Good Life Project - Overcoming Overthinking, Self-doubt and Anxiety With Dr. Julie Smith

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Struggling with self-doubt, overthinking, or harsh self-criticism? Join us for an empowering conversation with Dr. Julie Smith, clinical psychologist and author of "Open When: A Companion for Life's Twists & Turns." Discover practical strategies to cultivate self-compassion, nurture a growth mindset, and transform failures into opportunities for learning - equipping you to embrace life's challenges with confidence and resilience.You can find Julie at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Cyndie Spiegel about experiencing small moments of joy.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.

Failure isn't something you become, it's an experience you move through. Dr. Julie Smith is a clinical psychologist, bestselling author and mental health educator. With an audience of over 7 million people, she's become the go-to resource for common sense mental health. Her latest book, Open When, is a must-have companion to help navigate everything from self-doubt and overthinking to confidence and overwhelm. My innate drive is to protect my child. Every parent wants their kid to be safe. It makes sense that I had thoughts like that at that time. I sat up with her in the night

and just sort of looking at her in amazement and thinking. We have this just abject fear of choosing wrong. How can we build confidence and have this kind of sense of confidence being a goal or a destination that you can arrive at? And I always kind of say to people. With the FIZ loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff.

And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. On April 11th, the amateur outrides an IMAX. I want to find and kill the people who murdered my wife. Critics rave. The amateur is a tense, unpredictable ride.

You're just not a killer, Charlie. Train me. That constantly finds new and inventive ways to up the stakes. The first one you kill, you let the other ones know you're coming. You want them all? Academy Award winner Rummy Malik and Academy Award nominee Lawrence Fishburne. The amateur. Only in theaters and IMAX April 11th.

Good Life Project is sponsored by Aveeno Baby. So you know there's something remarkable about how nature protects newborns, that natural moisturizing layer babies have in the womb. It got me thinking about how delicate baby's skin really is. So I've learned it's actually about 30 percent thinner than adult skin and that is why a vino baby created their healthy start bomb. So drawing inspiration from nature's own protective design, they've harnessed the power of oats, blending them with ceramides and humectants to create this incredibly nurturing bomb that moisturizes to help strengthen baby's skin moisture barrier from day one. What's beautiful about this is how it fits so naturally into those precious early moments with your little one. It's quiet times of connection during the daily routine.

It's those small gentle moments that help build the foundation for lifelong wellness. So ready to start your journey with Aveeno Baby? Learn more at Aveeno.ca. I was always known as the quiet one and I think that was probably a symptom of being fairly shy, introvert as well, which is different, but sort of a part of that. I always had this sort of fascination with people. I only get that now when I look back on – I was a ferocious reader as a child so I would just read lots of fiction. I never read any sort of fantasy or science fiction or anything like that. It was all about other kids in family life. It was all

kind of normal life stuff. I had that sort of fascination with people from a young age, I think, and how humans worked and how we were supposed to live and how relationships worked. Maybe that was related to that sort of shyness early on, I guess. I would observe. I would just watch. When you're shy and you're not in the center of things, you know, doing the heart and soul of the party, you watch and you learn and you absorb things. So yeah, I think it was definitely a part of the development of that sort of fascination with, you know, not knowing at that point that psychology was even a word or a subject and sort of found myself in that world and equally fascinated by it.

So, yeah, it's interesting, right? I think, so I'll raise my hand as a fellow quieter person. And it really is such an interesting, it's almost like a trait of being on the quieter side that you have so much more space to observe what's going on around you. That doesn't mean you always do. I feel like oftentimes you end up in your head rather than externally focused. But if you start to look out into the world, it's like you just start to see things that maybe others miss, that maybe give you a different, more nuanced understanding of how people meander

in and out of relationships and interactions. Years ago, I actually had the opportunity to sit down with Richard Branson's mom, Eve, and we took a trip back in time and she was sharing a story about how, in her mind, it wasn't okay to be that child, to be the shy kid. And part of your job if you were in a room was to make other people feel comfortable. So she's telling a story about how,

when Richard was, I don't know, five or six years old, she drove him out to the countryside, basically booted him out of the car and made him find his way home, knowing that he would have to approach other people and ask them for directions. And this was like training for her. He never actually made it home that night, by the way.

No, really? A couple of hours later, they started freaking out and they started getting, they got back in the car, they're driving around, and they finally found him eating dinner at a neighbor's table. He just like, he found a place where he felt comfortable, he got invited and it just was enjoying it so, so, so. Kind of a, it didn't, the lesson didn't end entirely

the way she thought it would. I think I probably do a slightly less risky version of that where whenever we're in like a local cafe or a shop or something like that, we'll get the children to go and pay for something. But we'll wait back and just let them kind of feel like they're doing that on their own. So you're close enough to pick up any problems, but they get that real taste of having to make a conversation with an adult. My daughter's done that from a really young age. And so, yeah, anytime that she sort of was fearless in that kind of way, my husband would say, yeah, go on, let her do it. That's fine. And now she, you know, she can at 12 years old, hold a really good conversation with adults and is generally unfazed by it.

It's brilliant. Yeah, that's amazing to see that. I'm curious what it's like for you though, because I feel like for a lot of parents, you know, our, we have this vicarious anxiety when we, like, we want our kids to go out there and be brave and be vulnerable and do these things that we kind of know inside is really gonna help them. But at the same time, you know, like, they have their own potential hesitance or anxiety around it, but then we're anxious on their behalf.

So like, we feel like we need to step in and fix it or not do that or just do it for them, not because they're not necessarily ready for it, but maybe because we're not. Yeah. And do you know what I remember as you were talking that I sort of had these little flashback moments of, first of all, being pregnant and feeling like my child is never going to be more safe than they are now. You know, they're inside me, they're protected from the outside world and I can, you know, relatively keep control of this. And then this moment when my first child was born, kind of sat up with her in the night and just sort of looking at her in amazement and thinking, I don't want you to ever feel

pain. I don't want you to ever feel alone or feel distressed or be in physical pain or emotional pain and just not wanting any of those negative things for her. I guess that's partly a biological thing and also a psychological thing, being the mother of the child. My innate drive is to protect my child when they're born. It makes sense that I had thoughts like that at that time. You also kind of recognize on the other side that actually all of those things are a part of learning and you don't build strength or wisdom or knowledge or any of those things from just sitting in a room and talking about them or thinking about them. You have to live and we learn all those things through action and through trying things out and learning from when things go well and when things don't go well. I think

that's key in some ways. Some of the people that I've worked with in therapy before had never failed. They'd never had terrible things happen that they had to survive. Their confidence in their ability to cope with what might be up ahead was really low. There's something about, obviously you wouldn't wish negative things on anyone, but when certain things, certain challenges come along, even though we might look back on them and say, you know, that was a really difficult time, inevitably they leave us with this sort of unspoken or unwritten new sense of knowledge that we can cope with tough times and we can get through certain stuff and survive it.

It's a sort of inner strength I guess. Yeah, I mean that makes so much sense to me. I think every parent wants their kid to be safe, but I think what you're describing sounds like it's a fine line between wanting them to be safe and keeping their world small and also not allowing them to blossom into the human beings that they could be and move into the world with confidence and all those different things. You know, when you're describing that, also I feel like there's this opportunity where as a parent you can watch your kid take risks when the stakes are low. And if they do stumble, you can be there to help them process. And I often wonder, you know, rather

than trying to protect them from everything, as long as they're like with you, as long as you have the ability to protect them from like, what if we just let them stumble as much as humanly possible when the stakes are low and we can help them so that by the time they go out into the world and we're not there as much. That they're just much better equipped to handle it. Yeah, I think so. I think in that sense, the best protection for kids is teaching them how to protect themselves in the future. For example, my daughter started playing football, so English soccer, to you guys. She was new to it. There were other girls in the squad that had more experience and she wasn't getting picked for matches and things like that. She was coming to me feeling

upset about that and feeling like she wasn't very good at it. The natural urge as a mother is to make that go away. I knew that a conversation with the coach might have changed some of that, but I didn't want to do that. I had to sit with her in her disappointment and problem-solve with her. How are we going to do that? How do you get picked for a team? Well, you go off and you do the work and you practice and you get better until you're so good they can't ignore you. That's what we did. We kept going with that, but we joined another training program thing on a different day. She did that for a year and built up some really good skills. Then lo and behold, she was getting more game time

and she was a sort of valued member of the squad. And so while that was painful for both of us in that she had to go through this period of feeling like she wasn't really good enough for it, actually now she has a template for, okay, when you get into that situation and you're not as good as you would like to be in a particular skill or ability of something, then you put the work in. You put the reps in. You think outside the box. You go out there. You find another way to build your skills up. And then you come back and you try again, rather than having somebody come and fix it for you or force people into making, including you when you're perhaps not there

yet. Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense. And really, it also speaks to this word that you're here kicked around in the world of work these days, which is entitlement. There's a bit of a divide often, sort of like between management leadership and the rising class of employees. And I've heard this lament from both sides, you know, like I'm showing up on like, I've been here for 18 months, I've been here for two years, like it's time for the raise, it's time for the promotion, like this is like, I do my time, I get the thing.

And then from like leaders saying, it actually has nothing to do with quote, time served. Like this is all about like how you're showing up, are you doing the work, are you increasing your level of value and competence and contribution? And there's a disconnect there and what you're offering is a way to sort of bridge that gap. Yeah. And it's interesting that we never get taught that in school, do we? We kind of get this impression that it is about time and at a certain age you'll be promoted to a certain

level and then at a certain age you'll have the house and the car or the child or that, you know, there's this sense of these things just happen and there's a certain maturity that comes with the experience of realizing, oh, actually, these things aren't a given, I've got to put some work in. And maybe that's a natural part of maturing, but maybe it would be easier for everyone, you know, employers and employees. If people were kind of taught this sort of sense at school, this sort of dealing with people that you're working for and how to have those conversations and what you should be offering in return for a payment or, you know, what the kind of a decent set of values are around an employment contract and what to kind of expect of yourself and to expect of other people as well.

Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. One of my mantras just for life in general is no promises made. That applies to another minute, that applies to some benefit that you would really love to have. I think if we walk through life that way and just assume, okay, so this is all about the way that we show up, you know, it gives us both a sense of responsibility but also agency, you know, because it tells us we can actually affect the outcome. It's not just a matter of waiting around or sitting it out or waiting it out. Yeah. And I think agency is the key, isn't it? And you know, when I was talking about my daughter, in some ways, that was probably the lesson for her was the sense of agency,

that when it's not going your way, you get back on the front foot and you do something. You take some sort of action that can influence the situation but in a positive way, rather than sort of complaining or looking to someone else to fix it for you or that kind of thing. And all of those experiences from a young age, I think, create that sense of agency, right? I remember when I got to university the first time as an undergraduate, I felt really lucky to be that. I was the first person in my family to go to university. My mum's entire wages were going towards keeping me there. I knew that I wanted to make them proud for that. I was grateful for their sacrifices. I wanted to make them proud for that. I was grateful for their sacrifices. I'd also been in various different employments since I was 13. I think I took a paper round and worked

in a logical cafe and shops in town and all these things. I had experience of having to go and earn some money if I wanted anything extra special. When I got to university, there were other kids there who were much more privileged than myself and had sort of family life where they hadn't had to necessarily work for things that they wanted, which sounds great. It sounds like a great upbringing and a great life. But when they got to university, those people really struggled. Some of them dropped out because they couldn't manage their time and they couldn't be disciplined and get to lectures or they couldn't do the work or they couldn't budget because even

though they had the biggest pile of money in the account than others, they had never had to learn how to budget or were never allowed to go to zero and experience that and going without. If me and these other kids had compared childhoods, you might think that mine had in some way been worse. But in fact, I felt like I was much more equipped for young adulthood than I perhaps would have been if I'd have had everything I wanted. So even those sort of difficult things where you want to give your kids everything and make them happy in the moment, it's not always, there's a lot to be said for delayed gratification.

So true. Not easy to actually do in the moment, but deep down knowing the end is going to justify the means to a certain extent and we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. With the Fizz loyalty program you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan you know for texting and stuff and if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan. You're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Train me that constantly finds new and inventive ways to up the stakes the first one you kill you let the other ones know

You're coming. I want them all Academy Award winner Rummy Malik an Academy Award nominee Lawrence Fishburne the amateur Only in theaters and I'm ack's April 11th I've been touching in in different ways. I found some of the topics from your new book, Open When. I love the structure of this, by the way, rather than this being a book where you kind of read it end to end. It's like, now let me actually share a whole bunch of topics that are so common to so many of us, which has experienced them in so many different parts of life. So you can kind of flip open.

I mean, literally, the title of the book is like, basically, open this when this happens. You're in this situation. I'd love to drop into some of those with you. I think just riffing off of what we were talking about, that moment where kids show up or when we show up in a situation where we feel like in the moment, we're being tasked with doing something or showing up in a certain way or performing, and we just don't feel confident at all.

This is one of the things you write about. There's a sense of self-doubt that so many of us have. Take me into this experience a bit, like how it often shows up in life. Yeah. So I think confidence is often, people often ask me, you know, how can we build confidence and have this kind of sense of confidence being a goal or a destination that you can arrive at? And I always kind of say to people, it's not something you should aim for. It's always a byproduct of a life spent being willing to be the beginner at something, being willing to be vulnerable, being willing to repeat that, go into that space and stay there for as long as possible with the mindset of, I'm willing to not be

perfect at this because I know I'm learning. Often confidence can be situation specific a lot of the time. I think there is certain confidence in oneself that is universal to a degree and that you will carry with you in certain situations. A lot of it is situation specific, right? So, you know, if I went with you to your workplace that you go to every day and or the things you do every day, I would probably feel out of my depth and not confident. And yet if I brought you to, you know, a mental health hospital or my clinic, then I would feel confident and maybe you wouldn't. And that's purely about the experience, the time spent there, the training to deal with the

different situations. All of those things are stuff you can learn and stuff you can build on over time. I think the recognition that wherever you want to go, whatever you want to master and become more confident at, there is a path to that. It goes back to the agency thing, doesn't it? That there is a way to it. It's the fixed mindset, growth mindset stuff. If you think that how you are now and your strengths and weaknesses are fixed for life, then you're probably not going to do the work necessary to build your confidence. But if you're willing to go there and you're willing to begin to learn of learn and practice and get it wrong and scoop yourself up when you do fail, then over time when you suddenly

sort of you put some work in and you look up a bit and you think, oh, I'm so much more confident than I was. There are still areas I want to work on, but it feels fundamentally different to day one on day 200. Now that makes a lot of sense. And part of what you're describing here is this notion of we can't think our way into confidence. We kind of have to do our way into it.

Yeah. So our brains learn through evidence of action and experience. And, you know, I could sit in the therapy room with someone for hours on end, getting them to try and convince themselves that they are indeed confident. And it really just wouldn't do anything. You know, it's not going to move the dial really. What does move the dial is the stuff that happens between the therapy sessions. If someone has social anxiety and they really want to become more confident in social situations, we'd create a hierarchy. We'd list out all

the different situations that cause anxiety in order or graded in terms of how anxious does that situation make you. At the very bottom, it might be starting conversation with the person in the local store down the road when I buy my food. Right at the top might be speaking to someone I don't know at a busy wedding, you know, in a crowded room, all of those kinds. So there's lots of different situations in between there and each one might have, you know, a more intense, anxious reaction to it. And what you would do in therapy is you don't start with the worst one, the thing that's really difficult, you start at the bottom and start with a thing that feels like a challenge but feels doable. Then

when you do it, you go back to therapy and then you reflect on it and talk about it and talk about the experience. You're embedding the small victories that you're having and benefiting from when it doesn't go well because you're turning that into a constructive learning experience. You reflect on when it doesn't go well and what you could change to do next time. The changes in your brain chemistry are happening when you're having this experience and the work you do in therapy in between is embedding that and allowing you to be able to recall it and think it through in a coherent way. We have to have the action in there. Otherwise, yeah, when it's sort of, I don't know, trying to travel on a boat with no oars, you're just, you're

going to be floating around for ages. Yeah. I'm curious where you land on this in this context also. So years ago, I remember being exposed to the work of a guy named Eric Rees in the world of entrepreneurship. He wrote a book called Lean Startup, which was this sort of like, became the Bible for startups in that world for a long time. There's one line that stayed with me, and there was a lot that stayed with me actually, but this is one line, like really, like it feels relevant to this conversation. You know, he said that the thing that we're trying to do here is we change the metric that we're striving for from success to learning.

And when you do that, like when you're talking about these iterations like try the little thing and then the next thing and the next thing, if we enter that and say, okay, my goal here is not necessarily to succeed but just to do the thing and learn something no matter what it is, whether I'm embraced or whether I'm rebuffed, if my primary metric is just to learn something, it kind of takes the pressure off. How does that land with you? Yeah, yeah. And absolutely in terms of when I talk to people about the difficult part of building confidence in terms of being in that situation where you feel vulnerable.

Certainly for me, the only way that I, you know, as the kind of the shy introvert girl now doing things like live TV and big speaking events. The only way I'm willing to do that or able to do that is that I'm willing to look at failures as and when they occur as a learning experience and as a necessary part of that learning experience. And in the face of those failures, I'm not going to kick myself when I'm down. So anytime I make a mistake or if the worst happens, if I fall over on the stage and on live TV, I'm not going to use that as ammunition against myself. I'm going to look after myself through it and I'm going to speak to myself as if I was a coach who wanted the absolute best for me and to see

me continue to achieve. There are certain things you need to do to help you get yourself back up rather than, you know, seeing those missteps as a learning experience is key because I think then you see it as outside of yourself. You see it as an experience you've had. So I see failure isn't something you become, it's an experience you move through. But when you attach it to yourself, or you think that says something fundamental about who you are as a person, there's dangerous ground that's going to be much harder to recover from, much harder to learn from even because that will leave you in shame. And when you're feeling shame, you can't learn

and move on. So yeah, you know, keeping a really sort of constructive relationship with failure is key. So you just brought up the S word shame, which I think is part of so much of why we shut down in so many different circumstances. We feel the sense, but you just made a really interesting statement also, which is when we're in shame, we can't learn. Take me into that a bit more. I'm fascinated by that. But it's just so psychologically threatening when something that's happened, and I think that's the key, is when you think that whatever's happened says something about your worth as

a human being and your lovability or likability or worthiness in whatever way. When you're setting your estimation of yourself based on an outcome that you couldn't really control fully, then you're on really shaky ground because the shame that you experience when you don't feel enough for the people in your life is so threatening that you're then in fight or flight mode. When you're in fight or flight mode, you haven't got time to think things through rationally. You just focus on feeling safe again. Inevitably, then when we feel shame, we just start doing the things that push that feeling away and help us to feel safe again. In order to be those behaviors aren't the things that are helpful to us.

You don't necessarily even notice what the feeling is or label it. You just notice you're doing the thing that helps to numb it. You have a bad day at work and then you notice you haven't gone home, you're in a bar drinking or something else that is potentially destructive. I think all of that can be helped by that clear separation between the mistake or the problem and my fundamental worth as a person. Yeah, no, that land's so true. It also ties in really powerful and this is another thing that it's one of the chapters that you write about, this notion of fear of making a wrong choice.

We're in this moment where we have to say yes or no, we have to allocate resources, we have to. And it's funny because so many of us, I think, have this fear for the smallest things. When am I gonna order for dinner? But then the big things come, where the smallest things. Yeah, like, when am I going to order for dinner? But then the big things come where the stakes rise. And you know, we have this, the just abject fear of choosing wrong. Take me into this a bit. Yeah. And I think it can really, I think it can really ramp up when we're already struggling.

So if we're already under stress, and we sort of reaching our capacity, then you kind of notice that seemingly small decisions that are normally not a problem start to feel like a problem. Like the things like choosing dinner or deciding whether to go to that social event or not. And you can find yourself kind of ruminating over it. And sometimes that rumination can be a symptom of the fact that you're already highly stressed or low in mood or both and maybe you've got lots going on, which makes then decision making a real struggle. But I think sometimes when it's a sort of a bigger decision, there can be that kind of sliding doors

feeling of, you know, what if I make the wrong decision and I regret it? I think inherent in the idea is the sort of fallacy really that there is a right decision that will involve no cost and it would just be payoffs. It's just not true. Whether it's a decision to have children or not have children, this sense that one of those will be perfect decision that will mean you'll have the easiest and best and most fulfilling life just isn't true. They're different paths. Both of them might be brilliant in their own ways and both of them will inevitably have a degree of cost to you and sacrifice. It's not so much trying to weave through life, dodging anything that you might regret. It's working out which regrets you'll be able to live with and which costs that you'll be able to, or which costs that you'll be able to carry knowing that it's still the

right decision. I don't know, when I had children, for example, so before I had children, I was totally focused on my career in the NHS over here in the National Health Service and all the different things I wanted to do. Then when I had my daughter, it completely changed and shifted. It still doesn't feel like a cost to me that I made sacrifices in my career progression. I didn't go for the consultant job because I needed to be present for my daughter and that's exactly what I wanted because my values had shifted and so it no, even though it was potentially a sacrifice or would have been considered to sacrifice to my younger self, it now doesn't feel that way because I'm clear on why I made that decision and I'm more than willing to pay that cost.

Matthew 20.30 Yeah, it's interesting because you bring in, you know, when you became a parent, I think one of the things that we tend to struggle with is when, maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but I would imagine it's more general than that, is when you're at a moment where you need to make a decision. The stakes are meaningful, but it's not really your stakes. Maybe you're making a decision for, you know, a young child

who's not quite at a point where they can really make it themselves. Or maybe you have elderly or aging parents and you're making decisions on their behalf and you know that the decisions are going to, maybe in really meaningful ways, affect either that young child's future or your aging parent's day-to-day life.

And I wonder if sometimes like that becomes this added factor when we know that we have to make an important decision. And the decision is, it's not just going to affect us, it's going to affect people who we care deeply about in ways that could be extremely good, but also extremely challenging. Do you see that come up? Yeah. And you know, even in my own life, when all this happened, you know, I originally left the NHS so that I could manage my work around the family. And I started this really

small private practice from home that I could do in kind of school hours, that I could be present as a mom and still kind of keep my skills going and that kind of thing. Then when all of the videos I was putting on social media kind of took off and the book deal and I'm busy, it was all kind of going wild. I was really acutely aware at that time that I didn't want it to affect the children. I've made these decisions for our life so that I could be there and be present as a mum. I was so focused on it not affecting the kids, but I could also see the benefits to us as a family of doing this and the options that could create for us as a family. I was trying to do that and it not affect the kids. I was essentially not really sleeping that much. I was trying to do that and it not affect the kids. I was essentially not really sleeping

that much. I was putting the children to bed, working until late into the night. Then I was getting up early to try and make videos and things right before they got up because we were in lockdown as well. They were at home. The person who paid the price for that was me in terms of lack of sleep. You can't do that for too long before it has consequences. And so I think all of these things are a constant kind of balancing act, aren't they? It wasn't ideal to say no to all these wonderful opportunities that have been brilliant for our family, but it also didn't feel right to say yes to all of them and not see my children. But it also wasn't sustainable to sacrifice

my own wellbeing in order to make sure everybody else was happy and all the opportunities, everyone offering opportunities was okay and my children were okay and I wasn't, that didn't feel like a good equation either. There's always this toing and froing of this – people imagine that balance is this perfect sweet spot where everyone's got enough of you and you've got enough of you and it's just brilliant and don't shift from that. I think it's more of a constant movement, a constant awareness of when you're shifting too far in one direction, you readjust and balance the other way. Then you balance back and you come back and forth. Something that I talk about in both the books actually is how important those simple values exercises are to me. There's something from therapy that I personally do, I don't know, like every few months maybe

or if I'm just feeling a bit out of sorts or kind of overstretched or like I'm not kind of living in the way that I want to. I'll sit down and you just pen and paper, you just kind of jot out the different areas of your life. So I might put parenting, marriage, friends and social, family, health, learning, creativity, career, all of those things. In each box, I just put a few words about what matters most to me in that part of my life. Not what I want to happen to me, but the kind of person I want to be and how I want to show up there in good times and bad kind of rate them. So I'll give it a rating out of 10 in terms of, you know, it's fairly kind

of crude rating, how important it is to me. So zero, not at all. 10 is the most important thing. And then I'll do another rating, but this time is how much in the last couple of weeks, I feel I'm living in line with those values. And all it does is it just kind of shines a light on the areas that I've shifted away from in that balance. If you've got a rating for an area of your life, let's say health, and it's 10 out of 10 important to you, but you notice you've put a 2 out

of 10 in terms of living in line with your values around that, then that's just an indication of, hey, come over here. We're a bit neglected over here. You can't have top scores on all of them all the time and that's okay. It's not a source of self-criticism. It's just an indication of when you nudge the balance and because inevitably life does pull you away, right? Sometimes there are big things going on like with the coming out of the book, for example, recently, I've been doing lots of going up to London or doing podcasts and things like we're recording this now. I had to drop the children over to my husband's office and they're going to go off and he's going to take them to one of their classes. I would normally be doing that, but that's okay because

tomorrow I'll pick them up from school and we'll, you know, do stuff. So it's that constant just adjustment, that rebalance of, yeah, I'm still looking after the things that matter most to me and I'm fully aware of what those things are, but sometimes work will get a lot of me and sometimes the children will and sometimes other things will. Yeah. I love the way that you bring the values into the exploration and also the way that you bring a sense of self-forgiveness into the conversation as well

and say like, you know what? I gotta actually acknowledge and forgive my humanity. The fact that I'm not living in this sort of like isolated perfect world with perfect conditions of living a real life in the real world and things are gonna happen, I'm gonna fall fall apart the world is gonna change things will come up and we'll be right back afterward from our sponsors with the Fizz loyalty program you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan you know for texting and

stuff and if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan you're not with F like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Which is not a killer, Charlie. Train me. That constantly finds new and inventive ways to up the stakes. The first one you kill, you let the other ones know you're coming. You want them all?

Academy Award winner, Rummy Malik, and Academy Award nominee, Lawrence Fishburne, the amateur. Only in theaters and IMAX April 11th. This is one of the other topics you write about, this notion of self-criticism. And we can get so in our heads, like, you know, just kind of beating ourselves up and saying, you know, like, I made this decision or I wanted this thing to happen in a particular way.

I was a part of the way that unfolded and it unfolded in a way that I absolutely didn't want and hoped wouldn't happen. And then, you know, rather than saying, okay, so it is what it is, like, how do I actually, what can I learn from it? And then how can I move forward? And is there a way to improve or fix this? So often, you know, we get just stuck in our head

in this spin cycle of self-criticism, which can be so defeating, yet it's such a, I mean, I would imagine this is something that you've seen in clinical practice over and over. Yeah. And it's something that people want to hold onto as well. You know, people, a lot of people believe that it's the source of their drive and their success because, you know, when things aren't going so well, they are harder themselves and that's what, you know, gives them the kind of kick to try again or work harder and that kind of thing.

That's all fair and well, but it also assumes that you can only achieve from a place of threat, from that threat mindset of not going to be good enough. Again, it's the shame stuff that you're coming from. You can have a sense of drive from a place of worthiness but also wanting to discover your potential and discover your limits and do positive things for the world as much as you can. That's a much more pleasant place to come from in terms of drive and without the sacrifice of poor mental health. I remember one of the things we used to talk about in therapy was this idea of someone who is relentlessly self-critical. It's almost the equivalent to, okay, imagine if I was going to lock you in a room for a year and

you weren't going to come out of that room for the entire year. I'm going to put in that room with you the worst bully that you can remember from school. They're just going to be that bully to you for the whole year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When you then come out of that room after one year, you're going to feel pretty terrible. You're not going to come out with confidence. You're not going to come out feeling happy and jolly. You're not going to come out with brilliant mental health. You're going to suffer all the consequences of around the clock bullying. Whereas if you were in that room with your best friend or your favorite sports coach, you would come

out with fundamentally different mental health and feeling differently about yourself and feeling raring to go with all the things you've been dreaming about doing without the self-doubt and the self-criticism that comes with it. I say that for someone who's relentlessly self-critical, it's the equivalent to living in that room with the bully 24-7, because it's in your head every minute that you're awake. And that's not without consequence. So if the way that you speak to yourself in your head sounds more like the bully than it does the best friend, it will be costing you and it will be affecting your mental health in a negative light. And so it's this idea of, well, I think people have the misconception that if you're going

to be nice to yourself, that's somehow kind of self-indulgent and that self-compassion is the same as indulgence, which again is not true. So, you know, compassion is actually often doing the really tough thing or taking the more difficult decision that has your best interests at heart. So it can be really difficult. So let's say my son wakes up and he feels a bit tired, a bit groggy when he wakes up and he says, I don't want to go to school today. Indulgence might be me saying, okay, let's not bother. You know, we'll go in when you feel like it. That would be indulgence. Whereas compassion would be, okay, I get that you're tired. Getting to school on a regular

basis is really important for your education. Here's why. But we, you know, we get up, we have some breakfast, we have a drink and we, you know, see if you're feeling better and then we try anyway. Even though you don't feel like it, let's recognise that it's important. So you know, compassion is there for, you know, having his best interests at heart and encouraging him to do the thing that he doesn't necessarily feel like doing because it's going to help him in the long run and be better for his future. So it's fundamentally different. And so, you know, you can, you know, I don't know, have drive at work or you can get yourself to the gym or you can do these things

that are difficult from a place of compassion and caring for yourself. Treating yourself like you're someone that you have a duty to look after or if you're taking on that role of a coach, of an elite athlete, you want them to achieve their capacity and their potential. And so in order to do that, you can't pull them down, you've got to lift them up. But you've also got to push them forward and not pull them back. Peter Van Doren I feel like so many of us are better at offering compassion to other people than we are to ourselves. You know, when you think about, okay, so how do I actually be more compassionate in those moments to myself? Is there a question or

prompt or something that you would invite us to explore? Yeah, do you know what you hit the nail on the head there where people that don't have much self-compassion, it's not that they are unable to feel compassion. It's that most of it goes outwards towards other people that they care about. And so I would say that's really good news because it's kind of just a process of redirecting some of that so that we get to share it around because we're not asking someone to put themselves above everybody else in their life, just to bring them up to that same level of priority so that they're kind of treating themselves with the same care and respect that they treat everybody

else. So a really great exercise that a lot of people have found really helpful is this process of thinking of someone that you love or care for unconditionally. And that's often a child in the person's life, whether it's their own or a niece or nephew or something like that. You spend time with that image in your mind and feeling what you feel towards them. When you do that, you're engaging with that feeling of compassion. Often you then imagine that, okay, let's say that person, that child or adult that you feel such compassion towards is in the situation that you're in now and dealing with that problem. What would

you want them to have the strength to do? What would you want them to say to themselves? What would you want them to do to work their way through it? Often that then just gives you this idea of what would self-compassion really look like? Because inevitably you want that person to do what is best for them and what has their best interests at heart. It creates this idea of, okay, yeah, I'd want them to stand up for themselves or find a way to haul themselves out of bed and get to that exam even though they feel nervous or not be too hard on themselves when it went wrong or, you know, all of those things that we seem to be able to find that for other people so easily. And yet in the

moment for ourselves, it's really difficult. So there's lots of different exercises like that where you engage with the compassion, you kind of push it where it moves. So you find that compassion that you can feel and then you redirect it. I love that. It's funny as you're describing that. What came to me also is what's often classically known as the meditation or loving kindness meditation, which is, you know, it's repeating generally like a handful of simple phrases, things like may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you be happy, may you live with ease. But classically, and you cycle through different people

in that meditation, it takes only a few minutes, and the first person that you're often taught to start with is yourself. You start by saying, may I be safe, may I be healthy, may I be happy, may I live with ease. And then you go to a person who you really care about unconditionally, and then you go to a person I live with ease. And then you go to a person who you really care about unconditionally, and then you go to a person who is a stranger, and then you go to a person

that you struggle with, and then you go to all beings. But it's interesting that what you're offering is sort of like this interesting reframe and saying that first reframe for a lot of people may not be super accessible. You know, like may I, so what if you actually started with that person that's the next ring out where it's like, no, I can find it for this person and then work back into it. It's like this interesting shift in that. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think you

have to start where it's easiest to access it and then it's a shifting rather than a trying to generate something that you're not used to feeling. So that can be really helpful. Yeah, I love that. I feel like this also leads into another topic that you dive into, which is the notion of overthinking. You described self-criticism as something that sometimes people like to hold on to because they feel there's value in it. Overthinking is this interesting, very wide ranging phenomenon. So many people I know really get stuck in this. Weirdly, I'm somebody who doesn't spend a lot of time in overthinking and I'm probably the outlier among most people that I know and that I've learned.

And I've had conversations with friends and with colleagues and some of them have told me, they said, I know it's hurting me, I know it's a really uncomfortable experience just emotionally for me, but I believe it's hurting me, I know it's a really uncomfortable experience just emotionally for me, but I believe there's value in it. I don't want to let it go because if I keep spinning this thought in my head, at some point it's going to get me to a solution or to the big idea or to the thing. So I'll just suffer with it.

Do you see that as a common phenomenon also with overthinking? Yeah, I think that is the sort of that, I don't know what the word is, whether it's a sort of – almost a mirage, isn't it, or the illusion of worry and overthinking. And why it's so addictive in some ways is that it gives us the impression that we're solving the problem. And often what we're doing rather than solve it is to – because worry by definition is sort of unconstructive. What we tend to be doing really is rather than problem solving it in a constructive way, we're actually just playing out that worst-case scenario or a variety of worst-case scenario thoughts over and over again. What

if this happens? What if that happens? Often what we can do in a therapeutic situation is allow for this. I'm not trying to squash it or pretend those thoughts aren't there. We say, okay, well, what if then? If that worst-case scenario, what do we do either to prevent that or what do we do if we get there and that happens and try to create that sense of agency so you can turn those particular situations into action. You're doing something about it and you're getting off that sort of back foot feeling of rabbit in headlights, things are happening or can be happening to me and I've got no control over it to, okay, well, what are we going to do then? Let's put something in place and either try to prevent it or prepare for when it's going to happen so that we deal with it in a way

that makes us proud. I think sometimes that's what worry in itself or overthinking neglects is the agency and the action that comes with it. It's all fair and well to think about worst-case scenarios and it's actually a real benefit. It's not something that's wrong with our brain. It's really kept us alive all this time. It kept us alive when we were able to turn that into action to keep ourselves safe. If it's worrying about something that we don't need to worry about, so there's nothing we can do to keep ourselves safe. If I'm worrying about one day, I might get some illness that I don't know what causes it or how to prevent it. I could sit here for the next 10 years and worry about

it with the possibility that it might happen. There are not really many ways to be constructive about that unless there's some sort of health behavior you could do. That's the stuff to learn to let go with mindfulness and thought diffusion, that kind of thing. But if it's something that, you know, if it's, you know, I've got a speaking event next week and I feel super anxious about it and I'm imagining worst case scenarios, then there's something I can do about that. Often that worry will be because I'm unprepared and I need to put some things in place to prevent those worst case scenarios from happening.

And that's really easy to access that sense of agency over. Yeah, that makes so much sense. I feel like so many of the things that we've been talking about, it's like action is the answer. Not just random action, some sort of intentional thoughtful action, because action can also probably deepen the harm or deepen the painful emotion and yet like if we just stay in our head, then it's like there's no resolution. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this Container of Good Life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

I guess the first thought comes to mind is the value stuff that I was thinking about before. To me, a good life is really simple. Being the best that I can be for my family and the people that I know and care about and the wider community and trying to be a force for good within that. And I guess even in the work that I do, I'm reaching beyond my own community to strangers on the internet, I can't change the whole world but I can make my small corner of the internet a positive one. So it's always just trying to make sure that everything they put out there is with positive intent to do some good. And inherent in that is looking after myself to ensure that I can do that for as long as possible. Thank you.

And before you leave, if you love this episode, say it but you'll also love the conversation we had with Cindy Spiegel about experiencing small moments of joy. You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young, Christopher Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelly Del Bliss 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 or on YouTube too.

If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a second favor, share it with just one person. I mean if you want to share it with more that's awesome too, but just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. You're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at Fizz.ca. inventive ways to up the stakes. The first one you kill, you let the other ones know you're coming. Do I want them all?

Academy Award winner Rummy Malik and Academy Award nominee Lawrence Fishburne, the amateur. Only in theaters and IMAX April 11th.