Wise Effort: What Your Regrets Reveal About What Matters Most | Diana Hill

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

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

Episode Transcript:

Diana Hill 00:00:00  There’s not just one truth that we’re all trying to figure out, right? There are many. And what I really believe is we are both individuals and we are collective. It’s a both and paradox. And we both have our our genius. But we also aren’t all that special.

Chris Forbes 00:00:23  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:07  My mom passed a few weeks ago, and when Diana Hill asked me in this conversation to name a regret, one came up immediately. I didn’t take my mom back to Sarah Downs, the harness racing track near Columbus, where she grew up. When Chris and I started going. A few years ago, she told me she’d love to go. It would have cost me an afternoon. I never did it. Diana calls this a kindness regret, and she has a sharp way of using it. The ache of a regret tells you what you value. If we stay with that a moment longer, instead of running away from it. It points us towards what matters to us the most. Diana is a psychologist and the author of the wonderful book wise effort. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Diana, welcome to the show.

Diana Hill 00:01:55  Glad to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:56  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to discuss your book, that from the moment I heard the title, I knew I wanted to talk to you. Wise effort, how to focus your genius energy on what matters most. And I will share with you some of the reasons I love that title so much in a moment.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:12  But we’re going to start like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two roles inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. 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.

Diana Hill 00:02:50  Well, in my life, in the work that I do, a lot of my focus right now is on energy and where we are putting our our energy, our precious energy, our genius energy, the thing that lights us up, that interests us, but also that we care a lot about.

Diana Hill 00:03:05  And when I think about where am I putting my energy moment to moment in my day, and am I putting it into places that feed back to me, or regenerative, or am I putting it into places that drain me? Am I putting it into places that feed into the world in a way that is regenerative, or into the world in a way that’s draining? You know, I just mentioned to you earlier, I’m 47 years old. I’m living with my parents for how many times you have to move back in with your parents. It’s like the walk of shame. You turn into a 14 year old instantly. And just these little interactions that I have with my parents or I have with my husband, who’s also living with my parents or my teenagers, are those moments of which 1 a.m. I going to feed? Like, where am I going to put? If we think about food as a source of energy, right, our our life force, our actions as a source of energy, where are we going to put it? We’re going to put it in a way that feeds back to us and also spreads good in the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:58  I love that example because it’s very easy to take the position of. This is awful. I’m living with my parents, you know, to fall back into being the 14 year old again, all of that. And there’s also the ability to take a different perspective, right. Which is that like, oh, my parents care about me enough to have me live here. I get a chance to interact with them in a different way. I mean, I see sometimes these things where it’s clear from the outside which where my energy should go, but often from the inside it’s just not as clear.

Diana Hill 00:04:31  Right. Well, if you ever want to get a practice in working on your posture, go live with your 70 plus year old parents and you will start sitting up tall, drawing your chin in and your your top of your head to the ceiling quickly.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:42  100%. Yeah. Every time I see an old person, I suddenly am like, hang on, I gotta get get enough.

Diana Hill 00:04:48  Shoulders down. Yeah.

Diana Hill 00:04:50  So there’s that, that physical alignment. But then there’s also, you know, in Buddhism, it is often talked about in terms of like bring everything to the path. Everything comes to the path of teaching. And so especially the things that are uncomfortable, especially the things that you wish weren’t on your path, those are the ones to turn towards and welcome them in, because they can tell you a lot about why is effort the unwise move or the unwise effort move is to turn away from that what is uncomfortable for you. And when you do that, you also are turning away from your values. Because what I believe in acceptance and commitment therapy, the practice that I specialize in, is that that which is most uncomfortable is the biggest arrow pointing to what you care about. So if you know you’re struggling in a relationship, it’s because there’s something underneath that struggle that you care deeply about you don’t have that doesn’t keep you up at night when you have a bad bowling game, you know? But it keeps me up at night.

Diana Hill 00:05:50  If I have a bad session with a client like I will. I’ll rehearse it over and over. Where did I go wrong? What if I had done this or done that? Well, that’s an indicator underneath it. Just scratch the surface. There’s a care there.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:01  Yeah. I love your work because I have studied in the Buddhist path a great deal, as have you. And when I was introduced to acceptance and commitment therapy, I don’t know how many years ago I had Stephen Hayes on the show and Russ Harris and I just remember I was like, this seems like my entire life philosophy that they’ve just bundled into an actual clinical practice. So I love your work so much, and I love that idea that I think Kelly Wilson was a mentor to you. Correct. Yeah, I think he said, and I got to talk with him once. I think he said that our vulnerabilities show us our values, something along those lines. And I really love that. I just thought that was a great way of thinking about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:45  As you’re saying, it does tell us what matters.

Diana Hill 00:06:48  Absolutely. I mean, think about just on your list of things that irritate you today or the things that are keeping you up at night last night and the worries that you have. Those are the things. I mean, if you’re worried about climate change, if you’re worried about your kid not getting enough sleep because they’re on the screen too much. if you’re worried about your parents because they’re hunched over whatever it is, then, then, okay, those worries can take us off into a samsara of just, like, rumination. Worrying we know is not helpful. There’s, And actually, there’s some research that looked at worrying over ten days. What percentage of the time did your worries come true? Like if if you listed all your worries today and then we tracked you ten days from now, what percentage of the time would those actually come true? And I think the median answer to that question was zero. And I think the mean was something around 10%.

Diana Hill 00:07:46  And then there’s a part of us that goes, oh, no, 10% came true. Well, then that’s where psychological flexibility comes in. But it’s less about getting caught in the worry. And where why is effort comes in is it’s okay. Now I’m going to get really curious about that worry. What does that tell me about what I care about? And then now I actually have an action step, which is, oh, if I could open up to that feeling, then I could probably open up to action today in the here and now. That would help me live out that value. I can align my spine, or I could, if I’m worried about my kids technology, this I can look at my own technology use or if I’m worried about climate change. Here’s one I work with college students. I’m a part of this ten UC campus research study on resilience for climate change, and for students that are worried about it and need to take action, because that’s the only choice they have, right? We hold our class outside.

Diana Hill 00:08:42  If you’re worried about climate change, go sit in the current nature that we have. That is an action step because it shows that worry, shows what you care about. You care about nature, or you care about plants, or you care about breathing a fresh breath of air. And you can do that in the here and now. That’s why Zephyr.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:59  I think this is so fundamental a point that I want to stay with it for a little while. When that uncomfortable feeling comes up, there are a couple different ways we can relate to it. You actually talk about some of these in the book in a framework, but I want to stay with this basic one, which is that oftentimes what happens with that uncomfortable feeling is we turn towards something else that relieves the feeling but doesn’t honor the value, whereas this turning towards is that connection first with like, okay, there’s something at stake here, there’s something that matters to me. And then, you know, what’s one thing I can do? And I always think, like for me, I learned years ago.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:45  Like, if I’m bothered by something. Is there anything I can do right now about it to make it better? It can be so small. If I’m worried about finances, I can sit there on the couch and fret about it. Or I could go gather up the bills that I’ve been avoiding. It’s one small little step, and as soon as I take one step towards that, I start feeling better.

Diana Hill 00:10:11  Well I think there’s a half step. Little by little becomes a lot. There’s a half step before that. One step please. And so, so the half step before we take the step towards what can I do to make it better. The half step is what can I do to stay a little longer, to be to make contact with that which is most painful? This past weekend I have a really good friend of mine who was actually. We were in this women’s group together, and we’ve been in this women’s group for like five years, and about one year into the women’s group, she got diagnosed with cancer.

Diana Hill 00:10:47  And so for the past four years of knowing this woman, we’ve been on her cancer journey. And on Sunday she said, I want you all to come over for a ritual. This group, this group of women. And so we’re all like, okay, great ritual. I’ll bring the sage, I’ll bring the flowers, I’ll bring the poem. And she’s like, no, no, no, no, I’m going to do a ritual for all of you. And we’re like, okay. So we come over and we sit in this circle in this little glass greenhouse that we actually built for her, thinking that at some point she may want to pass in this little greenhouse. So we sat in this little greenhouse in a circle, and she did this whole grounding exercise. And then she said, what we’re going to do today is we’re going to touch my head. My hair is falling out. It’s in my cereal. I can’t stand it anymore. You’re all going to place your hands on my head, and you’re going to rub your hands down my head, and we’re going to take my hair, and we’re going to go give it to the birds.

Diana Hill 00:11:39  And then what I want you to do is you’re going to shave my head. And she said, this is my gift to you because all of you believe that you are this or you are that, or you’re defined by this. But I want you to have the experience of recognizing that you are not defined by your hair or your degree, or your fancy pants, or your whatever it is your face that has wrinkles or no wrinkles. And this is my gift to you. Now, what she was doing in that to get back to this original question, was she was going to the most painful thing. If you can imagine losing your hair like she’s she’s a beautiful, gorgeous woman who’s losing her hair and she’s saying, come touch it. Not only come touch it, come get close to it and find the lesson in it. And it’s my gift to all of you to make contact with this very uncomfortable thing. And it was the best thing of my whole week. I mean, it’s like, okay, well, that was amazing.

Diana Hill 00:12:32  You know, so what we do is we turn away. We don’t want we don’t want to lose our hair. I mean, this is like a topic for many men. I don’t.

Diana Hill 00:12:40  Want to lose my hair.

Diana Hill 00:12:41  You know, because we are identified with that small sense of self. We don’t want to age. We don’t want to not have our book accepted or, you know, have the rejections that we have in life. But if we can make contact with that thing and we can stay there a little bit longer, then yes, then we can make go from that half step. We can make the full step into how can we make it better?

Eric Zimmer 00:13:03  Yeah. I love that description of a half step I’ve often thought about. Perspective is a big thing with me. How you view the world is so much of your reality, and I’ve recognized that sometimes I skip the half step that you’re talking about. I jump right over whatever it is that’s uncomfortable to perspective because I’m pretty good at it.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:23  Yeah, it’s actually one of my skill sets. I’m pretty good at just going, oh, let me place this thing right size to what it really is. And if I do that, I miss what you’re describing, which is that ability to tolerate some degree of emotional discomfort. And so that’s why for me, I realized kind of with you, it’s like step zero, as you call it, is being with that. And you know, I know you have a you have an eating disorder history. I have an addiction history. And I’ve said before, sometimes I think the fundamental skill that unlocks, like sobriety long term, is the ability to recognize that you can be with any emotion and not have to immediately fix it. When I finally got that, I was like, oh, okay, I can do this. Not that it’s easy, not that it’s pleasurable, not that it’s fun, just that it’s doable.

Diana Hill 00:14:16  Yeah.

Diana Hill 00:14:17  A very common thing people say in therapy is like, oh my gosh, I’m just going to die of embarrassment or oh my gosh, I’m just gonna die of like, the creepy crawlies.

Diana Hill 00:14:26  If I have to be around my coworker any longer. Like, they’re so irritating to me. I learned this from I do these act boot camps where I train hundreds of therapists all over the country with Steve Hayes and Robin Walser and Miranda Morris. We’re sort of like this little groupie, and we go and train people and act therapists and act and coaches. And one of the things I learned from her is this line of like, have you ever met anyone that has died of embarrassment? Have you ever met anyone that has died of an urge? Have you ever met anyone that’s died of a panic attack? Have you ever met anyone that’s died of grief? Now, have you ever heard about someone that’s died because they were unwilling to experience embarrassment or an urge, you know, or a panic attack or grief? All the things that we do to escape that experience, and if you actually become a follower of that experience, become, as Frances Wheeler calls an apprentice to it, an apprentice degree. If you become a follower of an apprentice to the feelings and all the sensations that show up under our skin, then we can ride it in that that urge surfing way.

Diana Hill 00:15:37  And you become a better surfer over time and you realize it gets bigger, it gets bigger, it gets bigger. You want to jump off, you think you can’t handle it? Oh my gosh, I’m going to die of it. And it always comes down. That’s the first mark of existence. It’s impermanent. Guaranteed it will shift. But you have to stay. You have to abide long enough to learn that lesson. And we start small. We start small. So we start with that half step. I mean, in the wise effort method, I take people through these three big brushstroke movements. The first one is getting curious, and I see that as I get curious, move. And then the next one is open up. How do you open up to the feeling? How do you open up your mind? How do you open up to your wiser self in those moments? It’s not until the third step that we actually get into focusing our energy. Now what do you want to do? And there’s so much of our psychological interventions that are out there are about the third step, you know, the habits and the blah, blah blah, but not about those first two.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:50  So I want to circle back to kind of the beginning for a moment, back to just the title itself. Why is effort? Talk to me about what wise effort means to you.

Diana Hill 00:17:01  Well, I’ve been circling around this concept for a long time. And the first time I actually heard the word wise effort, it was right effort. And it was from Taiwan when I was 19, out of college. My dad was a long term follower of China, and he used to go every summer to Plum Village and my mom as well. And my mom took me and my at that time boyfriend to Plum Village, France. And I remember very well. Some of his Dharma talks. I mean, he’s he’s very memorable. You can’t forget him, right? So. Right. One of his dharma talks. A soldier raised his hand and said, you know, I it was like the time of the Iraq War. And he said something like, you know, I’ve been here for three weeks, I’ve been doing this retreat, and I don’t really want to go back.

Diana Hill 00:17:51  Like, what do I do? And what Tai said was, you are the one that should be behind that gun because you’ve had this experience and his teaching that that day was on wise effort or right effort. How were you using your life force, your energy, your presence? And actually, there’s no better hands to be behind a gun than mindful hands. Right. So it really shifted my understanding and perspective because I was struggling so much in my 20s. I mean so much with anorexia and bulimia. And it shifted my perspective on what I wanted to do with my career, how maybe this very thing that I have. That I had struggled with, allows me to then be able to serve in a different way, because I’ve experienced what I’ve experienced, and it was about energy. But it wasn’t until just a few years ago when I was I was really interested in writing this book, and I was on a retreat, actually with Jack Kornfield, and I was sitting down with him and telling him about, this is what I’m writing about.

Diana Hill 00:18:49  And he’s like, that just sounds like wise effort. I was like, should it be skillful striving? Should it be, you know, he’s like this just it’s just wise effort. And so wise effort is one of the steps on the eightfold path of Buddhism. We know the Four Noble Truths and the fourth noble Truth is the path. Like, how do you actually awaken and move out of suffering? And it’s quite behavioral. I like to think of the Buddha was very behavioral in many ways, and it’s like these are some of the things you do, you do. Why speech and why is livelihood and why is action and why is effort and why is concentration and why is mindfulness. And if you if you practice these on a regular basis, then you you now have a path. You are charting a path not only for yourself, but you’re also a charting path for others to follow with you. And that’s what wise it is. It’s about energy use, putting it in the right amounts, in the right spots in a way that not only benefits you, but that has benefit to those beyond you and those that which you are interconnected with.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:41  Obviously, I love that reframing from right effort to wise effort, because right is a word that can be struggling word because you think there is one answer. You know, there’s that phrase that comes out of recovery, do the next right thing. And that’s a great phrase, but I prefer do the next good thing, because if I’m looking for the right thing, I can get really stuck on exactly what that is. But good is broader. It lets me say like there’s a very there’s a few different things I could do out here. And I think wise is similar, right? It doesn’t expect perfection out of it. It recognizes complexity in many ways. That’s what wisdom is. Is the ability to take a lot of complexity and turn it into something useful.

Diana Hill 00:20:31  It’s so interesting. We also have to look at how a how a word lands in our own bodies, and then choose the word that lands in your body in a way that doesn’t contract you or restrict you, but that that opens you.

Diana Hill 00:20:43  For me, good constricts me because I’m like, be a good girl. Be, you know, like, yeah, be good. And I have all that perfectionism behind me for somebody else, right? Might sound, you know. Yeah, I feel this sense of like that feels right to me. It feels on the mark, you know? So it’s so much for me. Words are just felt experiences and choose a word that works for you. But with wisdom. I mean, there’s a lot of psychological research into wisdom. There’s things like the Berlin Wisdom Project, or there’s aspects where psychologists are looking at wisdom as this intersection between virtue and cleverness. Right. We’ve all met very clever people that are not wise. We wouldn’t ask them when to put our dog down, you know, even though they have lots of information. And then we’ve also met very wise people. Right. That may not have sort of the cleverness, the problem solving skills, the acute, you know, sort of on the spot in the moment procedural abilities.

Diana Hill 00:21:36  And what I think of in terms of wisdom is this is this space where we have our personal life experience. We have all the stuff that we’ve learned in books. Look, I have my PhD, like seven years of training to get to this spot. And then we also have our wise advisors, our ancestors. We have the wisdom of nature. We have our bodies wisdom, that inner whole body, yes, our whole body know. And then we have our collective wisdom. We have our second bodies, the genius advisors that we lean on, whether that’s your dog or that’s a good friend that you know, like I have, like my little curated friendless, I know which friend to call when I’m in a fight with my husband versus which friend to call when I’m feeling anxious about getting on a stage and they are different friends and I borrow their wisdom. And so wisdom is not something that we own. It’s something that we collectively share, that we co-create. And when we are in wise effort, we’re tapping into that and using that as our guide of where we’re going to channel this life force energy.

Diana Hill 00:22:42  Because your life force energy is different than my life force energy. But we do share collective wisdom. We’re co-creating it right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:49  I’ve never heard that the convergence between cleverness and virtue that is really striking and somewhat close to the mark for me, but I love the way you describe all the different wisdoms that are available to us, because I think oftentimes we hear people talk about one of those wisdoms and that that’s the thing you just follow. You follow what your body says. Yeah. And I’m like, that’s a source of input. But sometimes that’s not the right thing, right? I want to borrow all these different wisdom, and that’s for me. How discernment happens is by I’ve never heard it said as well as you just did, but by tapping into these different wisdoms that are available to me so that I ultimately my own wisdom then can make it better rounded choice.

Diana Hill 00:23:39  Yeah, I teach meditation. I’ve been teaching meditation for a long time, and one of my, you know how you have like these one hit wonders and like everyone loves this one, this meditation and one of the meditations that I that I lead, that really helps if you’re stepping into like, I want to make a wise effort decision here.

Diana Hill 00:23:53  Like I need to tap into my wisdom is and people can do this as we’re talking is you basically eyes open. You can do it stepping into a boardroom or to tell your kids you’re about to get a divorce or putting your dog out, whatever it is, you can take on the posture and spine of somebody who you believe and feel their strength. Like if you think about someone that you you think of as strong and solid. Solid as a mountain. Take on that physical posture and spine, and then you can take on the eyes, imagining you’re looking through the eyes of somebody. It could be a spiritual figure. It could be a child. It could be your best friend who sees the world really clearly. And then you can take on the heart, feel in your heart the warmth and the opening of your chest and in your heart, the heart of somebody who is compassionate and caring and can hold a lot. Okay. And then with that spine, with those eyes, with that heart, you take on the voice of your greatest wisdom and you step in with that.

Diana Hill 00:25:02  And that’s where, you know, sort of these practices of like, embodying wisdom, like, and that it’s not just mine, it doesn’t belong to me. When I was choosing my logo for your everything, I was just going through rebrand and I was like, okay, I’m choosing. I want to choose the California poppy because I live in California, Santa Barbara. They’re all over there. Wildflowers. They’re beautiful. They’re orange. All you want to do is go grab it. But at any state, it is illegal to pick the wildflower of that state. So you cannot pick a California poppy in California. And I love that. I’m like, that is me because it’s free to share, you know, like that. You like you offer what you got, you spread your seeds. But don’t try and pick it for yourself, you know, and so we can tap into wisdom physically like that. In embodied wisdom, we can tap into wisdom in a way of just thinking about times in your life when you had to make a hard decision, how did you find wisdom? And then you can also tap into wisdom by looking, I really think, nature and biomimicry.

Diana Hill 00:26:04  I interviewed a woman named Dana Baumeister as part of the biomimicry 2.0 series that I just loved her work, where you look to nature’s wisdom as clues into how to solve your problem. Like how does the oak tree adapt to really difficult adversity? You know, it has really thick bark, but then it also does this thing called crown shyness, where it it leaves enough room for other oak trees to come in, and it doesn’t spread its leaves on other people. And then it has leaf litter where it creates compost. How could I do that in my own life around something that I’m struggling with? So there’s lots of ways to access wisdom, nature, your body or other people.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:46  I can see why that meditation is a hit. It is a banger, as the kids would say, because when I at one point was working on how to lead people through values work, that that is a big part of act. And in general, I obviously reached out to Stephen Hayes and Russ Harris and asked them like, what’s your favorite? Like, what’s your top values exercise? And they both said, pick a guide.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:12  It’s you pick someone and you try and you try and understand what it is about that person that you admire. And that tells you something about what you value, what you just did. I loved because it allowed me to pick different people based on their skills, in the same way that you know what friend is right for this thing, and this other friend is good for the marriage conversation. I love the spine, the eyes, the heart of potentially three very different people. And I know for me, when I stopped looking for one person to have all the answers for me, things got a lot easier or I was able to tap into other people’s wisdom a lot more. In in 12 step recovery, you’re encouraged to pick a sponsor. And I always struggled with that because I was like, well, I like a lot about that person, yet that other person has that and that other person has that. and same with spiritual teachers. I’ve had the same sort of thing. Right. Right. And I love this idea, particularly in an in a way of action that you’ve just given of being able to select the best of different.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:25  I don’t want to say people different wisdoms.

Diana Hill 00:28:28  Yeah. And sort of back to this metaphor of a path again. You know, we’re sort of all walking in the woods and there’s going to be many paths as you’re walking through the woods. And if you come across one, it’s really good news, especially if you’re lost because it means that someone else has walked there. Yep. Right.

Diana Hill 00:28:47  It’s going to be easier.

Diana Hill 00:28:48  Than, like.

Diana Hill 00:28:49  Bushwhacking.

Diana Hill 00:28:50  It, you know? So someone else is walk there. But the other thing about choosing a path in the woods is that as you walk it, you’re creating a path, and you walk it slightly differently in a slightly different unit. Like like the trail tenders. How do people how do people keep trails going? They walk them, right. But they kind of change over time. Like the the trail today is not the trail ten years ago because every person that’s walked it has shaped it. So as you walk it with your wise steps, you’re shaping it for the person behind you.

Diana Hill 00:29:20  And that’s the the flexibility, the iterations, the there’s not just one way, there’s not just one truth that we’re all trying to figure out, right? There are many. And what I really believe is we are both individuals and we are collective. It’s a both and paradox. And we both have our our genius, but we also aren’t all that special.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:05  When I was in New York Last time I was wandering down the street, I saw a sign and it was called the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. I was like, whoa, what is that? I got to go in and investigate this. Well, it’s a school of thought by a philosopher whose name was Eli Siegel. But they had this pamphlet in there and it says, is beauty the making one of opposites? It goes through all these things. It basically says, like, does a work of art show the kinship to be found in all objects and all realities, and at the same time, the subtle and tremendous difference, the drama of otherness that one can find among the things of the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:48  Does every work of art have a certain precision about something, a certain concentrated exactness, a quality of particular existence, and does every work of art nevertheless present in some fashion the meaning of the whole universe, something suggestive of wide existence, something that has an unbounded significance beyond the particular. I’m not going to read all these, but I loved it when I thought about like, what makes for me both the best art and the best teachings. It’s that it’s making a beauty out of opposites. I’ve often said my favorite fiction writers are the ones that can make me laugh and cry, and the distance between the two is very short, you know, almost on the same page. That’s what I’m like, okay, this person is a master, and I feel like the same thing is true. And you, you talk about this in your book, in one of the frameworks, you have a step called Enter the Paradox. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about here. But I just thought, knowing what your love of poetry and all that, that you would find these interesting.

Diana Hill 00:31:51  Yeah. Yeah. So paradoxes are interesting. Paradoxes have three components to them. And this comes from Wendy Smith’s work. She’s in a professor of management and studies, large organizations and sort of paradoxes within them, the successful organizations. One component of the paradox is that it keeps on showing up over and over and over again. You know the paradox of needing both margins in your life space, silence, the strong desire to keep moving forward, get stuff done. Yeah.

Diana Hill 00:32:23  You know, be.

Diana Hill 00:32:24  Successful, not successful, but like.

Diana Hill 00:32:26  The urgency.

Diana Hill 00:32:26  Of just creation, right? Yes. The paradox of tradition versus progress. So there they show up over and over again. Another component of paradox is that.

Diana Hill 00:32:38  They need.

Diana Hill 00:32:38  Each other. One benefits the other. So to try and resolve the paradox, to just go yin without yawn or yang or without, you know, ghost, just go yang without yin you, you end up losing something. And and that is like such an important thing to remember.

Diana Hill 00:32:54  And I want to tell you what my favorite values exercise is, because it’s the complete paradox of what Steve Tae’s favorite values exercise. His values exercise exercises. Find an advisor. But mine is the paradox of that. The third component of a paradox is that they are contradictory. You feel the tension of being pulled in two different directions at once, right? So my my favorite values exercise is the paradox of Steve Hayes, which is what do you regret? And when I have people do is I have them and I’m going to actually have you do this, but I won’t make you say your regrets.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:30  Okay, okay.

Diana Hill 00:33:31  So imagine a piece of paper and imagine we were like in a therapy room and you would feel comfortable doing this with me because we have this confidentiality and we’ve developed a relationship over time, and we’re very close at this point. You share everything with me or most everything on one side of the paper. I’m going to ask you to write down four regrets. One regret is a what’s called a foundational regret, something that you wish you have been doing all this time, but that you’re not.

Diana Hill 00:33:56  You haven’t been doing like wearing sunscreen or saving money or getting your quarterly taxes in. Right. Okay. Another regret is a boldness. Regret? A moment in your life when you wished you were more bold, you went for it. Even an interview in the past six months where you wish you said something that was more bold that you didn’t step into as you’re launching this book. Do you have one?

Eric Zimmer 00:34:22  That one might take a little bit longer, but.

Diana Hill 00:34:25  You’re pretty bold, okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:26  I mean, at least at this phase in my life.

Diana Hill 00:34:29  Okay. Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:31  But one will come to me. I’m not perfectly bold and by any stretch of the imagination.

Diana Hill 00:34:36  Okay. So if you have the first one, that’s good. We’ll try a third one. If you have a regret. That’s a connection. Regret. A moment when you didn’t connect with somebody or a rift that you have with somebody that you haven’t repaired. Do you have any of those. Okay. And the last one is a moral regret, something that you regret that you’ve done that’s harmed someone or harmed yourself.

Diana Hill 00:35:00  As an addict, we all have moral regrets that we come on.

Speaker 5 00:35:03  This is the ninth step right here.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:05  I’ve got a reasonable list. Yes.

Diana Hill 00:35:07  Okay, so once you have that list, imagine if people can do this at home. These regrets come from the American Regret Survey, which is Daniel Pink’s survey that he surveyed over 4000 people and was able to distill. Most of our regrets fall into these categories foundational moral boldness and connection. So you’ve got those regrets on one side of the paper. Then I would have you do. If you were my client, is I would say, okay, flip over that paper and tell me, why is it that you care about these things? Why do they matter to you? Why do they hurt so much? What are the values that drive those regrets? So maybe pick one regret. Why do you care? Why does that matter to you?

Eric Zimmer 00:35:46  Well, I’m going to share the regret with you.

Diana Hill 00:35:48  Even better. Even better.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:50  My mom passed two weeks ago.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:52  And when someone passes, there’s all kinds of regrets that come up. But I have a very specific one, and I’m going to go in a couple of days with my friend Chris, and we’re going to go to this place in town called Scioto Downs, where they do harness racing. My mom grew up there to a certain degree. Her parents were really good friends with the people who owned it. She was around the horses all the time. It was something she loved. And my mom lived in Denver for a couple of years before she passed. But before that, she was here. And when I told her I had gone to Sedona down, she said, God, I would love to do that. And I never took her.

Diana Hill 00:36:26  It’s a connection. Regret. Why does that hurt?

Eric Zimmer 00:36:28  That’s what I’m having a I may have to talk it out loud to get to it.

Diana Hill 00:36:33  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:34  It’s that it would have made her so happy. And it would have been so easy for me comparatively. And and so I don’t know if that’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:45  It’s a the kind of regrets I have the most these days that come up are regrets of kindness. There was a moment I could have done a kindness and I passed it. That, for me, is the sort of regret that shows up time to time where I walk past something or I drive past something, and then a minute, two minutes down the road, I’m like, oh God, I should have done, I could have done X, I could have done Y, or the the kindness in public that I was too scared to do. On one hand, it shows kindness. You know, maybe that’s the the regret, but it’s also, I guess, it’s connection.

Diana Hill 00:37:23  Yeah. So what I’m hearing in there and correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just kind of feeling it out. Is that something that you value is using your energy when you have it? When it’s when it’s an easy move, when it’s nothing to you, when it’s when it’s, you know, but to to take that flow and put it somewhere that could help somebody out in a kind way, and especially if like a little, little bit for you is a lot for somebody else, that that little by little becomes a lot and that’s what you value.

Diana Hill 00:37:56  You value obviously a little by little. Little by little becoming a lot in your own life, but also that transmitted to others. And when you when you bring it into the arena of someone like your mom. Yeah. I don’t I don’t know what relationship you have with mom, no matter what relationship you have with your mother. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:13  Complicated.

Diana Hill 00:38:15  It’s usually complicated, but I will say she probably did. Little by little becomes a lot for you at different points in your life. Because that’s just the role of most if you lived with her at some point. But if we can actually contact that, if we can take the regret because something like a regret, especially around somebody that’s past that can become entrenched in us, it can be it can eat away at us. We can start to feel this like, wake up in the night and think about it. Oh my gosh, I wish I had done X, Y and Z and that is toxic regret. Yeah, we don’t want that kind of regret.

Diana Hill 00:38:48  What we want is oh thank you. Mindfulness bell That feeling that I have that ringing in my body. The sound of a regret is the sound of something that here and now, today. How can I do a little bit when it’s easy for me and I know it will be a lot for somebody else here today, for Diana, for, the next person that you’re encountering. And then you start to feel the regret because regrets are only healed in the present moment. Technology used to talk about how the past and the future are healed in the present. We heal the past by what we do today. We create the future by what we do today. So that is the power of regret. As Daniel Pink’s book is would say, the power of regret is to take action in the here and now. And I think that’s the very because people don’t come into therapy with me talking about, oh, all the people I admire, they come in and say, I wish I hadn’t done this or I’m doing this right now, and I feel so yucky about it, but I can’t stop doing it.

Diana Hill 00:39:53  Yeah. So let’s go there. Let’s make contact with that and I’ll tell you about what you care about.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:57  That’s such a great exercise. I really love it. And I love what I saw Daniel Pink’s work. I liked it because it was staking a middle ground that I hadn’t fully seen or articulated, because I don’t remember. I think it’s an artist named Paul Westerberg who was part of a band called The Replacements that I loved, and he has some song that basically says, you know, you have no regrets. What’s as cool as that? And and I was like, yeah, I mean, that’s it, right? But what I meant was toxic regret. Whereas people call it different things regrets, regrets. A better word maybe, than guilt, which can be kind of heavily laden. I don’t know if you make a distinction between the two, but I never want to turn off that faculty. I never want to turn off the faculty that can recognize when I’ve behaved in a way that’s not my best self, but I want to be able to use that faculty for good, not for making things harder for myself and ultimately others.

Diana Hill 00:41:02  Right? So it’s exactly what you were referring to before. It’s that that process of the paying or paying of regret. Can I make can I stay there a little bit longer to get curious about it, not just run away from it because I hate that feeling. I don’t like it. I’m going to die if I if I feel that feeling right. But can I stay there a little bit longer to get underneath it so that it can tell me how I want to take action? That is. Wow. I mean, if we could do that in a stay in the conversation a little bit longer, when we feel our cheeks getting red and we’re so angry at the other person and like, why am I so angry right now? Because there’s something that’s getting hurt in here. I take my kids to Plum Village now, my my two boys. I have two teenage sons and we go to Plum Village every year.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:44  I wish I’d been raised by you or your parents?

Diana Hill 00:41:47  Well, I don’t know.

Diana Hill 00:41:50  You may change your mind. Living with me or my parents for a couple of weeks. Okay. Yeah. So we take our kids to Plum Village over and over the past few years, and they, It’s actually pretty cool. They have this teen program. They’re in the teen program now where they, like, camp with the monks. And the abbot of Plum Village is brother who? He has a great podcast, by the way, called The Way Out is In. And I love brother for so many different ways. And I’ve interviewed him a couple of times, sometimes at Plum Village. Actually, I interviewed him in Hahn’s little hut. Oh. And I have all these pictures of how Ty left it from the hut. It’s on YouTube. You can go and see his shoes and his little bed, and then you see the window that he used to look out on that, he said, was his TV of the French countryside. And so I was getting ready for this interview with, with brother Apu.

Diana Hill 00:42:33  And I was asking my son was nine at the time and I was asking him, I said, what do you want to ask Brother Pooh? And he was nine, and he, his big brother, had just moved out of his room. So they had bunk beds and the 13 year old needed to go. Let’s just say you’re a 13 year old boy. You don’t need your nine year old brother anymore. So he left. But my little nine year old’s in the same room in this bed all by himself. And he said, well, can you ask, brother, what do I do when I’m lonely at night? What do I do when I’m lonely at night? And this is a question that all of us could have felt. What do I do when I’m anxious at night? Right? And so I had him record his little voice. And I played it for a brother. Who and what? What brother Pooh said was. Oh, when you’re lonely at night. But I want you to do.

Diana Hill 00:43:21  And this is a step in the open up to feelings part of my book, which is I want you to go to that feeling of loneliness and say hello, loneliness. I’m here for you. And then your loneliness won’t feel so lonely anymore. You know, a few days later, I played it for my son. A few days later I go and I’m, like, moving the dirty socks from his bed and straightening things up in there. And I look up in the little slots that are at the top of the bed, you know, and where they put like their posters and, you know, sometimes their gum. And out there there’s a little, there’s a little piece of paper that said, hello, loneliness.

Speaker 6 00:43:56  I’m not kidding you sweetest. I know, he said. So he wakes up in the night and he looks at it and he remembers he’s not alone.

Diana Hill 00:44:03  Right. And that’s the bit we want to run away. The wise part of ourself, it’s like, can I stay? Can I stay and can I actually take care of this feeling or can I be with it in a different way? Your idea around perspective, can I look at it differently? And then something shifts and then something shifts.

Diana Hill 00:44:22  So there’s so many intersections between psychology and Buddhism. And as you said, like all this stuff is just really Buddhism, but it’s also really gestalt. And it’s all the gestalt stuff is really. And where I see the field of psychology going and where I am invested in is getting out of this the ridiculousness of acronyms. Is it IFS or Act or DBT and that we all have to stake our claim as if we’re putting out countries on a globe and starting to look at the constituents, the ways in which all these different wisdom, traditions, science, spiritual traditions, indigenous wisdom, the continuance of where they overlap and where are the the collective truths that we are co-creating that we can share and that we give in our own individual ways are part of it, like our little piece of the path to this larger path that we’re all walking together, which hopefully is a path of kindness and a path of making this place a little bit better for all plants, animals, beings that are going to inherit it.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:24  That is a beautiful goal, and in some ways, I’ve been trying to do that with this podcast for 12 years is to sort of bring out these themes that emerge again and again from all these different places and make that that wisdom Available in a in a broader sense.

Diana Hill 00:45:42  Yeah, I’m starting this series. I’ve been because I’ve been podcasting for a lot of years doing wise effort and and have spent a lot of time in these like big spaces, go and do it in front of 400 people or online. And there’s like everyone’s in their little squares. And, and this year I just started, I did this like, wise effort move where I asked myself, there’s sort of something I do, which is an energy audit. And I asked myself, like what? Like in my body, what is a whole body? Yes. You know, what am I leaning towards? What what do I what does my body want? And then what is my genius? What am I really good at? So people could ask themselves, what am I really good? What comes easy to me that’s hard for other people? And then what are my values? What’s important to me? Where do I want to contribute in the world? And then this, this fourth piece of how can I be of service to something bigger than me, more than just me and my ego and my brand, you know? Yeah, Yeah.

Diana Hill 00:46:38  So we can ask this an energy audit. It’s a it’s a it’s a process to do an energy audit. But I so I did that for myself because I just was coming out of this book and I was feeling burned down. I was like, I can’t I cannot do this large, you know, talking to 400 people on zoom anymore. And what I, what I came up with was, I what I want more than anything is to be an intimate conversation with people. Unscripted, unedited, no notes. Don’t give me the questions ahead of time. I’m so turned off by how over edited everything is. we don’t know what’s real and what’s fake, and it’s going to increasingly be that way. And I want to talk about what is true. And so I came up with this idea of this series. It’s called Tell the Truth, Tell.

Speaker 6 00:47:23  The Truth of Doctrine.

Diana Hill 00:47:24  And Hell. And we’re going to meet in this like little.

Speaker 6 00:47:26  Downtown.

Diana Hill 00:47:27  Like in the Funk Zone of Santa Barbara Salon series.

Diana Hill 00:47:31  But we’re going to like interview. I’m going to interview rad people, and they’re not allowed to tell me their schtick, Like I’d be like. Tell me the truth. Like Rosemary trauma. Like she’s like my favorite poet of all time. She’s sick. Yeah. She’s coming. I’m like. Tell me the truth about grief. Trudi Goodman, who is Jack cornfields wife? Tell me the truth about what it’s like to be married to Jack Kornfield. I want to know. Yeah. And what it’s like. What it’s like to be a spiritual teacher and on this planet. You know, so I’m going to be doing this series. I’m going to stream it live. But, like, I’m super excited about it because if you think about for you, why is effort coming into this place where you get to combine your genius with what you really care about? And it’s a whole body. Yes. And it’s serving more people than you. Then whether you are a UPS person and you’re dropping off the packages and you love the dogs that you greet and the families that you serve, or you’re doing it in a salon series, you’re contributing to this world, and everybody has a unique way of doing that.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:32  That sounds like an amazingly good series and the conversations that are best. And this I would consider this a really great one, are the ones that I don’t look at my notes barely at all. I have not I have not looked at your notes except to reference where I knew something you had said was, and I wanted to. I wanted to be able to pull it. But in general, we’ve just talked and those are always, I think, the best conversations. You know, those are always the ones that I look back on. I go, that one was really special. There was none of the normal, like, okay, I’m going to lead somebody through their book in order or which is valuable. I mean, there’s not that there’s not value in that sort of thing, right? But for me, what I really enjoy and you sort of talking about finding what, what you most want to do is when we just sort of talk and, you know, I’ve got somebody coming up this afternoon, another conversation that I think is going to be more that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:25  Also, we’re just I just not overprepared.

Diana Hill 00:49:27  Right. So we could apply that to podcasting. Let’s start applying that to other things. Let’s apply that to work conversations where we come in with our whole preparation and our plan and all the things that we’re going to say and do to run this thing. If you’re a leader, if you manage people, and what if you came in with a beginner’s mind, you know that this person is going to co-create something with you. It’s not up to you. It’s up to us. And what if you did that at a meeting with your teacher, you know, like a teacher to your kids? Or what if you did that with a stranger on the on the street? And when we bring that curiosity to people, we have a different experience, because if you listen to any interview of me, it will never be the same. It will never, you know, it just it’ll be unique. The one thing the AI is doing in our world is it’s making everything the same.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:16  Yes it is.

Speaker 6 00:50:17  It’s you can read it. You’re like, oh my gosh, this caption, it’s so AI has a short little sentence with the.

Diana Hill 00:50:22  You know, and it starts to have that sound to it. Yes. In the same way that fast food made all the food taste the same in that, you know, category. right? And so what we actually crave as humans is we crave this like closeness that comes from being the truth of who we are. Of being unscripted, being real. And I’ve had I mean, I had I actually just a few months ago, I had a researcher, we were all set up for an interview and she said, give me the questions ahead of time. And I said, I.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:53  Don’t do.

Diana Hill 00:50:53  That. I’ve read all these studies. We’re going to explore these topics. I don’t know what questions I’m going to ask you. I’m sorry. It depends on what you said at the last, last thing I said to you. It’s just an organic, evolving experience.

Diana Hill 00:51:06  And she didn’t want to do it. She said, no, I can’t because I can’t prepare. And I said, well, then, thank goodness, because you wouldn’t have been a good interviewer.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:14  I get asked often for questions ahead of time and I’m like, I don’t have them. You know, I can give you the general thing we’re going to tell you I’ve prepared by learning about your book, like, yeah, I don’t quite know what we’re going to do. I’ve had a couple people decline, like you said, on those grounds. I’m like, wow, that’s that’s unusual.

Diana Hill 00:51:33  Yeah. It’s rigidity. It’s fear. It’s fear of entering into unknown spaces. And what we need more and more is the confidence to enter into the unknown to instead of uncertainty, like without certainty, because that’s what all of it is. We do not know what’s coming next. I mean, I said, the first mark of existence is impermanence, right? The second mark of existence is it’s going to be uncomfortable.

Diana Hill 00:51:56  And then the third mark of an existence is we are not solo selves in at all. So to assume that I have the questions and you have the answers is not the place that I want to be in with people or the reverse.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:11  Yeah, that’s beautifully said. So I’m going to ask you a question. I sent you one of my favorite poems of all time, Relaxed by Ellen Bass, because in your book you had the the story about the woman being chased by a tiger. Do you have a poem that you would love to share with us at the end here.

Diana Hill 00:52:30  Oh, can I give you both a poem and a way to write poetry?

Eric Zimmer 00:52:34  That would be best.

Diana Hill 00:52:34  Yes, I do with clients now actually do this when I train therapist too. So I learned from Rosemarie Trauma, who is my current favorite poet of all poets. Rosemarie wrote her book of poetry, The Landing, after her 16 year old, took his own life. And it’s it’s how she processed that grief. And she gave me this technique, which I started to try out, which is pick anything that you see in the space that you’re in.

Diana Hill 00:53:01  And so it could be like, I have a Pellegrino water bottle here and take a feeling or experience that you’re having like, excitement or grief or anxiety and write a poem about that item and that feeling. And you would start it with today my anxiety is a water bottle half full. So I wrote this poem. I was writing this poem every morning as part of my journal practice. I started writing poems and I wrote a poem about recovery. And it’s very embarrassing. I’m not a poet, but, But this one, is good for you. Okay, so I wrote this in my in my notes section September 20th, 2025. So today my recovery is an old pair of tennis. They were sitting on the couch and laced, battered, worn too much at the toe. I probably need a fresh pair. They’ve lost their bounce. Running the same route? A hundred, maybe a thousand times. Worn out. The pavement is hard. The road silent. Recovery has no fans, no bystanders cheering you on.

Diana Hill 00:54:12  The dog walkers don’t know about the fall you had last week. The ache in your hip. The effort it takes to get up again. Some days recovery is stopping right there, taking off your shoes and lying knees up on the side of the road. But just for today, my recovery is leasing up. Having faith I’ll get a second wind knowing that there will be a downhill today. Recovery is choosing to double, not heading out, trusting in the open road.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:38  That’s really good.

Speaker 7 00:54:40  Very good.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:40  Oh yes.

Diana Hill 00:54:42  But I love that process. That we can create poetry anywhere. And the use of metaphor to understand ourselves and the use of words to get around words. And anyone can do it at any point in time. So art, music, all these things are ways of expressing ourselves in that maybe we can’t quite always get to express with just usual language.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:06  I just came across a foundational regret.

Speaker 7 00:55:09  Oh yes.

Diana Hill 00:55:12  They come to you, don’t they? Good.

Speaker 7 00:55:13  They do. Good they.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:14  Do. And I’d forgotten all about it. So it’s it’s it’s just popped up the minute I thought about it though, I had a regret. So I was like, okay. And it was for a period of time My best friend Chris was also the editor of this podcast. Every morning we co-composed a haiku together. One of us had to take the first five syllables, then the some. The next guy took the seven, and then the same person did the five. And then we reversed those rules the next day, and we had a good long streak of doing those. And now I have a foundational regret that we haven’t kept doing it.

Diana Hill 00:55:44  Fabulous.

Speaker 7 00:55:45  What’s the value underlying back?

Diana Hill 00:55:47  Yeah. What’s the value that underlies that regret.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:49  There’s two.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:50  It’s connection. It’s my love with Chris. You know I mean who’s you know one of the great loves of my life and it’s creation I value creation. And the more I do it, I generally the better I feel. And so that’s an underselling of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:05  The more I do it, the more deeply me I feel.

Diana Hill 00:56:09  I bet it opens you up to like, if you could start with a little creative exercise like that, how the next piece of work that you do together would be shifted or different in some, in some shape or form. And so that creativity that you’re putting those two values together and it’s fun. And you can.

Diana Hill 00:56:27  Feel that the vitality of doing things like that. And it’s often those things that we think, oh, I’ll just put that aside because it doesn’t I don’t have enough time. We need to get to our agenda. And what we don’t realize is that spending our time on those actually makes our investment of time so much more meaningful. And when we invest our time in meaningful ways, we actually end up feeling like we have more time in our life. So yeah, that bring back the haiku. Maybe post one for us.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:55  I think, well, Chris is hearing this, so you got to get it on board Chris it’s coming.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:00  And I think that’s a beautiful way to wrap up, talking about how investing our time in the things that matter most is indeed what wise effort is. You and I will continue in the post-show conversation where we talk a little bit more about a couple ideas in your book that I wanted to hit. One of them is one of my favorite words of all time is sometimes. And you talk about that in your book. And so I’d like to explore that. Listeners, if you’d like access to post-show conversations and free episodes and want to support this show that always needs your support, you can go to one you feed. Thank you so much, Diana. I knew this would be a pleasure and it absolutely has been.

Diana Hill 00:57:41  Honor and delight. Thank you for spending the time with me.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:44  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:57  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.