Good Life Project - How to Feel Confident, No Matter What Comes Your Way | Ethan Nichtern

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Ever feel like life's ups and downs are knocking you off balance? Discover how to cultivate unshakable self-trust with Buddhist teacher Ethan Nichtern, author of Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life's Eight Worldly Winds.Ethan shares ancient practices for navigating the emotional hurricanes of pleasure/pain, praise/criticism, fame/insignificance and success/failure we all face. Whether you're battling imposter syndrome, recovering from a breakup or redefining your career path, learn to access the four powers of true confidence - compassion, lineage, awareness and "wind horse" - so you can stay centered amid the storm.You can find Ethan at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Henry Shukman about the way to original love.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The way I think of confidence is just like an actual willingness to be in the forces of life and trust, not necessarily that I'm going to get what I want, because we also fail quite a lot. I think trust is interesting. It's just sort of a feeling of this is going to be okay. I can work with this. It's that quality of like, here I am. This may be hard, but I'm grounded. And maybe that means grounded in groundlessness. But at the end of the day, I have to trust myself. So have you ever felt a deep lack of confidence that just seeps into your relationships,

your work, and even how you see yourself? Maybe you find yourself constantly seeking validation from others or afraid to fully trust your own inner wisdom, or perhaps you bounce between heights of self-assurance and depths of self-doubt, never really feeling truly grounded, so easily knocked off your seat and into the spin of uncertainty. Well, if so, you're not alone. We are living through a unique moment in time where many are just questioning their core identity, their purpose,

and grappling with pervasive groundlessness in nearly every domain of life. The shaky foundations that we once relied on, really, they seem to be crumbling all around us. In work, in love, in family, community, we're being called to find a deeper wellspring of confidence from within. On my guest today, Ethan Nickner, has spent years exploring the ancient wisdom that can help us cultivate unshakable confidence amidst life's uncertainties. Ethan is a renowned Buddhist teacher who leads meditation classes and hosts the Road Home podcast. In his book, Confidence, Holding Your Seat Through Life's Eight Worldly Winds. He weaves a powerful tapestry of insights to really guide us home in our innate sense of self-trust.

In our conversation, Ethan unwraps these things he calls the eight worldly winds. We dive into what those actually are, the contrasting experiences that we hope for and also fear in life, from pleasure and pain to fame and insignificance. And he shares how by taking really firmly our seat amidst these opposing forces, we can develop just profound self-trust. You'll discover practical strategies to harness the power of self-compassion and lineage and awareness and what Ethan calls wind horse, to ride confidently through pretty much every situation. So excited to share this conversation with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. We're having this conversation at a sort of an interesting moment in time where a lot of people are sort of like questioning who they are and their sense of confidence in themselves, in the world around them, in their relationships, in a connection to something maybe more expansive and bigger than them, and really trying to grapple with a sense of just pervasive groundlessness in nearly every domain

of life. And it's interesting because this is a space where you have not just lived, but you've been teaching in for a long time. I'm wondering just broadly, what are you seeing as you're having conversations with people, with students out there in the world these days? Yeah. The reason I wanted to write about confidence was because I've been teaching Buddhism and meditation and Buddhist psychology for a long time. And I think the mindfulness movement really caught on in the last decade or so. And I think when you look at people's initial interest in something like mindfulness, it usually is something like stress reduction or working with a difficult emotion or just working with, you know, what we might call monkey mind, you know, just really a difficult relationship with one's own thoughts and emotions. But what I noticed, and this really mirrors my own path, is whenever I

got one level below the surface with somebody about what they were interested in studying or where the teachings or practices were coming alive for them or where they were stuck, it had something to do with trusting ourselves to show up in some way to some aspect of life. You know, it could be related to just trusting yourself to being able to make it through a meditation session, which is not actually that easy. Kudos to everybody who does make it through a whole, you know, five or 10 or 20 minute meditation session. It could be trusting yourself to have a difficult conversation with your boss where you, you know, ask for a raise or advocate for yourself. It could be trusting yourself in a difficult,

very vulnerable conversation with your intimate partner or trusting yourself to like show up politically right now in a compassionate way that's saying, hey, we need to really figure out human society together. And I want to actually be part of that. And it's difficult. It's really hard to be part of it. So I also realized that the teachings I inherited, in a sense, you could say that Buddhist thought is not so much about confidence, at least not on the very surface level. But when you really get into it, it is about developing sort of a sense of trusting our own mind, trusting ourself. And I wanted to harvest both some of the ancient themes and some of the modern themes, because I think the union of ancient and modern is always where I find kind of the greatest wisdom

and application. I do agree we're in a time of immense groundlessness, and people are definitely struggling with actually kind of showing up and wanting to show up. I mean, we're all doing it anyway. You know, maybe we're hiding out for a minute watching our favorite streaming show or reading our fantasy novels. But in general, we are all really saying, like, how can I use my spiritual tools to actually show up to trust myself? And, you know, I also think what was important for me about this in this moment as a man, too, I think we do live in this era of a lot of false confidence, you know, a lot of kind of alpha male confidence. I've been reminded that actually the term con man is short for confidence man. So, you know, that's really been on my mind and alive too, because there is also this

question of like, in any of those situations, sort of like, how do I take my seat in my life, as we say in meditation, and then really claim, claim my spot? It's an interesting thing you said about, Jonathan, about groundlessness, because that's one half of it. But I think about the example of going back to ancient master, the historical Buddha. When he achieved awakening, he touched the ground. He was like, I'm completely grounded in being a human in my body at this moment, and I can show up. That's always interesting is dealing with trusting ourselves and working with groundlessness and uncertainty at the same time is, you know, I think that's usually where we harvest the greatest wisdom too. And it's definitely that time on planet earth, I think. Yeah. It's sort of like living in that gap. And how do we

navigate it? How do we dance with it? And I love, as you've mentioned, so much of the way that you brought yourself to the wisdom world has been as a bridge builder between ancient wisdom and modern life, even down to one of your books, The Dharma of the Princess Bride, one of the most adored movies that's been out there, one of my favorite movies. And then you deconstruct it in Buddhist thoughts. Let's talk about this in the context of life and what we learned from it. When you talk about confidence also now, trusting yourself is a phrase that you kept repeating. Yeah. When you use the word confidence, what are you actually talking about? Yeah. It's a term that I think we kind of know intuitively, you know, like when somebody,

when we think somebody has confidence, there's a sense of strong presence. There's a sense of bravery. But if you look it up in the dictionary, which I did, the most common definition of confidence does include the word trust and firm trust sometimes. Like somebody said, the Latin root has to do with faith, right? Which is sometimes a more spiritually or religiously loaded word than trust, but they basically mean the same thing. Like there's some belief in one's own ability. And the way I framed it in the book is it has to do with our ability specifically to work with hope and fear striking us. Like we want some things in life. And, you know, I think a lot of times when people study meditation, they think we're supposed to stop wanting, you know, which I would say,

good luck with that. Yeah. I have not come close at anywhere remotely close to that. Yeah. And I really want to write a book for people who want actually some kind of, you know, maybe it's, you want your screenplay to get finished and adopted and picked up by somebody. You want love. It's very human, right? And then you're afraid of certain things. We're afraid of failure. We're afraid of death. We're afraid of being criticized. We're afraid of pain. That's very human. And so when early Buddhism talked about these experiences of hope and fear, just like kind of winds striking us. And so the way I think of confidence is just like an actual willingness to be in the forces of life and trust, not necessarily that I'm going to get

what I want, because I do think a confident person in the true sense of the word, we do accomplish our purposes a little bit more frequently, but we also fail quite a lot. And you can get as enlightened as you want in business or art or politics or romance or relationship, but you're still going to have death, right? And like, if we want to say some spiritual master like Buddha was greatly spiritually accomplished, he got what he wanted in the end. He was so confident, but he also died. So confidence can't be about like just winning the game of life because nobody really wins the game of life from the standpoint of like surviving it, you know? And so working with how do we trust ourselves to show up and pursue things in the face of all that

is I think really, really what I was looking at. And, you know, I think trust is interesting. It's just sort of a feeling of, this is going to be okay. I can work with this. It's hard to define in words. It's that quality of like, here I am, you know, this may be hard, but I'm grounded. And maybe that means grounded in groundlessness, which is an interesting idea. It is, you know, and I feel like so many people have this experience where they'll actually trust other people before they'll trust themselves. Yeah. And I wonder if part of that, I'm so curious what your take is on this. I often wonder whether part of that, and I'm raising my hand here also, right, is that if we trust other people or if we go seek, well, let me talk to this wise person or let me go get this. We trust the data. We trust the people. We trust this. And then we make a decision

based on all of that external input. And then we can say, when we make the decision, we say, well, I'm confident based on X, Y, and Z external things. And I can point to those as the basis for this decision. Then if the decision doesn't work out, then we can point to something outside of ourselves and say, well, I relied on these people, these indicators, and clearly they were off. So it's not a personal hit because it wasn't my own self-trust that betrayed me. Whereas if I just say, let me go inside and say, hmm, let me really feel into this. Let me use my intuition. Let me use whatever intelligence or rationality I can make a decision. And then that decision doesn't work out. It's a much bigger hit for most people. So I often wonder whether we outsource confidence because there's something inside of us that subconsciously says that if we actually try and stand in a place and rely on our own self-trust and make a call and it turns out wrong and the stakes are high, that is going to hurt way more. Yeah. It's a beautiful discussion. I also think there's so much wisdom in Western psychology. So if you start with why do we trust other people, it's

because we enter the world helpless. And so from that standpoint, from a psychodynamic standpoint, we start trusting our parents or our parental figures. My daughter's getting more and more self-sufficient. She actually turned seven years old tomorrow. But when I pick her up, she needs to know I'm going to carry her, right? You and I don't get anybody to give us shoulder rides anymore, I don't think, right? We have to carry ourselves all the time on our own two feet. So there is something about like, and I think a lot of things we study, I think it's really important, you know, to have teachers or mentors or experts that we're looking to, right? And it's an interesting moment wherein I talk about this later in the book when

I talk about lineage, that I do think there's kind of been a growing distrust for experts in some ways, too, because you can feel like exactly everything you said, like, okay, it's on them, like, they will carry me. If they get it wrong, it's not my fault. But you can also feel like, oh, they don't, the experts don't know what they're talking about, right? Which is very similar to rebelling against your parents. And I think that's actually pretty, a pretty necessary phase in our psychological and spiritual development to be like, no, I'm going to figure this out, you know? And so I think there's some balance of the two,

right? Because we are interconnected with each other. So we do have to realize, you know, actually I'm not figuring anything out. Like even everything I'm saying comes from other people. I'm just kind of synthesizing it and putting it into my own expression. And at the same time, you're growing adult life and you say, whatever, whatever my parents and teachers and elders and family, whatever they taught me right now, it's just me here. You know, like nobody else can help me figure out what I'm going to say or how I'm going to show up to like this interview. It's like, OK, I have to like internalize whatever those parental voices are, whatever those mentors are and say, I got this.

You know, just like my daughter, you know, most of the time is walking herself. Yeah. It is interesting though, how much we do, as you say, kind of outsource our own power, even as grownups, you know, and I think then there is some sense of actually realizing, oh, okay. I outsource my own power because I did need help learning how to do things and I might still need learning help. But at the end of the day, I have to trust myself. And I think that's especially important when we're looking at receiving feedback from others, which is a whole chapter in the book, working with how we receive praise, how we receive criticism on whatever project we might be working on. People are going to give me

all sorts of ideas about how I'm doing and what I should do next, but I actually have to take those ideas and then synthesize them with what in Buddhism is sometimes called the principal or internal witness, which is my own sense of knowing. And I have to trust that at the end of the day, right? No, that makes a lot of sense. And the other thing that, as you're describing it, that's coming to my mind is that when we outsource self-trust or confidence, we kind of lose that magical feeling of when something actually does work out the way we hoped it worked out. Then if it was something that we really grappled with it and we reasoned it out and we felt into it, whatever you want to say is your process.

And then we make a decision and it's like, yeah, this actually turned out the way that it did and I worked hard. We have a level of ownership over that. That really just feels amazing. But if we outsource the decision making, if we outsource it, if we say, well, that was because I trusted the input of others and that's sort of like what led to it, we feel less of a sense of ownership. And we lose this magical moment of us standing in a place of agency that I think so many of us feel that we don't get enough of these days. Yeah. It's interesting because I think there's been a lot of talk in recent years, really

good talk and really necessary talk about accountability, right? Accountability for one's actions, accountability for how we show up. But accountability has sort of like a negative twist to it, right? It doesn't need to, but the way we often say that is like, if you mess up, take responsibility. The other side of accountability is actually empowerment. Like, you know, it's not, I think the other thing that I think Buddhism names is that there's a problem with the worldview of individualism, right? There's a problem with the idea that I did everything. For example, going back to the parents example, my parents are the ones who introduced me to quite a lot of the practices that I do. I mean, they didn't force any of them

on me and I had other teachers, but I would not be a Buddhist probably without my parents, right? So I can't really take responsibility alone, say I did all this. It's like, oh yeah, no, I had privilege. I had a good environment. It was interdependent. But then at the same time, there's like, and, and by the way, I worked really hard, right? And I showed up and I could do it again, right? I can take responsibility. I love that sort of two sides of the coin of agency and accountability. The other way to think about agency to use a more slightly loaded word is power, like claiming our own power. You know, like I can do something. I might not be able to do everything, but I can influence situations, you know, by showing up. That makes a lot of

sense. You know, it's interesting. I feel like so much of when you tee an idea up, it's often, well, let's actually look at the different aspects of this. So you introduced accountability and agency, but you mentioned this notion of worldly wins earlier and talked about these two, hope and fear. I want to dive in because in the book, you actually introduced the idea of eight worldly wins. So take me to what we're actually talking about when we're talking about worldly wins, and then maybe we'll walk through them a little bit so we can get a better feel for them. Yeah. So the eight worldly winds, that is talking about ancient versus modern. This is ancient wisdom, right? And it's still applicable. It comes from the historical Buddha 2,600 years ago. He talked about these eight experiences that if you're a human in the world,

you will face. And they're either called, like my teacher and friend Sharon Salzberg sometimes refers to them as the vicissitudes, which feels like a very SAT word. So they're sometimes called the worldly phenomenon. But I really like this metaphor of wind, which is the way I think Pema Chodron and others refer to them as winds, because there's a sense of like a force striking you. And the analogy that I use early on in the book, which there's always kind of a, I don't know if you're like this when you're expressing yourself or writing, there's always kind of a visual analogy that comes to me at a certain point is like, oh yeah, that. So if you go by a car wash

or a mechanic or like a car dealership, there's those, those noodle looking really tall inflatable guys sometimes are artificially blown by an air blower. But when the wind hits them, they wave, they look like they're smiling, they're laughing, they're dancing. And then if the wind stops blowing or blows the other way, they droop over like looking like completely depressed and crestfallen. So I was playing with that analogy of how these different experiences of life hit us. So the eight is really four pairs, right? And four pairs on each side of the pair, there's the experience that we hope for,

or that when it happens, when it hits us, it inflates us, it elates us, it makes us temporarily feel great about our confidence. And on the other side is the wind that deflates us, that knocks us over, that signals our defeat or our demise. So they go from sort of the most visceral to our embodied nervous system, which is we hope for pleasure, we fear pain. And then they get into our sort of our relational sense of self. We hope for praise, we fear criticism and blame. If we're trying to do bigger work in the world, have a podcast, or we're trying to influence a group of people in some way, we hope for recognition and renown and fame. We fear insignificance, having no influence. It's interesting in that pair,

fame and insignificance, another classic translation says that the feared outcome is infamy, which I think we still fear. But I also think we live in this interesting era where if you're infamous among a group of people, you can kind of turn that into a new kind of fame. The example I use for that is the rapper Eminem. Nobody ever talked about how controversial Eminem was more than Eminem, you know? So he's sort of, you know, turning his infamy into fame. So I think what we really fear in that couplet is we just have no impact. Nobody knows our work. Nobody knows what we're trying to do. Nobody remembers us. Nobody writes us a holiday card, et cetera. And then the most generalized one, which has to do with our spiritual quest, it has to do with every aspect of life. Any project we could conceive

is we hope for success and we fear failure or loss. So those are the eight worldly winds, but it's really working with this dance when we show up, when we try to, you could say, take our seat in the world, in our life, just the same way we might take our seat in meditation. We really hope to be inflated with the positive winds, and we really fear being knocked over with the negative winds. That makes so much sense. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be

fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. I want to walk through those in a little bit more detail. Starting out with pleasure and pain, you use this phrase, licking honey from a razor blade, which is pretty visceral. Yeah. That comes from an 8th century, very famous Indian Buddhist teacher who's very well known, named Shantideva, who wrote this text that's especially popular in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition called the Way of the Bodhisattva, the way of the being who's trying to awaken compassion, right? And he said that pursuit of pleasure can be like licking honey from a razor

blade, right? What he was talking about was fixation on pleasure when we know it's impermanent, right? When we know we can't make any pleasure last forever. And so the razor blade is kind of the truth of impermanence, the truth of death. I love that phrase because when I read it, I was like, you know, I'm from the 90s. So it did sound like it could be, you know, the 90s when I feel like all the music was about very personal existential dilemmas like Alanis Morissette. So I feel like that could be like a Nirvana lyric, you lyric. I just imagine them on MTV Unplugged licking honey from a razor blade. So the idea is that pleasure feels good,

pain feels bad. But there's this false promise that if we have a pleasing sensation in our body, in our sense realm, we can make it last. And if we do the right things, we might avoid pain. And I think in that arena, I'm always a casual fan and invested student of the conversation between Buddhist thought and neuroscience is really interesting to me. And sort of what they've discovered, I talk about one experiment, what they've discovered about how advanced mindfulness practice changes our relationship to pain, I think is super interesting. The long and the short of it is we don't brace against pain as much when it's not happening. But for very advanced meditators, what they found is during a painful physical experience, the pain receptors light up more than people who've never practiced mindfulness. You actually feel the pain more completely

if you're being mindful. They didn't do a pleasure experiment, which I also think they would find during the experience of a chocolate chip cookie, right? You would actually taste, it would be even more ecstatic for the mindful person than the non-mindful person. You would taste it that much more. And it's like, when we actually are holding our seat, we actually are feeling our experience more, right? But it's less of a problem. I think that's the thing about pleasure and pain. I talk about this. There's, there's a mirage in pleasure. There's this idea in hope or pleasure that this is going to save me, right? Like when you really want a chocolate chip cookie, there's some feeling of like, this cookie is my spiritual salvation, you know? And you're

never thinking about just tomorrow when you're going to be craving the cookie again, right? And I talk about the experience of being on a meditation retreat and having a really difficult itch on my nose from a fly buzzing or something like that. And just deciding that I was not going to scratch the itch, which is a very holding your seat kind of a thing to do. And I remember as a grown up person actually thinking the thought, if I don't scratch my nose, I'm going to die, which is not true. It's an irrational thought, but there is in pain or unpleasant circumstance. It's not that we're misunderstanding that we're in pain because we very much are. And if we're in chronic pain, if there's something we can do to reduce the pain, please always do the

compassionate thing. But we think that this unpleasant experience is going to be the end of us when really what happened with the itch is a few minutes later, it was just completely gone, you know, just evaporated. of like we have an enhanced level of awareness where we're going to notice and we're also probably going to experience sensory input more deeply, more intensely. It's going to be there on both sides of the spectrum, right? But the other part of it, which you shared, and people would be like, oh, sweet, more pleasure, like yay, but also like more pain. But at the same time, as you described, you experienced that stimulus, but part of the experience of it isn't just the neurons that are firing at the end at the point of stimulation. It's what your brain does with it.

And that very same practice says, yes, I'm going to actually notice all those firings, yet the signals that I'm getting from it, I'm going to have more of a say in how that lands in my mind, which is the other part of the experience. Yeah. I think oftentimes practices like mindfulness, like their experiences, Oh, the benefit is,

you know, you just, you know, you're the screen on the screen door in the summer porch and everything like it touches you, but then it just blows through you. And it's all about like the ability to just kind of be chill and in the center and let it go.

But it's not about, it's to just kind of be chill and in the center and let it go. But it's not about, it's not often said, actually, it may also give you access to really heightened sensory experience. Yeah, yeah. But you're going to handle it differently. Yeah. And that's a huge, that's the big qualifier there. Yeah, yeah. You know, that's based on the way you framed it, Jonathan. What I would say is being in the center, you know,

which I'm calling holding your seat is not so chill because there's always a lot going on. Right. That's actually what presence is. It's, it's not the absence of activity. It's actually, you're sitting in the center of this almost maelstrom, external, internal, you know, you have everything that's happening in the outside world. You have your sense perceptions, you have your thoughts, you have your emotions. And even in moments of boredom, actually, even, you know, when you're sitting some days when I have a break, especially in the summertime, I live here in Brooklyn, have a stoop, you know, which is the thing I've always wanted. That's living the dream for me is just having a stoop. It's a beautiful thing.

And you just go and it's a quiet street, especially when I sometimes can take a break in the afternoon. But even if you say, oh, for Brooklyn, for New York, this is a very quiet moment. This is a very quiet street. There's still so much going on. And even when I go to the country, which I do quite frequently, you say, oh, it's so chill here. But then you open up and you go, oh, like there is a symphony of birds and chipmunks and they're all talking to each other. There's so much happening when we pay attention and it's never that chill. And I think when we go into the deeper, I think pleasure and pain is a really good foundational level. And that's why mindfulness starts with the body and mindfulness starts with pleasure and pain because the things we discover about our reaction

to pleasure and pain, I think are very applicable to when life gets real or when life gets more relational, you know, pleasure and pain have so much to do with how we handle praise and criticism. Yeah. Which is the second pairing that you talk about, you know, praise and blame. And I think so many people feel like they're living in a world where there's a lot of opportunity for criticism. It's kind of coming at them from all angles here. And for a lot of people, I think it kind of shuts them down and makes them say, what's the middle path here where, you know, like I keep my head down enough so that I don't take any heat or any fire. I'm doing enough where I'm kind of getting by and I feel like I'm a constructive human being. And they're trying

to thread this needle, which is really unthreadable. And even if they feel like they end up doing that for a window of time, then if you ask them, how are you doing? And they're honest with you, oftentimes the answer is not good. Right, right, right. I think a lot of times that's sort of the sad thing is a lot of times people don't really try to accomplish a lot in life because they're afraid of how others will respond and we're afraid of criticism. So we don't put ourselves out there. And there's reasons not to. I mean, friends of mine ask me, like, how do you handle social media? It just sounds like people are coming for each other all the time on social media. And I think our technology is really interesting because praise and criticism in the classic Buddhist teachings would fall in the category of speaking and listening, right? Right speech, how we express ourselves, how we listen to others, kind of some basic guardrails for how that's done

with skill and with kindness. And again, there's a lot of modern nonviolent communication. I'm thinking of a lot of modern insight into how one works with that. But that's really about like verbal communication and two people talking to each other. And now we have this devices where you're just able to give and get feedback practically anytime to practically or from practically anyone you want, you know? Or don't want. Or don't want.

Or don't know and never will know. And that's like a part of it. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting because like, you want, you know? Or don't want. Or don't want. Or don't know and never will know. And that's like a part of it. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting because like, you know, praise and criticism are hard enough practices to work with our sense of self-trust if we know like 10 people. Just getting like a family together at Thanksgiving to say like, okay, hey, we're going to practice mindful speech. Let's each say what we appreciate about each other. And then if there's something maybe that somebody's doing that's bothering you, we could express that after we've validated a little bit. That would be near impossible for

a lot of families, although a valiant effort in some families, I think it happens well. And that's quite a joy when you actually see that. But now you're like, oh, okay. So you're struggling with communication in like five relationships. Try 5,000 strangers at once. It's not a fair arena in some ways. But the first insight that really works for me is, again, to go back to pleasure and pain. The more present you are, the more this is going to be true, that actually praise is going to feel good. And actually, a lot of times we don't let ourselves feel that. If somebody compliments you and says, oh, thank you so much for cooking me dinner, you go, oh, no, no, no,

it was nothing, right? Rather than just actually receiving the pleasure of like, oh, wow, I did a good thing and somebody's expressing appreciation. Yeah, people are so often so bad at actually receiving words of praise. Exactly. Because it's like too much kindness or something. It makes us vulnerable and it puts us on the spot. It's a wind. It hits us.

You know, something's actually happening in our system. And then also our defensiveness in the name of criticism. I once heard your friend, our mutual friend, Susan Piver, share great wisdom that I put in the book. What she was saying was there was one friend who would just point out potential problems or potential things that could turn into obstacles. And she said, when I was early on in the creative process, I really needed like that creative energy to be flowing. So I would ask for this person's feedback, but much later on in the process when it had already gained all the momentum that it needed. So I think this is one thing is like, if we're trying to put ourselves out there,

knowing who we're asking, and I think it's important to have people in our corner who are inherently supportive. I think that's really important for teachers, you know, or mentors or coaches, people who work with other people, because we are so biased to pay attention to negative information. That's just part of our evolution as well, to really be able to, when we're sharing feedback with others, to start from appreciation and then to maybe know that it's going to hurt if you get criticized. It might be really important to be criticized, to receive feedback. It is really important to receive constructive criticism if we want to

show up to anything we're trying to do. But knowing that that is the same experience as pain, I think is really important. That's really been transformative for me. I talk about preparing for the ouch when you're receiving feedback. Like don't post a thing on social media without being like, oh, somebody is going to disagree with this. They might not know who I am. They might not be well-trained in the tools of right speech or nonviolent communication. And it might hurt to be disagreed with, you know, just the same way an itch is unpleasant, the same way if somebody poked you with a needle, it would hurt. Like, that's just part of how I receive information. So I think that's really important is when people say, oh, I know how to get to the place

where criticism doesn't hurt. I'm like, I don't. I don't think that's what mindfulness is, you know? It's actually familiarity with the process and familiarity with like, yeah, it hurts, but there's also good information here sometimes. It's being able to parse that. I remember a couple of years back, Adam Grant was sharing that when he's working on a book, he'll work on the manuscript and get to a certain point. And then he has a small group of people who he gets together,

often his grad students or postdocs, and he calls them his challengers. And he'll basically share a piece of the manuscript or the entire thing and say, like, have at it literally just like, oh my gosh, tell me everything that you can figure out. Like, where did I mess up? What's wrong? What's the counter argument here? He wants to know it all, but he does it in a way that's really interesting, which is really syncs up with what you're talking about here, which is that he doesn't actually post that online to millions of followers and say, have at it. He has a very small number of people, maybe half a dozen people or something like this, who he trusts, who he knows are really smart, who know his work, who are really well-versed in his lineage and his science. And then he says,

okay, the agreement here is that you're not having at it because you're trying to take me out or take me down. We're doing this it because you're trying to take me out or take me down. We're doing this together because we're trying to refine the ideas so that they are as, as accurate and as useful and as valid as possible. So when mass numbers of people interact with it, I can feel better that we've done our work and maybe sure, like maybe that helps me feel like it's more defensible too.

And maybe we get less people disagreeing, but of course, like you're always going to have people disagree when something goes to scale, but it's an interesting example, I think of what you're describing there. And it ties in also with this sort of like this third couplet that you referenced earlier, which is the notion of influence and significance or what you described. There's a really interesting sort of like potential interpretation of infamy there, you know, because we all do want to feel like we're doing something that makes a difference, you know, like that we have some influence, that we have some level of say in our lives and maybe in other lives. And if we, if it ties in with what you were just

sharing also, because if we can't weather the winds of criticism, it's going to be really hard to be able to take a seat behind an idea or an identity that allows us to feel a sense of mattering and significance. And then there's that other fear of saying like, what if I don't matter? Which can be devastating. But maybe it's also really freeing at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I talk about, again, having a seven year old. I harvest a lot of wisdom from Pixar movies. I don't work for them, but just, you know, had my mind slightly blown or just had a lot of appreciation for seeing the second Inside Out movie. But I was really picking up on a theme from the Disney movie Coco, where it has to do with the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos and the land of the dead.

The way this is set up, as happens on Dia de los Muertos, you put on your altar ofrendas or offering to your dead ancestors as a way to remember them. And the way the movie sets this up is as long as somebody keeps remembering you on their altar, your spirit lives on in the land of the dead. But when you really die in this framework is when nobody remembers you well enough to make an offering on your altar. And so I call that the second death, right? And that's sort of, it could come before or after our physical death, but it's when nobody remembers us. I think it's really important, especially for those of us who are trying to do work that has impact. You know, I'm thinking of the song fame, I want to live forever, right? Nobody does that. And I think what we try to do is say, but could

I do something that has impact forever? And the answer is no, you actually can't. It might have impact for a long time, you know, like great people of the ancient world, but probably people are going to misremember you. I mean, there's so much conflict over who the Buddha actually was. I make the joke that most of the time time Jesus is just a totally different ethnicity than he actually was in his life. So he's not being remembered very accurately in a lot of ways, is a sense of letting go of our identity. Because a lot of times we do approach, you know, what we could call these days having a platform as like, yeah, but I really want people to know me and my work. In a sense, that's the more outward or more social facing level of seeking praise is there has a lot of wisdom, right? If you feel like, oh, I can offer something, I want to be a benefit, I want to help, and I want to live a good life as

well. The idea of offering that broadly is very important. It doesn't have to be super broad, but beyond just one-on-one interactions, right? We all want that. We all want to have some level of impact. I think for some people, this coupling of wins of fame and insignificance feels, or influence, as I called it, feels a little less relevant. But I think in some ways, whenever you're trying to show up in the world, you want to have impact. You want to be recognized by your family, at least. You want to be recognized by your friends. Nobody goes to a school reunion being like, oh, what have you been working on for the last 20 years?

Nothing. I'm pretty invisible. Nobody wants to feel that way. I joke about coming back from a meditation retreat with all these insights and hoping everybody really missed you. And instead, people are like, oh, wait, you were gone for a week. You know? Right.

But on the other hand, it's like on the one hand, yes, to all of that. And on the other hand, there is a certain spaciousness to not being missed. There's a certain freedom to that as well. It's terrifying. And at the same time, freeing. Literally, I was just talking to, as you mentioned, our dear mutual friend, Susan Piver yesterday, and some version of the phrase, I want my work to be seen, not me, came out of my mouth. And I've been kind of sitting with that and also in part asking myself, is that true? Because I'm not 100% sure it is. I'm an introvert,

I'm a sensitive person. So I love being at home by myself. I love solitude and I love creating things. I love the fact that I could create something and that that thing would go out into the world and that would be the thing of influence or significance or impact that would matter. And I've always felt like I don't necessarily need to be the one associated with it. I just want to know what's out there. I'm questioning that more and kind of saying like, is that really true? Or is it just that I value my solitude so much that I'm afraid that if I was a part of the thing that was appreciated or was out there in the world, that I would lose this other thing that I hold dear. And it's an interesting thing that I've just been sitting with. Yeah. I talk about that in Confidence, too, sort of my personal path. And for me, the interesting crux of this was since I was in sixth grade, I wanted to be a writer. Part of that was I just loved words and that mode of

expression. And I resonated with it. I always have. But the other part was I was like, oh, famous writers are really cool because you're still completely anonymous. Everybody could have read your work if you're a bestselling writer, but nobody really knows what you look like unless they really know who you are. And I was like, anonymous fame. That sounds like perfect to me, you know? And then I ended up becoming a teacher who also writes and there's again there's this sense of like okay but now my identity is like oh he's the wisdom holder and there is that complexity of like you know i'm sure when somebody comes up to you jonathan and says oh i really

appreciate your work it's had a really positive impact, right? There's this complexity of ego and egolessness where there's sort of like, oh, I'm so happy the work has been helpful. And then there's a part of you that's like, yeah, I did that. We flicker in and out of that. And I think it's very natural to flicker in and out of that. But then we can get fixated on like, I need my name on the building, you know, who's getting top billing, you know, et cetera. It was interesting. I had went on the,

the book tour that's been going on for confidence spoke when I was in Portland, Oregon at Powell's, which is from a writer's standpoint, one of my favorite bookstores in the world. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. It's maybe from a writer's, from a like bookstore, indie bookstore, aficionado standpoint, maybe the most famous bookstore in the world. I mean, we can argue, we can argue about that, but it's one of the only places where when you have an event, they put your name on a marquee on the marquee, which yeah, for a writer, it's like, I'm not a, I'm not a standup comedian. Like, and then you're like, Whoa, my name's on the marquee. And of course I'm a Buddhist teacher, but you snap a picture of that,

you know? Oh, right. I did that. And at the same time, it's like, and then they're going to take that down and there's going to be a new set of people trying to have influence and impact. And so I think if we can inhabit that dance of saying, I really want to be a benefit. And there's a part of me that actually seeks the recognition of that, but I'm going to be wary when that becomes a fixation, right? Just the same way I would be wary if pleasure was a fixation or people pleasing or praise was a fixation. If I start to notice that needing recognition is a fixation, I'm going to work with that and I'm going to try to embrace the other side of the coin, which is the experience of aloneness, right? Because at the end of the day,

we're always alone with ourselves. That's the basic premise of mindfulness is it's you, your body, your heart, your mind. That's your actual co-pilot through all of this life. And if we can't actually inhabit our aloneness, I think when we try to have impact with others, it is going to have an addictive quality to it. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. This final pairing in the worldly winds, this notion of success and failure that you referenced earlier, because, you know, let's say we do go out there, our work does go out there and make a difference in some way, shape, or form. We have this, and you write about this, you know, so much of the way that we measure whether we've quote succeeded or failed that like what we're trying to do is not in terms of tuning in and just sort of like listening to ourselves, but it is looking

around us and saying, where am I relative to like this person, that person, that person and the other person. And like, that is our measure of success. And it's just a losing game. I mean, especially, you know, like I'm in Boulder, Colorado, but I spent 30 years in New York City too. You're in Brooklyn. There is no way to live in a New York area and then ever feel like for the history of your life

that you can't find a thousand other people who by whatever measure you're judging externally are, you know, like eons ahead of you. It's a disastrous way to live and to measure success, and yet we do it so often. It's interesting. I really like to watch basketball, so I hope the Knicks are the best. So I think sports is a good arena where you try to figure out who's better than the other on this given day or this given day or this given tournament or this given season. And I think it's nice that we have certain areas of life where that

holds. But there's a lot of uses of what in Buddhist terms is called comparative mind. My level of okayness is judged relative to the perception of other people's success or happiness, right? So it's interesting. Like sometimes, you know, I've never written a bestseller, for example, but I do get to keep writing people enough. It's fine for me. But, you know, somebody tells you in the process of writing a new book, I think you have a bestseller in you. And you're like, okay, that's wonderful, because that's praise, right? But when you really parse, like, what does bestselling mean? Do you mean you want all the other people who are writing books to not sell well? It means better than. It doesn't mean great job, lots of people connected with your work. It means you did better than the other people. You know, one of the things I noticed people say in New York a lot. Oh, I have the best doctor.

I have the best dentist. And it's like, okay, what about I have a good doctor? I have a great dentist or something like that. Like best literally means what do you mean by that? Like everybody else has a shitty doctor. Like wouldn't you want other people to have good doctors too? And then we transpose that onto our children. I'm very aware of this as a parent and father. And it's weird being a kid in a

kind of progressive liberal space because the messages are weird right now. It's everybody's included. We value everyone, which is a completely egalitarian message, which I love to death and resonate with. Everyone's included. But oh, by the way, only about 5% of you are going to get into the college you really want to go to and feel important there. How do we start to actually hone? I'm succeeding or failing based on kind of my own metric of happiness and success. Because as you said, comparative mind is, it's literally endless. Like you, not just in New York, in, you know, samsara in all the realms. Once you start saying that person has something and I do not have it, and until I have what they have, I am not okay, it's a recipe for unhappiness, dissatisfaction. And it's also probably a recipe for putting on blinders and getting very obsessive and not really thinking of one's showing up or one's work in a way that's helpful to others.

It's much better as a writer to think, I would like my work to be a benefit, you know, and I would like enough people to read it so that it is a benefit and keeps me doing it, you know. And if it sells better than everyone else's, then honestly, I'm going to recommend people read other people's writing. It's such an interesting frame, too. I remember a number of years back reading some research on envy. And the researchers teased out this interesting distinction. They said, basically, we identified two different types of envy.

Benign envy and malicious envy. And they said they're both envy. You look at somebody else, you're like, ooh, I wish I had what they have. Or I wish I could do what they could do. But one of them is accompanied by a sort of schadenfreude, like how can we take that? Like, I hope they could do. But one of them is accompanied by sort of Schadenfreude, like, how can we take that? I hope they fail. The other one is like one inspiration. Maybe if I really work really hard, if I sort of really pour myself into this thing, I'm inspired by this.

They show what's possible to me. They're just going to make me work that much harder and devote myself harder and give that bigger because I see what's possible. And it was eye-opening for me because I think it helped me more intentionally flip that switch on a regular basis. So now as a writer, and I think there was a time where I pick up a book and I was like, oh, this is just like stunning. You know, like this is terrible. And now I'll read a sentence from a writer who I really admire. And I'm like, maybe in 10 years, I'll be able to write a sentence like that. And I'm totally down for that journey. You know, like how cool would it be? And I think there's a certain amount of, we can flip that switch. Like, I think there's a way to actually have comparative mind,

but in that benign inspirational way that draws us towards and celebrate something and is inspired by it, rather than I have to figure out a way to best that or take them down. I'm curious what your take is on that. Yeah, I wasn't aware of the distinction between malicious and benign envy, but it totally syncs up with my thoughts on envy. And I think the most important part for me of Buddhist wisdom is the idea that within every emotion, especially strong emotions that we experience, and especially within emotions that are difficult to admit we're experiencing, things like anger or envy, you know, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it in the chapter on success and failure is like, oh,

Buddhists don't experience envy. And it's like, so I just went ahead and told the story of like, the day I succeeded the most I'll ever succeed as a writer, and still felt, you know, envy of another writer on that day, you know, so Buddhist teachers do experience envy, because we're human. And if a, if a person ever says they don't experience human emotion, I'm not sure why that would be a good teacher for other humans. Benign envy really speaks to the wisdom of envy, which is if we can see how somebody else's path is succeeding, we could maybe say, okay, what is it in here that I long for? And sometimes it's easier to see it when somebody has a mode of success that's not your wheelhouse. Right. And there's no sense of competition or winner-take-all type of thing going on there. Yeah. I went to see when I was in Chicago, a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art by a painter

who's a Brooklyn painter, Nicole Eisenman, who I think is just amazing. And because I'm a huge fan of painting, but I've, I just, it was never the thing I was trying to do. So you can move through this show and just be like, wow. And there's not even a, like, I wish I could do that. It's just like, oh, this is so amazing that a person could do that. You know, it's like watching somebody like LeBron James play basketball or something like that. You're just like, I'm just going to watch the art and enjoy it. But sometimes somebody does have something you want and you could say, okay, what is it that I actually long to do on my own path? And maybe I could just take that information that, you know,

benign or that actually wisdom envy, we could almost call it and say, okay, how do I actually let this lead me towards my longing a little bit? You know, one other unrelated to what you're saying point I want to make about success and failure, because I really do think our relationship to pleasure and pain is so important to understand the other of the eight worldly winds. So one of the thinkers that I read in writing the chapter on pleasure and pain was Dr. Anna Lemke, who wrote a book called Dopamine Nation. And she's an addiction expert. And she talks, there's some good podcasts with her. I'm not sure if you're familiar with her work, but she talks about how pleasure and pain are co-located in the brain. And she talks about sort of like a seesaw,

right? That wants to stay in balance. And if you try to do too much, say on your smartphone or too much sugar or too much, whatever the addictive tendency that you have is to try to push the dopamine side of the seesaw so that it's going down, it balances out on the other side. You get less, less pleasure with each hit and she calls them the gremlins load up on the other side. But I love that idea of pleasure and pain wanting to stay in some sort of balance for a healthy brain and a healthy nervous system. Meaning we want to have some relationship to both of them, some appreciation, both of them. I think the exact same thing is true for success and failure. And I think this is really important. Like when I am

talking to students or people on the path about confidence and they say, I really want to succeed at X, you know, you'd be a jerk if you said, well, I hope you fail. Cause that'll teach you a spiritual lesson. Like that's never the thing to say. It's like, I do hope, but it's not always going to happen. And what I really hope for is that when you experience either success or failure, you learn something. You learn something about what it means to be human. And I do think that leads to more success maybe in general, but I think more importantly, it leads to an actual insight into being human, which is really what we're looking for. A hundred percent. It just helps us live a little

bit with a little bit more ease. You know, the Tara Brock's words come to mind where she's sort of like, you look at each of those situations and you're like, this too shall pass. Yeah. Sure. Like the highest high. Awesome. And it's going to go away. And the lowest low. Oh, and it's going to go away. You know, let's sort of like say yes to all of them, accept it as reality. And then know also that they're impermanent. It kind of wraps us around to what you describe as the four powers of confidence. And I want to move through this a little bit more quickly. So you list out compassion, lineage, awareness, wind horse, almost like this is your toolbox. This is what you get to access

when you sit in the seat, when you actually know, when you have this confidence with you, you brought up lineage earlier in our conversation. Compassion is something where I feel like, you know, there's been a lot of conversation around that. And I think we're all getting more attuned to the fact that this is really important for us for a lot of different reasons. Awareness is one of those four as well. This notion of being able to observe and take in what's going on around you,

not necessarily with a sense of judging it, but just knowing this is actually my reality. This is my subjective reality, but this is what I'm experiencing. Lineage and Windhorse, I think, are really interesting. I'd love to go into each one of those just a little bit more, because I think those are the two where people are going to be like, I don't really get what this is about. So talk to me about these a bit more. Well, Linny, obviously, you know, a lot of this is coming from things inherited from Buddhist teachings and trainings.

And the notion of lineage related to confidence, it has to do with that sort of interwoven nature between taking your own seat and saying, I can do this and kind of owning your own agency and power on the one hand, but also realizing you're not the first human in history to experience hope and fear. You're not the first human to try to do something. In my case, I'm not the inventor of any of these teachings. You're standing on the sort of shoulders of mentors, teachers, family, ancestors. And I think a lot of times we have a very, especially in modern life, you know, a very tenuous nature relationship with our past. You know, if you go through kind of, again, that psychodynamic sort of, you know, intergenerational trauma approach, you're like, well, this person in my family was a screw up and that person was a screw up and that person before them was a screw up. And I think studying Tibetan Buddhism, it's so crucial to acknowledge being part of a lineage, right? And not necessarily being the same as the other members of the lineage, but there's an idea

of actually being part of something larger than oneself. And, you know, there's a certain aspect of that that's humbling, right? To say, I didn't invent all this. But there's also an aspect that's empowering, which is to say, you can actually call on the support and the wisdom from your ancestors, right? From not just to look at one family line as a series of screw-ups, but to say like, oh, let me study like who my parents were, who my grandparents were, who my great-grandparents were, and maybe even imagine them coming with me, visualize them coming with me when I'm doing a hard thing and asking for their blessings. And in the Buddhist tradition, the idea of actually imagining the

great beings of the past in our spiritual heritage, in whatever work we're doing in the world, hopefully we have lineage figures that we really look to as like, you know, if I had a shrine or an altar, I would put these people up on it. And you can actually harvest that and say, okay, like when I am going to do something hard, I'm actually going to visualize and imagine, and there's meditations, especially in tantric Buddhism, where you really work with this in depth. Imagine them kind of coming forth and blessing me and holding me. You know, in the conclusion chapter, i talk about the one hard thing that i did during writing the book which again you know it's interesting when we talk about the things we don't have confidence in all of us have things that if other people looked at them we'd be like oh my god that's amazing i

can't believe you do that and you're like well it's pretty you know it's just a thing i do and then there's other things that people would be like, yeah, that's no big deal. And you'd be like, yeah, that was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life, you know? So for whatever reason, which makes sense, because I grew up in New York City, I didn't get my driver's license till later in life. And, you know, part of it was I just didn't have enough support when I took the test as a teenager. And then I kind of like, you know, freaked out and blocked it out. And I was like, if I'm going to write a book about confidence, I'm going to have to do a hard thing during this, getting friends to help me

borrow their cars, practice driving, taking the road test in New York City, where actually, supposedly people, the average person takes it more than three times before they pass, you know. And, you know, I did all that a year and a half ago. But one of the things I imagined was my grandmother, who is in the dedication of the book, not wasn't a Buddhist, but was a very powerful woman, and very bold and very confident. But another thing about my grandma Claire is she got her driver's license later in life. So to actually imagine grandma Claire and, you know, use tools like loving kindness meditation, like the wind horse practice, and actually imagine her like being there as a lineage figure in support really helped do it. And I was also willing to fail. If I failed the

test, I'd say I'd take it again. And a year and a half ago, I took the test and I've been driving a lot ever since. And I can definitely say on the roads of America, I am not the worst driver on the road. It's funny. It's such a New York City thing. It is a New York City. Raising a kid in New York also, it's just like, there's no reason. Let's circle back to the final thing, wind tourists, which you just referenced also, which my understanding is it's been explained to me as sort of like life force. Maybe people might use the word prana or whatever your word for it is. Is that sort of similar to what we're talking about here? Yeah, yeah.

So again, going on the theme of wind. So coming from a combination of Tibetan or Tantric Buddhism along with Tibetan indigenous wisdom that was sort of housed in the Shambhala tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, there's this theme, and it's a set of meditation practices, and usually a set of meditation practices that is done relatively quickly. So they're short meditation practices, like they can take one or two or three or four minutes, and you can do them before showing up to do a hard thing. But the idea is wind has multiple meanings in classic Buddhism. Here, it's exactly as you said. It's kind of like prana or sort of like life force,

but it's not just your life force. It also is kind of the force of the moment, which often takes an emotional, like if you're about to have a difficult conversation with a friend, let's say, the wind of the moment might be whatever the emotion is. It might be sadness. It might be resentment or anger. And you sort of acknowledge in wind horse the wind of the moment. You don't try to fight it. But then the notion of horse is kind of harnessing and riding the energy of the

moment, taking your seat and expanding outward with confidence, and then going into whatever the situation is. So it's very much about seeing that the life force or the prana of the moment, the wind, is actually in the human difficulty of the moment. So it's actually the energy that says, oh, I don't want to do this, or this is going to be really hard, or what if democracy collapses, and whatever it is, right, that you go, oh, okay, that's it, that fear, or that hope, or that emotion is the moment. I'm going to be present with that. I'm going to ground with that, acknowledge that, and then open my heart to and through that, and then do what needs to be done. So it's a kind of a preparatory meditation, usually, for showing up in difficult moments.

Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. So the book is filled with such a deeper conversation about all four of these powers as well, and also strategies, practices to say, how do I actually do this? How do I harness it? So I definitely encourage folks to dive in. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase, to live a good life, what comes up? Yeah, to live a good life.

I would say, try to come back to the present moment as much as you can and acknowledge that you're human. I think that's the most important thing for me. And there's no way to get around that. There's no need to get around being human. It's actually a really good working basis for a good life. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation. working basis for a good life. Thank you. Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, Crafted Hour Theme Music, and special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on this episode.

And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal Thank you. little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Thank you. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes the apple watch series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iphone 10s or later required charge time and actual results will vary mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.