of radical hospitality. Whether it was sending out hot dogs on fine China or designing hand signals to pour water silently. It was never only about the food, it was about making people feel seen. This is a conversation about joy, about seeing service not as subservience, but as nobility and the kind of creativity that invites connection. I’m Erik Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Will, welcome to the show.

Will Guidara 00:02:13  Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:16  We’re going to be discussing your book. That’s called Unreasonable Hospitality The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than they Expect. But before we get into that, we’ll start the way we always do with the parable.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:28  And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Will Guidara 00:03:02  Gosh, it’s a beautiful parable. I think everyone has two sides to themselves, and our ability to walk. The line that separates those two is often what determines our success. I think in the way that’s framed, it’s quite binary, right? You obviously want to be the wolf that is focused on kindness and love, and not that that is focused on greed and hatred or whatever other words you used in the latter.

Will Guidara 00:03:29  But I think where it gets more complicated is when there’s two sides of your personality where you actually do need each of them to feed your success, and where success comes almost because of the tension between them, not in spite of it. Yes. For me, in the business World. Those two sides are on one end. This unbelievable knowledge and passion for creating cultures where I am empowering and trusting everyone on my team, recognizing that unless they feel invited to bring their most fully realized selves to the table, we’re never going to be able to connect with the people we’re serving in the most authentic way possible. And then on the other side, this perfectionist quality to me, some of them is filled with OCD tendencies that likes to control as many variables as possible to ensure that as few things as possible go wrong. And without question, I will spend my entire professional life falling off that line in one direction or the other. But when I fall, that is not what defines me. It’s how quickly I can get back onto the line with humility and with vulnerability, and with the dedication to keep on trying to ride it as carefully and as considerately as possible.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:58  Oh, that’s beautifully said. There’s so many things in there that that I think are worth touching on. I mean, one is that idea that, like, we all fall off whatever line we’re trying to walk again and again and again, and I think the people who seem to stay on the line are the ones who just get back on quickly. Right. You just they’re falling off, too. You’re just not seeing it because their wobble is a little bit less. And then the second thing is I pick that up in your book too. You talk about these tensions that that you had. Another one was hospitality and excellence. Yeah. As a tension. And I want to get into those before we do. Why don’t we just spend a minute or two and, give listeners a little bit of your kind of, your background to today. So they have context for everything we’re going to talk about.

Will Guidara 00:05:42  Yeah. So I am most known or I was most known for the majority of my my career, for my success in the restaurant industry.

Will Guidara 00:05:53  I came up in restaurants. My dad was a lifelong restaurateur. My dad, who is still with us, is my greatest mentor, my best friend. The person from whom I’ve been inspired more than anyone else. And when I was growing up, I just wanted to be like him. I would have done whatever it was that he did for a living. It just so happened that restaurants, the thing that he did was something that independently, I fell in love with. I mean, at the age of 12, I always joke about this because I think it’s so funny. He my dad has taught me many, many things. Perhaps highest on the list is the power of intention. He’s a very, very intentional person, to ara Transcript

the point that at the age of 12, he asked me to come up with my to do list for life. And as ridiculous as that sounds, he was definitively being serious, And I know this because he gave it to me in my late 20s and it had three things on it.

Will Guidara 00:06:49  One was to go to Cornell University and study hospitality. And two was to open my own restaurant in New York City, and three was to marry Cindy Crawford. And I’d like to say that I did two out of the three, and then the third, maybe even better. And, it’s literally the only thing I did growing up. I worked in some of the best restaurants in America. I did go to Cornell. I did work for Wolfgang Puck and Danny Meyer, and eventually worked for Danny at a restaurant called 11 Madison Park, a restaurant that I bought from him. and over the ten years following the purchase of that restaurant, I turned that restaurant into the best restaurant in the world. and then I grew an entire company around it. And then I sold that company just a couple months before Covid, And, like many during Covid, retreated from the world for a measure of time and in that season had to decide what I wanted to do next. And sometimes I feel like the best way to decide where you want to go is to walk the path you’ve just been down.

Will Guidara 00:07:59  And so I wrote the book Unreasonable Hospitality, and now I do something very different for a living. The book was meant to help me decide what I wanted to do next, and it kind of became the thing that I went on to do, which is spending my work life trying to encourage as many people across disciplines to make the choice to be in the hospitality industry. Because I don’t care what you do for a living, you can make that choice simply through prioritizing people as much as you do product. And so you’re catching me at a really exciting season in life.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:34  I love that idea of everybody can be in hospitality because early on in the book you say talking about addressing questions you’ve spent your career asking. How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do you make them feel welcome. And I think for all of us, wherever we are, we can aim at those qualities with the people that are around us, whether that be our family or friends, the people we work with. If we have a big group of people around us, a small group, I think that idea of hospitality can run through everything we do. It becomes almost an ethos.

Will Guidara 00:09:17  Yeah. The US was a manufacturing economy. It is decidedly a service economy now. Yeah, I think three quarters of our GDP is driven by service industries, which means that it doesn’t matter what you do for a living. Let’s just start with work. You’re in the business of serving other people, and Now, whether or not you’re in the hospitality industry is solely based on. Well, the extent to which you work as hard to make them feel seen as you do in perfecting whatever service or product you’re selling them. And then in life, I mean, we should all be in the hospitality industry of life because I like to define the word often the word hospitality. And one of my favorite definitions is hospitality is being creative and intentional in pursuit of relationships.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:12  And wow, that’s a great line.

Will Guidara 00:10:15  And in a season where, gosh, there is so much division and people seem to be drifting further and further away from one another.

Will Guidara 00:10:23  I think the world would be a better place if we were all just a little bit more unreasonable in pursuit of those relationships.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:30  Yeah, you say in the book that the moment you start to pursue service through the lens of hospitality. You understand there’s nobility in it. And I just love that. I love that word in general nobility, because I think we can all act noble in our lives. You know, it’s not about kings. It’s about it’s about a state of being. But I think it’s a beautiful way of reframing serving others. Right. Because we could look at serving others as not good demeaning, which I didn’t have to do it, you know, but we all serve others. I mean, I whether we know it or not and whether we want to embrace it or not, and it’s far better to do it nobly and gracefully.

Will Guidara 00:11:09  I host a conference in New York City called the Welcome Conference, which has become, I’d imagine, the biggest hospitality conference in the country at this point.

Will Guidara 00:11:18  But years ago, perhaps in our first or second year, there was a guy who spoke. His name was Charles Mason. His family had for many, many years a restaurant in New York City called La Grenouille. It was this famous old school French fine dining restaurant, and in his talk, he acknowledged exactly that. That. I mean, when you’re growing up, no parent ever says, I really hope you’re a server one day, right? They always. You know, every parent, at least for a very long time. Like you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a banker. And there’s almost this culture where we look down on people who give their life in pursuit of serving others. But the truly great among us are those that have the confidence to well, to serve and and don’t require the external validation of others to feel like they are the person they always wanted to be. But I also think that to really impact the world, leverage is one of the biggest things you need.

Will Guidara 00:12:22  And he he described it in this way, which I thought was beautiful and very easy to understand, that literally if you are trying to pull something. And if you are standing over something, trying to pull it up, you don’t actually have that much strength with which to do it. But if you get underneath that thing and you push it up, you can actually exert so much more force. I think there is nobility in service in answering that call to me to just show up for others instead of, well, only showing up for ourselves. And I think if you do it well with creativity, with grace, I think you can also make a really good living doing it.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:04  Yeah. There’s a line that gets used in the yoga meditation world a lot that has always rubbed me the wrong way. I understand what people mean by it, but they will often say, you know, let go of anything that isn’t serving you. Said all the time I get it like let go of the things in your life that are, that are problematic.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:25  But just the framing of it for me has always bothered me because I’ve always thought about like, whoa, hang on, shouldn’t I be putting at least as much focus on, like, what I’m serving? Yeah, well, I’m serving.

Will Guidara 00:13:36  You know, I talk often about self-care and its role in hospitality. I use the the metaphor of a water pitcher. If you’ve decided that you want to pursue a career in service and hospitality, regardless of industry, whether you’re selling cars or insurance or you’re a banker or whatever, you’re effectively constantly pouring water out of your pitcher into the glasses of others. And if you don’t pause every once in a while and refill your pitcher, you’re going to run out of water to pour very quickly. So I believe in all of that. And yet and never in a million years did I think this conversation would take me here, at least this quickly. I feel like some of the self-care industries with language like that. I think it’s just been manipulated to the point that people are using it in order to give themselves the grace to be selfish.

Will Guidara 00:14:36  That every single one of your relationships, they all better benefit you entirely. And if they don’t get rid of them. And honestly, that’s just not a world I want to live in. Like we’re creating fancy language that makes selfishness permissible, and I think it’s devastating.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:51  Yep. I just finished my first book, and I just turned it into the publisher a couple of weeks ago. And in it, I talk about this idea that there’s this phrase that’s always haunted me, and it’s that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time around. And it haunts me because on one level, I think it’s true. Right. Like who I’m around influences a lot about me, but that assumes that the people I surround myself with are there as instruments to make me better versus relationships that I have. And so again, it’s another one of those self-help phrases that sort of makes sense. But when you when I examine it more closely, it troubles me a little bit.

Will Guidara 00:15:31  Yeah. Yeah. It’s also funny for me because I have a two year old and a four year old, and so I’m trying to figure out if they are 2/5 of who I am, then.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:45  They probably would be a good 2/5.

Will Guidara 00:15:49  By the way. I mean, you know what I will say, I have always brought a certain amount of levity to the way in which I. I try to show up in the world, but relearning how to look at life through the lens of a toddler, to appreciate so many of the things that we invariably begin to take for granted, is a pretty beautiful thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:14  I agree. My toddler is now 26 years old. Amazingly. but my friend and who’s the editor of this podcast, Chris, has a three year old. So I get to I get to re-experience some of it through him. And it is a beautiful thing. Something else that you say you learned, I believe, from Danny Meyer, although you can correct me if I’m wrong, was that you want to let your energy impact the people you’re talking to, as opposed to the other way around.

Will Guidara 00:16:58  Yeah, that was probably a mix of Danny Meyer, but also Randi Gerardi, who is my first boss  when I worked for Danny’s company, Randi went on to be the CEO of Shake Shack and is, in my view, one of the great leaders out there, full stop. And I’ve gotten to spend plenty of time with many of them, and he still sits very close to the top of that list. Randy was always just one of these guys that was unabashed in bringing all of his passion and enthusiasm to the team every single day. I, I think there’s this thing in both work and in life, honestly, where there’s a certain amount of us that will never cease being our high school selves. And in high school, you want to be cool. And the people that are celebrated for being the coolest ones are generally those that don’t try too hard, right? Like when I was in school, the ones that tried too hard, they were called nerds. The ones that were cool were the ones that like, were a bit more laissez faire about everything. And and it’s sad. And I think this is actually changing a bit generationally.

Will Guidara 00:18:08  But gosh, I want to celebrate the people that do try hard. I want to celebrate the people that are passionate And it takes an amazing amount of confidence and self-assuredness to just allow yourself to wear every ounce of your passion, to bring all of your energy to the table every single day. And when you’re able to do that, well, you can you can infect everyone around you with that passion. Public speaking is a big part of being a great leader. And yes, we should inspire people through our actions. But words also do a lot of the heavy lifting and restaurants. We have this meeting we call premium. We do it every single day, right before service with our entire team, before we unlock the doors. And that’s an opportunity to inspire, to get people fired up, to invigorate them. And too many people gauge what they give to that meeting based on what they are receiving from their people in that meeting, as opposed to recognizing no. My role is to energize them with my passion, not to become less energized because I’m not feeling as much passion in return.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:17  Yeah, well, I think that that goes for that sort of situation and lots of things in life in general, which is where how we treat somebody is tied to how they treat us. And I’m not saying that we should take this to some. Like I was going to use the word unreasonable, but you’re the wrong guy to use the word unreasonable with not not to take it to the point where, like, you know, we’re a doormat to people or we’re in abusive relationships. But I think there’s something to be said for here’s who I want to be. And this gets back to your dad and intention. This is the person I want to be, regardless of what I met with.

Will Guidara 00:20:02  Yeah. I mean, I’ll tell you this. And this is definitively one that I learned from Danny Meyer, one of my favorites of his isms. And Danny was a master of isms. These like little ways that he articulated the things that mattered to him, and in doing so, not only made them easier for us to communicate to one another, but in creating an ism around a core value or a tenant of his belief system.

Will Guidara 00:20:29  It was a meta signal to everyone that that was something that mattered to the culture at large. One of them was the charitable assumption, which is a fun way to say give people the benefit of the doubt. Here’s the thing, and I’ll use a restaurant metaphor for obvious reasons. If someone comes into the restaurant and they’re just acting like a jerk, you’re waiting on someone and they’re acting like a jerk. It happens, obviously. It’s completely natural, profoundly human, to decide that that person no longer deserves your most gracious Hospitality. The charitable assumption rather, though, would have you think this instead. Maybe that person is acting like a jerk because, gosh. On their way to the restaurant, they found out they just lost a loved one, or they learned that their spouse was cheating on them or some other thing like that. Maybe this person that’s acting like a jerk actually needs our love more than anyone else in the room. Now, sometimes the person was just a jerk. Right. But the idea is, my dad always says, ask yourself what right looks like, and then just do that.

Will Guidara 00:21:44  I’d always rather on the side of assuming the best than someone, and be proven wrong, than to assume the worst in them and be proven wrong.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:52  Agree 100%. There’s a story from a book. Maybe you’ve read it. Maybe you haven’t. The seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Covey tells this story of being on a New York subway car. And there are a couple of kids running just wild through the car. They’re kind of like the worst example of what a two and a five year old would be. And he’s getting frustrated with this dad who’s just sitting there, and he can tell that everybody on the car is frustrated and upset. And finally, it just gets to a point where he’s like, sir, I and I hate to I to bother you, but, you know, your children are kind of running wild. Maybe you could try and, you know, bring them in a little bit. And the guy looks up at him really dazed and says, oh, I guess they don’t know how to behave.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:39  Neither do I. We just left the hospital and their mother died. Oh, and in that moment, I mean, he tells it as a story of how quickly your paradigm or perspective can change. Because in that you instantly no longer is he a bad dad. You just want to help this guy. Yeah, but but that’s an example of the of the charitable assumption. Yeah. And I love what you said about. I’d rather think the best of somebody and be wrong, because I always think that if you think the best of people and you’re wrong, as long as you’re not getting horribly taken advantage of. No huge loss. But you begin to consistently be suspicious of people. There’s a huge loss, and that loss is to your own heart.

Will Guidara 00:23:25  Well, not only to your own heart, and obviously not only to just how you’re impacting people in an unnecessarily negative way, but the implications are almost endless. It holds back our creative output. It holds back the the flow of beautiful ideas that come into the world.

Will Guidara 00:23:43  I was doing a talk not too long ago, and we were talking about some of the stuff we used to do for people, and someone said, didn’t anyone try to take advantage of you when you were doing the stuff though? and yeah, of course they did. But gosh, if you limit what you’re willing to give to the world Old out of a fear that a few people are going to take advantage of your generosity. Like what a lose lose to let a couple bad apples ruin it, not only for everyone else, but also for you, in the same way that I’d rather assume the best in people and be proven wrong. I’d rather give a lot constantly, and be taken advantage of once in a while, than to never give it all and never run the risk of being taken advantage of.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:25  I think this would be a good moment to pivot to the title of the book, which is Unreasonable Hospitality. So I think up till now we’ve been talking about hospitality as a way of being in the world and of relating to other people, but you’ve tacked the word unreasonable in front of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:43  Talk to me about what that means.

Will Guidara 00:24:45  It really became my call to arms early in the evolution of the restaurant, as I endeavored to to take it to the top. I mean, here’s the thing. You look across disciplines, the people that are the most successful in every single one of those did so by being unreasonable, by being willing to do whatever it took to bring the most fully realized version of their product or craft or service to life. You think about everyone from Steve Jobs to Walt Disney to athletes like Michael Jordan. I mean, like, they’re unreasonable. They’re gonna do whatever it takes. That’s all I’m saying here. I’m just redirecting it towards how we make people feel. My favorite quote about hospitality. Most people at this point have heard it is by Maya Angelou. She said people will forget what you say. They will forget what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel. Unreasonable hospitality is just being relentlessly intentional and creative and willing to do whatever it takes into those little moments.

Will Guidara 00:25:53  The moments that sit in the in-between, the moments surrounding not what you’re serving someone, but how you’re serving it to them. The the opportunity is to create a genuine and meaningful connection with the people that work with you and the people that you are collectively serving. And I think the big paradigm shift of unreasonable hospitality is it’s not just about being really nice. It’s about recognizing that to achieve any significant level of success, you need to develop practices and systems and a very thoughtfully considered approach. And the same is true when it comes to hospitality, that you can systemize graciousness through creating the right framework and the right culture, and making gestures of hospitality as easy as humanly possible for the people on your team to deploy. And if you approach all of those things as unreasonably as humanly possible, What you have the capacity to do is nothing short of extraordinary.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:58  Give us some examples of some of the things that you guys did at the restaurant that came out of this unreasonable hospitality mindset.

Will Guidara 00:27:09  There’s a position that I added to the restaurant that has certainly received the most fanfare, for lack of a better word, and is one of the stories in the book that people have resonated with the most, to the point where I’ve now seen this same position added to NFL teams and hospital systems and retirement homes and like multinational banks.

Will Guidara 00:27:33  The position is called the Dreamweaver and named after the iconic song by Gary Wright, which has always been one I’ve loved. And this was a position out of the team who had no operational responsibilities. They had nothing that they were actually charged with doing to power the service or the product or anything like that. They were just there, serving as a resource to help everyone else on the team bring crazy ideas and gestures of hospitality to life. And so they were there every single night with us just as a resource. And the stuff that we did with that person, it was it was wild. You know, little things that cost a little bit of money. Talking about Danny Meyer, Shake Shack was right in the park and so could be one of our servers overhearing one of the tables talking about as they were consuming like a caviar course that they smelled Shake Shack on the way into the restaurant and they couldn’t stop craving it. Easy enough. The Dream Weaver runs across the street to Shake Shack, gets a shack burger, and then as their pre entry before whatever their 30 day dry aged ribeye, we serve them a little slice of a shack burger.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:47  You tell a great story about how a guest mentioned mention coming to New York and, you know, hitting all the big restaurants they wanted to hit. But the only thing they didn’t get was a New York hot dog. Yes. And what you do is you run out and get him a hot dog. But my favorite part of that story is you bring it into the kitchen and trying to get this Michelin award chef to plate up a hot dog in an elegant way.

Will Guidara 00:29:12  Well, by the way, like you talk about how hospitality and excellence are not friends. And in the beginning of our conversation, you referenced the inherent tension between them. And that moment is a beautiful illustration of that tension. On one side, a chef who has spent his entire life trying to be celebrated for being the best chef that he possibly can be. And then on the other side, me just trying to do the right thing to make these people happy. Those are not friends. Always, right? It takes someone recognizing that the thing they’re trying to do is just a little bit less important than the other thing in that moment.

Will Guidara 00:29:50  And yeah, I mean, you know, we spend weeks, if not months conceiving of every single dish we serve days, if not weeks, prepping every ingredient that goes on to that plate. Years and years training every single one of the people that is touching every one of those ingredients as it gets cooked and sent down the line before it finally hits that plate and gets walked by. Someone who has spent years learning how to be the best dining room professional they can be, and then put in front of you on the table and explained in the most elegant way possible. And then right before that, we serve you a dirty water dog again. If you don’t have the right amount of confidence or the right perspective to understand what actually matters in those moments feel very demeaning. If you do, though, it’s unbelievably exciting because when you can create the kind of experience that is truly specific to the person you’re serving it to show that you care enough to listen, and then to do something with what you hear, illustrate that the experiences that are one size fits one where you are willing to bend your own rules solely in pursuit of making that person happy.

Will Guidara 00:30:59  Well, that is much more satisfying and definitively much more noble than creating a plate of food that looks pretty.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:18  One of the books that I’ve spent the most time with in my entire life is the Dao de Ching. It’s an ancient Chinese manual for living well that somehow also reads like poetry. Here’s an example of one verse that I come back to over and over through the years. If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money. You will never be content. That kind of simple truth doesn’t just sound good. It actually changes how you live. If you let it. It’s simple, it’s direct, and it hits me harder every year. If you’ve ever been curious about the Dow, or just want some ancient wisdom that actually works in real life, I’ve got something special. I teamed up with Rebind to create an interactive edition of the Dow. I handpicked 40 core verses, translated them into plain, relatable language, and built them into a guide where you can ask questions and get my take in real time.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:17  It’s like having a conversation not just with the Dow, but with me too. You can grab it right now at oneyoufeed.net/tao. Now, if you’re looking for a little more clarity, calm or direction, I’d love to meet you there. You were just talking about sort of navigating a partnership between you and the chef who ran the restaurant, and you say in the book something about how to proceed in pursuit of a good partnership. And I just love this idea, and it’s to decide that whoever cares more about the issue can have their way. Nothing solves every problem, but that’s a really good way to think about something like who cares more? And we get locked into debates and discussions about things that maybe we don’t care very much about, but the other person really does.

Will Guidara 00:33:13  Yeah, we had all these different ways that we developed to navigate through moments of tension. I think it’s just important. Right. Like, here’s the reality. If you work alongside a group of like minded people who are as passionate as you are and wanting to be the best.

Will Guidara 00:33:32  That is a very, very special thing. It does not happen all too often and and therefore it’s something to celebrate, but also when it is the case there will be tension because when passionate people agree on a destination, they are invariably going to disagree on the right way to get there. You have to look at it and have it as something that you celebrate, because the tension implies that everyone just cares. But the more intentional you are in navigating through it, the better. Because I think a lot of people react to moments of tension in one of two ways. They either back away from it because it’s uncomfortable and they want nothing to do with it, or they just try to bulldoze their way through it and get the other person to agree with them. And each of those approaches is a waste, because if you can thoughtfully navigate through a moment of tension with anyone in your life, it will of course bring you closer to them. But together you can identify what is the best next step to take.

Will Guidara 00:34:34  And so, in not just that relationship and in so many of our relationships and work. We had hacks. One. If you and I disagreed on something, we couldn’t get through it. Either of us could at any point just say, hey, time out switch. Which meant I had to now start arguing for the thing you wanted, and you had to start arguing for the thing I wanted. It’s a funny thing about human beings. More often than not, we just want to be right. And the moment you start arguing for the thing you were just arguing against, now you want that thing to win. And it’s actually a beautiful shortcut to empathy, because you work more to more deeply understand the other person’s perspective. Sometimes that wouldn’t work, though, and in another one we call timeout and say third option, which meant if you want A and I want B, and neither of us can convince the other, maybe it’s because neither idea is good enough, and maybe it’s time for us to start working together to identify a third approach that’s better than either of the first two.

Will Guidara 00:35:32  But sometimes when you can’t get somewhere through a logical path of reasoning, then you just need to say, hey, who cares more? And maybe I should just let them have their way. And we used to say, I mean the words, this is important to me. We’re we’re sacred. But there is the side note, which is if you choose to do that, you cannot play that card too often.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:57  Right. Throughout the book, you talk a lot about the systems that you put in place to ensure both hospitality and excellence. And I was blown away by so many of these. Like the water thing. Tell us about the water. As somebody who really is thirsty all the time, I love this one.

Will Guidara 00:36:20  I mean, I just I love the intellectual challenge of trying to make every little thing you do just a little bit better. My dad also used to say to me when I was a kid, keep your eyes peeled. And what? What he meant when he said that was.

Will Guidara 00:36:36  If your eyes are open wide enough, you can really find inspiration everywhere, oftentimes in the most unlikely of places. And so yeah. Is that a baseball game? And I’m watching the, the catcher, sign to the pitcher and watching the pitcher shake his hand. The catcher shakes his head and the the catcher does another one. I’m like, gosh, sign language. It is such a remarkably effective thing. And I was like, I wonder if we can bring sign language into the restaurant. And so I started just studying the experience to try to identify where it could exist and have the most impact. And there’s two things. One, economy of time and economy of movement are both really important things to think about when you’re trying to make any experience better. Economy of time. Because invariably in a fine dining restaurant, there’s all these different things you want to do for the guest, and you want to squeeze as many little things as you can into the experience. But if the experience drags on too long, it’s just ruined economy of movement because you’re trying to create the serene, peaceful environment.

Will Guidara 00:37:43  And yet, in a fine dining restaurant, there’s a lot of people that work there. And if you’re not very intentional in how you’re moving them through the room to do all the thousands of little things that we do for people when they’re in our dining rooms, it can feel very chaotic. And so in water service, I found an opportunity to improve it both through the use of sign language. And so anyone who’s ever been to a restaurant knows that at the beginning of the meal, a server will come up to you and say, would you like Stillwater or sparkling water? Or would you prefer tap water? However, the restaurant has trained them to say that, and then that person needs to go and either themselves get the water or in a slightly nicer restaurant, find their busboy or their bus girl and communicate to them what the water is that they’re meant to give. It’s just a lot of unnecessary movement and a lot of wasted time. And so we just had sign language that if I’m talking to you, the moment I get your order, I’m signing behind my back to the busboy who’s across the room watching me because they knew I was about to go create your table.

Will Guidara 00:38:47  And I don’t know actually how to explain this by words right now, but like, if I move my fingers like this, kind of like dancing my fingers up and down and then sparkling water, if I went like this, it was ice water. And if I went like this, it was bottled Stillwater. And it almost was like a magic trick where I could actually still be talking to you. Right? And the person came over and started pouring the water that you had ordered from me. And these little moments, you know, Penn and Teller, teller has a quote. Sometimes magic is just being willing to invest more energy into an idea than anyone would reasonably expect. These little moments, These things, these systems that you can come up with that not only make things more perfect, but make things a little bit more magical. Not only do they feel good for the person on the receiving end, but they are so fun to conceive. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s actually a magician, and he was talking to me about this.

Will Guidara 00:39:47  He was brought in by a movie producer to train an actor, a famous actor who was about to take a role in a movie where he needed to know magic. And so this guy was brought in to spend an entire day with this actor teaching him magic. And they were finally done. And it was him and the producer and his assistant and the actor in the living room of the producer’s house. And they were done. And the producer’s like, come on, one more, one more. Give us your best trick. And he’s like, well, I kind of I kind of just did give you my best trick. He’s like, no, come on, you gotta have something else. And he’s like, all right, do you have a backyard? And the guy’s like, yeah, yeah. So they go into the backyard and he says to the actor, he’s like, all right, just look around the backyard and just put your hand in a direction. And now say a card. 234567, eight of jacks, clubs, spades or clubs? Spades, diamonds, hearts.

Will Guidara 00:40:44  They walk over there and then the guy takes out of his bag a shovel and he gives it to the actor. He goes, all right, dig. And the guy digs. And the card that he said is buried in the ground right there. And it’s this wild moment of magic like, oh my gosh, maybe magic is real. How the literal heck did this guy do it? But he’s not there just to do magic tricks. He’s there to teach him magic. So then he pulls up a video. The night before, he was relatively certain he’d get to the end of the day and the producer would say, give us one more trick the night before he went there and in a clock format so he could very easily in his head, remember where he had buried every card, buried all 52 cards in the ground, and remembered where each one was. He used some, like mine, like markers in the yard. So no matter what, where the guy pointed and what card, he said, the guy could massage it to get to exactly where he wanted to be.

Will Guidara 00:41:41  That is a moment that you’ll never forget. And it wasn’t hard. Yeah, it just required trying harder. And I think that’s just a beautiful thing. And I don’t know, so many people do things that are so unbelievably noble and so impactful. And if you do one of those things and you’re not working hard to imbue your approach to it with a bit of magic, I just think it’s a waste.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:07  That is such a great story.

Will Guidara 00:42:09  It’s fun.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:09  Yeah. And now I’m wondering how much magic can you learn in a day? Because I’d love to. I mean, if it’s only going to take a day of investment to.

Speaker 4 00:42:17  Be able to build you to be able to do some magic.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:20  I might sign up. I just assumed to be able to do any kind of reasonable magic was going to take a long time.

Will Guidara 00:42:26  No. By the way, by the way, there’s there’s a company called theory 11, and if you go onto their website, you can learn magic and you can learn the kind of things that you can do at a party that just they’re not only fun to do, but if you’re the kind of person that loves bringing other people joy, I just think magic is one of the most beautiful ways to do it.

Speaker 4 00:42:45  All right, theory 11.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:46  I’m sold. What would you say is the best example of hospitality that you have received? That really kind of blew your mind?

Will Guidara 00:42:55  Man, I mean, that’s a hard one, especially since I put out the book.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:00  People just go out of their way to blow your mind.

Will Guidara 00:43:03  It’s always the case. Restaurateurs love serving other restaurateurs. because they know. We know that those people will appreciate the energy you invested into making the experience special more than perhaps other people will. And now, with the book, it’s just really anyone who’s passionate about hospitality. So I can’t say the best, but I’ll share one that happened recently, which I think underlines a pretty beautiful idea. I was in Palm Beach with my wife and my then three year old daughter, and we were staying at one hotel, but, my wife is a pastry chef. She has a chain of bakeries called Milk Bar. And so we both love good dessert. And there’s a hotel in Palm Beach called The Breakers, which is celebrated for its key lime pie recipe, which hasn’t changed in 80 years.

Will Guidara 00:43:57  And it’s a secret recipe. And so we went. We left the hotel we were staying at and with our daughter, drove to that hotel for dinner to have the key lime pie. now the breakers, if anyone’s not familiar with it, it looks like a Disney castle a little bit from the outside. It’s big over the top. Gorgeous. And as we pull up in the car, my daughter Frankie says, daddy, is that Elsa’s house? Referencing Elsa from the movie frozen. And I, in a in a moment of poor judgment, said, yeah, babe, we’re going to Elsa’s house right now thinking that, okay, that’s the end of this interaction. And it was for a moment. But then we get out of the car and we walk into the hotel. She’s like, well, let’s go meet Elsa. Like, I’m not going to Elsa’s house without meeting Elsa. And I was like, oh. And so we go to the restaurant and I cheat ahead with the maitre d who was seating us.

Will Guidara 00:44:53  So my daughter and my wife were a few steps behind. I was like, dude, I need a little help here in 30 minutes. Can you just come back to the table and say to my daughter that you checked, but Elsa is actually away for a couple days, and she’s going to miss Frankie, but she’s so excited she’s here, and you just want to send her Elsa’s regards. He’s like, totally, dude, I got you. He does come back 30 minutes later and he does say that. But in addition, he. They must have had this stuff at the gift shop or something. He had a little, like, plastic pearl necklace and a plastic pearl bracelet and a little tiara. And he went over and gave my daughter all these things, from Elsa to Frankie, to just welcome her to her house and say how sorry she was to have missed her. I’ve been upgraded to some amazing hotel rooms, and I’ve been left some amazing bottles of wine, and I’ve been given some very, very thoughtful gifts.

Will Guidara 00:45:49  But that one will always sit close to the top. And the reason for that is, sometimes the best way to love on someone is to love on the people they love. And they made the most important person in my life feel unbelievably good, which, well, that’s the fastest way to my heart.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:09  That’s a wonderful story, and I love that. What? The line you just said, which is sometimes, you know, the best thing you can do is love on the people that someone loves. Because you’re right. That is very profound. The example that came to mind when you just said that was thinking about nurses. My mom has been in and out of hospitals a lot over the last decade, and there are some nurses that go just a little bit beyond. They’re not unreasonable. They’re not giving her princess necklaces. They’re just being a little bit more kind. But it it feels so important in those moments in a hospital like that with a the mother who’s not doing well, there’s so much that’s out of your control and you’re scared.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:00  They’re scared, everyone’s scared. And that that kindness just comes shining through. And I just, I as I think about that, them being kind to my mom is far better than anything they could do to me. For me, in that, in that moment. Right.

Will Guidara 00:47:13  I’m sorry that you’re going through that or that she is as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:16  Well, she’s doing okay right now. She’s she’s been, Well, I’m not going to jinx it and say she’s been hospital free for x amount of time. We’ll just leave it at. She’s doing all right for the moment. I’m going to see her in. She used to live in Columbus, but we moved her to Denver recently where my sister is, and I’m going to see her on Friday.

Will Guidara 00:47:34  So amazing. Now, I think the other version of of this is there’s been more than a few times where I will be someone, somewhere with my wife or my dad or something, and someone is trying so hard to impress me that the 3 or 4 of us will be standing around, and that person is only looking at me and only talking to me, and it completely ignoring the people that I really care about.

Will Guidara 00:48:00  And that is the opposite of the right way to impress me. Yeah, right. And then I’ve been with other people who I think they might be trying to impress me, but they basically ignore me and focus only on my dad or my wife. And that is the best way to impress me. Yeah. You know, like, I just think we’re we’re uncreative sometimes. And how we pursue someone because we don’t recognize that. Just think about the things they care about and pursue those things instead.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:33  I want to talk a little bit about managing people, because I think that the lessons that go into managing people that work for you are lessons that can be applicable in any area with people. And there was something that you said, and I think this is you got to be in our relationships. Careful with this. But you say that praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment in the workplace. What do you mean by that?

Will Guidara 00:49:00  By the way, I think that’s true in life as well.  It’s just there’s different rules that apply to it. I think that we’re in a season where so many companies are so focused on praise and ways that they haven’t been before, and gosh, that’s a beautiful thing. I think for a long time it was not nearly as significant a part of corporate culture as it needs to be. When you set impossibly high expectations, when you have your team working incredibly hard to achieve them and they do something well, you better be there to affirm them and to celebrate them, because people crave affirmation and we deserve it when we work hard and it’s just the right thing to do. And yet, I think in many cases, companies have become so focused on praise that they have lost focus on on how powerful and beautiful criticism is. Because yes, if praise is affirmation, criticism is investment. And I don’t think there are many things you can do that are more generous than being willing to step outside of your comfort zone for long enough to invest in someone else’s growth. Now it’s only an investment if it’s approached thoughtfully.

Will Guidara 00:50:16  And I have rules of criticism, and these are those that exist in the workplace and criticize in private, never in public. Like any message, it’s one you’re hoping they’re going to receive. The moment you criticize them in public. It makes them feel shameful, which puts up a wall and they’re no longer listening. Criticize the behavior, not the person. We conflate a behavior with someone’s entire identity too often in how we criticize them. And if someone is doing something wrong, we talk to them as if they’re a bad person when they’re not. They’re just doing this one thing wrong. Just talk about that. Yeah. to criticize Says consistently in that some people only criticize others when they’re in the mood to, or when they have the energy to. And what that does is sends very unclear signals about what right looks like. Because I could be doing something today and no one talks to me about it. I do the same thing tomorrow and now suddenly I’m in the wrong. And that’s confusing. And to be unclear is to be unkind.

Will Guidara 00:51:22  And there’s a bunch more of them. And. But the one that I think is very important. Oh, actually, I do like this one. Criticize without sarcasm. I think it’s what a lot of insecure people do in moments where they’re having to hold someone accountable is they they’re sarcastic about it, about it. They think if they turn it into a joke, it’ll be easier to receive. But you should never joke about something as beautiful as investing in someone else’s growth. That makes both people look bad. But the last rule circles back to where this started, which is if there is someone who works for you, you better be praising them more than you’re criticizing them. Because if you’re not, it means one of two things is true. You are just so focused on catching people doing things wrong that you are not focused enough on catching them doing things right, or that person shouldn’t work for you anymore, and you’re at fault for allowing them to still have their job. Now in life, the rules change and a lot of them are still true.

Will Guidara 00:52:26  But in life you also need to receive an invitation. Like if someone works for me, it’s part of my job to hold them accountable to a standard that I have set and they have chosen to work for me, ideally because they want to grow within my organization or they think they can learn something from me and I’m there to usher their growth. That is not the case in life. In life, I am not there to hold other people accountable, unless I’ve been invited to play a role in making them a better version of themselves. And I think that’s one of the most beautiful parts of mentorship, intentionally picking the people who you would love to see invest in your growth.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:09  All right. We’re nearly done. Is there anything you would like to talk about that we haven’t? That’s, like exciting in your life or ideas that are new to you, that you haven’t put in a book that are, you know, lighting you up?

Will Guidara 00:53:20  I mean, something that I, I’m having a lot of fun with this one thing right now, a buddy of mine.

Will Guidara 00:53:26  His name is Aaron Routier, and he lives here in Nashville, and he’s a Grammy Award winning songwriter, and he’s written music for everyone from Lady Gaga to a bunch of, like, really? I think he has like two number one hits on the radio right now, and I’ve known him for years. And about a month or two ago he invited me over to his his house. He’s like, hey, let’s spend an hour and write a song together. And I went and wrote a song with him. I believe one of the things I talk about often is how there’s a sacredness to the table. It’s one of the few remaining places where people will genuinely come together and put their phones away and lean across the table and connect, and we need more of these things that create conditions for connection. But for now, let’s protect the table at all costs, because it’s where a lot of beautiful things can come to exist. And we wrote this beautiful song called That Table and it ended up getting cut.

Will Guidara 00:54:26  I got my first cut as a songwriter within a few months of being in Nashville, and it’s coming out next month by this unbelievable band called The Lone Bellow. I bring it up for three reasons one, I’m just really excited about it. It’s fun for me too. I really do believe in talking about the power of community and what can happen when you gather together awesome people around the table and and choose to put the world on pause for a little bit. But three what it actually did for me I was not expecting in in farming, you know, you’ll hear often about crop rotation, which is certain crops deplete the soil of certain things. And so if you’re growing soybeans in a field for a measure of time, you need to plant something else in that field for a while in order to restore the nutrients required to grow the soybeans again. And I found that to be the case so powerfully with me when I invested even an hour of my life in a creative pursuit that was different from the one that I normally do.

Will Guidara 00:55:31  Yeah, right now I spend my life writing about and talking about hospitality, and I do that with, with television, with the bear, and I do it with my book and with my newsletter. But spending an hour doing something with no ambition to, like, win a Grammy or something. Actually made me feel more creative in pursuit of the things that I actually do for a living. And gosh, I just would inspire everyone to take a little time and invest it in a creative pursuit that they’re not trying to turn into a career, because I think it will make you better at the thing that you do.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:07  Yeah, I’m an unabashed fan of of that idea, and that’s got to be one of the most Nashville stories that’s ever been told. You just show up in Nashville and the next thing you know, you’re writing a song. I mean is very Nashville. And interestingly, I just I do these episodes that I give to to supporters of the show called a teaching a song and a poem where I, where I talk about I pick a song I love, a poem I love, and something I want to talk to the audience about.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:36  And the one I just did. I used a quote from the, Jeff Tweedy, who’s maybe you might know. Wilco. Their music features in the bare 100%.

Will Guidara 00:56:47  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:47  Anyway, he has a book called How to Write One Song. And I used to be a songwriter about before I started this podcast. I was a I was a songwriter, not a not a not a successful one, but I wrote songs and I loved it. And over the last ten years or so, what I’ve done is I still make I still write music. All the all the instrumental breaks in the show are all Chris, my, my editor and my friend and I. So I still make music, but I haven’t written a song song. And I just recently was like, all right, I’m going to write a song again. And so I pulled the tweedy book off the shelf about how to write one song. Yeah. And so your story further feeds that sort of inspiration to do it. And we had an episode recently with the poet and author Maggie Smith, where we talk a lot about creativity in that way and just how wonderful it is to try and make things.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:43  And I love what you said with no reason. Yes, like I’m not writing a song so it will do anything. It’s not going to do anything. Maybe Chris will hear it. Maybe my partner Ginny will hear it, but it’s the act of it.

Will Guidara 00:57:58  But here’s the thing. It will do something. It’ll make your next podcast interview better. Yes, yes, it’ll make you better. And by definition, it will more positively impact the things that you are trying to do in the impact you’re leaving in the world. And I think that sometimes we try too hard to measure the ROI of every little thing we do, without understanding that we need to measure the ROI in, in.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:23  Holistic terms.

Will Guidara 00:58:24  And holistic terms. Yeah, yeah. And you know what? The other thing that I’m really excited about is when I worked on the book, as I’m sure you felt this, actually, you develop a practice of writing, right? Yeah. And you, you figure out what is the rhythm that works for you, and you sit down and you do it.

Will Guidara 00:58:41  And then the book was done, and it felt almost sacrilegious to stop doing that, because practices are really hard to start again once you stop doing them.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:52  Yes.

Will Guidara 00:58:53  And so the way I’ve done that is I now have a newsletter that I put out every two weeks. It’s called premium. It’s kind of like what I would be saying to my entire team on a nightly basis if I still had the restaurant, and it’s just something I love doing, and it’s one of the things I’m most proud of right now. And so anyone listening, check it out. You can sign up at Unreasonable Hospitality. Com.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:13  Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Writing the book taught me something about my ability to create that I didn’t know before I did it. Yeah. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. Will, I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. The book was outstanding. I think even people who were not in hospitality would get a lot out of reading it. I know I did, and thank you so much for spending time with us.

Will Guidara 00:59:37  Thank you so much, man.

Chris Forbes 00:59:39  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 onefeed.net/newsletter.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:59  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 part one of this two-part conversation, we walked along the edge of paradox where effort gives way to ease and the search itself becomes the obstacle. In this second part of my conversation with Zen teacher Henry Shukman, the way begins to reveal itself, not as something we grasp, but something we live. We talk about awakening, the collapse of separation, and what it means to encounter reality directly beyond language, beyond self. And we find ourselves circling the same mystery from different directions, Henry through the Zen path and his app The Way and me through a new project with Rebind, which is a new AI powered dialogue with the Tao Te Ching. Different forms, different longing to meet life more honestly, more fully and more whole.

Discover a Deeper Path in Meditation – Looking for more than just another meditation app? The Way, created by Zen teacher Henry Shukman, offers a single, step-by-step journey designed to take you deeper—one session at a time. Get started today with 30 free sessions!

The Tao Te Ching is one of those books I keep coming back to. Ancient wisdom, wrapped in poetry, that somehow feels more relevant every year. Like this line: “If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money, you will never be content.“Simple. Clear. Actually useful.I’ve teamed up with Rebind.ai to create an interactive edition of the Tao—forty essential verses, translated into plain, everyday language, with space to reflect, explore, and ask questions. It’s like having a conversation not just with the Tao, but with me too. If you’re looking for more clarity, calm, or direction, come check it out here.

Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of meditation and mindfulness practices.
• Insights on the nature of thoughts and their observation during meditation.
• Importance of a structured approach to meditation.
• Personal experiences and reflections on meditation journeys.
• Discussion of the “inner radio” metaphor for understanding thoughts.
• Techniques for enhancing present-moment awareness through meditation.
• The significance of variety in meditation practices to cater to individual needs.
• The role of moderation and balance in personal growth, drawing from the Dao De Jing.
• The relationship between relative understanding and direct experience in Zen.
• The transformative potential of embracing uncertainty and interconnectedness in life.

Henry Shukman is a poet, author, and meditation teacher who has guided thousands of students from around the world through mindfulness and awakening practices. A Zen master in the Sanbo Zen lineage and the spiritual director emeritus at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Shukman is a cofounder of The Way meditation app and founder of the Original Love meditation program and has taught meditation at Google and Harvard Business School. He has written award-winning and bestselling books of poetry and fiction, he has taught poetry at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker and the Guardian.

Connect with Henry Shukman:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Henry Shukman, check out these other episodes:

Embrace the Chaos: Finding Clarity Through Meditation with Henry Shukman (Part 1)

How to Find and Follow a Healing Path with Henry Shukman

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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:

Chris Forbes 00:00:07  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 00:00:52  In part one of this two part conversation, we walked along the edge of paradox where effort gives way to ease and the search itself becomes the obstacle. In this second part of my conversation with Zen teacher Henry Shukman, the way begins to reveal itself, not as something we grasp, but something we live. We talk about awakening, the collapse of separation, and what it means to encounter reality directly beyond language, beyond self.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:23  And we find ourselves circling the same mystery from different directions, Henry through the Zen path and his app the way and me through a new project with Rebind, which is a new AI powered dialogue with the Daodejing. Different forms, different longing to meet life more honestly, more fully and more whole. I’m Erik Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Henry. Welcome back to part two of this conversation.

Henry Shukman 00:01:53  Great to be carrying on with you, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:55  If people want to know how Henry responded to the parable of the two Wolves. Go back to the last episode and it’s all there. I’m not going to make us do that again, so we’re going to jump right in. I ended the last interview with a little bit of a cliffhanger, and I said that even though I’ve been meditating for 30 years in lots of different traditions and lots of different teachers in your app, the way I had an insight that I had not had before. And so I kind of want to share it, and then we’ll kind of go into the conversation from there.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:30  And in the app, you do a great job of walking people through what sort of objects of meditation can be, or what you might notice as you pay attention to your present experience? Right. You can hear sounds. You can feel things in your body. You can see things with your eyes open, your eyes closed. You can hear things. But you talked about thoughts And thinking of them like an inner radio. And I have used that analogy a bunch of times to talk about how you can sort of just tune out your thoughts because I, you know, I may have gotten this from Stephen Hayes and acceptance of commitment therapy, but something about like, sometimes you could treat your thoughts like a radio in your neighbor’s house. You can’t turn it off, but you actually did something a little bit different, which was to encourage us to pay actual attention to the thoughts, to listen to them as if they were the radio. And up until now, every time there’s a thought, I may glance at it.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:35  And I’ve had teachers encouraged me to glance at it, but then you come back to something else. But in this meditation, that was it. It was the thoughts were you treated them like an inner radio. And I have to say, it kind of opened my mind in a new way.

Henry Shukman 00:03:50  Well, I’m happy to hear it, Eric. Yeah. You know, I remember, when I was a kid, I must have been five. Probably. Or maybe six. This was in the UK, in Oxford, you know, back in the late 60s. It would have been. And my parents, along with having kind of a modern transistor radio little thing box, you know, they also had this sort of ancient thing called a wireless set, which was a wooden big thing, maybe 2 or 3ft tall, which stood on its own. It had these actually, it still had these things called valves in it, which were these sort of like long, thin light bulbs, and they had to warm up.

Henry Shukman 00:04:29  So you switched it on. It took kind of five minutes for these things to start working. And then it was just a radio with almost like a kind of wicker front where the speaker was.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:38  I seen them, they’re actually kind of beautiful now.

Henry Shukman 00:04:41  Well, it was, it was, yeah. It was like a piece of furniture, you know. Right. And anyway, I remember I loved listening to it, you know, whatever was on it was fascinating. And it didn’t matter if it was, you know, music Musical people talking. And I remember this day when I was sitting next to it or kneeling next to it or whatever. I was right there looking at it. Hearing voices inside. And I had been assuming that there were little people in there. You know, I was young enough to have just thought, well, obviously, somehow I don’t know how it works, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t really think think it through. There’s got to be little, little guys in there talking, you know.

Henry Shukman 00:05:20  And then I suddenly had this realization. No, there aren’t actually people in that. But the voices are still happening. Yes. And so that I’ve often thought back to that moment as an insight into thinking, because if you’ve become a meditator, you get good at just recognizing, oh, I’ve been lost in thought. Yeah. And I think I was like that for years. I knew if I’d been lost in thought, but I hadn’t really stopped to. And I could have said what the subject matter was. You know, I was I was thinking of that conversation I had 18 years ago or yesterday or I might be having tomorrow or whatever it was, but I hadn’t really delved into what is actually happening. What’s the phenomenology? What are the what’s the actual concrete phenomena? Sort of concrete of thinking. And of course, it actually is describable. We typically hear voices. We hear talk in the mind, and we sometimes see images. This sort of video, you could say radio and sometimes video sometimes, of course, both like watching a movie.

Henry Shukman 00:06:31  But that moment from my childhood, it taught me something about thinking, which is that, I mean, later when I thought back to it, you know that, yeah, I can hear the talk going on in my mind. And Rather than being the equivalent to thinking there’s real people, there is sort of getting sucked into the the subject matter that the voices are talking about, so to speak. It may just be one voice across the commentary. So actually, to take that step back and there isn’t a real thing going on there. That is what it’s about. The real thing that’s going on is hearing the words in the speech in my mind, and I can sit and be aware of that and not be drawn into it. And I can also do this thing of sitting and being aware of the kind of place or space in the mind where that kind of talk arises. And I can sit there and and be aware that, well, no talk is arising right now. Oh, there’s a bit there’s a little snippet.

Henry Shukman 00:07:45  Yeah, I almost missed it. It almost caught me, but I just saw it. I heard it rather, you know. I was aware of it. So it’s that kind of apparatus of the actual machinery, as it were, of thinking. I believe it’s incredibly helpful to become aware of a because it’ll mean over time we get less caught up in thought and more therefore more present. But be because it’s another thing to be aware of, just like sounds out in the world, you know, it’s another dimension of of mindfulness. We could say, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:24  Yeah. It really struck me in that idea of like, where in your head is that voice coming from? And the thing that I noticed even more clearly, I had noticed this before, but again, this sort of sharpened the picture for me was that thoughts happen almost at different volumes, too. Right. Like there’s ones that are very sort of insistent or loud, but there’s others that are just barely audible that are sneaking through in there.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:55  That’s right. And so when I started, like you said, to pay attention to the machinery, it was really insightful for me. And and talking about being present, that is present moment awareness. I mean, those thoughts are happening right now. And so by noticing that then I’m there. And so it was just a slight reframe, but it was making spending some time letting thoughts actually be the object of your focus, instead of the thing that pulls you away from what the object of your focus was. And for me, was was really profound.

Henry Shukman 00:09:35  Yeah, I’m glad to hear it. And you described it perfectly. And by the way, on that thing about where they’re arising, it’s something that I find sometimes is I kind of okay, I’ve got. I’ve got the zone in my mind where they’re arising. I’ve got it clear and I’m listening in there. I’m listening in there. And then suddenly I was, oh boy, I wasn’t paying attention. And another one snuck in at a different, slightly different place than I thought.

Henry Shukman 00:10:00  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there you are. Right. So it’s, you know, we have to stay on it in a sense. But I totally think it’s it’s a worthy object of mindfulness. You know, it’s. And then, of course we can. Then we can bring in the heart area and the emotionality, the emotion tone in, in the heart area as well. And then we’ve got kind of a full picture of our inner experience. And we can be more aware and as we’re more aware we can be more accepting of it. So it’s got a lot of knock on benefits, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:32  Yeah. So I’m going to ask you another question about the way the app, or what happens in the app, because what you have people doing early on is. noting mentally what’s happening. So, for example, if I were to just be sitting quietly, I might be like, you know, thought, you know, hearing a sound, feeling a sensation in my body. Right? I’m just kind of watching what pops into awareness.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:03  You have people noting it. This is a nerdy question just for me. But you often have people then repeat it. Like, let’s say I’m trying to focus on hearing externally. It almost sounds like you’re using the noting not just to note what you hear, but to remind you of what you’re trying to pay attention to. Say a little bit more about what’s going on, because it’s kind of a persona, but kind of not.

Henry Shukman 00:11:30  That’s right. It’s some sort of in some ways, it’s like some vipassana. There’s a strong Vipassana teaching from maharshi or in Burma to do this kind of labeling noting practice. There’s also places in the early sutures that they talk about this kind of labeling. But what essentially what it is is it can either be responsive labeling. In other words, when something’s happened, we want to just note to ourselves that it has been happening. That’s really helpful for bringing back our kind of calm, steady presence and mindfulness. But also we can use it to direct our attention in a certain direction.

Henry Shukman 00:12:09  So exactly like your example. Yeah. Yeah, we use it both ways. So for example, if we want to be paying attention to the soundscape, to, you know, what we’re hearing of the world while meditating, just a little light note here. You’re hearing or listening, you know, just occasionally repeated. It’ll just keep our attention on that. And, you know, we can make it can be we can get more and more absorbed in the soundscape if we’re consistently keeping our attention on it and it can become, you know, quite fascinating. We can get more curious about it. So that’s a really helpful thing. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:46  So a couple things really unlocked meditation for me probably 12 years ago or so. I have been doing it. I’ve been doing on and off for 30 years, but there was a lot of off in the on over that time. Right. You know, go back 12 years. It’s before you have a thousand meditation apps. You know what I’m getting, I’m getting from books.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:08  And mostly what I’m getting is meditate for like 30 minutes a day or 20 minutes at a time, that kind of thing. And that was a long time for me because, you know, I’ve joked when I sit down to meditate, it’s like the the dark circus rolls into town, right? Like, it’s it’s not that way anymore. But it used to be that way, you know, like a sort of a and so trying to do it for that long was hard. And it was almost always breath as the anchor, which for whatever reason, is not a great one for me. And one day I heard somewhere, somehow. Go sit outside and just listen to the sounds. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, I get what people are talking about when they say that meditation is peaceful and enjoyable. And like, I had not really much had that experience. For whatever reason, the breath was a fight for me. but all of a sudden, listening to sound and just knowing what came up was pleasant, enjoyable, and it allowed me to steady my attention enough that then I was able to do things like breath, meditation and others. So sound was a really big one. You know, it’s it’s it has a special place in my heart.

Henry Shukman 00:14:24  Yeah, that’s beautiful to hear. I can totally relate to that. You know, there’s a thing about the breath. I mean, it’s it’s it’s standard practice across many traditions. You know, start with the breath. It’s here. It’s kind of very It’s in a way, it’s almost sort of transparent, you know. Yeah. It’s, you know, it’s there’s sort of what’s really there. Of course. Really what it is is just the sensation of the muscular sensation of breathing. But it can be very soothing in time. But it’s not a great it’s not always a great place to start for the for the reason. I mean, it could be a variety of reasons, but one strong one in my mind is that that is right. Where all our emotion is felt in the body is right where the breath is, you know, in the chest, the diaphragm, the belly.

Henry Shukman 00:15:08  That’s our zone of sensations of emotion, you know, the actual muscular, subtle contractions that go with different emotions. They’re right there. So breath will often take us to emotionality, and we may not be ready for that in our practice. It can be, you know, if people have trauma and, you know, probably most of us might do to some degree, you know, and it’ll will be kind of forced to to face it. And that may not be a good place to start. So here’s the thing. There’s so many kinds of meditation. There’s there’s so many approaches. There’s so many framings of it. There’s so many specific practices that that are that are in. You know, especially in Asia, of course, where it’s been a, you know, really much more developed than in the West. And, you know, somebody once I read this somewhere long ago, like to use the word meditation is about the same as using the word sport in the variety of things it could be.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:13  That’s a great that’s a really good analogy. And I agree with you because there are so many.

Henry Shukman 00:16:19  Yeah. So that thing of just one practice. Do it forever. Follow the breath or something like that. You know, there’s there’s pedagogical sense in that in certain ways. And of course, it might not be the breath. You could just listen for the whole of your practice. But on the other hand, there are arguments for having different practices and so on. The way we try to lead somebody through a variety of practices as a kind of foundation, you know, so they’re really building up the basics of, of a meditation practice. And, and I mean, just for one example, there’s one famous manual for meditation in the early Buddhist canon, the early Buddhist sutures, the Pali Canon. And that is, it’s only like a four page or maybe six page document. And it’s got 65 different practices, you know. So you know.  So and but we the, our idea in the way is like, let’s get you clear on some of the foundational practices and purposes, the possibilities of meditation.

Henry Shukman 00:17:23  So you’ve got a better grounding then, you know, gradually will develop and keep you moving through them all over the course of the pathway. So you’re getting a better grounding, you know, that’s that’s the logic in my mind that is behind our pathway. Really. You know, it’s that kind of exposure to, to to different foundations of practice.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:44  Well, what I think is really helpful and useful about that is I do think that exposure to different ways is important in the program that I teach used to be called spiritual habits. Now we call it wise habits. There’s a different type of meditation for every week to sort of expose people in the way that you do. But the thing about what I’m doing is basically I’m just dropping this thing in there and going, okay, well, if you like it, stick with it. Like what you’re doing is exposing people in a systematic way to these different things, but also keeping them on a track. Right. And we talked about the part of the problem today is there are a thousand meditation apps, and some of them have tens of thousands of different meditations that you can choose from.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:30  Yeah. It’s similar to the the Netflix syndrome where you you get on and you instead of watching anything, you spend all your time trying to figure out what you’re going to watch. Right. It’s a similar phenomenon. Yeah. So but what what we get with the way your app, what we get is variety, a sampling, but on a path and headed in a certain direction instead of random. And I think it’s that’s really helpful. And I think the other thing that it does is it gives people access to a teacher like you in the way you would have access to a teacher in real life. So, for example, I can listen to nearly any meditation teacher in the world has a few meditations out there, right? I can go listen to them. Yeah. But the thing about working with a teacher in anything, really, is that that teacher takes you along a path, you follow along a path with that teacher, and they’re sort of shaping that for you. I think what people get with the way, what reason I love the way is that you’re leading me on a journey.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:39  You’re not just giving me a meditation or two. You are. It’s like if I were working with you as a student and you’d say, do this now let’s do this. And hey, Eric, for next week, let’s do that. And. And so I think it it really does that very well.

Henry Shukman 00:19:54  That is the hope that it’s sort of a path of training you know. And of course there’s you know I know there’s no perfect way to do it. And you know and it’ll some parts people will like more. Some parts they’re like less. And there’s kind of nothing we can do about that. But if there’s just that incentive to keep going. Yeah. You know, my hope is that if somebody really just followed this, you know, in three years, they’d be in a different place. They just really would be because they’ve had three years of pretty consistent meditation, and they’ve learned a lot, and they’ve studied a lot about their own experience inward and outward. They’ve had glimpses of different dimensions of practice, you know, which is really important because a lot of people meditating, that’s great.

Henry Shukman 00:20:40  And a lot of them think, I just want to use it to dial down my stress, you know? And that’s great. And it can help with that. But man, there’s so much more. It offers, you know, these existential discoveries we can make under the rubric of awakening or getting into deep flow states and discovering more support in our lives. There’s lots of good things in meditation that are beyond stress reduction. So anyway, so I’m glad you say that, because the main thing I wanted was like, here’s why it’s worth keeping going and here’s what you need to do to keep going. Just hit the next one. Step by step. You know, it’s that simple.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:17  That’s that’s exactly it. I mean, you know, the book that I just turned into the publisher, the working title right now is how a Little Becomes a Lot. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about here, right. Is that you do a little each day. Yeah. And the thing about the, the philosophy of or the approach of little by little, you know, little becomes a lot is that those littles have to go in the same direction.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:43  Yes. A thousand different littles don’t add up to a lot unless they’re, like, focused in some way. Right? That’s the thing about it. And that’s what this app does. It allows you to do a little. Yeah, each day that is accumulating in a particular direction. And it’s what you would get working with a good teacher would be the same thing. Right? Each day is a little thing, but it’s headed somewhere.

Henry Shukman 00:22:09  Yeah. But look, it’s exactly it’s like if we if we’re on a program, it’s that much easier to keep going. You know, a program gives us a direction and it’s in many areas of life, it’s the same thing comes up. It’s like someone says, I really want to follow a spiritual path. Well, give me a step by step path. You know, like 12 steps or something. You know that we really have a path to follow. but actually, Eric, I don’t want to. I want to. We’ve been talking a lot about the way.

Henry Shukman 00:22:40  But let’s talk about the Dao, because that, you know, that is also the way. And if I was a complete sort of newcomer to the daodejing and really sort of had heard of it, but really didn’t know a thing about it, I’d really want a guy like you to tell me to show me the way in. Yeah. And I wondered if you might just be willing to speak a little bit about sort of favorite verses from it, you know? Sure. Yeah. And yeah, I’d love to hear more.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:22  I’ll read one. And this is one of the verses that has been my favorite since I picked the book up the first time when I was 18 years old, which was a long time ago.

Henry Shukman 00:23:33  Not that long.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:34  Well, it’s verse nine in some translations of the book. The verses have a name and others they don’t. In this case, I went with the name, and the one I came up with was an exercise in placidity. And it goes like this. If you keep filling a bowl, it will overflow.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:54  If you keep sharpening a knife, it will become dull. Care too much about money and you will never be free. Care too much about the opinions of others and you will bring ruin upon yourself. Do your work and let go of the results. The best path to peace.

Henry Shukman 00:24:13  Beautiful. Beautiful. Wow. Pearls in every line.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:18  Yeah, yeah. I mean, kind of all the way through. But that line about care too much about the opinions of others. When I was young and reading that, that hit me, I was like, oh, because I did. I mean, it’s part of being young, I think because you do care deeply about the opinions of others. For me, one of the benefits of aging and spiritual practice is I don’t care so much. I’m not saying I don’t care. I’m saying I don’t care so much. But I recognized in that line that that path wasn’t that wouldn’t work, you know, and I like the line care too much about money. It’s not about everybody cares about money.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:55  You shouldn’t not care about money. Care too much about it, though, and you’ll never be free. And that’s the idea of enough, right? Because if we don’t know how to say enough and so much of the Tao is sort of about enough, those first couple verses, you know, if you keep filling a bowl, it will overflow. If you keep sharpening a knife, it’ll become dull. That’s talking about not knowing when enough is.

Henry Shukman 00:25:20  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:21  Right. Yes. Talking about. Just give me more, give me more, give me more. And, I first was introduced to this book when I was 18. It did not stop me from descending into heroin addiction. But looking back, you know, these lines really resonate. I can see like, well, you know, addiction is nothing but really keep trying to fill a bowl, you know, that it’s actually the reverse is it’s kind of you, you keep filling the bowl and it keeps remaining empty, you know, in the case of addiction.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:51  But yeah. So that’s one of my favorite verses for sure.

Henry Shukman 00:25:54  Yeah, that’s absolutely beautiful. It makes me think of, you know, the Epicurean ideal of moderation. Yes. You know, Epicurus was he’s often mis mistranslated or misrepresented as being like Epicurean these days, you know, for a long time has meant sort of gorge. Yeah, yeah. But actually he didn’t he didn’t mean that at all. He. That’s really wrong. He’s just said that it’s okay to enjoy a good meal in moderation. Like it’s moderate. Your your your desire. You know, be in a balanced place. And it’s it’s kind of like the middle way. Yes. You know, in Buddhism like like in I mean, Buddha’s early story was that he was brought up in the lap of luxury and, you know, in the sort of consumerist Paradise, as it were, where you could have everything you could possibly want. Then he he woke up to the fact that he was going to die one day. The stories about how that happened, and then he got into the path of practice and went the entire opposite way to extreme asceticism.

Henry Shukman 00:26:58  You know, he was he at one point, he starved himself to the point. The sutra said he could see his spine through his belly, you know, and and birds nested in his beard and grass grew up through the mats. He was sitting on the mat he was sitting on for meditation. And that didn’t work either. He was about to die. And eventually Sujata, this milkmaid, came and brought him this very beautiful, refined kind of rice milk pudding kind of thing. And he ate it. And he felt better again. And he and he, he then decided to follow the middle way. You know, not extreme luxury and indulgence, not extreme self-denial. Just. And he actually said he wanted to trust his heart. Yeah. The heart he had as a child, you know, just trust it. And sure enough, soon after that, a week later, he awakened in a blaze of glory, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:27:54  Yeah. No, I love the middle way. There’s a chapter in my book about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:58  I mean, there’s a whole chapter about just that idea. And in the whys habits program, we spend a week on it because I do think it’s so, so important now in my life, there are some things that there is no middle way on. Right? So for me, with addiction, I kind of am like, right, I just need the off switch. Yes, but if I wasn’t built that way, I would love I. A glass of wine would be lovely. Yes. Right. Yes. You know, a drink would be lovely. It’s. It’s one of life’s pleasures. It’s just in my particular wiring. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that’s one area I can’t do. The the middle. But so many things. And I think the other thing about the middle way, we talked a little bit about this yesterday about the sort of potentially things that seem like they’re opposite, like accepting right where I am and wanting to be different. And to me, the middle way is you can hold both those opposites.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:56  It’s not always just splitting the difference. Sometimes it’s holding the tension between two things that are different. And I think so much of life, if we look at it closely, is exactly that. You’re holding a tension between two things. I value my children, and I value my job. And those things are intention at times. Yes. And that’s not going to go away. And so becoming comfortable holding these things that seem opposite. And that’s one of the things the Dow does and Coens do too. They constantly flip you into this paradoxical state. Yes. You’re like, well, that doesn’t make any sense. But that training of getting comfortable with certain things, not making sense to me, also helps with the training in life of recognizing that you’re going to have to hold things that are in tension with each other.

Henry Shukman 00:29:50  Yes. That’s beautifully put. And I think there’s a there’s something I don’t know whether you resonate with this, but I feel that there’s when we’ve got two things in tension, the capacity to hold both actually gives us just a little opening to this space of awareness that is, is just a little bit larger than our ordinary sense of things.

Henry Shukman 00:30:15  And that that, you know, this is what koans do as well, is they. They’re often paradoxical or make no sense, but they’re kind of trying to push us in some way, or they have the capacity to just give us a little key that opens a little door that opens up more space. So suddenly. Yeah. Wow. I can rest in a place where these two apparently contradictory things are both true. And I can do that, you know, and I can. I find a piece out of that tension comes this slightly larger capacity that I didn’t know I had, or I didn’t know I was already kind of plugged into but hadn’t recognized it. And that’s the place. That’s a place that is actually dynamically peaceful. It’s kind of energetically energetic and peaceful at the same time. And that’s a great place to hang out, really in life if we can get there. But I’d love to hear more, actually on Dao. Can you can you give us a another highlight for you?

Eric Zimmer 00:31:16  Sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:16  I’ll do one more here. This one is verse 44. And it’s going to be similar because the Dow does that a lot, right? It’s not a linear book that you read and it just progresses you through ideas. It’s got these themes that circle around each other and you keep coming back. This one’s called fame and fortune. Fame or self-respect which matters more? Health or wealth? Which is more valuable? Gain or loss? Which is more painful? If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money, you will never be content. And here’s my favorite, maybe my favorite set of lines in all of the Dow. If you are content with what you have, you can take joy in what is. When you realize there is nothing lacking. The whole world belongs to you.

Henry Shukman 00:32:08  That are that is glorious. And that’s that’s I think, I can think of many points in Zen that grow out of that, you know, because, as you wisely said in a prior conversation, you know, Zen is a kind of fusion of Buddhism, and Daoism is what happened when I think you put it beautifully.

Henry Shukman 00:32:30  When Buddhism, Daoism met in China in about the fifth, sixth century CE, you know, around about that time. And there’s like this I’m thinking of a line of a verse that was written to a koan, which is like the the holy hermit doesn’t need to be appointed a lord, the holy hermit, already he or she is one who already knows. You know that nothing is lacking. Nothing is lacking. So they have all the wealth in the world because nothing is lacking, you know. And so that’s. Yeah. That’s. I’m. It’s really. It’s. I’d love to actually be more versed in in the daodejing, I must say, because I think there’s, there’s so much in Zen that does come out of Daoism. It does, you know, and even things like the Cohen collections, they are like the koans, you know, as we said, are these little nuggets out of the biographies of great Zen adepts, you know, that became kind of meditation points that people could sort of sit with.

Henry Shukman 00:33:43  And sometimes it’s just a line, sometimes it’s a little dialogue, sometimes a little is an event, you know? but they’re, they, they can really trigger whether subtle or quite dramatic, they can trigger little or large shifts in the way we experience an ordinary moment. And they so they sort of reveal stuff about our ordinary experience that we might not have noticed and just that open that larger space, you know, and but what they do in these collections is they’ll they’ll state the cone and then there’ll be some verse on it, little, little verse, and then maybe a little commentary. That’s very like the E ching, you know, the you get the hexagram. I don’t know if people know it, but you know, the I-Ching, the Book of Changes. You get the hexagram, you get a verse, you get a commentary. It’s the same sort of structure, you know. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there are ancient commentaries that, oh, at least there’s lots of lines of the of the daodejing that get quoted throughout the Zen texts, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:47  Yeah, yeah. And there’s and there’s commentaries on them in the same way from contemporaries or maybe not contemporaries. Exactly. Of of Lao Tzu, who we don’t even know if is one person. Right? Yeah. We don’t know what the Tao is exactly. you know, we don’t know whether it’s written by one person, whether it’s written by many people. There’s some legend around it. and I want to go to koans in a second, but I want to circle back to this verse real quick with this idea of, you know, realizing that nothing’s lacking. The whole world belongs to you. And I’ve had some of the kensho satori type Zen moments, these these moments of enlightenment. In my case, some of them have been longer than moments. But that line when you realize there’s nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you, describes that state to me, to a very large degree. Right? There is this sense that there is nothing lacking at all, and that the whole world belongs to me and I belong to it.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:48  Yes. In this deeply felt sense. Yes. Yes. And so I love this little, little piece here because it points in a direction. Now we’re, you know, to have a moment where we realize that where we truly feel that nothing is lacking. That’s that’s a state that you know, you may get to. You may not get to, but you can get closer and closer to it. Because the way we tend to process everything is let me go get or do X, Y or Z, then I will be happy. And this points to the fact that there’s actually a different way to do that. That all the steps along the way could be cut out. I don’t need to go get X, I don’t need to get Y, I don’t need to get Z. This isn’t saying that there isn’t a realm in which all that stuff is really important, but there’s another realm. There’s another way of thinking, of being where you realize like, oh, I don’t need to do any of that.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:50  Yeah, right. And I think that’s what I think. That’s what the Dow points to. I think that’s what Zen points to. I think that’s what Buddhism in general points to. I think that’s what, you know, the Christian mystics point to is all this idea that from one view. Yes. Nothing needs to be different.

Henry Shukman 00:37:07  Yes. Yes. Yes. I totally agree. Put it beautifully. You could. It’s almost as if, like if we can just really inhabit this present moment, we’ll find that nothing was ever lacking. Yeah. And somehow we get conditioned in this way of not fully inhabiting this moment, because we’re so aware of the past and we’re so looking toward what is coming next. There’s one Zen master. She said. Somebody came to study with her and they asked like, well, what do you what do you teach? And she said, when I sit, I sit. When I stand, I stand. When I walk, I walk. When I arrive, I arrive.

Henry Shukman 00:37:50  And the potential student said, well, big deal, I do the same. She said, no, when you sit, you’re already standing. When you stand, you’re already walking. When you walk, you’re already arriving. When you arrive. You’re already leaving. It’s like we’re just not really in this immediate moment.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:09  We tend to treat most moments as things we need to get through on the way to other moments. And I think it’s important that we just stress real quickly. The the Zen idea. I don’t know if it’s I learned it in Zen of the relative, in the absolute meaning that there is a world in which your job, your your children, your health, all that matters. It’s important. It should be tended to. It needs to be tended to. This isn’t saying like, oh, everything’s perfect just right. But there’s another view where what we’re talking about is this inherent perfection with the way things are. And what, what I, what Zen has encouraged in me is the ability to move between those two.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:58  And then ultimately, you realize they are one and the same thing, but it’s very helpful for me because the thing that happens when people start talking, like you and I are talking about everything being fine the way it is, is that any anybody can manufacture a list off the top of their head of 20 things that are not fine about their lives, about the world as a whole, all of that, and that’s all valid. So I think it’s important. And that’s what I loved about Zen. And this idea of relative and absolute was it told me, you don’t have to give all that up. You don’t have to suddenly think like, oh, starving children. That’s not a problem. The world’s perfect, right? No, it’s not from this view.

Henry Shukman 00:39:40  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:40  But there’s another view. But most of us live 99.9% in the relative and almost none in that other. And what Zen training does or what, you know, going into the Dao more deeply and studying or taking the way app with you is it allows us to get a little bit more time. In that other view.

Henry Shukman 00:40:01  You put it beautifully. Yeah. There’s there’s a metaphor that’s in an early Chinese Buddhist document of the path of practice being like a cart track, and the cart track has two wheel ruts, you know, one for either wheel. And one of those ruts is the path of gradual development that is basically on the relative side. It’s like, you know, which we need to work on, just like you say, both in terms of our life and even when it comes to practice, we actually need to work on healing our healing our stuff, cleaning up, you know, what do they say? Waking up, but also growing up and cleaning up. You know, we got to do that work. And then the other wheel, right, is actually this absolute side that’s always already here. So you can’t really you don’t exactly get to it. That’s why I think last time we were talking about. Can I go and find it? Well, not really, because it’s already here.

Henry Shukman 00:41:00  Not only is it already here. It’s what you already are as well. You know you already are that. So you can’t really be looking for it. You’re. You are it, you know. But but to have both sides be manifesting in our practice, you know, we can work on the more relative side in practice and in life as we do. But if we’re on the meditative path, we’ll start to get little flickers of that absolute side, you know, and it can show up in a variety of ways. It’s just be it can just be a weirdo. Kindness that I didn’t I didn’t. Didn’t seem to make sense. And it can be even at times I got a lot of troubles and challenges that I’m really trying to work my way through. But I do my morning sit and it just cumulatively, I might suddenly get a moment standing at the water cooler, looking out the window, or getting into my car when suddenly this weird spell of volcanoes just sort of lands on me out of nowhere.

Henry Shukman 00:42:00  And it’s. And it’s beautiful. And it can go deeper as well, where, you know, suddenly I feel I’ll get a flash that in some way that’s hard to express, actually, but I feel it very strongly. I’m not separate from this world. I’m truly part of it. Not as an idea, but as a felt experience. And that can be very powerful. And really, you know, sometimes it’ll have us weeping with the beauty of it and, you know, the kind of revelatory love of belonging in a way. You said it so nicely, actually, you know, that, we how did you put it? The world belongs to me. But. Yeah, but also we belong to the world. Exactly. Yeah. So that that absolute side is a kind of, Man, it’s it’s such a beautiful thing to get to know more. It changes our perspective. And I totally agree with you. But it’s not about denying the relative side. It’s expanding our perspective and our and us, you know, in a sense of love and belonging that we can live with.

Henry Shukman 00:43:10  You know, and again, the middle way would be like, how do I ride both. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:32  What I’d love to do next is have you give us a koan. We’ve talked about what they are. We’ve talked about what they can do. If you stay on the way. Your app, you’ll you’ll get to them, right? You’ll you’ll actually get to, do koans with you, and I think you’ll be modest about this, but in general, a lot, a lot. A lot of people would think you are one of the modern masters teaching the koan. You know, again, I know that you’re humble and you’re not.

Henry Shukman 00:44:06  You’re just you’re in trouble. Then if that’s the case.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:08  You’re going to brush that off. Nonetheless. It’s true. And so, you know, the app will get us to the place where you can. You can try that. But but give us a koan so that people hear one in the same way. We just gave them a verse of the Tao.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:22  Instead of talking about the Dao, we gave them a verse. Now give me a koan or give us a koan.

Henry Shukman 00:44:27  Okay, okay. This is, you know, they come in all shapes and sizes. Okay. So so this one, this is more of a narrative. It’s I’ll just cut to the chase of it. There’s a, there’s a young brilliant scholar called Darshan and he’s, you know, this is China, late eighth century. So he’s, he’s versed in Buddhism and he’s probably versed in Daoism as well, you know, and he’s got it down. He’s particularly big on this particular suture called the diamond suture. He knows it back to front. And he’s been he’s been studying hard, practicing hard. And he believes that you have to go through endless training in order to have a flicker of awakening to this stuff we’re talking about. And he hears about this. He’s he’s not yet a Zen guy. He he’s and he hears about this other school of Buddhism, the Zen school that’s saying, no, you just need to look into your own heart and you’ll find awakening is already there.

Henry Shukman 00:45:29  And he’s thinking, rubbish, they’re wrong. And he loads up this sort of barrow with scrolls and scriptures and commentaries, goes down to meet some Zen masters. And and the first one he meets, he starts having a conversation with him, and it’s in this monastery. And the guy is called Long Tan, which means, Dragon Lake. Actually, it’s the name of the master. He lives near a lake known as Dragon Lake. So that’s what it’s called. And they start talking late into the night, and it goes on and on. And he’s asking lots of questions of this master, and he’s really trying to trip him up and challenge him with all the stuff he knows from his scholarly studies. And eventually the master says long term, says it’s late. It’s late. It’s time we go to bed. And and Darshan sort of pushes aside the blanket hanging, hanging over the door. And it’s pitch black. And he doesn’t know his way around this monastery. He comes back and says, it’s pitch black outside and long time the master lighter paper lantern for him, which is an ordinary, you know, illumination device, like a candle in those days or something like that.

Henry Shukman 00:46:42  He lights it for him and he holds it out. And Diane is reaching to take this little lamp. And just as he’s reaching for it long term, blows it out. He blows out the lamp. And in that instant, Dyson has a profound awakening. And he he. The story is, you know, he’s trembling and weeping and sweating and. Shaking and bows to to this mushroom and says. I’ll never doubt your words again. You know. He’s suddenly seen something he’d never seen before. So. Okay, so that’s that’s the happy story, you know, the next day, Dyson gathers all his scriptures and burns them. And he says, you know it. You could you could master all the all the scholarly works in the world. It’s just like a hair in a vast space, that’s all. It amounts to a scholarly Understanding. So this is a perfect example of the difference between our ordinary sort of human understanding, you know, relative understanding which you can get very refined. But one moment of direct experience of the absolute and it puts it in such a different perspective.

Henry Shukman 00:48:01  So we sit with just that moment. He’s reaching for the lamp and the teacher blows out the lamp. That’s actually the koan. It’s just that. So as a meditator, we would sit, you know, get into our quiet, calm space. The meditation, however it’s showing up. We let ourselves be as we are soft body, loose body slowing down. And we’re starting to just settle in to being present. And then we drop the little story in. The master blew out the light, the master blew out the lamp. And you know, Darshan has probably seen a lamp blown out 10,000 times. But this is the first time he sees it in a most intimate way. In a way, he’s never seen it before. And so we just kind of rest with it, and we just let it gently work in our subconscious, in our unconscious. You know, we might sit with it on and off for weeks, letting it just kind of steep in us, and we just sort of see what happens.

Henry Shukman 00:49:13  We might get little moments that are that was a little unusual. What was that? That birdsong seemed inordinately close or intimate, you know, or wow, that sunlight is suddenly so beautiful. Just little glimmers and shivers of actually another way of being in the world, just subtly touching us, you know. And so, in other words, we don’t need to have the mind blowing awakening Experience that Deshaun had, but we can get little echoes of it. You know and and and it’s all there in just that moment. The teacher blew out the lamp is right there you know. So that’s a that’s an example of a of a koan, you know, and how we would, how we would actually sit with it and let it work on us. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:08  Beautiful. That’s a that’s a great one. I’ve, I was sharing with you. I did, I got through a hundred koans. And when I say get through, what that means is your teacher gives you a koan. You go do what you suggested, which is you sit with it, and then you come back to your teacher.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:24  And something in Zen that’s called DocuSign, and you present your response. And I think that word present is is fairly accurate. Yes, you present and very often what you will get for a while is, you know, if your teacher is kind like mine was, I think you need to sit with that a little bit longer. I think less kind is no right. It’s just just a simple no. Or maybe. Maybe somebody whacks you with a stick, I don’t know. But but yeah, that’s that’s kind of the, the process.

Henry Shukman 00:51:01  Right. That’s what we do in the traditional, you know, student teacher context. But we can also just sit with them on our own. There’s no you know, they’re public property. And Cohen actually means a public case and so on the way people do actually write in and tell us about experiences they’ve had. And we always respond to everything that comes in. But, you know, they’re they’re very valuable just to, to, to to nourish our own sitting just like that, just by themselves.

Henry Shukman 00:51:33  You know, if we don’t have access to a teacher, you know, it works that way too.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:37  Beautiful. I’m going to switch directions a little bit and play a little game here. I’m not known for games, although for Something About You brings out the the, the the trickster in me. I remember when we were in, New Mexico last year, I read a passage from a book you wrote like 40 years ago that was very Zen. And you were like, I wrote that. So something about you makes me want to do things like this. So what I’m going to do is this I interviewed recently, a favorite of mine who is a old sort of new, old and new friend of yours, David White.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:15  Yes. And David has this wonderful book called consolations two and Consolations. One was the same thing. He picks a word and he writes about it. And he’s a beautiful, beautiful, poetic writer. He’s a poet mainly. And the last word in the book is Zen.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:32  So I’m going to read something he wrote about Zen and just let you then say whatever you want Afterwards. Okay.

Henry Shukman 00:52:39  Okay. Lovely. By the way, I actually got an advance copy. He just banged out that essay, and he sent it straight to me. I bet before the book came out, we had great conversations about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:49  Yeah. He described to me you guys were friends a long time ago in England. And he said that he at that time was teaching you about Zen. And then he described it as. Then Henry got in a Lamborghini and went tearing past me. And now he’s the Zen master. All right. This is what he wrote. Zen is surprising under its subterfuge. Zen’s biggest surprise is that it seems to have more confidence in the incoherent life we first brought to it than the one we are trying to replace it with.

Henry Shukman 00:53:29  That’s beautiful. Yeah. It’s one of the sort of, one of the little phrases that has come to be better known about Zen is not knowing.

Henry Shukman 00:53:39  Not knowing. There was a Korean Zen teacher who always taught. His book is called only don’t know, only don’t know. Just let go of the confidence that we have in ourselves having the whole picture do. We’re very you know, we can’t help it. We we we’re very convinced that we’ve got the whole picture of what this life is and how we navigate it and what this world is that we’re moving through. And Zen says, can we just even a little bit let go of the certainty that we have the whole picture? What is it like to make that little surrender? Maybe, I don’t know, the whole picture. And in that little fracture, that little crevice of uncertainty, of surrender, There’s a tenderness, there’s a warmth. There’s a promise that this very world as we know it, with all its troubles and challenges, could actually be our very own healing. It’s like there’s a great koan. The whole world is medicine. The whole world is your healing, you know. And what kind of sense does that make? Well, it’s like there’s a possibility coming back to what we were talking about earlier, of discovering that you belong to the world, that you’re really, truly of the world, and the sense of separateness from the world that we all, you know, kind of naturally, automatically almost live with.

Henry Shukman 00:55:25  You know, that is fair enough. That’s the relative side. And there’s another side to the absolute side where we’re simply not separate. But in our world of certainty about our situation, it’s harder for that side to show itself. So the what? I forget David’s language, exactly, but that inchoate confusion that we come in with that might be closer to the not knowing, to the release of my preconceptions and my assumptions that my preconceptions are correct. You know, sometimes I feel it’s like we’re walking on a cement floor, you know, walking through life on a on a bed. A foundation of certainty about the way things are and what koans want to do. What Zen wants to do is, put a little earthquake under us, a little upheaval under us, and suddenly we might find that that solid foundation And isn’t solid. And instead of it being horrifying, it’s marvelous. It can. Well, it can be quite a shock, you know, as well, but it’s a beautiful shock. You know that great teacher Rinpoche, Tibetan teacher, you know, he said.

Henry Shukman 00:56:52  One glimpse of emptiness is so horrifying that compassion naturally arises. And then he added, no one glimpse of emptiness is so marvellous that compassion naturally arises. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:07  I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Henri, you, without meaning to actually cued what we’re going to do in the post-show conversation, which is I want to talk about emptiness. It’s a concept in Zen, in Buddhism, and it’s in the Dao a lot, too. And it’s a confusing one for a lot of people. So you and I and the post-show conversation are going to jump into that. Listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show show conversation, as well as a special episode that I make just for you. That’s called Teaching Song and a poem where I share a poem I love, a song I love, and an idea that’s on my mind. And you want to support the show, go to one. You feed, join and become part of our community. Henry. Thank you again. It is always such a pleasure.

Henry Shukman 00:57:51  It’s been a delight for me. Thank you very much for having me. I’m really honored.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:55  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. 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.