Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 109: Bonnie St. John, Former Olympic Skier, Motivational Speaker

Episode Date: November 22, 2017

Author, motivational speaker and former pro-skier Bonnie St. John had her right leg amputated at age 5, but that has never slowed her down. The San Diego native made a Paralympics run in 1984 and became the first African-American to win medals in Winter Olympics competition. A Rhodes Scholar, St. John went on to serve on the White House National Economic Council and has written seven books, including one with her husband called "Micro-Resilience," which outlines five frameworks for small "life hacks" to help boost focus and energy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. For free. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris. Everybody, a couple of pieces of business to get out of the way before we get into this podcast, which by the way, is a very good one. First of all, we're doing this kind of weird thing where we have set up a hotline, the 10% happier hotline. I don't know if that name will stick.

Anyway, it's this place you can call and leave me a message, and then we're going to do a special show where I answer your questions or respond to whatever comments you want to say. So here's the number. 646-883-8326. I'll try to tweet this out. So in case you don't feel like writing it down now, you don't have a pen or whatever. And we'll also put it in the episode description. So you'll get it there. Anyway, it's a little experiment. We're gonna do a special show in the not-too-distant future

where I'll answer a bunch of questions or respond to comments. So hit us up, appreciate that. The other piece of business is related to that, which is we're doing a special show in conjunction with this book I'm putting out, which comes out on December 26th, kind of in time for a new year, new you.

It's called meditation for fidgety skeptics. And the whole thing is about, basically we did this cross country road trip in a very weird orange bus, and tried to meet people who want to meditate, but aren't meditating and figure out how we can help them. And so given that a lot of people are going to be sending meditation as a New Year's resolution, we thought it

was a good convergence. So again, 646-883-8366 and you can check out the book or you can pre-order the book if you want anywhere you order your books. Okay, podcast, Bonnie St. John, really cool woman. She had her leg partially amputated as a child and went on to perform in extraordinary ways in athletics, specifically skiing. She also is incredibly smart and went to some fancy schools and is now a, she's a lot of things, she's an author, she's an inspirational speaker, she's a corporate consultant, and her newest book is called Micro Resilience. She really gets that resilience is important for all of us, not only in a macro sense, you know, recovering from traumas and setbacks, but also just micro, you know, how do you make it through the day without, you know, the last conversation dragging you down, heading into the next conversation. So she's got a lot of

really interesting things to say about all that. And of course, she's also a meditator. So here we go, Bonnie St. John. How and why and when did you get into meditation? So when I was 12 years old, my mother took us all to Transcendental Meditation classes which was popular in Southern California at that time and you get a mantra and you learn so what did you say that's Hindu meditation? Yeah so Transcendental Meditation is derived from Hinduism where they used Buddhist do this too but it's much more predominant in Hindu meditation where you

use a mantra which is the word you repeat to yourself, sign on the in your head, and just the repetition of that word can blot out discursive thinking. And actually feel really good. So I was introduced to that early on. One of the most profound things, this is funny, that happened to me. I was training for ski racing. I was on a glacier in Oregon in the summer training. And I sat next to somebody.

I have no idea who this person was, who had just read a book on self-hypnosis. And I was really curious, and I said, explain to me everything you learned. And they did. And I proceeded for the rest of my life to use my, you know, to take what he said, turn it into something my own and create my own practice

around self-hypnosis. So I never read a book on it. How old were you when that happened? That was later in life. I was, I was probably like eight, 17, 18. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, so, because I was trained, I went to the Olympics when I was in,

when I was 19, so I was training around that time. But it's, I relate it to meditation because really what self-ipnosis is is just like getting into a meditative state and then giving yourself a couple of suggestions. Well, tell me how that works because I don't know anything about self-ipnosis. So what I internalized from what he said was imagine closure eyes, imagine yourself going down a set of stairs and you can count backwards like from 50 to one and walk down these stairs. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, there's two doors.

Go in the first door and imagine that it's a great place. I was just doing this and I was imagining my library and my house, sitting in a big leather chair with a cup of tea and my husband. So just imagine a really good place and imagine it in vivid color and sense and sound and just you get feeling really good. And then come out of that door and go into the other door and imagine it's your inner self and you can give yourself a few suggestions. So I used this intensely for racing because it could get you really focused.

A race, a ski race can be 30, 40 seconds. You have to do it, not when you choose, but when they tell you to do it. You have to do it perfectly. So using that technique to get really focused before a race, it's you settle your mind, you calm your mind, the visualization, the count, it's like having a mantra, you get yourself very relaxed,

and then you give yourself a suggestion. And I learned a lot over time doing it. Like it's important that the suggestions are positive. You know what I'm saying? Oh, I'm screwing up. Yeah, and I used it for speaking as well. So many people fear speaking. I speak to, you know, 30,000 people at a time.

So the suggestion isn't don't be nervous when you're speaking. Because what your brain is gonna implant is nervousness, right? So what would be the positive suggestion? implant is nervousness. So what would be the positive suggestion? Tap into your best self or something along those lines. Yeah, and if you're thinking about like skiing or speaking or like you're going to help a lot of people. Yeah, it could be be be helpful deliver the gift or something. So you want to before you go into the meditative state, you want to think about what is it that is

important. So with skiing, often it's being smooth. You don't want to be jerking your moves, you know, and so, and whatever it is you're working on is stay ahead in the turn, you know. But you want to have a positive suggestion that you can give yourself and by just getting into a meditative state beforehand, you're super charging that suggestion. So it's not, it's not voodoo. It's not anything crazy. It makes sense.

When I'm standing at the top of a ski race and other people are talking trash or getting distracted, it makes a lot more sense to focus your mind on, get really relaxed, focus your mind on what it is. I really need to do in this 30 seconds that I have to decide whether I win the medal in the world versus, you know, talking trash and getting distracted.

So I learned that, you know, and I used it for speaking. I even used it when I was preparing for childbirth. It worked so well. I delivered in four hours. But you know, it was giving myself suggestions about let my body be part of the process, you know, let my body go with not fight it, you know, let my body go with not fight it, you know, but you wouldn't say not fight it, but let my body be strong in the process.

So it's about asking yourself to go with what you're doing. It's interesting to me because I, and I will admit, and I think I've already admitted, but I'll say it again, I don't know much about hypnosis, so I'm sure I'll get some education on Twitter at once this is posted, but I've always thought of hypnosis as like the opposite of meditation where you're like giving up your own agency over your mind. But you think of somebody else hypnotizing. Yes. I'm talking about self-hypnosis. I don't know what that even means.

But from what I just told you, all it is is meditation and a suggestion. Yeah. Actually, this is my whole problem, Dan. It sounds like visualization meditation. Yeah. Dan, along with that for me. This is my whole problem, Dan. It sounds like visualization meditation. Yeah, Dan. Along with that for making it. This is my whole problem though, is I'm so goal oriented. So what I've just said to you was, I do goal oriented meditation. Yeah. Which is like a contradiction in terms of that.

Exactly. And so the new book I have about micro resilience, I was thinking about where are the common areas with meditation. And that's, the whole book is very goal oriented. It's a bunch of little things that you can do to be more resilient. And we divided them into five categories of curated information. But one of those five categories is the reset category. And it's what you do when you get hijacked.

So you can get emotionally hijacked by things that little things that happen throughout the day. And so we give you practical things to do. And the things we give you to do to respond to a hijack are the things in the book that resemble meditation. So there's labeling, which comes from research out of UCLA with Matt Lieberman that is saying, you know, when you're getting that emotional hijack, if you use words to label what you're feeling,

FMRI brain studies show that it actually dials back that hijack reaction. Yeah, and meditation would call that noding, and that is, that is a bad thing. It's mindfulness, right? It's mindfulness. No, I didn't, I didn't realize that until I was reading your book, you know, and then I realized, oh my gosh, so labeling is mindfulness. Yeah. And I didn't realize, and the other thing that we do is conscious relaxation, which is deep belly breathing and relaxing your muscles.

And we do that for combating a hijack because in a mech-doh hijack, you know, it's a threat response in your neuro system. And so what happens is you tense up your muscles because you're ready to, you know, get a fight or flight, you tense up your muscles and your breathing gets shallow. So the, the, the, because you're getting ready to run away from a saber-toothed tiger. Exactly. The way to disengage that response is to relax your muscles and belly-breathe. But again, that's like meditation, but we are putting it in a goal-oriented context.

Let me say something about goal orientation. Because I get open up goal or you know. No, I'm goal oriented too. I have lots of goals. And I actually, I want to make, I'm thinking out loud now, so I may say something I'd later disavow, but I don't think it's entirely wrong to come to meditation with goals. I would say there are three primary benefits for beginning meditation. You start to feel calmer, your focus is improved, and you achieve some greater degree of mindfulness, meaning the ability to see what's happening in your head without getting carried away by it. And those are things we should all want and aspire to, and I think it's okay to go into meditation with a certain amount of desire to,

and desire traditionally categorized as a enemy in hindrance to proper meditation, but a desire to improve these innate human qualities to cultivate these qualities as well as compassion, not for nothing. But those are good goals to have. I think it's in the meditation itself. It is not fighting with what's happening in the moment. That's where the over-efforting or the striving can get in the way. So I don't actually think there's a big contradiction between your mindset and meditation.

Thank you. I guess the way I would do it is put it on a spectrum, is say, pure meditation is when you're just doing mindfulness to reach the larger goals that you mentioned. You're not in the moment trying to address something. That's like sort of pure meditation. And so maybe what I'm talking about is more applied meditation. And that could just be on a different spectrum. And it's good to do pure meditation as a discipline over time, right, to strengthen your focus

and your clarity and calmness, but then you can also apply it to specific situations, which I don't think typical meditation people talk about as much, but it's like what I talk about in the book, Microresilience, and when you, you know, we talk about the self hypnosis technique I was mentioning, it's more applied.

I think if you can do it pure and applied, I think that's good. Let me just reframe it slightly rather than pure more applied. So I think if you can do it pure and applied, I think that's good. Let me just reframe it slightly rather than pure and applied. I would just say there are different kinds of kinds of meditation. Absolutely. And we don't need to get overly dogmatic about what's the best. There are just what you described as a kind of mental. If you think of a meditation, you even set that word aside for a second.

I have no problem with the word, but it's training your mind, right? This is, most people aren't told that you can train your mind. And there are lots of ways to do it. And through meditation and through these mental practices. And so there's mindfulness practice where you're just kind of sitting back and letting thoughts and emotions and physicalizations

come and go and you're observing them non-judgmentally. But then there's, and I know you are involved in this because you talked to me about it before we started recording, loving kindness meditation where you are deliberately cultivating feelings of goodwill toward people in your world. And that's super goal oriented in a way. Although the twist there is, and this is actually a relief, is that the proper instruction for loving kindness meditation, where you are trying to develop feelings of goodwill to our people, is you don't actually have to feel a certain way. It's the intention to send the goodwill towards somebody that is what matters. So, the Buddhists talk about right effort and wrong effort. So, it is okay to have goals in a certain sense, but

then there's a way in which it can devolve into striving and fighting with reality that can only sort of twist you into knots. Absolutely. Yeah, I love your playful sense and trying to get the message out to people that I know you try to get this message out to people that you shouldn't be so hard on yourself about meditation. Like I have to do it right, you know. And what you're saying is there's so many different ways to do it. You can invent your own ways. You can make it personal. And you're going to.

And what I said to you last time too is is in coming in and thinking, wow, I'm going to be doing this interview about meditation. I was really reflecting on my life. And I've tried a lot of different things and for me meditation even blurs into prayer. But what I noticed when I came in last time was I felt like I realized, oh my gosh, I'm probably worse at meditation now than I was 10 years ago. And so I was just reflecting on my whole journey with meditation. And I think a big part of it is these lovely little phones

that we have, the iPhone, and I get so addicted to it, and I'm constantly doing email, and I'm constantly playing my little words with friends with my aunt Donna. And so I think I'm so much more distracted than I was 10 years ago. And so for somebody, I've been on a journey all my life doing meditation.

It was an interesting kind of reaction for me. So one of the things that's made a difference. So I wanted to come in and tell you, since the last time I saw you, I am better at meditation than I was the last time I saw you. I don't know if I'm as good as I was 10 years ago. But for me, what's been helping is to put it in the phone. If the phone's distracting me and drawing my attention, can I put some meditation in my phone? And so I have your app, which I think is wonderful. And I highly recommend it. The conversations about meditation that answer some of your

questions can help keep you focused and give you that sense of forgiveness that you're going to mess up in meditation. And there are predictable ways we mess up. And it's okay. So I loved that. Meditation is mess up and you know it's okay. So I love that. Meditation is messing up. Yeah it is. You're not doing it wrong, you're doing it right when you mess up. And you go and quote unquote, messing. Moving through that is what it is. So what's his name Joel? Joseph Goldstein. Joseph Goldstein. Yeah so those conversations between you and him on the app I think are really helpful. So it's not just brief, you know, you actually get to hear more. Yeah, well, I mean, the benefit that we like to do, and there are lots of great apps out

there, and I know you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're talking about them. I love, I love, I guess I'm supposed to view them as competition, but, um, and this is why I'm such a terrible businessman. I actually think there are people out there doing amazing things. But what we do that I like, though, is that we get these people like Joseph Goldstein have been doing it for 50 years and we let you hear from them. Unfortunately, I have to listen to me ask the questions. No, that's not true.

No, that's not true. I mean, to me, that's the value add because while you were absolutely correct when you said for that, you know, we should have a playful attitude. We should be allowed to improvise a little bit and make the practice our own. It also is helpful to hear from people who've been doing this for decades and have been down every call to sack,

every blind alley in the mind possible and can say, well, let me tell you from my experience, that's probably ill advised. Or, no, that's your head in the right direction there, it's a good, et cetera. Or or like me who's been doing it for decades and to say I'm bad at it now I'm worse at it now that I was 10 years ago, you know And I hope that's freeing for other people to hear that too But I like bootify of using that and there's one called loving kindness meditation that I found in the app store

And and so yeah, so playing with a bunch of different apps and there's different things. And it's been helpful to have the distraction bring me to meditation instead of the distraction taking me away from it. That's really cool. I love the idea of co-opting the engine of our distraction, the phone, and using it as a way to actually tune in until being alive, et cetera, et cetera.

Because we become, I find, as a friend of mine, use this term that we're like these giant parade floats like we're all head. You know, we're all just stuck in our head all the time in part because we're glued into this phone all the time and we're not connected to the fact that we're like these living beings, this is starting to sound a little woo-woo, but it's true that we have these bodies,

we exist on planet Earth, and we're all just stuck in our head with words with friends, and how many likes do we have on the latest Instagram posts, et cetera, et cetera, and I love the fact that we can use the phone to cut the strings of the Mariana. Yes, absolutely. So, yes, so I've been doing that more, and because we are fanatics, some of these apps give you the opportunity to track how much you've been doing. But still, I think it's really good. And so I do use meditation in a goal-oriented way, but this is allowing me to do more when I would call pure meditation or meditation that's just

the overall discipline. Don't beat yourself about using it in a goal-oriented way. I think that's fine. As long as you don't take it too far and it doesn't sound to me, I'm not an expert, but it doesn't sound to me like you're doing that. It sounds to me like you're... Well, I wasn't beating myself up. Okay, good. Good. I was just distinguishing who I am.

Can you, can you, can you, speaking of who you are? We've neglected to do this far in this conversation. Just, can you give the urbex star because it's so awesome. Can you just tell that a little bit? It's a crazy story. So I'm the first African-American to win Olympic medals in Winter Olympics. And because I lost my leg when I was five years old,

I competed in the Paralympics. Actually, before it was called the Paralympics. And it was called the World Winter Games for the disabled under the ausp Games for the Disabled Under the Ospices of the International Olympic Committee. That's an unwielding thing. So they came up with a new name. trivia.

So I have on my Olympic medals, the Olympic rings, which now they don't, because they have the Paralympic logo. And I have this logo that they came up with, for this thing. And they took the Olympic rings and they broke them. And so they're like these broken rings. I know it's like a really bad idea.

It was a really bad idea that came and went. So there's history as they were figuring out what they were gonna do. But anyway, so I was in the Paralympics, but the crazier part of the story is I grew up in San Diego and my family did not have a lot of money. So a lot of people say, wow, you skied on one leg, it's 70 miles an hour, I'm like, yeah,

but it's really hard to ski with no money. Yeah. So I grew up in San Diego, yes, so I was, so one leg at Black Girl from San Diego who ends up becoming an international ski racer. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So in addition to that, you know, how did you lose your life?

It was a birth defect. The growth was stunted. So my legs looked normal when I was born, but the right leg didn't grow as much as it should have. So, if they hadn't done anything, my foot would probably be sticking out where my knee is. But as it is, so they amputated my foot, gave me the artificial leg, and as you know, I can walk around pretty fine.

Yeah. I wear the leg without, since we're on audio, I can walk around pretty fine. Yeah. I wear the leg without, since we're on audio, I can tell you I wear the leg without a cosmetic, so it looks like the terminator, it has a lot of metal in it. And that's a lot of fun because I'm going through airports and things and, you know, kids will look at it and they'll say, see, I'm a transformer. But it starts interesting conversations. The Dalai Lama, I met the Dalai Lama and he looked at my leg and he was like, wow, you know, that's so neat. And he gave me a big hug. It's nice to have it be literally transparent to be out there with it. And when you put the cosmetic on it, it never, the cosmetic doesn't look like real skin. You know, it's an approximation. And. And people look at it like, what is that?

This way people know what it is. When you have the metal, it is what it is. It makes it a lot easier to get through airport security, too. I'm going to travel with you. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi.

And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears.

When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. How did you take this experience as somebody with a disability and somebody with an athletic, an incredible athletic accomplishment and turned it into what you've become now. Well, I also was a nerd. Actually, when I was growing up, I couldn't, I wasn't on school teams. You know, I wasn't an athlete growing up. I used to read books on the playground

because I couldn't do hopscotch and double dutch. So I always wanted to write books. I was a real nerd, I went to Harvard, and then I was a Rhodes Scholar and went to Oxford. I worked for IBM, which taught me a lot about computers, which I loved in sales, and then worked in the White House on the economic team in the Clinton administration, and then started my own business.

So did a lot of motivational speaking, but then ultimately started doing a lot more leadership consulting with clients and I run a women's leadership program. So I do a lot of diversity work. Actually just got asked to be on the diversity advisory board for Uber. Nice. So that was a bit of a... Was that... Did you have to think twice about that?

I did because, you know, there's a lot of serious things that have been going on there and they know that and they want to address those problems. But I, you know, I wanted to know, are they serious? You know, if they're inviting me in to be window-dressing, you know, I don't want to do that. So, I do believe they're serious and they have a real burning platform, which helps companies make change

when you have a real burning platform. And so I am going to the first meeting and we'll see how it goes. But if I can be part of something that's a really positive change, I certainly would like to. So tell me about the new book. We talked about it a little bit, but how does it fit

into your overall message and mission? So the book is micro-resilience, and it's my seventh book, I think. I've just pounded these things out. Well, no, I've been doing this for many years, but I've written about. And you wrote it with your husband. I wrote it with my husband, yes, thank you for saying that.

Alan Haynes, let's give him credit, you know. Well, I know, because he came to I wrote it with my husband. Yes, thank you for saying that, Alan Haynes. Let's give him credit, you know. Well, I mean, because he came to the last tape, maybe the long lost first tape. Long lost first tape. The basement tapes. So, yeah, so it's micro resilience, but it builds on a lot of the things I've done.

I've written about joy, I've written about prayer, I've written about women's leadership with my daughter. And I think all along people are always saying, you know, how do I have more resilience? How do I, how do my kids have more resilience? How do my team at work have more resilience? And so this is a very practical book that we looked at a lot of things that I used, a lot of research that I learned, and then added, scoured the literature and curated it into these five areas. And it's called micro-resilience because it's small things that you can do each day. We tend to think of resilience as big things

as how do I recover from cancer or a hurricane or a lost job, but there's also little resilience. How do I recover from a bad meeting that I was in or a conflict with the coworker? So this is the... I was just in a bad meeting. Micro-resilience. Okay, so what do I do?

So, I'm doing a lot of apologizing. That's my first step, but what else should I do? That sounds good. So there's five different areas. There's things that can help your brain be more resilient, that we get mental overwhelm, our brains get exhausted.

We talked about the reset area, which is responding to mental high, emotional hijacks. How can we be less emotionally hijacked? The third one is spiraling to the positive, that we, as human beings, we're designed to spiral quickly to the negative. So how do we strengthen our muscles to go positive? And then there's a couple of little things we do for metabolism, just keeping your metabolism more even, because when your metabolism is flying around, it's, you know, you get hangry.

Yeah. So it's harder to do the other things. And then the final one, the fifth one, gets a little more complicated, but it's on purpose. So looking at how do you clarify your purpose, but not just that. A lot of people talk about clarifying your purpose, but then you put it on a shelf and you go to work, you know. So we talk about how do you then connect your purpose to your day-to-day work. So at three in the afternoon when you're tired and frustrated, how does purpose help you?

So that's micro-resilience, is the little things you can do throughout the day. So which of those appeals to you after your bad meeting? They all do. Can we just go on, can we just say more about all of them? I'm serious. Okay. They're really, really interesting. You just take them one by one to say more. So mental overwhelm, I think of it has our prefrontal cortex is the most advanced part of our brain.

And it's a, but it's a late addition in terms of evolution. It's something that was added late. And we, I would say we're so overusing it that it was designed, you know, with primitive man occasionally used the prefrontal cortex and allows you to envision things to plan, to restrain your impulses, you know, is what it does. But now we're using it for everything. Like you said, we live in our brains and there's so much information coming at us, compared to even 50 years ago, we're just putting so much demand on it.

So one of the insights is if we understood the limitations of our advanced brain more and respected them more, we get more use out of it. Like when it's exhausted and overwhelmed, it's not working very well. So stop trying to use it for everything. So it's simple tips like offloading more things from your brain. And that can be writing down to do list, but it's also checklists. So things you do repeatedly, instead of just trying to remember everything you do,

have more crib sheets, and even less decision making. So I tend to wear black tops, black skirts, and black shoes, and just change the colors of my jackets, you know, and it's less complexity. It's creating a habit structure that lowers the cognitive load. Yes, and the more you can do that, the more you're going to seem smarter. Right? And so some of the tips revolve around that. There's also- Steve Jobs did that, right? I mean, in terms of his wardrobe. And Einstein, there's the big joke that he didn't even know his own phone number,

because he's like, why would I waste space in my brain for that? There's another insight that I love about exercise, too, for the brain is that we tend to think of exercises, you know, I'm going to work out for an hour, four times a week, and I was going to make it healthy. And that's macro. That's what we would call macro resilience. But for micro resilience, it's about the hour by hour day by day things that you're doing. And the research shows that a little bit of exercise can make you smarter for hours afterwards, so that if you do 20 minutes,

there's one study about 20 minutes of dancing or 10 minutes of walking, and your memory works better, you do better insights, better decisions, you generate more ideas. So if you know that, it changes the way you behave. This has been a huge behavioral change for me. Is in the past, you would say, I have a big project today. Either I have to finish a report

or I have to deliver a speech. And you say, you know what, I had my workout yesterday and I'll do another one tomorrow. I'm in good shape, but today I gotta focus on this work I have to do. But if you understand that inside about micro resilience, you would say, oh, I really want to just do a little bit of exercise this morning,

because it's gonna make me smarter. And I can do better at that thing I'm trying to do. And so it's different. The macro resilience exercise looks like maybe getting really sweaty and working with a trainer, you know, it's this perfect idea of exercise. But the micro resilience exercise you do to help you be more effective today might look simple. I love that. to be more effective today might look simple. I love that I worked out this morning for 30 minutes and then meditated for 30 minutes and promptly got up and did something stupid that led to the bad meeting that I just referenced.

So it didn't help you to be smarter. No, just think how much worse it would have been. Yes, I was just going there. Okay, so what else was on the list? So we talked a little bit about reset because I said conscious relaxation helps you pull back from the amygdala hijack, right? Because we're tensing up and so you pull back

and then labeling is another one. And another one in that category is smells. There's certain smells that also cut through an amygdala hijack and sounds. So I've heard that from Dr. Borishenko. So the third one is spiraling to the positive. And again, we are conditioned as primitive, the genes we inherited are to spiral to the negative. If anything is possibly negative, we get really strong reaction. But with positive things,

I always say like, if primitive man saw the bushes rustle, you might think, oh, if somebody's coming to attack or the saber tooth tire, but if primitive man sees berries, you just go, berries, you know, we don't respond strongly to the positive. So training ourselves to do that. So one of the simple things that we talk about in the book is a joy kit is having a first aid kit for your attitude.

So we have first aid kit for a cut or a bruise, but you know bad things, like you had your bad meeting today. So you could have a first aid kit for a cutter or a bruise, but you know bad things like you had your bad meeting today So you could have a first aid kit for your attitude at your desk It could be a drawer or a box or and you put things in it that help you turn your attitude back to the positive So in picture of my kid exactly and so I was just saying mine I have a note from my mother who passed away 10 years ago that says cherish yourself I have a note from my mother who passed away 10 years ago that says cherish yourself. It's that old-fashioned penmanship. Some people put, you know, sand from their last beach vacation, or I know somebody who

has a digital recording of their dog barking. But one of the things is our desks often are like a joy kit, right? It's we have pictures, we have all these positive things, we put on our desk, but they disappear. You know, you stop seeing them after things we put on our desk, but they disappear. You know, you stop seeing them after a while, they don't have that emotional impact. So part of the idea of a joy kit is things that you put away that you can pull out.

And a lot of people do them on their phones. So if you're traveling a lot, I know one woman who was just an executive who had an iPhone and she would look at it when she's in a taxi, and she was having a lot of problems getting negative ratings as a leader. And the joy kit was one of the things she did that really shifted her positivity,

so helped her shift more into the positive. And she had tried so many different things. She'd had different coaches, but instead of, you know, the coaches told her, smile more, don't cross your arms so much. You know. Instead of external changes, it helped create an internal shift to the positive that helped her to be a better leader. The side effect, though, was she told me, so I was following some people who were using these techniques from micro-resilience. And she said, she started dating.

It was the first time in four years she'd been dating, because again, she made this internal shift that was more positive energy, and she started dating. So. Nice, I like that. So we've done three out of the five. internal shift that was more positive energy and she started dating. Nice. I like that. So we've done three out of the five. So the fourth one is refresh techniques. And this is really simple. It's metabolism, but I am not a nutritionist. You know, I am not an exercise consultant. So it's just saying stay hydrated

and keep your blood sugar more even. So make sure you're eating food on a regular basis. So it's not just about how many calories you're eating. You know, it's, are you keeping your blood sugar even? And the funny part about this is, you know, people say drink six or seven glasses of water a day and you may be good at that, but when you're under pressure,

again, when you're trying to get that debt, that's when you forget. And so the micro resilience insight is when you're thinking about how to be more resilient during the day and how to perform at your best, it's, are you drinking water when you're under pressure? And there's a lot of studies about that too, kids that drink water before a test do better. It's very, our brain can't really store glucose or water or hydration. And so your brain can get dehydrated even before you feel thirsty.

So, it's a lot about performance. Again, I'm the Olympic skier. This is all about day-to-day performance, hour-by-hour performance. I have no beef with the eye. I want that. I'm incredibly ambitious. I have two shows on ABC. I got this podcast.

I got a startup company, I've read books. I have two shows on ABC. I got this podcast. I got a startup company, ready books. I'm all, you don't need to apologize. So no, I'm not apologizing. I think it's a good marriage. Some people say micro-resonance and they look at it and they go, oh, it's wellness. And I'm like, it's a marriage kind of a wellness and high performance because it is so goal-oriented.

It's not saying, oh, just relax and drink water. It's drink water when you're under pressure. And that's a key thing that we forget to do. And then the fifth area was purpose. It's about purpose. So I actually think that's incredibly important. And you said before, if it's three o'clock in the afternoon, you're tired and cranky or whatever,

and you just had a fight or whatever, how do you reconnect your purpose? How do you reconnect your purpose? So one example is what we call touchstone, is having a touchstone that you're conscious of being able to use throughout the day. A friend of mine, Sylvia Burwell, who was Secretary of Health and Human Services and is now the president of American University, when she was at the Gates Foundation, she had a picture of an African girl who was 10 years old that she put in the conference from wall on the wall. And when you, when I think about the Gates Foundation, I think, how could you lose sight of purpose?

You know, you have billions of dollars you're spending to fix all the world's worst problems. You know, every day, that must be like a purpose romp. But the reality is, there's a lot of red tape, there's egos, there's warlords, there's all these things getting in the way of actually being able to solve a health crisis in Africa or something. And so, you might be getting in these conversations, should we solve 20% of the problem for 80% of the people or 80% of the problem for 20 percent of the people or should we make this compromise. So she put the picture there in the conference room so that when her team is sitting down having one of these discussions, she called the girl the boss.

She would say, what would the boss think? And it's sort of like if you had to explain your idea to a 10-year-old girl in Africa, would you be embarrassed? Maybe you should rethink it. So is it touchstone to pull everybody back to a sense of purpose and reminding them of what they're there for? Organizational, this strikes me is very difficult because sometimes the organization will come up

with its purpose and then put it on everybody's ID cards or paint it on the wall, but then it becomes invisible. So how do you make it visible? I think it's what she did. Yeah, because that was her thing for her team. Yeah. I think when you have like the overall corporate purpose, that is a challenge. And I think it's good they do at least try to put it on your ID card.

But I think what you do for your team, and you could also do touch-done as an individual. Is what's your individual touch-done? Alan, my husband, used to do a lot of the marketing for movies for Disney. And he was so passionate about Disney. When he grew up in Pennsylvania, and when he was 10 years old, his father drove him out to California to go to Disneyland. And he was so excited. He had been watching the wonderful world of Disney on TV, you know, and to actually be there on Main Street. He looked around and he said, this is what I want

to do. You know, I want to do entertainment. And so years later, he finds himself working with Disney. But the reality is there's egos, there's celebrities, there's stars, there's narcissists, you know, it's not all just about entertainment, right? So his touchstone is he would go down to Disney and sit on a bench on Main Street and watch the families laughing and smiling and remind himself, this is why what I did it would I do. So it's having some touchstone and it can be a picture, it could be a phrase that you put on your desk having something that you can use to pull you back at three in the afternoon when you're tired. What if you had to write a phrase about your purpose, what would

pull you back? We'll get to that a second. I'm just going to say what you're talking about reminded me of a previous guest we had in the show whose book I happened to be rereading. His name is Thubton Jindpa, which is a Tibetan name. He is the Dalai Lama's English translator. So in return, Dalai Lama speaks anywhere. You see this guy in a nice business suit next to him. It's not a monk. That's Thubton Jindpa. And he was on the show, actually, you can listen, listen, just go back and find it. He wrote a book, I wouldn't have called the book this because I'm not a huge fan of the word heart, but he called it a fearless heart, which I highly recommend. It's a really great book.

He worked with Stanford University to develop a loving kindness or compassion meditation training course over eight weeks, sort of a systematized protocol that they could then teach people and then do scientific research on. So he talks about intention setting. So in the morning, saying to yourself, you know, this is my intention, this is my purpose, this is what I want to do today. And then at the end of the day, kind of revisiting it. And I can think the old version of me would rebel against something as touchy feelies that, but I've found now that I'm old and soft, that it's actually quite useful. And in the Buddhist phrase, would be, you know, setting the impossible goal of, you know,

may all beings be free from suffering, which is impossible, but a nice aspiration. And not a bad thing to think about, like, is everything you're doing in some way useful to other living beings? That would be a purpose. That would be your purpose? Yeah. Say it again. Is the overall thrust of my life in the direction of alleviating human and animal suffering? Am I doing a good job on that? Am I at least making a contribution to that?

That's interesting. So as a touchstone, as you come out of this bad meeting and you are frustrated with your day, how does that help you with that? I actually think I was right in the overall thrust of what I was suggesting. I think I went about it the wrong way. So I created a little suffering. And so that's why I reverted to the apology. So you feel like I did that wrong. So I'm going to apologize. Yes. But I think the overall move that I was suggesting was the right one. So but does reminding yourself of purpose

help you to feel better coming out of that or help you get back on track? It does now, I would never have thought to do that. That's why I like your advice. You know, in a bad moment, sort of step back and say, all right, what is the purpose again? What's my job on the planet? And is-

Check in with that. Yeah, is what I just did or what I'm about to do aligned with that, and that can kind of get your head straighter to give you a sense of, okay, well, that thing just happened, I can't change it, but I can touch base with my touchstone, what's my overall job on the planet, and can inform my next steps. And so when you do that, what I hear is that you feel like you did the right thing, like apologizing is on track with your purpose.

Yes. But it just feels good to go, yeah, oh, that's good. OK, now I can move forward. Yes. Yeah. So great. You can ask me mine. Yeah, what is yours?

I wasn't going to go ahead because I'm so in my own self-centered head space. But thank you for popping me out of that. So definitely inspiring people and it's inspiring people to sort of see what's possible in life and to see how to be the best version of themselves. And I think as the one-legged African-American ski racer from San Diego, you know, that's part of, you know, you can see that that's the assignment that I got is, my life is such a symbol of what is possible that you wouldn't have expected.

And so helping other people to see what that means in their own life is, is how can you go beyond the boundaries of what you thought you could do. So okay, so in your traveling, you just talked earlier about how it's stressful to travel. And your flight's delayed, or maybe you get, there's a sharp word exchanged with somebody at the counter who's telling you, actually you can't fly until tomorrow,

and there's no hotel available, or whatever. How do you operationalize the idea of reconnecting with your touchstone in those moments? Or do you? You know what, I had that the other day. I had that on Friday. I was supposed to fly from DC to Newark, and I was flying there to go to my daughter's boarding school for parents weekend, and I was really looking forward to seeing my husband and my daughter and everything, and the flight wasn't going to go.

And they said they after, you know, a while of time going by, they finally announced that the repair people weren't even going to come for three hours to start working on the plane. And there were no other flights. And by this time, all the trains from DC to Newark were gone. And so I rented a car and I drove and I got there. I was tired and so I was a little cranky. But what I said at the time and as I'm talking to my office, I'm talking to my husband, I'm talking to the airline, is that when you travel as much as I do, you just do the next thing. Like, okay, this plane's not going. There's no drama about it. Why have drama about that? That's just

wasted emotion. And it is upsetting here. Like, okay, but just, okay, what's next? Is it the train? Looks like all the trains are going to be gone. Most people are going over to the train. I think I'm going to let that go. Besides, there's a lot of transitions. If I took the train, I'd have to take the taxi to the train. And anyway, you see what I mean. Is you just figure out what's next. And if you can be at peace, and not, I can't always do that. I'm not perfect, but I just find it's an easier way to live is to be peaceful through those changes. And as I was driving, I used the time to hands-free call, but catch up with some different people in my office and in my life and just move the energy somewhere else, I guess is

the answer. That all makes perfect sense to me. St else, I guess, is the answer. That all makes perfect sense to me. Strip out the drama, do the next thing. How does that fit into the five areas of resilience that we discussed or does it? Well, as you said, staying on purpose is that you, if this is the time I have, it's not in a plane, but in a car. How do I stay on purpose? If you do get upset and sometimes I do,

can you do some deep breathing or something to calm just the physiological reaction you're having to a thread? Do anything of the brain part? I mean, there's different ways. So, yeah, so you can definitely use it all. You're awesome. Thank you. And thank you for your purpose and what you're doing,

because you're really making a big difference for a lot of people who are contributing a lot on the planet to help them contribute better. Okay, so that does it for another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. Please take a minute to leave us a rating and a review. And if you want to suggest topics or guests for the show, just hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Special thanks to Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan, and the rest of the team here at ABC

who helped make this thing possible. And remember, we're now on Tune-in. You can hear our new episodes there five days early, on Fridays, through the end of this year. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.