In this episode, Taylor Jacobson discusses the hidden cause of procrastination and how to finally move forward in your life. He explores how transformation rarely feels graceful, how repressed emotions shape our behavior, and what it takes to live a life true to your inner compass. It’s a vulnerable, grounded conversation about fear, reinvention, and creating space for what you actually want to give to the world.
For the first time in over three years, I’ve got a couple open spots in my coaching practice. If you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader feeling stuck in scattered progress or simmering self-doubt, this might be the right moment. Through my Aligned Progress Method, I help people move toward real momentum with clarity, focus, and trust in themselves. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at oneyoufeed.net/align.
Key Takeaways:
- Importance of experiencing and releasing emotions for personal growth
- The concept of safety in productivity and its impact on focus
- Overview of Focusmate as a solution for procrastination and accountability
- The role of community support in overcoming distractions and enhancing productivity
- The significance of vulnerability in seeking help and building connections
- The principles of behavior change, including commitment and accountability
- The relationship between emotional well-being and productivity
- The challenges of transformation and the necessity of aligning with one’s true self
- The exploration of intuition and discernment in navigating emotions and decision-making
Taylor Jacobson is the CEO and Founder of Focusmate (www.focusmate.com), a virtual coworking community with a mission to help everyone do their best work. Thousands of people in 193 countries worldwide sit side-by-side, via video, to keep each other company, cheer each other on, and hold one another accountable. Taylor is a passionate voice on creating soulful work and workplaces and has been featured in The New Yorker, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, and more.
Connect with Taylor Jacobson: Website | Twitter | LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation with Taylor Jacobson, check out these other episodes:
How to Overcome Procrastination with Tim Pychyl
David Kadavy on Getting Started
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Episode Transcript:
Taylor Jacobson 00:00:00 We don’t want to be walking around, you know, getting pissed at every driver on the road. That’s a really unpleasant way to live. So the antidote to that is like learning how to really fully feel and release the depth of those emotions.
Chris Forbes 00:00:20 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes a conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:05 What happens when the thing you built no longer feels like it’s yours? For Taylor Jacobson, founder of focus, Mate.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:13 The answer wasn’t to push harder. It was to pause, reflect, and begin again. In this conversation, we talk about why transformation rarely feels graceful, how repressed emotions shape our behavior, and what it takes to live a life true to your inner compass. It’s a vulnerable, grounded conversation about fear, reinvention, and creating space for what you actually want to give to the world. I’m Erik Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Taylor. Welcome to the show.
Taylor Jacobson 00:01:47 Hey, Eric. Great to be here.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:48 It’s a pleasure to have you on. We’re going to be talking about a variety of things today. We’ll be talking about your company that you’ve built called focus mate. We’re going to be talking about spirituality. We’re going to be talking about focusing routines, all kinds of different stuff. But before we get into all that, let’s start like we always do with the parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:15 One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at its grandparent and says, whoa! Which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Taylor Jacobson 00:02:40 Well, I just got chills in my body listening to you tell that, even though I know it obviously thought about it. What it means to me, you know, is like, good and evil are not these abstractions. They are our experience of ourselves in every moment. And I think evil is just the expression of fear. And we all have fear. You know, it’s a it’s human nature. And then on the other side of fear. You know what is there? There’s different words for it. But you could say that’s.
Taylor Jacobson 00:03:15 Love or kindness or truth. I’m a fan of that is kind of the opposite of. Fear or the opposite of ego. So I think it’s just it is a moment to moment discernment and effort. For each of us to feel the kind of, reflexive or autonomous nature of our fears and the patterns that those have cultivated in us, and to just resist them, one tiny little choice at a time, and to find that what’s on the other side of that is this intrinsic goodness that wants to be expressed.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:53 I love that and I’m going to put a pin in coming back to truth, because I think it’s a big word for you, and I want to make sure we get to it. But let’s start by talking about focus, mate, the company that you’ve built. And I don’t want to spend a ton of time here, but I’d like to know a little bit. First, maybe you could describe for people what you do and then secondly, why you built it.
Taylor Jacobson 00:04:15 Yeah. Thanks for asking. So yeah, just really tangibly, what is focus made? Let’s start with what problem we solve. You know, a lot of us are, let’s say, distracted or have a hard time taking action on the things that we most want to be in action on. Very universal experience. So I started focus mate to help really myself first, but to help other people to be in action on the things that matter to them. And I can talk about how that’s evolved. But yeah, simply put, we create the opportunity for you to meet up with one person, one partner or group of people to keep each other company and hold each other accountable while you take action on whatever it is that you want to be in action on. And so after this, I could set up a focus mate session because I want to write a blog post and I could get matched up with you and you want to edit a podcast episode. And so we share our commitments to what we want to work on, and we might write those down actually, and post them in the chat interface.
Taylor Jacobson 00:05:16 And then we hang out there on video while we work quietly together. And, it’s really an experience of not just accountability but also camaraderie, you know, and I’ll say structure to like it really helps us to have some kind of definitive start point and also end point for things. And so it’s kind of this very light touch in all those ways. And I think people are surprised by how much those things can impact you. But it’s enough to have a very transformational and often life changing impact on just your ability to do the things you want to do.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:48 Yeah, I first heard of your organization through a coaching client of mine, and had used it as a way of. Kind of, like you said, procrastinating on things he could show up. Book a focus mate session and log in and, you know, have somebody there now. The first thing that a lot of people, when they hear that think is like, I’m just going to meet a complete stranger that I don’t know and feel anxious about that talk about why and how people get past that.
Taylor Jacobson 00:06:15 Yeah, so that’s totally the right question. In fact, because so much of the power of focus, mate, is actually in the experience of feeling safe and being with other people. It’s a facet of how our nervous system works, actually, that we can’t really reach optimal sense of embodied safety alone, or if we’re too isolated too often. And so one of the reflexive responses that our nervous system has to being around somebody that is not presenting a danger that feels safe to us, is it actually helps to calm us down, help us feel grounded and to help us focus. And it has an impact on even blood flow to the brain. And, you know, so a direct impact on our ability to focus. So all of that is to say feeling safe is really critical. And so having those thoughts go through your mind, you know, and to be evaluating, am I going to feel safe with this other person? And even the word stranger I think connotes danger. I think that’s kind of what we mean when we say stranger is like, I don’t know if this person is safe.
Taylor Jacobson 00:07:17 And so focus me. We just put a tremendous emphasis on our culture and on creating safety. So the culture of focus is really the opposite of kind of hustle culture or grind culture, which might seem counterintuitive for a quote unquote productivity company. But I believe in my experience, is that when we’re in that headspace, we don’t think as clearly. And the ways we work, even the things we work on, are not as true of expressions of ourselves, and our work isn’t as creative, so on and so forth. So there is a bit of a leap of faith when you try anything new. And I would say almost universally, what people find is it’s like this really magical soft landing of safety and warmth and acceptance, and it’s a declaration of vulnerability to join, focus, mate, to say, you know what? I’d rather admit that I might be better off getting somebody else’s help than continue to struggle, because it’s more important to me to to follow through on this thing, to be who I really want to be, than it is to try to muscle through or or tell myself the story that I can do it on my own.
Taylor Jacobson 00:08:26 And we really strongly reaffirm that in every touchpoint of your experience, so that when you experience other members of the focus make community, it really is a lot of encouragement, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of like wherever you’re at, wherever your starting point is, is okay, you know, and we’re also working on ways to give you preferences over who you get to work with as well. So, you know, one of the examples is gender based matching. You know, some people just would feel safer working with somebody of their own gender, for example. And if that’s you, that’s fine.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:58 And so when someone logs on, it’s not like you’re spending this time chatting with another person. There’s a little brief introduction and then it’s kind of to work. Right.
Taylor Jacobson 00:09:07 Yes. We say about 60s, you’re saying hi, you’re being friendly, but it’s really, you know, smile and then ask the other person, hey, what are you up to? What are you working on this hour? And then you get to work within 60s.
Taylor Jacobson 00:09:18 And then at the end, it’s similar, you know, a chime goes off and you’re just checking in. How’d it go, Eric? You know. Okay, I got distracted for a minute or so, but I got back to it, and I’m really psyched about my progress, how to go for you. And so it’s it’s very, focused.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:33 What led you to create this product?
Taylor Jacobson 00:09:36 It really came out of my own huge struggles. You know, I’m going to say, with being who I knew I could be or being who I wanted to be. And my whole life I’ve always been interested in, let’s say, personal development. But about ten years ago, I almost got fired from a job and I chose to leave that job instead of getting fired, basically. And it was just very demoralizing. And it was really a result of me not I was working from home and I just couldn’t I couldn’t hack it with that kind of isolation, lack of accountability. I just couldn’t do it.
Taylor Jacobson 00:10:08 And leaving a job like that was very demoralizing and also humiliating for me. And so it just kind of cast me into this dark place. And I got a lot more serious about how do I get unstuck, you know, what do I need in order to bootstrap myself to a better place of being somebody I want to be? And so I just by and by, got more and more passionate about all the things I was learning and sort of realizing I could use all this struggle to help other people. And, and it was years later that I really stumbled on this technique. But when I did, it was just so life changing for me that it clicked really quickly, that there is an opportunity to help other people as well.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:51 Yeah, I mean, right off the top of my head, I see several core behavior change principles embedded right in focus. Me. Right. Like, no, when you’re going to do something, okay, you commit to a session that tells me I’m doing it at this time.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:06 Know what I’m going to work on? You know, knowing what I’m going to do. I talk about it with coaching clients as just basically like, we want to be specific. Like what, when, how, where any bit of ambiguity in those things is terrible for procrastinators, right? They can become roadblocks. And so with focus made immediately, I know when I know where I’m going to be in front of my computer, I know I’ve decided what I’m going to do in that period because I’m going to articulate it to someone else. The other big principle there is that we just tend to it’s just a facet of human nature. We’re often more accountable to others. You know, knowing that somebody is going to be sitting there without a partner if I don’t show up. You know, enables me to try and make it to the session. Although maybe they wouldn’t be without a partner because you’d rematch them. But the point being, I’ve got an accountability there, and I think you guys keep track of accountability also, right? And if you make sessions and you don’t show up, there is some penalty for that over time, right? Maybe penalty is not the word you would use.
Taylor Jacobson 00:12:08 Yeah. I mean, we’re really like a carrot, not a stick kind of culture. Yeah, that’s one way to put it. We’ll basically just say, hey, it looks like something came up. Yeah. That’s okay. We’re not judging it, but we just. If you have another session after that, we’ll kind of freeze your account so that the next person has a partner and sort of say, hey, just kind of wave your hand and say, hey, I’m back. I’m okay. Yeah, re-activate your account. And, you know, and we trust you. And that seems to work better than the stick approach. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:38 Got it. That makes sense. So let’s move on from the product and let’s talk about focus. So you know the goal of focus mate. And the problem you were solving was an inability to I would say it would be maybe an inability to get started and then actually focus. You know, you’re sort of solving two things there. But get started.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:02 Focus mates, a clunky name. Talk a little bit to me about how you think about a getting started on a task. You know, for people who procrastinate. Let’s start there and then we’ll move to focus after that.
Taylor Jacobson 00:13:13 How I think about getting started on a task.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:15 Yeah. Like if somebody’s a procrastinator. Obviously focus mate is sort of your best answer for, you know, how to work through that. But do you have any other suggestions or ideas?
Taylor Jacobson 00:13:25 Yeah. Well, just taking a step back. Like I think that procrastination is an expression of feeling unsafe. And I’ll explain that a little bit more. But like we are so perpetually stressed out and and from a nervous system standpoint, in fight or flight, you know, when we’re distracting ourselves, it’s kind of this expression of that constant low level agitation or anxiety or whatever you want to call it, but stress. And we might think of fight or flight as like, oh, I stepped into traffic and I like got a huge rush of adrenaline.
Taylor Jacobson 00:14:05 But actually a more common experience of fight flight is much more subtle. It’s just stress, basically. Or it’s rumination or, you know, like waking up early with thoughts about work or something, whatever it is. And when our body is in that state, we can’t focus because our body is is basically preparing to either fight or run. It’s optimizing for one of those functions. So there’s a lot of agitation. There’s a lot of energy to act, but it’s not focus. It’s not calm. Right. So we’re really bad at slowing down and being like, okay, what do I really want to do with my time? And then doing that thing because the blood flow is not even in your brain, you know? It’s just it’s just moving you and it’s kind of grabbing for things. It can help to really numb that unwanted feeling. But what we really need is to slow down and feel grounded. And from that embodied, safe place, what naturally is going to arise is, is a more authentic desire than Netflix or snacking or whatever myriad things we do from from a procrastinating place.
Taylor Jacobson 00:15:12 So that’s sort of indirectly speaks to what I’m talking about. But yeah, with getting started, I do think that addressing that experience in our bodies can be really important. So when why is a morning routine such a popular thing? It’s because when we say morning routine, we’re not doing things that stressed us out. We’re basically morning routine is doing things that ground us, and even things like just brushing our teeth or drinking a glass of water. It’s having a slowed down experience of ourselves that that actually signals to our body. I’m safe. And so from that place we’re able more easily to get started. And something like focus, mate. You might still feel a little bit of that agitated energy when you show up, but the commitment, as you said, like the accountability to show up, you’ve got to schedule a time that might be enough to get you over the hump as well. Right. And then once your butts in the chair, you’re already slowing down. Now there’s a person there. They’re helping you feel grounded to reflecting on what you want to do.
Taylor Jacobson 00:16:14 So it’s sort of easing you into a into a safer space. But it doesn’t have to be focused, mate. You know, it’s it’s really how do we ground ourselves? How do we slow down, how do we set the intention. And so it’s starting to feel slower and safer in our bodies. And then how do we just get ourselves over the starting line to start that thing as well?
Eric Zimmer 00:16:31 And so you’ve got a line that I heard recently. It was design a life that demands what you want to give. Say a little bit more about that.
Taylor Jacobson 00:16:39 Yeah. You know, that’s something we say internally on our team at focus, mate. And the way that we think about ourselves as a company and our mission is it’s actually not really about focus. It’s about being who you really want to be or being who you truly are. And that starts with our team. You know, we think about serving ourselves on our team before we think about serving our customers. And like how we interact with each other on our team is is kind of the energy that we’re putting out to our community.
Taylor Jacobson 00:17:11 And so we have this mantra internally of that’s what we’re helping each other do, is to design a life that demands what you want to give. That’s kind of one way of thinking about this. And so we don’t have a lot of hard and fast rules about how we work at focus at the starting point, you know, even in interviewing somebody. This really let’s let’s really learn about you and what works for you, and we’ll share about us as well and see if there’s some real alignment there, and see if this is a good environment to support you in designing the life that you want to live, and are the things that we need. The roles, the skills that we need in our team are those things that you really want to give, and it could be tactical stuff to, you know, the times of day that you want to be working. Do you want to be on a lot of calls or is that really not good for your energy? And you like to, you know, just kind of be asynchronous in whatever.
Taylor Jacobson 00:18:04 So that’s where it comes from, you know? And actually I’ll just share briefly like I’m in a very active like reinvention of my own role at the company. And it’s really been enabled by the strength of that conviction and commitment by the entire team, where I was very scared, honestly, to relinquish some of the responsibilities that I had. But I could also feel that I just no longer had the energy to keep like muscling through some of the things that I had been doing since we started the company and the team, and especially our head of operations, who has really taken a lot of this stuff off my plate, was just really adamant, like, we got you, we got this, let’s reinvent this. Let’s design a life that demands what you want to give. And we all have faith that when we do that and when I do that, it will serve the company as well.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:54 Yeah. I think what’s interesting about that line is two things. One is my experience is no matter what you design to get a life, you demand, there are still things that you don’t really want to do.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:06 You know, there’s just some measure of that. You know that at least the stage that our organization is right. There’s just things I do that need to be done, and I don’t love doing them. I outsource as much of that as possible. But as you know, you know, early on in a company’s state, you don’t have money to do all that. But I think the other thing that’s really interesting about that is that it changes, you know, we design a life that demands what we want to give and then what we want to give. At least my experience is it can morph over time. And that maybe was your experience with focus mate was early on. You were giving what you wanted to give and then it transformed and you had to, as you say, kind of be willing to try and reinvent. And that word reinvent always sounds lovely, but it’s rarely a lovely process.
Taylor Jacobson 00:19:53 Yeah, that’s such an important observation. Like or transformation. Like, God, I would never wish transformation on my worst enemy.
Taylor Jacobson 00:19:59 It’s like pain, you know? But, yeah, I mean, often the way we come to it is like burnout or something like this where you get in a groove and hopefully it starts out being, you know, you’re doing something that’s authentic, and then you just keep going and you may start feeling some dissonance and you know, the like, the thing starts to rattle a little bit and you maybe you start to get migraines or like chronic pain or like other signals that your body is like, no, this isn’t working for me anymore. For us anymore? Yeah. Unfortunately. Because of. Categorically, I guess we’ll say fear. Like, oh my God, if I stop doing this thing, it’s not going to get done. The company is going to fall apart. You know, for me, it was real. Like, if I tell my colleagues what’s going on for me and that I need rest, everyone’s going to stop working. If I need rest, our culture is suddenly going to become lazy.
Taylor Jacobson 00:20:47 And I’ll come back to that in a second. We have all these stories that keep us from just noticing, like the moment that thing changes, it’s like, whoa, I feel some strong resistance to doing this and like, can I make a shift? But instead we just kind of plow through and then we have burnout or other, you know, or injuries or other things that really force us to a halt and, and kind of force the reinvention on us. But the stories are rarely true, you know. So like in this case, the whole team was like really rallied around. They were like, oh my goodness. Like, you’ve worked so hard and let us take these things off your plate and find out, you know, what’s on the other side of this reinvention for you.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:01 Hey everyone. I haven’t had an open spot in my coaching practice in over three years, but right now I’ve got a couple. But I work best with a certain kind of person. So if you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader and you’re ready to move from scattered progress and simmering self-doubt to aligned action, strategic clarity and real momentum. This might be the right time through something I call the aligned progress method will turn inner alignment into real world r esults so you can grow your revenue, reclaim your time, and finally, trust yourself as much as others already do. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at www.oneyoufeed.net/align
Eric Zimmer 00:22:44 You’re in the startup world, which means you are trying to please a variety of people, right? I guess that’s not just a startup world, right? A companies in general are trying to please their investors, slash shareholders. They’re trying to please their customer. They’re trying to please their internal team. You know, it sounds like your internal team was 100% behind you sort of saying, all right, I’m going to slow down and get some rest. Did you find any pushback from any of your other constituents or stakeholders around that? Because startup culture is very much grind, hustle, macho like, you know, I can work more hours than you can work. Did you find any or have any issues there.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:22 And you’re welcome to say if your investor situations are ones you don’t want to talk about, I get it. So you’re welcome to say pass.
Taylor Jacobson 00:23:28 No. You know, for me, being able and willing to have one truth for all audiences is it’s really like, I think the ultimate aspiration in some ways, I think for like a human being is to feel that peace that comes with being true in all ways, with all people. There’s nothing to hide. So that’s an aspiration. But, I haven’t experienced any of that pushback or tension. And I think it’s because it’s always been a core aspect of our ethos, and even our mission is really about paradigm shift. Like creating a company in a different way and doing it at scale to really model that. It’s possible that you that hustle and grind isn’t necessary, and to show, To find out. Experiment with what happens when you do things this other way. And you know, I imagine that scares our investors sometimes. Just like it scares me sometimes.
Taylor Jacobson 00:24:30 But it’s just like, what are we here for? What is my life for? It’s not to make a lot of money. And so, yeah, the pursuit, it’s not. I really hope not. For me, it’s like the point is to, you know, find out as much as you can, experience as much as you can of your, your soul, your true nature to really, you know, experience that deeply. And so, yeah, how can our work and how can this company specifically for me, be kind of the vessel to further that experiment? And so it’s very authentic for me to say to an investor, yeah, we want to make this as big as possible. And we really believe we can reach, you know, tens, 100 million people or more. And so this can be a great place to put some money to work. but we’re going to do it our way. You know, and I also think we’re at a moment in time where that’s, you know, the kind of gestalt is, is shifting the collective consciousness.
Taylor Jacobson 00:25:27 You know, we’re all like the great resignation happening now. We’re all feeling that inner pull for something different. And so I think that’s also attractive to our customers and to our community. And, you know, when we have an outage or something like this, you know, we had a seven hour outage a few months back, and we were very vulnerable about it and very apologetic about it. We did everything we could to provide alternate resources to people who needed them, but people were also very understanding. And we’re kind of just like, you know, you got this. It’s okay because we’re so actively creating that narrative, you know, in all facets of what we do.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:08 Let’s go back to focus for a second and let’s go back to you said somewhere, our ability to focus is a function of our nervous system state period. And you hit that a little bit. I’d like to dive in a little bit deeper there. And I’m going to start by saying I sometimes feel like we have hit a point where we need a different way of describing nervous system function than fight flight freeze.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:36 I’ve I’ve heard recently flop, which crack cracks me up. I sometimes feel like those terms point towards. And you said it. It doesn’t have to be extreme, but they point towards an extreme. You know, they point towards a very heightened type of reaction. Whereas I think what’s happening with a lot of us is what’s happening nervous system wise is mild but chronic, I guess. First, your thoughts on that?
Taylor Jacobson 00:27:04 Oh yeah. That’s pretty interesting to unpack a little bit. Actually, I’m thinking about it as you say it. Like I do think there’s absolutely a need for a lexicon that resonates with people that, like, feels relevant to my life, right? Because what I would love to see happen is for what we’re talking about here, and what we’ll talk about more in a second. To become common knowledge, you know, for parents and teachers and just everyone, workers like to understand how your body works, how your nervous system works, and what’s really happening. And this extends far beyond focus.
Taylor Jacobson 00:27:40 I mean, the implications for relationships are profound. So yeah. Fight, flight. It’s like, yeah, no, I’m not like, I’m not about to have a fistfight with my colleague. And so you might just reject this as somehow irrelevant. On the other hand, I believe that part of why we are so stressed is that we repress the extent of the experience that we’re having as one of fight or flee. And so we’re trying to here’s a fun example. If you’re experiencing fight flight. Meditation might help you because you’re slowing down your breath. You’re sending signals to your body, basically, that I’m safe. Right. But you might actually have enough pent up fight flight energy that you really need to get it out in a more aggressive way. And I’m a little bit reticent to even use this language. But it’s the truth is that when we’re angry, it’s a kind of murderous experience. You know, the fight impulse is violent. And it’s so taboo in our culture to name that, let alone to allow ourselves to fully experience it.
Taylor Jacobson 00:29:02 And I don’t mean act it out, of course, at all, but to just experience the level of agitation like the directionality of that fight flight energy in us is immense. And I think why we have so much angst is that we’re collectively so repressed, and we don’t have the tools, and also don’t have the kind of shared understanding of what it actually means to release that fight flight energy in a healthy way, like something that I will often do is I’ll I’ll do like primal screaming, you know, and sometimes I’ll do it in a pillow if I’m in a place where that’s necessary. But there’s also a few things that are more liberating for me than, like going up on a hilltop and just like, you know, screaming and in a very literal way that’s vibrating your body and it’s unblocking this stuck energy that’s in your body, you know, if you’re not releasing that, you’re literally just holding tension in your body, you know? And that’s what we’re walking around with when we feel stress, when we feel anxiety, when we are procrastinating, whatever it might be.
Taylor Jacobson 00:30:05 So I’m with you in terms of how do we make this common knowledge through through more accessible lexicon. And on the other hand, part of that is we can’t nice it up and say we’re just going to do all these sweet, gentle practices. There’s actually a need to fully embrace and and feel our anger so that we’re not projecting it in all these sideways ways. And, you know, you can imagine, like the term snide remarks coming up or sarcasm or some of these really low key things that most of us are doing constantly. It’s just like these little pressure valve releases of anger, but it’s not actually a release. It’s a manifestation of this pent up, unexpressed, unfelt fight, flight, energy. And we don’t want to be walking around, you know, getting pissed at every driver on the road and all these. That’s a really unpleasant way to live. So, you know, the antidote to that is like learning how to really fully feel and release the depth of those emotions.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:02 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:02 As you’re talking about that, it brings me right to I feel like one of the fundamental questions we wrestle with here at The One you feed, because it’s a fundamental question I wrestle with, which is what do we do with negative emotion? What do we do with it? Do we experience it? Do we feel it? Do we just really go into it and let it be? Do we work to try and soothe it? Do we try and put it in perspective? I’ll give you an example. The other day I had a busy day. Lots of calls, calls, calls, calls, and I’d been having trouble with the prescription for like four days. The poor pharmacy is overworked. They don’t have enough people. It’s just been very difficult. So I had like 15 to 20 minutes and I was like, all right. It’s a three minute drive. I’m going to go to the pharmacy. I’m going to get there. I’m going to get it. I’m going to leave. Right. And so I’m sitting there and I’m waiting in line.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:55 And, you know, it was supposed to be ready like four hours earlier. I finally weighed in this whole line the whole time, you know. Talk about the sort of fight or flight. I’m like, oh, God, I’ve got a coaching call. I’ve got a client in seven minutes. You know, and and I’m not freaking out, but, you know, I’m feeling that energy build. And I get up there and the guy’s like, yeah, we’ll get that ready for you right now. They had not gotten it ready, even though I talked to somebody a few hours earlier. Then I just had to go, well, I can’t stay. I got to go and I wasn’t going to be able to get back there for another day because of my schedule. Anyway, long story short, I was leaving and I was feeling very angry, you know, anger out of proportion to the situation. Right? Right. So there’s a couple ways to go there, right? One way to go is to go and get in my car and bang on the steering wheel and scream for a while and let out a, you know, a bunch of curse words and just vomit that energy out.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:51 That’s one approach, another approach, and it’s the one that I chose to go with this time. But I don’t always was, I, I really went hang on a second, like, get this in perspective. Like you are an incredibly like privileged lucky person. And if this is the worst thing that’s happening in your life, you need to take it down a notch and recognize, like, hey, there’s nothing to be that upset about here. But that points to two directions, and sometimes they’re compatible. Sometimes there’s a way to do both those things, actually. But I think it does point to particularly as we look at spiritual literature. Right. And we look at spiritual traditions, both those ways and psychological traditions, both of those ways are stressed at different times by different people. And I’m just kind of curious how you think about that. And that was a long setup for that question, but hopefully it’s helpful.
Taylor Jacobson 00:33:43 Such an awesome illustration. Yeah, and I love the contrast between those two approaches.
Taylor Jacobson 00:33:47 So yeah, really glad you shared that. Yeah. You know, it’s an ongoing experiment for me. And I’ve I’ve learned a lot, as you’ve alluded to from like different viewpoints and different traditions. So like I read a book by David Hawkins called Letting Go that is profound. And, you know, his view is basically all emotion is projection. And so the experience that you had in the pharmacy was sort of the world helping to needle some anger that is repressed within you. Right? And you talked about the disproportionate magnitude of your anger. So, you know, perhaps David Hawkins would say that once you’ve released all the old repressed anger, you might not even feel any anger in that situation. It would just be kind of a ho hum. This is what is. At other times, there might be like a very small feeling in your body that you could label like the parts of your body that might heat up or feel tense or something. That’s anger, but it’s just so momentary that it kind of just guides you back to here’s my boundary.
Taylor Jacobson 00:34:49 Like something that didn’t work for me, you know? And then, like Peter Levine, whose body of work is somatic experiencing, right? He talks about how you see dogs that, like a dog will just come in from taking a walk. It’ll come indoors and it’ll just shake, right? It’s like we just went on this excursion. There was different stimuli happening. Now I’m back in my nest. I feel safe. Whatever stress, whatever tension or emotion that dog is holding in its body, it just immediately releases. And that’s the thing that all animals do except humans, is they immediately release that fight or flight energy or that stress, that tension. It’s all emotion. I think all of these things are synonymous in some ways. So the tricky thing for humans is that we have all this stored up tension. And so the technique that you chose in that moment, I would call that kind of a conscious dispersion of the anger. Right? Like, well, I just don’t need to be angry right now.
Taylor Jacobson 00:35:47 But you also experienced the disproportionate, you know, experience of anger, which points to, okay, I have repressed anger and I’d say this is universal, right. So I think the answer is really both. It’s. We don’t have to. We can choose to do the work to unearth these stuck, repressed, suppressed things in our body. And if we do that, then that situation will make you gradually less angry in the future.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:37 Oftentimes I say to people, if you’ve got to choose between taking a perspective and feeling an emotion, feel the emotion first. Let it happen. Let it be. Allow it to be there. Then move into taking a perspective on it right? Then move in to going, okay, you know what? Maybe it really isn’t that big of a deal. You know, like if you’re unsure that order of operations is probably best because then you’re not repressing or bypassing to the same extent. What I think is interesting with what David Hawkins is saying, and I’ve seen that theory a lot of different ways and a lot of different places.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:10 What I sometimes wonder is a couple of things is it bottomless? So I went through this at one point in my life when I was, I don’t know, 30, 30 years old, 32 years old, my marriage split up and I was separated from my son, and I certainly had a role in that happening. But my partner had left me for someone else and I was really angry. It’s interesting because that was a time that I expressed anger a lot. I took up boxing. I was so mad at her. I took up boxing and it was great. And I wrote hateful letters that I destroyed, and I allowed the anger to flow through. So I’ve had some experience with like. And now, you know, a couple of years later, I went from wanting her to, you know, burn in hell to being like, oh, yeah, sure, I’ll come over for Thanksgiving. That sounds nice, you know? Out, so I do. I do agree with that. But at the same time, I started working with a therapist and we started doing inner child work.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:01 Right? That phrase then and now still makes a certain part of me inside cringe. But the idea was, hey, look, the things that happened to you as a child impact who you are today, your emotional reactions today. The way to work through that is to go back if you can and express the emotions that come up from that. And so I spent some time doing that, and then I hit a point where I felt like maybe I had more or less sort of gotten all there was to get out of that. But there seemed to be from her perspective, like you just kept going. And in my perspective, I was like, it feels like I’ve done enough of that, that there’s not enough benefit. As I’m talking this through, I’m realizing that what was happening was I started to realize I didn’t have the emotions anymore. So I had, in essence, sort of worked through them. All right. That was a long way of answering my own question.
Taylor Jacobson 00:38:52 Well, I do think That.
Taylor Jacobson 00:38:54 Thanks so much for sharing that. And like, oh, like my heart goes out to you. But also just like pulling the thread through to where you are now and like going over Thanksgiving dinner. It’s like such a amazing illustration of this. Oh yeah. It’s just like it kind of is bottomless. Like, clearly you might be happy now, but the pharmacy still pisses you off. You know, so it’s like there’s no righteousness in, like, am I going to keep working with my anger, or am I going to just say, you know what, I have really a healthy enough relationship to my anger right now that I want to focus elsewhere. There’s no, like, right or wrong about that. But I think it’s just understanding, like cool. Like at that point in your life, it was getting in the way of everything that you wanted to do and who you wanted to be. And so that that was an urgent priority. And sometimes that’s what life serves us up. Is these like, unavoidable things to heal? Yes.
Taylor Jacobson 00:39:43 Right. Yep.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:44 And then back to our point about transformation and reinvention. Like, yeah, I transformed a lot during that period. There’s no doubt about that. I don’t want to do it again.
Taylor Jacobson 00:39:55 Exactly. And. Yeah. And then it’s just like, I think for me, it’s. Have I reached a safe landing pad where I want to exert my effort elsewhere? Or even things like doing yoga? You know, like if you’re continuing to do. I don’t know if you do yoga, I do some yoga. I’m very aware that the yoga I do is tapping into stuck energy, stuck emotion in my body. So, like, I might be feeling really good, but at the same time, I’m like, I really want to keep feeling better and keep healing more and keep getting my deep seated. We could say inner child fears whatever healed and out of the way so I can experience more of my soul, or true self, or inner freedom, or inner peace or whatever these things are.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:35 So speaking of yoga, right? You are living on an ashram right now. That was, I’m assuming, part of your getting rest from focus, mate. Anything you want to share about what that is, what you’re doing there, what that’s like for you.
Taylor Jacobson 00:40:47 You know, I guess the first thing I’ll say is that it wasn’t just getting rest. It was really going through, in my case, also a breakup last year that just brought up a lot for me, you know? And really, I’ll say the trauma that came up through that experience forced itself to be handled. You know, I spent several months kind of muscling through or trying to do things the ways I knew how, but at some point I just I realized that I wanted to fully commit myself to, you know, we talked about the nervous system that really became my lens, like, what’s the optimal environment to do this kind of work? And, you know, nature is extremely nourishing. Living in community can be really nourishing.
Taylor Jacobson 00:41:34 There’s yoga classes every day here. There’s healthy vegetarian meals cooked every day here. There’s a shared commitment to personal growth here. There’s a lot of ancient teachings that are really profound that we talk about on a daily basis here. So it was really for me was I want to try and experiment in what’s the best. And I sort of joke, it’s like focus mate, for my whole life. Yeah. As opposed to just, you know, a one hour experience. I want to see what this is like, you know, and I’ll say it’s it’s been really a lifelong interest of mine to live in community and sort of experiment with what I feel are more intuitive, healthy ways of living that are just really hard to come by in modern society. So I guess I just I reached a tipping point within myself where I was like, screw it, I’m going to do this. I’m going to try this, you know, for my own sake. But it’s also it’s certainly inspired me and provided a lot of learning in terms of, you know, stuff I want to take out into the world to.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:30 And is it the sort of situation in which you can also continue to work to some extent, or is it one of the spiritual communities that sort of asks you to withdraw from all that?
Taylor Jacobson 00:42:39 Both.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:41 Yeah.
Taylor Jacobson 00:42:42 Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s actually been a really challenging and fun experiment in that regard, because I’ve been really playing with that edge of yeah, there’s a way that they’ve sort of asked me to show up here that adheres to their way of doing things, and yet my commitment to my own inner truth is higher than that. And so I’m really using this experience to try to thread that needle where I say, you know what? There’s been moments where, you know, I skipped satsang, which is, you know, like we all gather to meditate and chant and these things. And I skipped it and I got some pushback. And immediately where my mind goes to is, I’m going to get kicked out, you know? And then I kind of walk it back and I say, well, did they say anything about kicking me out? Or like, am I reacting to reality right now, or am I just creating a fear based story that I can’t live my truth and have it work here as well? And so, you know, this is a thing that we all do in relationships.
Taylor Jacobson 00:43:47 It’s like we’re so scared of abandonment or getting hurt. We’ve run away from the dynamic rather than just saying, oh, let me, let me like try to be true to myself, but in a very loving and gentle way. And so it’s helped that this is a short term residence for me with people I’ve never met before where I can say, all right, I’m really committed to that experiment. I’m not going to run away from this place. I want to be here, but I also want to skip satsang sometimes, or I want to, you know, I have work stuff that I that I want to do. And so how can I be very loving in communicating that rather than defiant or angry or pushing back against them? And honestly, it’s shocked me in some ways how well that’s gone where I, I will say, you know what the really loving thing to do here would be to communicate where I’m coming from and why I’m choosing this, not because I’m asking for permission to do this, but because I want this relationship to work.
Taylor Jacobson 00:44:42 Yeah. Yeah. And then to hear the responses back, that’s like, okay, cool. You know, like I never would have expected that. But so it’s been it’s been really eye opening for me in terms of this is healthy relating.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:54 When you’re there. Is it harder for you to put down work and go towards the spiritual, or is it harder to put down the spiritual and go towards work, or is it just go back and forth?
Taylor Jacobson 00:45:06 Well, to me that’s a false dichotomy.Because I think we have a lot of concepts about what spirituality is that we haven’t directly experienced. And so I think those are just ideas. But to me, the strongest access point that I have to spirituality is this thing that I will often call my inner truth. And to me, that is spiritual, because where does that come from? It’s not something I analyzed. It’s not rational, it’s intuitive. But like, what is intuition? Where does that come from? I don’t know. But to me, there’s a certain like What I would call divinity or kind of, like, inexplicable, higher power that’s at work in all of us.
Taylor Jacobson 00:45:53 That is that voice, your inner compass, you know, whatever it is. And so, to me, kind of the ultimate spiritual practice is I’m going to trust that inner GPS. I’m going to listen to that inner truth right now. And, you know, in spiritual communities, people use the word ego a lot, which I think ego is just it’s the collection of all of our fears and under one umbrella called ego. So when we choose our truth, the only reason it’s hard is because we’re scared to do it. There’s a fear that it’s coming up against, right? So for me, choosing to skip satsang because what’s authentic for me is I want to actually go take a hike up to the top of this hill and do you know, whatever. That’s the truth that’s coming up for me right now. and in order to choose that truth, I have to face this fear that people are going to be pissed that I skipped that song. I’m going to get kicked out. I’m going to get scolded, whatever.
Taylor Jacobson 00:46:49 I’m not going to have a home like all these, all these fears come up. And so how do you conquer your ego? Let’s say to me, the answer is you just choose your truth. Because in the process of choosing your truth over and over again, you’re going to experience fear. And maybe you’ll heal a little bit of it, or peel a little bit of it back, and you’ll see that it’s actually the thing that I was scared of isn’t so scary after all. And in the process, yeah, I think you get closer to ultimate truth. And to me that is spirit. That’s God. To me, the words aren’t so important.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:22 Boy, there’s a lot in there that we’re only going to get to a little bit of before we need to probably go into post-show conversation. I’m trying to pick which part of that I want to grab. Let’s start with this one. You talk about intuition, your inner GPS, that inner knowing. Do you believe that there’s inner characteristics that are true in you that are different than me at the most basic level?
Taylor Jacobson 00:47:48 Oh, yeah.
Taylor Jacobson 00:47:51 There’s a notion I’ve heard at times of the idea of the healthy ego, which is it’s sort of your individuality, your uniqueness. Right. And so one way that I think about this is like all of the experiences that we’ve had, and especially the trauma that we’ve had, deeply inform the gifts that we can give to the world. And when we are living from the fear, we are not giving those gifts. We’re basically just trying to protect ourselves. That’s kind of our full time job unconsciously. But as we heal those things and we tap into those gifts, now we’re tapping into what I would call, you know, your soul or your truth. And I think that true nature is intrinsically loving. Like, that’s just kind of what comes when you’re not scared is we just find that we want to love and serve and give and but the way that we do that sometimes it’s like has the same shape, the same outline as our trauma, same outline as our fears. So like, let’s say it’s, you know, the shape of your handprint.
Taylor Jacobson 00:48:56 It might start out being all fear and it’s an expression of fear. But as you heal those things, it’s like now the light is coming through, but the light is coming through in the same shape, because your unique gift is a function of your history with addiction or that traumatic breakup of your marriage, or or these other things that have helped you become who you are. I think of that the same way as like, you know, a fish and a dog are not the same thing. They’re occupying what Bill Plotkin calls their unique eco niche. They don’t have the same problems that we have in doing that. But yeah, it’s like when we’re really being true to ourselves, we’re occupying our kind of correct role within the oneness of all things.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:38 It’s a nice way to say it. And I would say, you know, our traumas and our fears may be one of the major shaping forces of that role, but I certainly think everything that happens to us shapes us. And I think obviously we’re clearly shaped by some genetic capability.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:57 There is a unique creation here that is Eric, and it is informed by everything that has ever happened to me, good and bad. It’s informed by the genes that I got. It’s informed by all those things. And then I do believe this is a Zen idea. Emptiness and form form an emptiness, right? That emptiness is pure potentiality. It’s the it’s the energy underneath everything. But then it pops into form based on all sorts of things, you know, echo niche, all these different things. So I think we’re kind of talking about the same thing, and that there are versions of me that are truer to essence the more I’m healed.
Taylor Jacobson 00:50:36 Yeah. Beautifully put. I hadn’t heard some of those kind of Zen concepts, but it really resonates.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:40 Yeah, you should look into, you know, the ideas of of form and emptiness, though I think they’ll really resonate. They resonate very much with what you just said before I started talking, which is that idea. All right. We’re going to wrap up.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:53 You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation because I want to talk about how do you know whether to trust your intuition? A former drug addict like me is hesitant to trust strong inner feelings because, you know, I had pretty strong feelings that were coming from inside me that destroyed me. And so I think, you know, how do we know what inner voice to listen to, which inner voice to trust, to think we’re going to pursue that in the post-show conversation, listeners. You can get access to that and add free episodes and all kinds of other great things by going to one you feed dot net join. Taylor, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s really been fun.
Taylor Jacobson 00:51:33 Oh, yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. This is awesome.
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