Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Scott Barry Kaufman and Jordyn Feingold on CHOOSE GROWTH: Transcend Trauma, Fear, and Self-Doubt EP 188

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. I think change starts from within and for some people that personal self-oriented motivation is going to be what gets them on this path. And then I think what ultimately will sustain the path is realizing the good for others and something that is larger than ourselves. Paradoxically, the best way we may grow as ourselves is to focus on others and that is also how we sustain the growth option. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders,

Starting point is 00:01:06 visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 188 of Passion Struck. Ranked is one of the top health and fitness podcasts. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back to the show and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you just want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episodes starter packs, both on the PassionStruck website as well as Spotify. These are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we group into topics.

Starting point is 00:01:40 To give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything that we do here on the show, just go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed our interviews from last week, they featured Dr. Cassie Holmes, where we explore her new book, Happier Hour. Cassie is one of the foremost experts in the world on time and happiness.

Starting point is 00:02:00 We also had on Jason Feiffer, who is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, and we explore his new book, Build for Tomorrow, How You Embrace Change, and Adapt Quickly, to Future Proof Your Career. And lastly, we had on a special episode with Seth Goedan, where we discuss the Carbon Almanac, and we go into why systems change is so needed to address this growing climate change that we're all facing. Please go check them all out if you haven't. And we would so appreciate a five-star rating or review.

Starting point is 00:02:31 If you like today's episode or any of those others, they go such a long way in helping to promote this podcast as well as its ranking on iTunes and Spotify. Now let's talk about today's guess. Dr. Scott Berry-C Kaufman is a cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist exploring the deaths of human potential. He's a professor at Columbia University and director of the Center for Human Potential.

Starting point is 00:02:55 Dr. Kaufman has offered 10 books and his host of the psychology podcast. Dr. Jordan Feingold is a resident physician and psychiatry at the ICANcan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, well-being researcher and positive psychology practitioner. Her research and clinical interests involve protecting and promoting health care workers as well as patient well-being and incorporating positive psychology into health care delivery. Scott and Jordan are co-authors of the brand new book,

Starting point is 00:03:26 Choose Growth, which launches actually today. It is a workbook for transcending trauma, fear, and self-doubt. And in our discussion, we go into how Jordan and Scott initially met and how that encounter ended up changing Jordan's approach to medicine altogether. Scott discusses his popular Science of Living course at Columbia University. We go into what self-transcendence really is, and why life is not a linear journey,

Starting point is 00:03:53 but more like the path of a sailboat. We unpack the different elements of choosing growth, as well as the lessons for how you do it. These include the importance of human connection, how to face fear, the power of exploration, and we end by discussing the keys to savering life and so much more. Thank you for choosing Passion Struct and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am so ecstatic to welcome Scott Berry-Coffman and Jordan Finegold to the Passion Struck Podcast.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Welcome, Jordan Scott. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, John. It's great to have you both here and congratulations on a launch of your new book. I can't wait to talk about it. I'm going to put it up right here. We'll put it in the show notes. We're also going to be covering Scott's book that I've got right here along with it. I'm going to put it up right here. We'll put it in the show notes. We're also going to be covering Scott's book that I've got right here along with it. One of our first podcasts together,

Starting point is 00:04:49 Jordan and I. So this is a special moment for us. Well, I feel very honored. So incredible to have you both on. Well, I understand that you both met at the University of Pennsylvania, where Scott, you at the time were teaching a course and Jordan, you happened to be a senior. And I wanted to ask, Jordan, as you were sitting there, something moved you so much about what Scott was discussing and teaching you about human flourishing that it caused you to actually postpone

Starting point is 00:05:20 your medical school application. Can you tell us a little bit more about that from both your perspectives? I had always known that I wanted to be a doctor and my vision was I loved the human body and I wanted to help people achieve a whole state of health. I didn't really know at the time that medicine was really more oriented about getting rid of disease and dysfunction and that which afflicks the human condition. So my senior year I had some extra courses I could take and I had known about positive psychology because Penn happens to be the fertile ground where the field was founded and I am sort of one of those

Starting point is 00:06:00 people who came out the womb optimistic and when I heard about the science of positive psychology, it kind of resonated with the way that I lived my life. I was like, oh, there's a science about how I sort of feel I exist in the world and came to class. And it was a three-hour seminar that Scott, and he insisted we call him Scott, S-B-K, which was very atypical for a pen professor to go by their first name.

Starting point is 00:06:25 You were always SPK, yeah. And he, Scott, you must have been in your mid-30s of the time. He was just this young, down-to-earth, cool professor who sat at the front of the room for three hours on a Monday, and Mondays are notoriously not the best day of the week in college when you're coming back from the weekend. And it was just the most amazing experience. We were learning about human flourishing, talking about these incredible concepts.

Starting point is 00:06:50 It's when I discovered that there was actually a field that was explicitly about well-being as opposed to just getting rid of illness. And I was so motivated. I'm sure I was at the edge of my seat. I hand-wrote all my notes. And I was just so struck that there was something here that I needed to pursue further before I would go and eventually be a doctor.

Starting point is 00:07:11 I had this reckoning that I needed to do more than just cure disease and get rid of what's wrong with us. I really wanted to promote what was right with people. And Scott was my introduction in a formal way to the field. Well, great. And I'd love to hear your perspective on it, Scott, and what was it like seeing this student who was just glued to what you were talking about? Well, I think that's what professors live for, really.

Starting point is 00:07:38 I mean, you want students like Jordan, you want students that wanna figure out some way of applying that information in their life. I mean, I think that's why we all go into the teaching profession quite frankly. So it's a very touching thing when you have a student who has such motivation, which is the topic of your podcast. Jordan was just so motivated to make a positive, to figure out

Starting point is 00:07:56 how she can maximize the positive change she wants to make in the world. OK. And Scott, maybe as a follow on to that, I know you teach a very popular course at the Columbia University called the Science of Living Well. Can you talk about what that class is about? I'm impressed. You even know the name of the course. You're welcome to sit in on the class any time, you're New York, by the way.

Starting point is 00:08:19 The class is an introduction to the latest science of well-being, but in a different sort of way than a lot of classes. There are some classes that are on happiness that are great to my friends and colleagues teach classes on happiness, but this class is a little bit different. Living well is something that encompasses, well, obviously a lot more than happiness. It encompasses meaning and encompasses self-actualization I would say that probably the core thing that runs through the entire class is self-actualization and Helping the students in their path towards wholeness and their path towards reaching their highest potential students are so

Starting point is 00:08:58 stressed out right now. There's so much anxiety going on and I think so much of the anxiety is a pressure to perform as opposed to be and this class is a class on being and so it takes them a little bit time to adjust especially Ivy League students. Yeah you were so right and I had your friend Susan Cain on the podcast a while back. And we were talking about this effortless perfectionalism. And I've seen it play out, especially with my daughter. She was going through high school. She just started at the University of Florida. But it just seems like these kids have so much pressure on them,

Starting point is 00:09:41 not only to get the best grades, but they have to do all these volunteer hours. And because she was in the medical magnet, she had to get an additional 100 hours for that. And then on top of that, the groups you need to be in, the societies you need to be in. And I think it only gets worse when they get into college. I mean, it doesn't stop there. A lot of people are affected by this beyond that. So, and I know this perfectionism is something that will address in your workbook as well as we get through this interview. I wanted to switch it to Jordan for a second. This podcast is one of the top five alternative podcasts on iTunes. And we talk about a lot of different things, medicine, functional medicine, reverse aging,

Starting point is 00:10:26 how to speed up your metabolism, ketosis, all these different things. But I'm not sure I've ever heard of positive medicine before. Can you explain what that is and how it's different? Yeah, absolutely. And I love the podcast, by the way. The idea is a positive medicine and confess so much of these alternative

Starting point is 00:10:43 and integrative modalities. And this really stemmed from my recommendation that in positive psychology, Marty Seligman, when he was president of the APA in the late 90s, early 2000s, basically said, psychology is super fixated on what's wrong with us on all of the mental illnesses that afflict human beings. We need to usher in an era where we study what's right with people. And I think in many conversations with Marty, one of the things he expressed to me and conveyed to me was that one of the areas he had the hardest time really making a dent in has been medicine and applying positive psychology and medicine. And I think that's large in part because doctors go

Starting point is 00:11:25 through such a specific rigorous, sometimes fairly brutal training. There are a lot of similarities, I think, between medical training and the military, which you can talk about, just in terms of the culture, the hierarchy, the rigor, sleeplessness. I don't think it's a conscious thing, but there's almost this intolerance of someone from psychology or another field coming in and saying we have to focus on the positive or like let's make some changes. So as someone who was going through medical school and planning to enter the field myself, I thought what an opportunity to help usher in an era of positivity and medicine akin to that which Marty started in the field of psychology now over 20 years ago. And when I was

Starting point is 00:12:12 getting ready to write my thesis in my master's program, there's so many applications, possible applications of positive psychology and medicine. What I realized is that the clinicians, the healthcare workers themselves, are experiencing and even before COVID, this was back in 2015, 2016, such an epidemic or even a pandemic of burn now, of mental illness and of suicide within our field. I was drawn to really saying positive medicine has to start with the healthcare worker and teaching and embracing principles of understanding the mind-body connection, relationships, the power of relationships in our work and what we do as social prescriptions for

Starting point is 00:12:52 our patients and ourselves, engagement, vitality, really having the energy to do our day-to-day tasks with bigger, get enough sleep. And I know you have a great episode on sleep that you posted recently. get enough sleep, and I know you have a great episode on sleep that you posted recently. And nutrition, which is nearly absent from our traditional medical education, accomplishment, thinking about our success as physicians and as patients as a non-zero-sum game, what you're referring to this perfectionist cycle, talk about undergrads. I think it's magnified, and mentioned your daughters in the medical track, but medical students are such high achievers, but we're often putting cultures where we're pitted against one another in order to get a select number of medical school positions and residency

Starting point is 00:13:36 slots and encourage in positive medicine. In my course is we encourage collaboration and breaking down this notion of success as a zero-sum game, finally connecting with our meaning and purpose and extracting the positive emotions from what we do. So really using this model I call revamp, which is the acronym I just alluded to, relationships, engagement, vitality, accomplishment, and positive emotions, as a framework and a springboard to not just getting rid of what's wrong with us as healthcare workers and then transmitting that to patients, but to really building what's right with us and seeing ourselves and our patients as whole people.

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Starting point is 00:15:30 Indeed.com slash passion struck terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need indeed. Now back to my interview with Scott Berry-Coffman and Jordan Fine Gold. Okay, that's great. And the rest of this discussion is really going to be on this backdrop of transcendence or your book's got transcend. So a white paper that I really enjoyed reading that helped me understand this more was done by your friend David Yaden with some just incredible people. I think he had Dave Vago, Jonathan Heyte, Andrew

Starting point is 00:16:06 Newberg on this as well with them. But to baseline the audience, can you explain to them what transcendence really is and why it's so important? Wow, that's a really big question. A lot of people have defined self-trick sentence throughout the ages in very, very different ways. Abraham Aswell and an article, I think he calls the varieties of transcends, he proposes like a 96 or something definition. There's very different ways you can think of it, and I'm curious what people conjure up in their head when they think of the word transcendence who are listening to this podcast. David Gait and his colleagues did a real systematic review and found that two main

Starting point is 00:16:45 components were cross most of definitions. So you could find some commonalities across most, whether the facets is a, less of a focus on yourself. It's not necessarily that you lose yourself forever, but that you temporarily lose yourself. You don't focus as much on your artwork somehow in your consciousness. But also the second bone is a connection with the world. So Andy Newberg, who is a neuroscientist, did a lot of work on he. I think you wrote a book you're brain on, God. He proposed a unitary continuum. There's extent to which we feel connectedness to the world and to even to the universe, to animals, to nature. It can really go out and out and out and it can really go out and out and out.

Starting point is 00:17:25 And it can actually go in and in and in, you can have a great connection to a book you're reading, whether they can be the flow experience or something you're creating can be the flow. But if you really can zoom out and you want like, the ultimate transcendence, we could start talking about mystical experiences which very few people ever have a mystical experience,

Starting point is 00:17:42 but that's just oneness with the world. Although more and more people are having it now since psychedelics is hot right now and and is in. There was a Michael Paul documentary on it. I think it's right now. It's I think it's on Netflix. So more people are having mystical experiences than maybe ever have before the history of humanity. Maybe the easiest experience people could have is the feeling of awe, which probably happens more than some of the others, but it's these peak experiences that really make life what it is. And so I think it's such an important conversation. Now, Jordan, you guys open up this book

Starting point is 00:18:20 and you talk about what the book is and what it isn't. And I was hoping you could kind of lay that framework down for the listeners. It's so interesting because we want to help readers create transcendence. And that does mean figuring out where the boundaries are between ourselves and the world and being self-focused enough that we can build self-awareness and live deliberately, but not being so self-focused that we are just so self-absorbed and only thinking about ourselves and not how we relate in the world. So I think it's really important that folks use this book not to bolster their own narcissistic self-image, which we very much lay out in the Salta Steam chapter, but really to experience oneness, to experience transcendence, and contribute to the good of society. So we talk

Starting point is 00:19:13 about this book, it's not just a manual of how to be your best or most ideal self, and it's not prescriptive, it's not a book of, this is the version of yourself that you ought to work toward. Rather, it's really a guide to help us build insight and understand chapter by chapter what are our basic human needs that Scott outlined in Transcend, the book that preceded shoes growth, and that is the basis of our workbook.

Starting point is 00:19:42 What are our basic needs? How have these needs been thwarted? And how might we begin to close the gaps between where we want to be and where we are currently? While we have a lot of prompts and questions to build insight and then challenges to go out in the world and actually do the thing, actually meet the need and practice dipping our toes

Starting point is 00:20:03 in the water of meeting these needs. It's not a solo expedition, we say, to use the extended metaphor of the sailboat, which I'm sure we'll get into, but it's really something that we should use ourselves and engage with others, engage with a therapist or counselor, engage with a book club or a gross group where we can all go through the book and these practices and talk about it together. So we want people to use the book as a guide to meeting their own needs in community and ideally in an ongoing basis. It's not a one and done process as you make your way through the book. We actually say at the end of the book, okay, now it's time to go back to square one and start again. Okay, and I'm going to tackle the sailboat now, and I'm going to ask you each a question on it. The first I'll send it over to Scott, and that is I was doing my research on Maslow, and I'm sure

Starting point is 00:20:58 this is the case with most people. We see the hierarchy of needs represented in this triangle, which based on your research was never Maslow's intent. When your book, you outlay this new metaphor for it. I was hoping you could just take us through what that is and the different layers of it. Yeah, it turns out Maslow never drew a pyramid. It was a bunch of management consultants in bringing a textbook in the 60s that tried to depict a stereo motivation.

Starting point is 00:21:29 But they didn't really do a good reading of this theory because if you really read the theory of motivation you realize it's a really rich theory. It's not like, life is a video game that you reach some level of needs like a need for safety and then some voice move of is like congrats you've unlocked connection then you can like move up some sort of legend of Zelda sort of thing. It's very

Starting point is 00:21:49 clear that that's not how Mazel thought about life and I say I want to say about captures is the idea that we need to have an integrated hole as we move through this world. We're more than the sum of our parks. There's something that emerges that has got Barry Kaufman whatever cheeky and quirky being this is right now that's talking is an integral is more than the sum of its parts. And the way that we integrate the various parts of ourselves is very important. The way that we address our safety means in dialectical with our growth needs is very important. These things

Starting point is 00:22:22 play off each other in very important ways. It is very, very important that our safety needs met or it's then to feel a secure base of a sailboat. If you have too many holes in the sailboat, you're going to sink. Not a little sink. We don't want to sink as humans. We don't want to feel like we're sinking. It's very, very important to feel stable. But at the same time, humans strive for much more than just ability. We strive to open up our sale and grow to be our authentic selves, to be our most self-actualized selves, to move in the sense of direction and purpose. We want to be, have agency, propelled by passion, propelled by

Starting point is 00:22:59 authentic intrinsic passion. So, but all the part, that's the work of self-actualization and I actually am creating with Jordan a new form of coaching called self-actualization coaching. I'm really excited about it. So that's like on my mind a lot these days and a big part of that is really identifying, understanding all these different sides of yourself so that you can have really go in the direction you really want to go in in your life. Yeah that's great. I understand you guys have a course that you've built. You've got a quiz that you're doing as well. I can't wait to see the content myself. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:23:33 If the listeners have never heard this before, and I'm not sure if you guys have, up until he was 35 years old, President Abraham Lincoln described himself as a piece of driftwood, an autopilot, aimlessly being floated down the waterways. And I use that analogy because in some of the discussions I've had here on the podcast with notable behavioral scientists, Haiti Milkman, I let fish back, Michelle Seeger, Cassie Holmes, they all bring up the importance of the power of choice. And it's something that the two of you discuss in the book as well. And I'll direct this to you, Jordan, but why do we, as humans, need to choose growth instead of

Starting point is 00:24:14 living this autopilot life? This idea of choice is so critical. And it's so critical that it is the title of our book, Choose Growth. And this comes from a quote by Abraham Maslow, I'm just gonna read it so I don't misquote it. But it's one can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again. Fear must be overcome again and again. And that is where the title of the book comes from. In my own psychiatry training and my training director, one of them, Oshar's time, and always tells me,

Starting point is 00:24:50 we always have a choice. Human beings always have a choice. Everything we do. There are many things that we cannot choose. For example, our genetic makeup, we had no choice. We didn't choose to be alive. We didn't choose the family as we were born into. We didn't choose the conditions of our birds.

Starting point is 00:25:09 There are so many things that we have no control over yet that can't build an illusion that we are not in control of anything. And one of the goals of this book is to help people understand we often have more choices than we actually think we do. And if we fall subject to a victim mentality or think the world is just happening to us, and I know this idea of being a victim is something Scott is incredibly excited about thinking through and I'll leave that to him. If we choose to see ourselves in that way versus choosing to see ourselves as agentic beings who have a lot more control than we think, we can actually build our autonomy. We can start to bolster our self-esteem. We can move in the directions of life that we want to go. Of course,

Starting point is 00:25:59 with some limitations, and these choices are not necessarily equitable across society and we have to recognize the real structural barriers to making choices that are in line with our goals and how we may have to overcome different barriers to do so, but we always have a choice. And this book is really about helping people identify like what is in our control and what is not and how do we really optimize that locus of control and live the life that is authentic to us and in line with our values? Yeah, there's so much nuance there. Wonderful, I'm sort of, there's so much nuance there,

Starting point is 00:26:35 and interaction we have with our environments, and how can affect how some choices can be harder to choose the growth option versus others. We're trying to think this through. Sometimes a really big part of the choosing the growth option versus others. We're trying to think this through. Sometimes a really big part of the choosing the growth option actually is choosing to change your environment, choosing to change things. The most simplest example is if you have lots of, if you want to lose weight, don't keep lots of staff all around your apartment. If I have like starbursts everywhere, you know, it's going to be harder for me to choose the growth option when I'm really craving sugar.

Starting point is 00:27:03 This idea of choosing growth, we're not trying to say it's just always easy, right, to just choose the growth option, but there are things we can do in our lives to make that option easier for us to choose. Okay, well, thank you for both for explaining that. And now I'm going to start going through your book. So going back to the cellboat analogy, there's this concept of anchoring. And I'm going to start going through your book. So going back to the sailboat analogy, there's this concept of anchoring. And I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with Ben Hardy's work, but I really enjoyed his book, The Gap and The Gain.

Starting point is 00:27:34 And in it, he talks about how unsuccessful people are living in the gap because they're measuring themselves against this ideal. Whereas the people who are living in the gap because they're measuring themselves against this ideal, whereas the people who are living in the game, which is they're measuring themselves against their previous selves are more successful. And I wanted to use that metaphor to understand what are some techniques

Starting point is 00:27:55 for how we can anchor ourselves. Yeah, so that's a very interesting question. So anchor ourselves in the sense that we have an awareness of who we used to be, a way up an awareness of where we want to go We also have an awareness of the present moment my gosh You can have all sorts of those kinds of awareness. That's what meditation can help you with big time I don't know if you're a meditation guy John. I am that's why I wanted to have Dr. Bagu on the podcast because he's one of the experts on it

Starting point is 00:28:22 Oh, well, do you want me to make an intro or? Oh, he's already been on. He's already been on. David's great. Yes. Wonderful. Wonderful. I love his work. There's a lot of overhate claims about mindfulness that Dave writes about and his

Starting point is 00:28:34 work. He wrote a scientific paper called Mind the The Heath. I believe it was the title. But I think that some real great aspects of mindfulness, even not just mindfulness meditation, practice like where you sit in a cushion, go to time about just mindfulness in your daily life, like Ellen Lang or old school psychological mindfulness before the whole new mindfulness craze came into science

Starting point is 00:28:54 to talk about the meditation. But actually, how can you have mindfulness in your interactions with people? In either very, very high level of transcendence, as Mazzo talks about, you're able to see the, I hope I don't start getting too woo-woo here, but you start to see the eternal in the every day. You have this amazing simultaneous awareness in every moment. Even I would say Susan Kay, my friends, is saying bitter sweetness, right? It's like you can really enjoy a moment, but also be

Starting point is 00:29:17 aware that that moment won't last forever, and also be aware that in a sense, that kind of moment in the sense of humanity will last forever even after beyond you. There'll be someone else just like you having a moment just like this with someone else who's just like the person you're talking to, you know, these things recreate self-generation after generation. There's gonna be a Scott Barrett, someone who looks like me in that generation doing podcasts and talking about, that was so cute potential. I hope they watch this podcast a hundred years from now, by the way. And there's only one spot very often.

Starting point is 00:29:49 There is only one. Well, that's very kind to you, say, Jordan. There's just something beautiful in the awareness of like this oneness. I say that in the spirit of connecting with humanity, not just the humanity in our current generation, but connecting with the future generations that never even come about and connecting with past generations and all the hard work people have done.

Starting point is 00:30:07 And just feeling part of, just for the more we can kind of feel part of humanity, I think the more connected we are to each other. Yeah, so I'm going to go to the human connection piece here in a second, but I wanted to ask one more follow-on question to Anchor and one of the things I will highlight to the listeners is that throughout the book, you guys have kind of techniques that you outlay for how people can overcome certain things. And I know one of the biggest things we all deal with is fear. So I was hoping, Jordan, that you might be able to tackle some of the techniques for the listener of how they can overcome that fear in their lives.

Starting point is 00:30:43 There are so many different types of fears. There are psychological fears, which we talk about in the book, fear of failure, fear of losing control, fear of rejection. Then there are things like phobias, these hard wire and sort of ancient evolutionary fears of things that could kill us, like heights and spiders. And we don't talk as much about

Starting point is 00:31:05 the specific phobias, but we use techniques that we actually use in the field of psychiatry and psychology to help treat things like specific phobias, like exposure therapy, to help people overcome every day psychological fears. We first have people think about a fear that they have overcome in the past. And really hold this and mindfully keep it in their minds eye. What is something we've all likely faced a fear, whether it's far in the past in childhood or more recently perhaps during the COVID pandemic, which is really an anchor of the book. And what was that fear, imagining having the reader imagine how they overcame it, what internal resources did they utilize, what

Starting point is 00:31:44 strengths, what external resources, what other human beings did they seek someone out for help. And then we have them really bring to mind a fear that they are currently engaging in. It could be something that's really top of mind. We don't want everyone, all the readers, we really encourage them to be mindful of their own psychological safety.

Starting point is 00:32:02 And we don't want people making decisions that are actually unsafe for them physically or harmful. And they don't necessarily have the support to process what they're going through. So we want folks to choose a fear that give them the right dose of adrenaline and fear without being too overwhelming to tackle. And we have them think about really imagining themselves doing a mental rehearsal,

Starting point is 00:32:26 dipping their toes in the water of facing this fear, thinking about who they might recruit to help them, what resources that they use to face a past fear that they might use. And we have them really meditate on this before they actually go do it. And then we have folks go out and try it and then reflect on it and iterate. We don't expect everyone's going to go face their fear the first time they try, but perhaps they can little by little get out of their comfort zone just like we would gradually expose someone to thinking about a spider and then seeing a video of a spider and then touching a spider, little by little, so we can increase the tolerance to the thing that we are afraid of. Can I guess end that fear is there's a term in psychology called

Starting point is 00:33:06 experiential avoidance. We know that's one of the top things that keeps perpetuating a cycle of mental on wellness. I don't like the phrase mental illness, but mental on wellness. We do so many things in our lives to avoid the thing. There's actually a study that just came out. I just tweeted out five minutes before this conversation we had just now showing the huge analysis of a meta analysis, which is a very, very large analysis of all the studies that have ever been done on trigger warns. And the research

Starting point is 00:33:35 found that trigger warnings have absolutely no effect on your learning of the material or even on the emotions that you feel when you encounter something that you want to avoid. This research is consistent with this Gibraudder idea that if you have fear for things, the more you avoid those things, stronger you build it up in your head, the more that you create this fantasy, this idea that you are a fragile human being that just can't handle life on its own terms, and then it starts generalizing. Look, I say this for someone who for a large part of my life suffered from generalized anxiety disorder.

Starting point is 00:34:11 I don't know if I've ever admitted that in my entire life on a podcast. It's someone who experienced that for many, many years, even when I was in Philadelphia, sometimes it was hard for me to even just like leave my apartment because I was so afraid of it. Also, high sensitivity, so lots of noises and things bothered me. My first book on Gifted came out, my first book for that people cared about, it looks before then, that were academic books, but the Gifted came out. I had to suddenly go on planes and give talks, give keynote talks and things. I'm just like, I'm not going to let all the

Starting point is 00:34:42 fears that I've have in my life prevent me from living the life I want to lead. And I'm just like, I'm not going to let all the fears that I've have in my life prevent me from living the life I want to lead. And I think that's what it comes down to at the end of the day, right? That's what we'd write about. So actually, are you making choices that are really preventing you from living the kind of life you want to lead? Be the kind of person you want to be. I started off with some zadex on some of those plane rides, but eventually weed myself off and just the more exposure I got, the more I call that I the more I confident I felt that I could handle the life on its own terms.

Starting point is 00:35:09 But now I have supreme confidence in the world. I'm joking, but I've come a long way. I think that's so important to mention and I just have one final point on this. When it comes to fear, avoidance reinforces our fear. I think that's such an important bottom line. That when we continue to avoid or move away from the things that we think we are afraid of or we think may be bad for us, it makes them so much larger.

Starting point is 00:35:35 And like you said, it generalizes. So one question I always like to ask my patients when they're talking about fears or they're getting to something they're avoiding, are you moving away from something or are you being drawn toward something? When we think about passion and living the life we want to lead and moving our sailboat in the direction of growth, it's really about finding this balance of what are we avoiding, what are we trying to move away from,

Starting point is 00:35:58 and possibly replacing that with something, what are we moving toward, and what is calling us. That is just one way I see growth supplanting fear. Oh, Jordan, I love that. I guess we gotta give John a chance to talk, but I feel like Jordan, I have this conversation here. It's like, oh, I love that. That is in line with the ACT approach, the ACT approach.

Starting point is 00:36:20 It was on my podcast, well, multiple times with friends. He always emphasizes the importance of realigning your consciousness to your values in moments where you feel like you're straining away like let's say you want to you know it's like oh I want to go to the refrigerator and eat that chocolate I know it's in their refrigerator and then like oh wait wait values or long-term vision of myself is not as someone who is just sitting their all day long eating chocolate on the couch, right? There's a greater purpose for me. So being able to align your values constantly is it can override sometimes your fears and it can also override poor choices in your life. Well, I want to jump into your chapter two. And for the listeners who tune in every week,

Starting point is 00:37:06 we've been talking about the grant study in a couple of the episodes lately, which was this mega study that went on for 75, 80 years. I think it's still going on where they analyzed the lives of people over that time period. And regardless of wealth, not having wealth, the one thing that they found brought people happiness was human connection. And I wanted to ask this question,

Starting point is 00:37:29 giving that as a backdrop. Why is it so important for us to move from small talk to big talk, and how do we do it? Yeah, I love this practice. I did this with a group of medical students when I was teaching my positive medicine class during the pandemic. And we were all on Zoom. We really were craving deep connection and realizing it's really hard to get past small talk. We're not even good at small talk anymore. We're not used to seeing people and and being behind these screens. And we wanted to get away to get folks bonded and just get to the heart of who everyone was and really create a space where we're not just talking about

Starting point is 00:38:07 where we're from or what we're studying but deep questions of what makes you tick? What are you thinking about? What's on your mind? So we have this whole practice that is aimed at helping folks create deeper richer connections. We call that big talk but we also want people to practice small talk as well, because all of us are probably a little rusty on that. There's a study I from many years ago, the Aaron and Aaron study. When was that from Scott? The 90s. 96. Okay. I'm just gonna make that up. 1999-97, very close. Yes, so Arthur Aaron and his wife and their team of researchers had actually brought folks into the lab to study different types of connections. So they

Starting point is 00:38:53 had people do a small talk, exercise, and get to know each other, and then they had them do a deeper talk, and they gave them the questions to use. And they found that those who were in the deep talk connection had much more robust connections with the stranger that they were paired with when they went through these questions. So I think in this era where it is hard to connect with people just in general that we wanted to give people a way of getting deeper and I feel like I'm not saying this very eloquently. So Scott feel free to jump in. But we want to help people get to know each other

Starting point is 00:39:30 and be vulnerable and move past just the weather outside conversation, but really create deeper, sustaining connections so that people can create a lifelong relationship with someone or find common ground. And it's these deep connections that that brings so much richness to life. Yeah, I was wondering are there people that really enjoy small talk? Do we all kind of hate it?

Starting point is 00:39:55 I think there are people who enjoy it. My father is, he's a big schmoozer. A big schmoozer. Yes, okay, there's a word for it again. Yes, that's true, that's true. Okay, I was just wondering. But I think a lot of people that are talking to each other, a lot of instances where they would rather not be having this small talk.

Starting point is 00:40:15 And if they could have some sort of methodology to be able to have some bigger talk, I think they would probably enjoy their interactions a lot more. I would agree. I mean, the question I hate more than anyone is, what do you do? Because it's just defining question and you do so many different things. So now I just answer it that I'm a storyteller and then let it go from there. I wanted to touch on chapter five, which was one of my favorite there. I wanted to touch on chapter five, which was one of my favorite chapters, not only in this book, but also in Transcend. And Scott, in the book Transcend, you discuss this light versus dark triad. Can you explain what that is? And can you also touch on the core components of B-love? I'll start off with the notion of B-love because that

Starting point is 00:41:06 actually was an impetus for going into that whole research program in the first place. Mazzalo had this idea of love that we kind of love for the being of others. It can transcend even to feelings of liking someone, right? You might not even like someone and yet you still have love for their being and for their deep respect that they're a separate entity for you and not only that but you can watch another human being unfold in their own way without having to control them. There's a certain beauty to that. Even if you don't particularly, it's not how you would act. You can still appreciate or respect that that's how someone else is acting. There's a pair of famous car Rogers,

Starting point is 00:41:42 I'm a respected that's how someone else is acting. If there's a pair of famous car Rogers, but car Rogers is another humanistic psychologist versus when you look at a beautiful sunset, you don't think, oh, if only I could move the left hand aside a little bit to the right and change the hue a little bit, you just enjoy the sunset. And the humans can be just as beautiful as sunsets if you let them be.

Starting point is 00:42:01 So, okay, so all that to say that's the notion of be-law. And then there had existed a whole psychological literature on the dark triad for over a decade. For actually 20 years in the field of psychology, there's been such a disproportionate focus in personality psychology on the dark side of humans that's like narcissism, that's psychopathy, macadalianism, people who always like stretch,

Starting point is 00:42:24 stratop schemeing. They do people like that every second. They're thinking, how can I get more podcast views? How can I do this? How can I exploit that person? It was exasperated with this. I went to the positive psychology center, went to my, we already mentioned David Yaden, went to his office, and I was frustrated. And I said, is there anything interesting about people who aren't? Because it seems like that's all that people care about.

Starting point is 00:42:46 If you look at Netflix, all the documentaries, like the Tinder, or Swindler, you know, that's all people care about. Really, if he was just joking, he wrote me an email and said, well, I try and question Mark. And I, being me, was like, David, I know you're probably joking, but why don't we start a whole new research program? I

Starting point is 00:43:06 Guess that was my own mac exploitive drive there. Well, I see an opportunity sometimes I was like, why don't we create a whole new program and see if there's something that exists along those lines and We conducted so many studies and so many participants. We're still ongoing conducting this with all around the world were coming up with a map of the light triad by country by country state by state the light triad comprises three components one is having a basic respected dignity for each individual having a faith in humanity that humans are perfect but there is a basic goodness to humans treat people as not means to an end but treat people as ends to themselves. Which we in a really nerdly fashion don't

Starting point is 00:43:51 continusm which is the mirror image of Macavelianism because here we go nerds because cons first categorical imperative in his philosophy is treat people as ends into themselves don't use people. Don't use people. That was his moral imperative. And Maca Valley was the exact opposite in his writings and the prints and stuff like that. Do that make any sense? It makes sense.

Starting point is 00:44:16 And in chapter seven, you have one of my favorite quotes by Seneca about intentionality. And it says, if one does not know to which port one is sailing No wind is favorable and I use this daily mantra every day Where I say let go of the destructive habit of breaking the commitments that you make to yourself And then I say the marked plane saying you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do Then by the things that you do do so So throughout the bowline, sell away from the safe harbor, etc., which is all about your sailboat, metaphor. So Jordan, how can we cultivate and nurture our inherent capacity for exploration, which is so

Starting point is 00:44:55 important for understanding with this intentionality where we need to take our lives? Another very big question. When you mentioned the need for exploration, we just talked about love, and you brought up chapter seven, which is all about purpose. Now we're talking about the sale. We're talking about the part of our sale boat that propels us forward into the world, helps us engage, helps us really understand the horizons, understand our potentials, really live rather than just exist.

Starting point is 00:45:27 We've alluded to this already in this conversation that one of the paths forward for doing that is really to understand our values. And what are the horizons that we're moving toward, as opposed to avoiding or moving away from? And when Scott and I, we always ask our students at the beginning of classes, what are your deepest held values? I find it perplexing how many people have never thought about the answer to that question and have never really sat down with that and say,

Starting point is 00:45:58 hmm, what are my values? The first thing is trying to understand what our values are, First thing is trying to understand what our values are, understand how we are or are not living by them right now. And thinking about ways to deliberately start integrating those values into our day to day. I think one of the amazing things about this podcast and the reason we wrote this book is because just knowing something isn't sufficient to actually enacting it into our lives and to doing it.

Starting point is 00:46:27 So thinking about our values and that tied into values are also passion and purpose and really understanding why do I wake up in the morning? How do I actually craft the hours that I'm spending in a day to be oriented towards these things? Bringing them into our awareness and then figuring out how we can move the needle

Starting point is 00:46:46 and not just giving up when we fail, because we will fail, because life is so busy and there are so many demands on our time and people are gonna ask us to do things and we're gonna say yes, then we left to learn how to set boundaries so that we can live by our values. But this is a constantly evolving, constantly negotiation with how we can live by our values more,

Starting point is 00:47:05 more authentically and more deeply. And being aware that values can change over the course of our lives and over the course of time. I didn't want to end this interview without talking about chapter eight, where you go into how we become trend centers. And Scott, I'll direct this to you. What is Maslow's theory Z? Because most of the listeners probably

Starting point is 00:47:30 have never heard about this before. And how do we live more in the B realm? There's a famous sort of workplace theory of the theory X and theory Y is just that if you're a manager and you wanna motivate your workers by theory X, it's carrot stick, like, string stick rewards, and that's how you motivate them. Theory Y is the way to motivate them is by intrinsic passion. But Maslow said, let's go even further folks, what about a theory Z?

Starting point is 00:48:02 What about people who are motivated by transcends? They're motivated by peak experiences by flow Experiences by values that transcend being itself I never quite put it that way, but actually that makes a lot of sense values that transcend being well That makes sense. Yeah, I never know what's going to come out of my mouth. Things like justice, truth, beauty, right? These are things that lie outside of ourselves just as much as they lie within ourselves. In fact, Mazzle said that we get to some point of transcendence where we can transcend the geographical limitations of ourselves. So it's not that we have

Starting point is 00:48:37 completely self-sacrifice yourself. No, that's not the point. That's not the point. The point is that our self is in the world so much that there's really very little division between self and world. What is automatically good for us is automatically good for the world. And that's really that encapsulates, I think that whole chapter. What do you think, Jordan? Yeah, I totally agree. And one of the ways that we operationalize transcendence is dichotomy transcendence, not seeing the world in this black

Starting point is 00:49:06 and white version of itself that's so easy to fall subject to, we're so polarized thinking about all of the binaries that exist among us, but really embracing all of the nuance and bivalence, shades of gray, and honoring the totality of what we experience even when certain values or certain emotions or certain experiences may seem to even conflict with one another. How do we hold that and honor and uplift even those contradictions? Okay, and I always like to ask authors this question, and I would like you both to answer it. If there was one thing that you would want to reader to take away from the book, what would it be? My answer is really almost like self-evident, and it's just really that one can choose growth.

Starting point is 00:49:51 People don't even realize that. They get caught in their loops. Right? They can call it every day. There's a lot of learned helplessness. A lot of this, by the way, I mean, we're influenced by Barns Sousman's seminal work on learned helplessness. A lot of this, by the way, I mean, we're influenced by Warren Sousman's seminal work on learned helplessness and then how he went to learn hopefulness, which is where that's where his work is at right now as well as our friend Dan Thomas-Soo, I wrote an awesome book which I wrote the forward to called a learned hopefulness. We want to instill a lot of learned hopefulness in people that if they're in their life of learned helplessness and then I think that process is choosing the growth option.

Starting point is 00:50:27 And I think my takeaway is twofold. One, we can't do it alone that we have to invite and include other people on the growth experience with us because we're not solitary beings. We are deeply interdependent and the needs for both connection and love as distinct needs very much both include other people and that it's a journey growth is a journey without a destination there is no definitive place we land when we say we're done all right I've grown sufficiently I'm it's time to stop but that it's a constant commitment and recommitment and sometimes we have to take many steps back in order to reorient and recommitment. And sometimes we have to take many steps back in order to reorient and get to the place where we're going. I wanted to end with one

Starting point is 00:51:11 philosophical question and either one of you can take it. Not sure if you guys know Ari Wallick, he teaches at Columbia as well. He has this new book called Long Path and in it, he believes we need to focus ourselves on a purpose that is greater than ourselves, that impacts our future ancestors and their ancestors. And do you think that's true when we're choosing growth that it needs to be bigger than ourselves? Not always. Sometimes the smallest, seemingly softest choices, the growth option that we need in our life

Starting point is 00:51:44 at that time. I don't take a hard line stance in that, that growth option that we need in our life at that time. I don't take a hard line stance in that that everything we must be choosing in our life has to serve some grandiose life purpose. It's amazing how these micro moments of growth over time add up and will multiply into huge transformations that impact the world automatically because you become a transgender. I'd love to hear Jordan's answer to that. I think it's a yes and I think change starts from within and for some people that personal self-oriented motivation is going to be what gets them on this path and then I think what ultimately will sustain the path is realizing the good for others and something

Starting point is 00:52:24 that is larger than ourselves. I would say, I do believe that is ultimately true, that the best way, the best way we may grow as ourselves is to focus on others. And that is also how we sustain the growth option. Okay, well, for the listeners, I just want to tell you you I've just covered an extremely small aspect of their book There is so much incredible content in here and on these podcasts I don't like to give out too much because we want you to buy the book so if you Read this you're gonna become Amherst into how do you become and is it even possible to become fully aware?

Starting point is 00:53:02 immersed into how do you become and is it even possible to become fully aware? You'll learn things from William James and Carl Jung. You'll learn about existential gratitude. You'll learn about imposter syndrome. You'll learn about perfectionalism. All these different things and ways to tackle all of it, so it can guide you on this growth path. So I just wanted to say what an honor it was

Starting point is 00:53:24 to have you both on this podcast. Congratulations so much on this book, which is, I know, been years in the making. And I think this collaboration between the two you is amazing. So thank you Jordan and Scott for being here. Thank you for having us so much for having us, John. And for all that you do. Yeah, thank you for kicking up off the whole book tour. Thank you. You kick this off. Well, I'm so happy I was able to do it.

Starting point is 00:53:53 So thank you guys for being here. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Scott and Jordan. What a pleasure that was to help them launch their brand new book. I wanted to thank Jordan, Scott, Alissa Adler, and Penguin Random House for the honor of having them both on this podcast. Links to all things Jordan and Scott will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any

Starting point is 00:54:14 of the books from the guests who are featured on the podcast. It helps to support the show and make it free for our listeners. If you prefer to watch this in addition to listening to it, check out our YouTube channel at JohnRMiles, where we have over 400 videos today. Please go there and subscribe. Avertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place. Apassionstruck.com slash deals. I am at JohnRMiles, both on Instagram and Twitter, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I find incredible guests like Scott Jordan, it's because of my network, go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview I did with Dan Dupani, who is a Hindu priest,

Starting point is 00:54:54 entrepreneur, and former monk of 10 years. Dan Dupani is a sought after internationally acclaimed speaker and leading expert on leveraging the human mind and the power of focus to create a life of purpose and joy. And we discuss his brand new book, The Unwavering Power of Focus. Focus needs to go hand in hand with purpose. I talk about leading a purpose, focus life. People talk about being intentional with our lives, right? Leading intentional life.

Starting point is 00:55:21 It's like, okay, how would you lead an intentional life if you don't even know what you worked? The fee for this show is that you share it with friends or family members when you find something that's interesting or meaningful to you. If you know someone who's really into self-actualization and personal growth, definitely go ahead and share today's episode with them.

Starting point is 00:55:39 The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share this show with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life-assioned struck. you

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Scott Barry Kaufman and Jordyn Feingold on CHOOSE GROWTH: Transcend Trauma, Fear, and Self-Doubt EP 188

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