Modern Wisdom - #227 - Heather Morris - Lessons In Listening From The Tattooist Of Auschwitz

Episode Date: October 3, 2020

Heather Morris is an author. Heather's first book The Tattooist Of Auschwitz was a global phenomenon and the process of creating that work involved years and years of delicate, patient, attentive listening - a skill which many of us could benefit from learning. Sponsor: Shop Tailored Athlete’s full range at https://link.tailoredathlete.co.uk/modernwisdom (FREE shipping automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Buy Stories Of Hope - https://amzn.to/34btgeb Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello people in podcast land. Welcome back. My guest today is Heather Morris, international best-selling author of the worldwide phenomenon, the Tatoist of Auschwitz. The process of creating that book involved Heather sitting down for a very, very long time over years and years and listening, focusing hard, being present, and cultivating a genuine skill of listening. And today, that is what we go through, using some fantastic examples, which really give a better insight into the process of writing the tattoos of Auschwitz,

plus some wonderful examples from Heather's life, when she was a young girl. There's some interesting points here to do with gender roles, and just how much we've progressed since the 60s to the present day. There's also some really important takeaways here for how to be a better parent, brother, partner, whatever it might be, even just a member of society by being a better listener, by focusing and being present and actually allowing other people to have their say and then caring about what it is that they say.

In other news, the next couple of weeks of programming are absolutely mad, including Aliyab Dal, who is one of the UK's productivity experts who came first at Med School in Cambridge, dropping all of his study and learning tips. The man himself, Daniel Sloss, Netflix Special comedian and good friend of the show is returning for his round two, and that will be live this Monday. I've got Andrew Doyle coming back for another time, Massimo Piglucci for another time, the rearranged episode with Chris Voss, the ex head of the FBI's Negotiation Division, Constantine Kissin, from the trigonometry

podcast, Jay Morton from SAS, who dares wins Seth Golden, Diana Rogers and Dr Stuart McGill all coming on within the next month. I guess, seen as I can't train or even walk still with the the old single angle problem, I might as well record some good podcasts, so that's what you're going to get. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Heather Morris. MUSIC Many of the listeners will be familiar with your story, but can you tell us how you came to write the tattooist of Auschwitz? Absolutely, because it's one of those crazy things that anyone in life can look for. And I guess the lesson here is when somebody asked

you to do something, unless you've got a damn good reason for not doing it, then say yes. And I've learnt that particularly from what happened with me and Nully, because having a coffee with a friend who I hadn't seen for many months, I'd been putting it off. And while we were casually having that cup of coffee one Sunday afternoon, she just casually said to me, I have a friend whose mother has just died and his father has asked him to find somebody he can tell us story to. That person can't be Jewish. You're not Jewish, do you want to meet him? I said, what's a story? And she said, I don't know.

And I said, oh, okay, then I'd love to. So from having a cup of coffee and saying yes to that and then saying yes to meeting a stranger, the turtle has to vouch for it, you know, came apart. So what happened next? Well, a week later, because that was a Sunday and I worked for time. This was a 2004 and I worked full time. This was

on 2004 was three. No, the end of 2003. And yeah, a week later, the following Sunday, I knocked on the apartment door of Lali Sokolov and he opened it and he had a dog either side of him. One of them was, well, she was big, and about the size of an average small pony, and the other one was small of them, I cat. And he didn't even look at me. He just opened the door, and must have the word come. And he and the doggies turned around and disappeared. So I followed them in, and he just walked into a room and allowed shining room. And just pointed to the table and went sit and pointed to a chair. So I sat and he and the dog he's disappeared again. I'm getting a little bit unnerved here as you can imagine. But a few minutes later all three of them reappeared, was bloody bringing me the first of many, many bad cups of coffee. It didn't make a good coffee. Never. I was so grateful when our relationship

got the point where we were now friends and I could say to them, hey, how about we go out for coffee? Anything to be able to do. Love is God, please stop making me your coffee. So what's the writing process like? Obviously, you have this very, very emotional story I imagine for him to try and get out. It's a long time ago. It took a long while for you to fully eke out the entire narrative, right? Oh, absolutely. You've got to remember, this is a man, you're 87 years of age and he was grieving the loss of his wife and just wanted to be with her. He wanted to tell a story and I didn't know for many, many weeks, months probably, whether or not there was actually a story there that

could be strung out because he kept going over the same thing. He would never finish a storyline or a vignette he was telling. And I knew from my work that when you're talking to people, elderly people in particular, and people who are traumatized, that the only thing you can do to hear their story is to listen. I had no pen and paper in front of me, I'm not writing anything down, I've got no recording device, nothing to distract. That was what I had to do, And that's why I sort of took those many, many weeks of me racing home and trying to frantically write down and finitically writing these German words that I'd never heard of. I mean, when he keeps talking about himself

being the tattoo Vera, and I'm sitting there going, what the heck's a tattoo Vera, until I could find some spelling resembling that word and translate it. So it was a challenge. You were working your memory quite hard then. Well, yes, but here's the thing and you know that this is what plays out in the book that is being released tomorrow. And my first as far as I'm concerned, because tomorrow is going to be Thursday for me. It was because where I worked and from past experiences, I knew that if you actively listen to somebody, you listen to them without thinking in your head, or what can I jump in and say

here, what's my two bobs worth? How should I respond that when you're doing that, you're actually not hearing everything that's being said. And so I did have my brain through my work trained to just actually be in the moment with people. What was your work then before you were now obviously famous novelist? Well, for 20 years I worked in the social work department at a major hospital here in Melbourne. So every day I was talking to patients, friends, relatives, carers of people who are there and many of them work up that morning not knowing that they were

going to end up in an acute hospital or their family members' children. So always through periods of tragedy and trauma. And under those circumstances, if you don't help them in any way, even if you're not, you have to learn to listen and you don't write notes. And I guess that paid dividends when it came to sitting down with someone. How lucid 87 can you be? Was there a lot of listening to the same story over and over? Did you hear the same tale a few times? It's a shame, obviously, that you couldn't sit down and it was perfectly chronological. Here's what you need to know from start to finish. I imagine it bounced around a lot.

There was none of that quite the opposite and you're quite right. He would start telling one story and this is how I knew that there was so much more to be got from him because he'd start offence to say something and then he'd put his head down again and his shake his head and I could see him getting distressed Which told me that what he was now remembering and thinking about was very very painful and And I never pushed him. I just had to wait till I saw an opening and I decided that opening for me with him was to invite him home to meet my family. And how else can this man ever trust me if he doesn't know me? So by having him meet and get along with my husband and three adult children,

and openly flirt was the young adult daughter, which is speechless. It was an absolute sod. But that's fine. That's how the Lully of Old started coming back by being introduced to this young sort of 18, 19-year-old potty, as he called it. But yeah, and per se, he had secrets about me. And so he now had the goods on me. secrets about me. And so he now had the goods on me. And in knowing about parts of my life, it gave him that freedom to now trust me and feel that he could talk to me. And that's when it all changed. And he now openly whacked and trunched me and with me as he did recall and remember the evil and the horror. And all those amazing story lines that he had survived. It's an interesting point that being vulnerable to someone is one of the

biggest bonding experiences that you can go through. A lot of the time I think, especially when perhaps when my younger, especially if you're a guy, you presume that you bond over like shared masculinity, you know kind of shared strength, like your courageous, I'm courageous, your brave, I'm brave, but actually what really, really forms a friendship is telling someone something which in the wrong hands would be catastrophic to you

because it shows that you have faith and trust in them. Exactly, and he had to get to that point. As much as he wanted to tell his story, he was only ever going to tell a very clinical factual story if I hadn't have persevered and won over his friendship. And yes, somebody else may have written his story. And I love it when I talk to journalists and they say, well, that's not the approach I would have taken. I said, I'm not sure you would have invested three years of your life in him. Not that I see it that way, quite the opposite. We were friends and after I got his story out down and I had produced a draft of a screenplay,

which is how I wrote it initially, and he was sort of reading that and proving that we were just going out because he started living again Which I guess what happens after you've lost your partner He stopped saying I need to be with Gita and he then was asking me to go out with him While he reconnected with the Jewish community that he'd pulled away from and There all of a sudden I found myself going out at his date and him introducing me as his girlfriend. And sending me off to go and join the ladies. And we then had this amazing friendship of social occasions with anywhere between six to 200

members of the Jewish community, coffee shop gatherings, movies. Yeah, that became our life. And he had to jerk with my husband. She made me your wife, but she's my girlfriend, you know. And Steve, we're going, yeah, yeah, I can, you're one, you can have her. That's great. When did he pass? On the 31st of October, 2006, three years later.

Wow, so that was, I'm gonna guess you were, you needed all of that time, all of the remainder of his life really to get the story out of him. Not really. He's the thing about him. He was a bit of a bugger about things. And his favorite phrase to me was, that I tell you about. and every time he did that I would just roll my eyes and go go and he'd start telling me something and I'd look at him and go no you're buggy haven't and you know I've written the screenplay you know we've got a producer and director working on it now he was saying that right up to two or three days before he died. He would continuously say, that I tell you about,

because it suddenly remembered something else. We'd want to embellish or enhance something that he'd read in the script. Yeah, gosh, it knows how much more he went to his grave with. Precisely. What do you think he would have thought if he saw the state of what happened in 2018 when the novel came out?

Well, you wouldn't be talking to me, you'd be talking to him because he would be wanting to be the person out there talking up his story, that's just who he was. You reckon he'd be a good podcast guest? Oh, absolutely, he wouldn't get a word. But look, he was utterly, utterly charming. And he got him talking, he didn't really shut up. And you might occasionally be able to go, can I just ask you this? You know, you'd go, don't interrupt.

But he would be loving it. And he would want to be sent to stage and I'd be pushed into the background somewhere and he'd just drag me up as his girlfriend, not the writer of his story. That's amazing. The final thing I wanted to touch on from this, upon reading and doing a little bit of extra research, the survivor guilt seems to be a real strong theme for everyone, all of the little survivor stories that have come across. Can you talk a little bit about what you found during your discussions with him to do with the survivor guilt for the prisoners of Auschwitz, and I guess all of the other concentration camps?

Well, absolutely, and the many, many survivors I've spoken to, the ones in Melbourne who he introduced me to, and I think Australia got the second or third largest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. And so I privileged to meet hundreds of them here, not too many of them are still living, one very special lady still is. And they all exhibited what I would say, an on-low clinician, on low expert here, but just through talking to them I would say an onload clinician, onload expert here, but just through talking to them that every single one of them had a degree of survivor guilt. How could they not? And talking to their family members, that that actually was always confirmed and born out by talking to their children or their adult grandchildren. It was a matter of, did it stop you in living the best life you could? Now with Lully and Gisha, it didn't stop them because the day they got married, they

made a promise to each other that the only way that they could honour all of those people who did not survive was to have the best life they could. No good, he said, would come of us not having the best life we could. And so I met many others like him and there's two particular ladies in Israel right now who I'm very very attached to who's going to be going to remain an extorting there in 94 and 96 and yes they did that same thing they got on and had the best life they could but then I also met so many who have struggled. And that survivor guilt, it's been proven that it actually can get passed down through

genetics into children and even to grandchildren. There's some fascinating research being done on that. And once again, I've seen children of these survivors now adults with children and grandchildren of their own, and even they know that they are carrying that trauma. It's bizarre the way that this nature and nurture combines. Final thing, actually, I promise, we're going to get onto stories I hope with you in your book in a second. I'm going to guess you'll have read Man's search for meaning by Victor Frankl. Yes. Yeah. What was there anything upon reading that, which is, I guess, one of the other very famous insights into that world?

Was there anything extra that was illuminated? Everyone it's listening. We'll know that I'm a massive fan of that book. Upon reading that, did you start to draw any threads that you hadn't before? Oh, absolutely. Same with our premier Levy's book too, you know, Night in particular. And yet, the storylines are different, but the same. And that's the whole thing about Holocaust survivors, I think we're only survivor from any kind of evil or horrific period in history, that even the I met survivors who said to me a couple, we also met in Berk and Al, and they each had their own version of their life there as well. And that's why I think I've been so delighted with how the Jewish community all around the world from here to the Europe, to South Africa, Canada, the States, how every person in that

community, if we once been touched, if we Jewish persons been touched by the Holocaust, and they all want to say to me, thank you for recognising that there's an individualism about surviving. That it is wonderful, though, the historians and academics have told the story of the Holocaust for decades, but hearing just the one story, via Victus, via Lullies, via Salka's, however, you can relate to the one and see the common threads and then their own individual survivor skills. Are you familiar with some of the studies that have been done on how humans are affected by altruism requests? So there is a really unfortunate effect that everyone appears to fall prey to. If you are to show an advert for one particular a unissaire for a support African-starring children advert and you have a single girl

there, the impact if you have the girl and her brother or the girl and her family or the girl and her village decreases. So people donate less. The more, it's a little bit like I guess the, it's called the witness, that witness effect where you all think that someone else is going to ring. I think it kind of starts to dissolve down the story. So you're totally correct. Obviously, the numbers of the Holocaust are absolutely astronomical and terrible. But it doesn't drive a learning point home in the same way that a single narrative does, because you can't learn to love 4 million, 10 million, 20 million people, but you can learn to love one character, right?

Absolutely, and look, it's been born out to me a couple of times with regard to that. And here's a story that someone sent me a clipping from a newspaper in the States. And I think it's a few years old, but a gentleman in New York, a Jewish gentleman, he got obsessed was trying to work out what six million of something would look like. Because that's the figure that they say, six million Jewish men, women, boys and girls died. And he started collecting paper clips. ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― him and he reached and he just plucked out one and he said this is the only one that matters. Because he could not comprehend or relate to that huge pile. I think there's something for a lot of us to learn there about the fundamentals of human nature, especially if we want to have impact with people. A lot of the time,

objective measures of success that you see, Instagram followers, book sales, money, that sounds on the surface of things great, but as you've identified there and the studies that I've just brought up show, that doesn't impact in the same way as going very, very deep and narrow. So moving on to the next book, the new one, Stories of Hope. Why have you written this and how does it relate to your first novel? Well, after a year of Lully's book being out and traveling around the people I was talking to was still coming to hear me talk. Yeah, this is kind of still overwhelmed me and I sort of struggle. You really want to come hear me chat? You were here last year when I was here. And it's wonderful. But of course so many people now have read the book.

So when I'm now going and sitting up in front of a 105, 100, where even a number of people that are in the room with me, they actually don't want to have, have you talk about the book? They want to tell me to tell them about my time with Lully. They want to hear the bits about Lully that are not in the book. And so that was one reason, but the other main reason that stories of hope has come about is really from day one virtually of the book coming out. I have received thousands of emails from people all around the world. Now these, I'm terrible. I've read a lot of books because I've been around a long time and I have never written to an author.

So I'm feeling really bad about that and I think maybe I should do that. So Michael Conley, a David Bell Darts she is coming. However, they weren't just writing and thanking me for the book and saying how much they enjoyed it. So many of them were sharing something very deeply personal, painful, traumatic about their own lives and saying that from reading about Lully and Gita and Selka, they found a sense of hope that they actually now could overcome or start to work towards overcoming this tragedy that was in their lives. And I'm talking about thousands of these, absolutely thousands, Chris.

And some of them are just incredible to know that somebody is going to attempt to continue carrying on after she had given up hope having seen her brother being collateral damage in her drive-by shooting. A young man, second year of university, was everything to live for why, why did this happen to him? The couple who have been trying for years and years to have a baby and finally have a baby that then dies 16 days later. This is the kind of letter in email I get. The 50 plus year old woman in Germany who had just found out her grandfather had been the engineer who had designed and built the gas chambers and ushwits and felt she had no right to continue to live with that being her background. So when you start getting these stories and I, of course, I write back to the ones that are really, really personal,

I have to unfortunately rely on my manager to write back to a lot of the others and say, here, this red or your letter, because I read them all and respond. And so when talking about that and then when silker came out or was coming out, I was in Koshita and Slovakia doing some research for finishing off silker's book and I was there with my publisher from London, Margaret, my big drum London, and off we went to Koshita. And we spent a couple of days talking to these amazing friends and neighbours of silkers and finding out now once again, talking, listening, listening, hearing about this amazing woman. And a couple of days I think it was maybe on day three

and that night Margaret and I we had dinner in the restaurant in the hotel and we had a drink a wider two and then somebody pointed out there was this downstairs bar and so the two of us found ourselves wandering down into this dungeon of a bar and this you know average hotel and Koshita. And were you over a few drinks? I think she said we'd progressed to the port of that stage and get a get a bit vague there, but she started, she started asking me about, she said like, she'd been observing me, okay, because she's now with me while I'm talking to people. And it's not the same by the way when you have to do it with translators too, your head's going in all directions. And she said, I was watching you listening,

she said it really is something else, she said if you've always been able to just listen and focus on the person talking to you. And I went, well not really, I said nobody listened to me at home when I was growing up. I said, oh with the exception of this one person in my life, my great grandfather. And we started talking about that and I was just telling her and I write about it in my book, how this old man who was well into his sort of 80s, at that point, when I was 10, 11, 12 years of age, how he taught me to listen. And he used that word, listen to me, listen to nothing, listen to yourself.

And so I had several years with this amazing man, and from that, she said, oh, I think we can do something here. How about we take a little break from historical fiction and throwing stories of hope? What's the outcome that you want people to get from stories of hope if there was something that people would take away like a single lesson? What would it be? That it's never too late to start listening. And how you do that is actually not that difficult.

I give a few clues, particularly if it's like listening to your elders. And that was the other thing that so many people were saying to me, I wish I'd asked my dad or my granddad to tell me about his life. And I was hearing so much regret from people who had had an elderly person in their life that they'd never bothered to sit down and get their story from. And I think that's quite sad to have that regret. Look, I've got a true, I probably didn't listen to my dad or asked my dad enough to tell me about him. And so there was that and the people who were saying to me, how can I get my grandfather, my mother, whatever to talk to me. There was no double whammy thing. I love this quote from the book, listen to your

elders advice, not because they are right, but because they have more experience of being wrong. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, they've made the mistakes. You don't have to learn from them and I think that's the other important thing. By the way, you do get to make your own mistakes and that's something that as a parent I rammed home to my kids. I'll maybe talk to you and we'll chat about things, but you get to make your own mistakes. You're not going to lead your life off mine. And if you've read the book, you know that I too made a very serious mistake, only 12 months ago, with my daughter and her newborn baby. And that just goes to show that yeah, we'll make mistakes, it's trying to pick up on it quickly. And that could have had quite dire consequences.

Yeah, it did actually for a period. And I'm very, very proud that she and her husband agreed for me to write this storyline. And I've already had a couple of individuals like yourself, two women in particular who have said to me, you have no idea what reading that story about postnatal depression meant to me. I had a sister, I had a friend, similar thing we didn't know how to cope.

The elders point, I think is really interesting because in this new 21st century YouTube podcast diverse that we're in and obviously I'm contributing to that problem myself by providing this content. In the past, our evolutionary history, our elders would have been the ones who had acquired wisdom, right? They would have been the ones that we would have turned to. And I think that that's certainly been forgotten in the 21st century because the gateway to information access, all of the friction has been removed. I can access anything I want instantly online. I don't need to go to my granddad. I don't need to go to the tribe leader or the shaman or whoever it might be. I don't have to go to them. And conversely, you have more liquid intelligence, a little bit younger, your crystallized intelligence

continues to rise as you get older, but you, sorry, fluid intelligence peaks are around about 21. So you think, well, the quickest learners in the world are these chess Grandmasters who are, you know, young age. So I should just focus on the rapid access and digesting of information at that young age, which kind of casts off the wisdom of the old. But as you've said there, you don't necessarily need to be taught how to do something. It's how not to do something which can be just as informative. Oh absolutely. Most people were an older person and their life even was just a neighbour. They love talking. It's one thing I have learnt is that they're hungry for someone to listen to them. I can't help but think that as we come out of the pandemic, there have been so many elderly people who have been totally

alone for months. I'm not asking everybody in the street to go and find their neighbour and sit down and chat to them, but you know, I wouldn't hurt you. And even if you don't learn something, you know you are giving back. Now, there is nothing more rewarding than actually giving. You don't have to be receiving even any wisdom, any advice. I kind of get a bit upset that some people just think that I'm just an ordinary person and I haven't had a remarkable life. Well to me there is no such person in existence. Everybody has got something about them that is remarkable because it's unique.

It's them. They just don't know it. And like Lully, he just kept, he would just say, but I was just an ordinary man. And I went, yeah, but you were living in a pretty extraordinary time. That's the bizarre thing. All of our lives, we feel so mundane, of course, it's just familiarity, right? Exactly. And that's not the, that's not the reality really. It may be yours because, and hey, maybe this is why we jump to the

next sort of chapter, or I don't know how many more it is, the listening to yourself and the importance of doing that. Because if you do learn to do that at a deeper level than you're probably doing now, because I don't think many of us listen to ourselves too well, unless you are into that kind of spiritual ism that you do go and meditate. That doesn't seem to be the normal amongst people I know. They're beating themselves up. They're not taking time out to just sit down and look at their own body, their own physiology,

how am I reacting? Can I feel my blood pressure going up? They're not having that just internal conversation with themselves. It doesn't have to take long. It can be done quite quickly. Do it in the damn shower, that's enough. I know it's why, I did a lot, because you're on your own.

And the other thing, there's nothing else to do. And the other place that can help you get into that state of being relaxed and content, I find, is a pet that if you're hanging out with your dog, that dog's not asking anything of you. And I used the dogs of Lullies to help me when I was getting upset because the two dogs are always with us. And often when I was hearing something that was really starting to get me to stress. I didn't want to shat him up because he was on a roll. I could just reach down and I just stroke one of the dogs, stroke one of the dogs. And so I think dogs and cats to a less end of Greek because cats will only let you do it if they're in the

mode. But try listening to yourself a bit more. Yeah. I think a lot of people struggle with the fact that the inner monologue that they have is not very friendly. The negative self-talk that we've accumulated throughout our lives, I put in my newsletter this week, there's a lyric from a song that I love called, I wouldn't talk to a friend the way that I talk to myself. And sadly that's the way that a lot of people's inner monologues go, that

they're, if it was a friend or another human outside of you that was saying the things that you say to yourself, they'd be your worst enemy. And you can't turn that off. So it doesn't surprise me that people don't necessarily want to turn the volume down. And this is where you see individuals who can't better be alone, who are constantly need to be with someone surrounded by a friend in a group or substances, alcohol, drugs, whatever it might be because that silence starts to let them hear quiet voices that they really don't like the sound of. And if it really is that bad, then that they need to sort of get someone who can help them with that, but just did they begin to that point where they realize that they need some help to

shut that voice up. And I also think that the whole notion and, you know, I've got some using it. I'm talking about social media and Facebook. And I remember when it first came out hearing more friends of my children's boasting about how many friends they had on Facebook and that whole notion of what is a friend. And a friend is not some person that you've never met. But you decided to say, except when they asked you to be their friend on Facebook.

I think that sort of can be very, yeah, very, very... Well, it can be quite damaging a lot of people to think that that's the only outlet they've got for a friend. And I suspect that things are going to be even tougher in the next few months as we come out of COVID and the damage to the mental health of a lot of people already we're seeing it here in Melbourne It's quite significant and just in the last 24 hours The police have shot a man because he was having a mental health episode and charged them with a knife and they had no choice And even though we're in lockdown here in Melbourne. I mean real lockdown at curfew here in Melbourne. I mean, real lockdown, at curfew, can't leave home. If you do, it's for one hour maximum a day. And that is just going to take a terrible toll. I'm not sure that any book on

whole stories of hope can make a bunch of a difference. But yeah, all I can say is if you've got a neighbour. And look, and this is the funny thing, and this is what we're seeing here in Melbourne. We went into lockdown, and during that first lockdown, everybody was out on the street, everybody was knocking on neighbours' doors, everybody was bonding together as a community. It was fabulous to see, and the papers and the media

were full of all these beautiful stories of how we were pulling together. And then we came out of it and we got a little taste of freedom and then things went pear-shaped and Melbourne. And so we got locked down again hard, even harder than before. But people are not responding the same. No, no, no, no, I've been there. I've done that.

I want to do it again. And now we're having riots. We're having people taking it to the police who are trying and forces very strict rules and laws that have come into the town. And very, very different to the first time. So we really only had one shot me blew it. I think that that's the major concern. You can probably get people to comply to some discomfort once, but getting them to go back and burn their hand the second time. Once you've put it on the stove once, you can put it chalk it up as a, right, that's a lesson to be learned. But then being mandated to go do it again, it kind of doesn't surprise me. Going back to the book, we've talked about elders, but also there's some wisdom apparently

in children. Now, I have not a massive amount of experience with elders, which I'm really sad about, most of my grandparents have passed, which is a real shame, but I spend even less time around young children. There was a story that you pulled out from your own life. You said, you didn't want to grow up to be like the female role models that you had in the 50s and 60s, in your relationship with your mother and grandmother seems really distinct from the world that we see around us now. Could you tell us a bit about that and how that upbringing shaped you? Oh absolutely. It was these two aspects to it and one of us that I was growing up in a time when children were to be seen and not heard. And I was quite an observant little thing. I had four brothers.

And so I was on the outer, straightaway. The females in my family, my mother, my aunts, and my grandmother, and we all lived in quite close proximity, in rural New Zealand. They never ever spoke to me except to yell at me, grout at me, or tell me to do something. except to yell at me, grow up me old, tell me to do something. There was never any conversation. I've not really admitted this to anyone else, but my mother actually said to me so many, many times, when I was growing up, that she was sorry that she had me, that she was sorry that she'd had a girl. To her, she could see no life other than the one that she thought and found herself trapped in, and that the boys

were going to be fine because they could go away and then have a life. And you know that there was a pretty tough thing to be told for, you know, all your impressionable years that someone's sorry to put you on the surface. And my grandmother, she was extreme even more. So yeah, I did not have that. Now here's the thing about being a parent that I took on board. I looked at all the things that my parents had done to me and brought me up, though my brothers and I say

we weren't brought up, we were dragged up. And looked at the few things that I thought were okay, and then made sure that I would not duplicate as apparent all those behaviors that I thought heard me and were not productive whatsoever. You know, my adult children accused their father and I of now of not being tough enough on them. I mean, you just can't win.

You know, the two damn tough as a parent or now I'm hearing from these adults and their 30s and boardies, you weren't tough enough. You let us get away with too much. I'm not going to let my kids do that. And I'll go, you just take what you like from my parenting and reject the rest because that's what we get to do. and reject the rest because that's what we get to do. But yes, I think mother-daughter relationships are complex the best of times. I'm really, really proud to say that I don't think mine is with my daughter because I worked bloody hard

to make sure that she did not have any of that baggage that I carried, it did not transfer. In that baggage that I carried. It did not transfer. In fact, the first words I said to her when she was about a minute old, and I held her, and I looked at her and I said, you will never be a victim. And to me, making sure that as a female, there was no victim mentality ever allowed to creep into any of her behavior or anything she said. And you can do that really subtly.

She didn't know what I was doing. But the whole anytime, as a child, she said, the boy, you know, because she had two older brothers. Of course, you know, but the boys are doing it. Why can't I? Is it because I'm a girl? No, it's because they are significantly older than you. And they're at that right of passage.

But yeah, when you listen to them, listen to kids and what I'm enjoying now is the use of my grandkids. They are just delightful. And the whole notion which I talk about of listen to the little things, really listen to them when they say that their brothers whack them. You know, empathise with her and say you'll talk to them, but hear them. Let them know they've been heard, because you do not want them to become teenagers and then not talk to

you. That's the worst time that they can suddenly say, well, she didn't listen to me all my life. Why should I start telling her now my problems, when those problems now matter? It's really as I was in it, throughout the 1900s, parents focused everything they could on getting children to walk and talk for the first three years of life and then sit down and shut up for the next 15. Pretty much. Pretty much. You did not have an opinion or a thought or even a feeling, which is very sad. That was just none of that. Well look, I can only talk about me and that's all I ever talk about in this book and I think right up front I make it really clear. Guys, I have got no qualifications but telling you anything all I can do is tell you a bit about me and that wasn't easy to do can I say?

What did we say right back at the beginning about the importance of having the individual narrative? Having the single story that is the delivery mechanism and it helps us, we live our lives in narratives. We can think that we're these logical creatures, but for all of our history, all of human history, stories were told through mythology, through archetypes. That is the beauty of the storytelling art form, which I think in a world where 15-second TikTok videos and even our long podcasts, this still probably isn't like an entire night spent around the fire

With the elders talking these stories etc etc There's probably still room to be moved on the on the ceiling of long-form conversation And yeah allowing people to immerse themselves in stories like that I think is is really important Oh, absolutely. Does this show sense it? Fire away. Okay. I love it when my publishers say to me, we think you've always been a storyteller and I would

say, well, that's not the worst my family use. They called me a bullshit artist because I know that I did talk and want to tell stories, nobody listened to them, but they just would, excuse me, have talked me a load of bullshit and living on a farm with cows, you know, that was the appropriate phrase, wasn't it? But yeah, because I actually love telling stories and even if they carve them are made up, isn't that part of the fun too? You can start out with a little pearl of a storyline and then you know why not just embellish the hell out of it and see where you can go with it if you've got somebody

prepared to listen. You are obviously a budding novelist weren't you? So how can everyone that's listening now be a better listener when they leave this podcast? First of all Recognize difference between listening to the person in front of you for the purpose of responding or Are you actually wanting to hear what they were saying because he's up guys if're talking, you're actually not learning anything, you're just repeating something you already know. And to be able to distinguish between, oh, he's saying that and look, his body language

is saying something as well, that there's more in the words and in the body. And once you start doing it, it's actually incredibly rewarding and it's not difficult. It can come quite easily. There will be times, of course, in the majority of times when you're in conversation. A conversation is different. That's a two-in-fro thing. That's not a really sharing of anything in the way that somebody's wanting to tell you something about themselves. That whole aspect of making yourself vulnerable that you mentioned. in the way that somebody is wanting to tell you something about themselves, that whole

aspect of making yourself vulnerable that you mentioned. And if somebody does that to you, you get to feel really honoured and respect it for what it is. In terms of listening to other people, elders, what I found often works is to find an object or something they've said and hone in on that. And if it's your grandmother and you've been visiting her for the last 25 years every Sunday and everyone's been there and you've never really sat down, go back and pick up something of her mental peace.

You've been looking at it for all your life. Guarantee there's a reason that's sitting there. And if you ask about something, there's your in. So people are not gonna just start talking to you for the hell of it, you have to find an end. The exception being kids. Kids are gonna babble at you nonstop. You're gonna have to just sort of pick out what's in there. Uh oh, maybe I need to stop what I'm doing and respond to that.

And you're only going to do that 10% of the time trust me. I've been there done that. But you know what, 10% is better than none at all. And I think I mentioned in the book watching my five-year-old grandson, yelling at his three-year-old sister. You're not listening. Rachel, listen to me and I looked over and there was a little madam just turning it back on him because he's wanting to show his something and and and, and Volvo and something and

she's not going to play ball and he just was getting subset. Until I went over there and I sat down and what's the problem? Rachel won't listen to me. He's five and that's the word he uses. You're not listening already. And so I turned Ranshy around to make eye contact with her and just very simply said, do you not want to listen to Nathan right now? And she said, no. I said, do you think you might want to listen to him later? Might, okay, well why don't we go share? When's a good time for Nathan to come and talk to you

and you'll listen. A simple fact, 10 minutes later, she was listening. Schedule slots in, if you could get the kids, your manager, see if your manager's got a little bit of spare work capacity, maybe they can schedule in some time slots, what's your availability to speak, and what's your of it, and then they could put it on a calendar, share it on Google a Google calendar or something like that.

And then they'd be fine. And that would be absolutely great because that's how we did this. So it makes sense to me. Yeah. And you talked about how to listen when someone's going through or been through trauma. Is that a specialist type of listening?

Well, yes and no. Once again, it's something very easy. But the other problem we have when we are listening or when we're having a conversation is that we're hardwired not to like silence. And when there's that person stop speaking, that they need to jump in and get rid of that silence, that's overpowering at times. Sometimes, and that's the whole thing about listening to people in a traumatic or tragic circumstances,

they say something, and if you actually do just shut up for a little bit longer and just give them that room to formulate something else to say, you'll probably find that they do. And it's knowing when to actually then come in and ask another question, but more often than not, talking to people during that kind of time in their life, you're better off going for more silences and letting them come and fill that gap when they're really not because

you've gone and pushed in. So that's the other trick. Embrace the silence. I love that. I really do. And it's something, as an only child, talking was, or being able to share was a rarity. And I think that cultivating that ability to sit with silence is something that really I've only developed in my adult life, only recently. But everyone that's listening knows that, right? Especially if you're not,

you're not thinking sufficiently about the conversation that you, right? Especially if you're not thinking sufficiently about the conversation that you're having, or maybe you're not feeling very confident around the other person, or just generally not too confident. And you feel like every second has to be filled with noise of some kind, because if you're not talking, maybe that's because you're not interesting, or maybe because it's because you don't have anything

to say, or maybe they'll think that you're not interesting. Oh my god. What if it's, what if it's and you just garble and and sort of babble words out which you don't need to do because even on this, this show which is being listened to by other people, you know, million people a month listening to what is said on this. million people a month listening to what is said on this. And some of the best episodes that have resonated with people is a guy called Daniel Schmackt and Berger who is a philosopher comes civilization engineer from LA. And some of the weights that he had during an episode I did with him were 20 seconds long, 20 seconds of pure silence in a podcast that was only an hour and a half and he consistently was doing that.

And the people that enjoyed the episode really resonated with the silence. So that's, you know, from someone who is being fairly heavily rigorously critiqued online for the way that they converse, I can say that the conversations in which I've allowed the silence to sit the most have had the biggest impact. And that's in a very transactional relationship with people who can't even interject. They couldn't even contribute if they wanted to, because,

you know, I'm not listening to them listening to me. That was a real insight, allowing Daniel to have his, he's a very considered speaker and I knew that he was gonna have these gaps. So, but I could even, even when that was happening, you have, it's like vomit. It's like you have this sort of visceral response and you shoulders come up, yeah, it's like you want a gasp for air,

you want to say a thing, get the word out when it's quiet. And that's not necessarily always the best way to deliver or to allow a conversation to manifest. No, it absolutely isn't and that's a great example. I love that. And the other thing too is that if it is a conversation and you don't know the subject matter that well you don't know what they're talking about. It's actually okay to say that. How often do we try and bullshit our way through something when we really don't know it? And I've learned that it's actually okay to say, oh, I'm sorry, I'm not up to speed with that. I don't know that. Admitted, you know, if anything that may give

that person you're talking to, the right thing to tell you more if you want to know more, but sometimes it pays to be honest. You touched on something at the very beginning saying, if you're talking and learning anything and that is such a basic, obviously such a basic insight. Sometimes you synthesize ideas that already exist in your head while you're thinking or talking, but really it's unless you're Einstein working with like this unbelievable foundation. For the most part, it's actually best for your development to just hear what other people have. So the most selfish thing you can do from a personal development perspective is to selflessly listen. Yeah, yeah.

And you'll allow that to invite whatever the other person's got to say. I can't own that quote about if you're talking you're not learning anything new. It was the Dalai Lama that said that not me. I'm just pinching it and paraphrasing it. that said that, not me. I'm just pinching it and paraphrasing it. And yeah, and I think of one of the things I was talking about, I sort of said, you know, you have to just shut up and listen and the person talking, he said, I don't think the Dalai Lama would have used the words

shut up and I went, now never mind, but it's my version of it. It's what he meant. Yeah. There was a word that you used in the book that I haven't heard in years, earwigging. Oh my God, like if that's not a way to make young children lose a love of listening, it's to give it this like nasty kind of naughty terminology to it, which just makes kids feel like they're,

oh, I shouldn't, I shouldn't be doing that, it's even got it on term. Like it's literally the way that they learn. It's the only way that they're going to be able to learn, apart from, you know, seeing what you do, hearing what you say is next. Yeah, you feel like you're a bad person. And you're not bad. You're unrespected, I think. And maybe I didn't want to listen to a lot of the conversations going on with my female

family members. Because sadly, I think that we're just gossiping. And when I think about it now, the amount of information that I earwigged and overheard, the majority of it actually wasn't nice. It was gossip about other people, either in the family or in the village. But maybe that's just a small town, sort of syndrome. Come on guys, take a look at me. It's pretty obvious that I did not grow up in the time

of television and everything I learned had to come from radio, which I was only allowed to listen to in very small occasions, because the cricket was on and my dad was listening to it. I'd have no problem with the cricket being the primary source of information for children growing up. I think that there should be more cricket at all times. It's the England, the day that we're recording this is the third in the series of the England. What's that?

Is it the one day or is it all? It is, it is, that's tonight. It'll be your morning tomorrow, but my night tonight. So I've messaged my mate, Sam Billings, who will be listening to this episode, way, way, way in the future. Sammy Boy, I need another hundred from you tonight, mate, if that's okay. Thank you.

And that's good luck. But before we finish up, what have you learned during 2020 that's re-framed some of the lessons that you pulled out of Stories of Hope? Is there anything else on top of what we've already talked about? It's just tell how much I've really learned more about what the power of a book and the power of one person's story and once again I'm talking about Luddies to a fit people and you know indeed it got born home many a couple of months ago by one of these amazing emails I've gotten I'm kind of happy to share it because to me it just smacked me in the face. A 20-year-old young man

wrote to me, he lives in Milan in Italy and Italy got humbled really, really bad, really early on. It was where it was all really going down. I'm talking about the pandemic, guys. And he wrote to me, a casha would have been, I think, in July. And he said to me that he lived in Whanau ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni hearing about these people he knew in his apartment building, family members outside who were dying of COVID, and he had dinner one night with his parents and his sister and he said I told them I've given up hope when never going to leave this apartment alive. His sister went to her room and came out with my book and gave it to him. He wrote to me 48 hours later telling me that he hadn't slept. He had read the book and he was now writing to tell me that not only his Lullian Gatoran silk is survival, given him the hope that he will get out of that apartment building, but he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to all

those family, friends and neighbors who did not survive. That's from a 20 year old young man and Malam. So I just continue to be amazed and overwhelmed by the bravery of people being prepared to share. I think it's a very, not a lost art form, but it's certainly a missing piece of people's lives for them to read stories of suffering, resilience, overcoming discomfort, because the lessons that you can learn from that books like The Tatooist, Man's Search for Meaning, endurance about Sir Ernest Chackelton's voyage across the Antarctic. The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Erkhardt, have you read that? No, I haven't. You will absolutely adore it. He was captured by the Japanese in World War II, one of the

Scottish regiment kept on a death ship, basically had dysentery for five years, built the bridge over the river choir, locked in a tin box in heat, then taken to another town, got knocked off his feet by the aftershock of the atomic blast from Nagasaki. Everything that could have happened to this guy went wrong and then kept quiet for 60 years. Very, very similar. I think you'll really, really enjoy it. But I mean, that, that is a, sort of a more old story, but a recent one, only yesterday, Tim Ferris, guy that wrote The Four Hour Work Week and The Four Hour Shelf and The Four Hour Body, this unbelievably well-knownknown multiple times New York Times best selling author with an amazing podcast and millions of news that are subscribers. He released a podcast

where he tells the story that came back to him during a DMT experience about five years ago and it turns out that between the age of two and four, he was sexually molested as a child, as a baby, an infant, and he sits down with his friend who is also a trauma survivor. And this is Tim fucking Ferris, right? This is the guy who has spent 450 podcast episodes talking to the best performers on the planet about abstract ideas. How can I utilize the idea of sleep to enhance my performance so I can get more done in my day? Or what's the best way to pulse alternate day fasting or whatever it might be? Like how can I have more sex? How can I do this to any other? But all of these are abstract ideas. And then Tim totally changes everything. There's no musical intro, there's no nothing else,

there's no podcast sponsorship. And he says, look, like this episode is incredibly personal, probably the most important thing I've ever done in nearly half a thousand episodes. Please like to my friends that are going to message me when they hear this. Like I accept that, please accept that I'm not going to necessarily be able to reply all this stuff. And it's just super heartfelt. And he's spent months working his way up to it. He tells about how he'd written this book that was ready to be published after his parents

died because he didn't want his parents to have to live with the guilt of knowing that they'd let this happen to him between the ages of two and four, so he's there not to go through. All of this stuff, and I'm listening to this podcast, and exactly the point that you're making there, which is a single person's story from Tim is so much more impactful than the, even the abstract ideas. I'm a lover of knowledge, as is everyone that listens to this show. But Jesus Christ, like that delivery mechanism, the way that he's able to utilize his own story and obviously the subtlety and the detail that you can only get from having lived something, not just learned it, is one hell of a way

to get a point across. And I think that ties in with what you were just saying. to get a point across and I think that ties in with what you were just saying. Oh, look, thank you for referring me to that. I'm going to find that because I really do want to listen. And I'm going to throw one back at you. It's a book that you don't even know exists yet because I think it's coming out in January. And it's called Nine Lessons for a Remarkable Life. Who's it by? And it's written by a London journalist Nadia Komani, where she's writing it with this 100-year-old man who lives in Florida.

His name is Benny or Benjamin. I troubles pronouncing Eastern European names, but it's spelled F-E-R-E-N-C-Z. And this, this wonderful 100-year-old man, Nadia, managed to, a bit like me with Lully, she managed to persuade him, I need to tell your story. This man's story should be told in volumes. She writes it under 200 pages. it under 200 pages. Yeah, the immigrant from Transylvania and to New York, upbringing in the 1920s in New York, putting himself through Harvard, really incredibly decorated World War II soldier in the American Army, but because he

was a lawyer, the American Army got him to be one of the first prosecutors of the Nuremberg Trials. He subsequently was the person that instigated the International Crimes Court. Now, this man, he tells a story with such humor and beauty and simple, every single word you can relate to, even though this is a man who's brilliance is off the scale and his life is anything but the most remarkable one that I've read in a long, long time. So I look for a remarkable lot, yeah, nine in a sense for a remarkable life, 90 of Comunee. I think she's with the Guardian or something, yeah. I'll put it on the list. Stories of Hope will be linked in the show, notes below, of course, available on Amazon by the time this goes up it will be available everywhere anywhere else that you want to send people any other stuff that they should check out online.

Oh, no, I think people put in a word just put in a word Google it and let it take you wherever you go. I do that. I love that and get lost for hours. I can get lost for hours. It weighs too much time. I meant to be researching my next book, but you know, I just kind of worked. Oh, that'll do. Um, look, just never stop learning. That's all I say. And listening. I love it.

Thank you so much for your time, Heather. My absolute pleasure. of that.