Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 282: The “Lifequake” Survival Guide | Bruce Feiler

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

We have another themed week for you, with two episodes about how to navigate major life changes-- clearly a resonant theme, given the various dumpster fires that are raging in our world right now. Coming up on Wednesday, we’re going to get a deep dharma take on this subject, but today, we’ve got a guest who takes a more journalistic/scientific approach. His name is Bruce Feiler. He has a new, bestselling book called Life Is In the Transitions. In it, he offers seven tools for navigating what he calls “lifequakes,” which can range from divorce to job loss to addiction. Bruce has written a series of bestselling books, including Walking the Bible, and Council of Dads, which became a TV show on NBC. He didn’t mean for this new book on transitions to come out during a pandemic, but the timing is perversely perfect. In this conversation, we talk about: the events in his own life that got him interested in this subject; why “lifequakes” are a feature, not a bug; and why the word “resilience” makes Bruce grumpy. Where to find Bruce Feiler online: Website: https://www.brucefeiler.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brucefeiler Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BruceFeilerAuthor/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brucefeiler/ Book Mentioned: Life Is in the Transitions by Bruce Feiler: https://www.brucefeiler.com/books-articles/life-is-in-the-transitions/ Other Resources Mentioned: Jean Piaget's Theory and Stages of Cognitive Development: https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html Freud's Psychosexual Stages of Development: https://www.simplypsychology.org/psychosexual.html Erik Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development: https://www.simplypsychology.org/Erik-Erikson.html Daniel Levinson on Midlife Crisis: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5e75/2a77fb59cc48e9eea4b1ef4c53056b0f140e.pdf Elliot Jock on Midlife Crisis: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-23-me-jacques23-story.html The Rites of Passage by Arnold van Gennep: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Rites_of_Passage.html?id=kJpkBH7mB7oC William James: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/bruce-feiler-282 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello fellow suffering beings. We've got another themed week for you with two episodes about how to navigate major life changes, clearly a extremely resonant theme given the various dumpster fires that are raging in our world right now, messing many of us up. Coming up on Wednesday, we're going to get a deep Dharma take on this subject, but today we've got a guest who takes a more journalistic slash scientific approach. His name is Bruce Filer. He has a new best-selling book called Life is in the Transitions. In it, he offers seven tools for navigating what he calls Life Quicks, which can range from divorce to job loss to addiction. Bruce has, by the way,

of background written, a whole series of best-selling books, including Walking the Bible and Council of Dads, which then became a TV show on NBC. He did not mean for this new book on transitions to come out during a pandemic, but the timing is perversely perfect. In this conversation, we talk about the events

in his own life that got him interested in this subject, why lifequakes are a feature, not a bug, and why the word resilience makes Bruce Grumpy. Here we go, Bruce Filer. All right, well, nice to see you. Thanks for doing this. My pleasure, Dan. Thank you for having me.

What, how would you describe the thesis of this book? I'm debating whether I should start right with the thesis or tell you how I came to the thesis. So, I think I'll do the second way because I didn't go into this project with the thesis, but a big linking thesis showed up halfway through. So, what happened and kind of what led me into this? Some of the things that I'm going to talk about is how we deal with these big, wrenching changes in our life. I call it a lifequake.

And a lifequake is what we're in now. And I got interested in these because I went through a lifequake some years ago, as you know, first I got cancer, as a new dad. That was the same year as the Great Recession and my family was hit very hard. And then my dad, who has Parkinson's lost control of his mind. This was a man who was never depressed, a minute in his life. And he tried to take his life six times in 12 weeks. And this was a kind of a big crisis in every way you can have

a crisis, the conversations that we had to have were unhappable. I like difficult conversations and these were difficult conversations that were impossible to have. But I'm the story guy and I'm the meaning guy in one morning and one Monday morning, I woke up and I said, well, here's an idea. Like, what if I send my dad a question? Because my dad was always a bit of a storyteller. And I sent him a question like,

what toys did you play with as a kid? Couldn't move his fingers at this point, Dan. And what he thought about it all week, he dictated his answer to Siri who spit it out, he began to edit it and it worked. And so I've, like, also named him another one, like, don't even have to house you correctly. And this went on essentially every Monday morning

for what became years. I think about the how you become an eagle scout, how you join the Navy, how you meet mom. And this man who had never written anything longer than, like, a three sentence memo in his life backed into writing a 50,000 word autobiography. And I got very interested in like times of crisis in our lives, like it's a narrative event in some way. And it turned out there's a whole field narrative gerontology. There's a whole field

of narrative adolescence and narrative medicine and kind of storytelling was just becoming kind of a thing that people talked about at that time. And so what happened, and you know, this makes me think of your own life and how you ended up in this conversation is when I began to tell the story to people, everybody had a similar story. My wife had a headache and went to the hospital

and died my daughter tried to kill herself. I had never sprained down on my television in your case. And I thought, well, no one has had to tell their story anymore. And let me see what I can figure out because what people were saying is like the life I'm living is not the life I expect. Like I'm living I'm out of order in some way. And I call my wife one night. And I said, I got to figure out a hell. And I don't know what I'm going to find. And I don't know how to do it, but I feel compelled to do this. And so I set out on this journey, what

became three, four years, crisscrossing the country, collecting what became hundreds of life stories of Americans, all ages, all walks of life, all 50 states. And you name it. Dan, people lost homes, lost limbs, changed careers, changed genders, changed religions, got sober, got out of bad marriages. And at the end of it, I had, it was powerful, but it was like too much. I had 6,000 pages of transcripts, a thousand hours of interviews, and I ended up doing something I've never done in 30 years

of writing books. I got a whole team of people and we spent a year coding these stories, combing through them, debating them, kind of beating one under against the head, trying to figure out what was the big message, what was the big theme coming out of it. And so that's the backstory and now I can answer your question. So the big idea that emerged out of this was that the linear life is dead. The idea that you and I grew up with, that you're going to have one home, one job, one relationship, one spirituality, one source of happiness from adolescence to assisted living, like that's just

gone. And it's been replaced by what I call the nonlinear life, which has many more twists and turns, and that involves many more life transitions. And so my book then gets into kind of a toolkit for how to navigate them. And kind of my point is that this is a skill that we all must have. But this is a lifelong skill of a lifelong sport that no one's teaching us how to play. And I've been thinking this for years, I've been working on this for half a decade, and the book arrives low and behold at this moment when the entire planet is going through a life transition at the same time.

Use terms like a disruptor and a lifequake. What do those terms mean and what's the difference? So the essence of the nonlinear life is a series of changes that we all go through in the course of our lives. And one of the big themes that emerged from these conversations is that the number of these changes is going up. The variety of them is getting broader and the span in our life that they happen is getting wider.

So this kind of myth of the midlife crisis that everyone's gonna, the whole idea of passages book in the 1970s until 20 million copies said everyone does the same thing under 20s, same thing under 30s, and then everyone has a midlife crisis at 39 and a half. Like that's all gone. We have these changes across our lives.

And so what I did was I teased them out and it turned out there were 52 of these. I call the fundamental base unit of change a disruptor. And I used that word very intentionally because they're not all crises. They're not even all negative. Like some of them are positive. Getting married is a disruptor.

Having a child is a disruptor choosing to change jobs or to move. That's a disruptor. So a disruptor is the basic unit of change. My data show that we go through three dozen in the course of our lives. That's one every 12 to 18 months. And most of them we go through three dozen in the course of our lives. That's one every 12 to 18 months. And most of them we get through. We're pretty good at adapting to change. It turns out we go through a bit of discomfort.

We rally around our friends. We adjust our lives. We kind of tweak our life story. And then we move on. But one in 10 of those becomes a massive change. And that's what I call a lifequake. And I call it a lifequake because it's higher on the Richter scale than consequences and the aftershocks last for years.

And so these lifequakes, they could be voluntary, moving, changing religions, leaving a bad marriage in voluntary, your spouse cheats on you, you get fired, you lose your limbs and an accident, you get a diagnosis. But a lifequake is the event, but how you get through it is the life transition. And it's interesting because this is the thing I think that's landing at the moment that this book is landing is the lifequake is the pandemic. The lifequake is the virus. It's the shock that we all took and they were all taking and it's gonna last for years. But the one hand, it's a collective involuntary lifequake in my terminology, but what's interesting is

that the way we experience it is different. So, you may be making a job change. Someone else may choose to get sober. Someone else may choose to leave a bad marriage or to have a baby or delay having a baby. So, it's interesting because we're all going through this together on the one hand, but on the other hand, the way each of us is gonna respond to it,

the transitions that are gonna come out of it are gonna be different depending on who we are and where we are and what circumstances we face in our lives. I'm gonna jump the gun here because I wanna get deeply into the toolkit, the fact that these are how we handle a transition is there are skills that we can develop. But I just, you know, when people talk about the pandemic and we're all in it together,

we're all in the same boat, it's often been said, you know, we're not, some of us are in yachts and some of us are on rafts. And so it's a loaded proposition in my mind to talk about skills or you're handling this better, but because so many of us are, we're so much more vulnerable to this lifequake than others. Well, this is, you know, I have a couple of reactions to that. So I created, I analyzed all these lifequakes. That was sort of the essence of what it was. And let me just say that they, I did them on two different categories, on two different

matrix for axes, if you will. One was voluntary or involuntary. Okay, and that was more or less 50-50. 47% of people's lifequakes were voluntary, people choosing to make a change. 53% were involuntary. And what's interesting is, I was born in 1964, which is nominally the tail end of the baby boom, and I looked at this and I thought, wow, 47% of our lifequakes, like, cool, like What's interesting is I was born in 1964, which is nominally the tail end of the baby boom. And I looked at this and I thought, wow, 47% of our lifequakes, like cool, like we're

getting the nominant in your life, we're getting the idea, we've inhabited the idea that we can change our lives. I had a bunch of millennial coders on my team and they looked at this and were like, oh, 53% of lifequakes are involuntary. They were still kind of clinging to the mythology that they were going to be able to control their lives. The other metric I used was collective or personal. So personal is something that happens to you and a collective is something that happens

to a large group of people. So the smallest category was collective involuntary lifequake. So a collective involuntary lifequake would be a natural disaster. I talked to somebody a preacher in Joplin, Missouri. That was the most devastating tornado that the country had ever seen. 9-11 was the one that came up most commonly. I talked to a professor at NYU named Naomi Clark, who was born male body, and always felt that something was off.

They had never heard the idea of transgender, the idea that she might be a woman because she was male-bodied and she was caught downtown on 9-11, covered in ash and she thought I may lose she was a game designer at Lego at the time and she thought I may lose my job, my parents and friends may shun me but I've now come face-to-face with an existential moment. I would rather be alone and be true to myself than not be true to myself. And that became the motivation that inspired her

to go through the transition and become a woman. She actually threw, we'll get into this later in the toolkit. She actually threw a hormone party because people use rituals in these moments. So 9-11 came up with, and there's a line in my book then, like speaking writer to writer here, like a throwaway line, that had I done these conversations a century ago, there would have been many more collective involuntary lifequakes. There were two world wars and depression, and it showed,

I think my line is something like it shows that we're kind of more me oriented, and we go through these things alone, and then suddenly, here's this collective involuntary lifequake that we're all going through. But since you did teased that we're going to talk about the toolkit, I think what happened was, when we first went in it, there was a period of profound denial. Like, we're gonna stay home, we're gonna beat it,

and things are gonna go back. And of course, that's one of the things that happened. We now know some months into this that we're to go back. And of course, that's one of the things that happened. We now know some months into this that we're not going back. So the thing I want to say is that the experience of going through what I think is very profound. And now I want to address the point you just made about how it feels.

One of the things that surprised me most, but that was very clear and that frankly, is not in the literature of human psychology and development that I have seen and God knows I know that literature, tried to know that literature very well, is that these disruptors, they tend to clump. They tend to gather together just when you get fired, you know, you wreck the car. Just when you're going to move, your daughters found out to have an eating disorder and your mother-in-law needs cataract surgery.

And I think that that is what I've been thinking about in the pandemic, because I think that what, and I struggled with what to name this for months. I couldn't figure out like, why was it happening? And I eventually came to call it a pileup from like the old black-and-white movies, you know, where the first car stops and then the second car wrecks and then then the next one and then the next one and the next one. And so, some of this is coincidental.

Some of this is like a last draw, but really what I've become convinced is happened in a lot of cases. It's as if our immune system gets weakened. It gets weakened by one difficult thing that we're going through. And so when something that is small that we might be able to be back comes along, we get sick a second time. And that's why I think it's going on in the pandemic. So the pandemic is a massive pilot.

So we have this economic challenge. We have the emotional challenge we're working from home. We're starting having to adjust our work-life balance. Do I have a job? Should I quit my job to take care of my children, like, what am I going to do with my aging parents? This is what I'm facing, what you're facing, what everybody is facing. And so I think that our immune system is weakened.

And so therefore, other problems that we have, some problem in our marriage, a drinking problem, you know, an anxiety problem, something that may have been tamped down when we're just in the rush of normal life, seems more acute because we don't have as much power in our emotional metabolism systems in order to beat it back. So but within this framework, how do you think about the fact that people of color or the economically disadvantaged have just taken so much more of a hit. Would you just think that their lives have had way more lifequakes, disruptors, pile-ups heading into this?

So that's what made them more vulnerable. Right. So I think a couple of things about this. First of all, in general, this is a situation where it doesn't discriminate against anybody. Anybody can get the virus. But what's happened is in certain communities, in certain families, in certain individuals who already have a weakened immune system because of economic disadvantages or structural racism or any other reasons, this has exacerbated those

problems. It's almost exactly the same point. But there's another dimension to this actually that I think is very interesting because I normally don't get to talk about this, but we have a luxury of time here. The pandemic is a collective involuntary lifequake. We're also going through another collective lifequake and it's Black Lives Matter and it's the protest movement. And I think it's an interesting question that we may spend decades trying to unravel is that why? Why was it George Ford and Brianna Taylor and,

you know, Amit Arbery, I'm here in Georgia as we're having this conversation? Why now when these problems have been here arguably for 400 years and this particular problem certainly for dozens, if not hundreds of months, I think the answer is because of the pilot phenomenon, which is to say that the collective body of the country was already weakened by the pandemic, it highlighted the problems that had been tamped down. And so suddenly one of the things that manifested is a collective volunteer life, because we wanted to do something.

There was some act of agency. That's, of course, another thing that we can get into in this conversation is, right, these lifequakes are meaning vacuums, and there are times when we think the building blocks that give us meaning. And I, of course, have three in my book, the ABCs of Meaning, one of them is agency. What we do act may create. One of them is belonging our relationships, friends, neighbors,

colleagues, and the sea as a cause, a calling something higher than ourselves. And what happens in lifequakes is we rebalance them. And so suddenly in the middle of the pandemic, like we decided we want to do something and we want to have a cause. And want to have a community that's a B and C in my model and out We go into the streets because it had been building up our immune system this weekend And that's an almost like a perfect example that life craze can be not just negative, but also positive We keep teasing the toolkit and I promise we'll get to it But just one more sort of foundational question here. You talked about life now being non-linear.

What changed? Yes. When was it linear and what came to disrupt that? I continue to think a lot about this question. But let me tell you what happened because it was kind of super interesting. We just to say, going back three, four years now, it was one of those moments in my life, Dan, I feel like I'm gonna spend the rest of my life

trying to understand. I like, I pulled the book off of a bookshelf and the bookcase opened and there turned out to be another book and the whole other room in the library, if you know what I'm saying. But it was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You know what told me that there was a sequest passage

way in this library and now I'm in this new room and here's what was in the new room. What was in the new room was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You know what told me that there was a sequest passage where in this library, and now I'm in this new room, and here's what was in the new room. What was in the new room was this idea that for me was new and electrifying, which was our lives have shapes. And every culture has a kind of paradigmatic shape, and that's how we think our lives are going to follow. And so what I mean by that is, like, how we look at the world affects how we look at our

life. So in the ancient world, you know, I've spent a lot of time, of course, in the ancient world, I wrote by books, Proven Run in Middle East, looking at stories of religion and spirituality and politics and conflict. So in the ancient world, they had no linear time. So they thought life was a cycle because that was the agricultural calendar. And so to every season turn, turn, turn, and they thought life was a cycle. The Bible in the West introduces the idea of linear time. And as you know, in my book, I found these things in the middle ages, they literally

had these hundreds and hundreds of graphs of your life with a staircase up to Middle Age. You then peak and then you go down. Incredibly rigid. Men and women alike. That means no new love at 40, no second career at 50, no divorce and starting over at 70, no moving to a new place and opening a B&B at 80, none of that. Straight up and straight down. And what's important about that is the way we all grew up, it was the opposite. Middle age was the bottom. So this all changes with

the birth of science 100 plus years ago when suddenly this was the Industrial Revolution and so suddenly life was linear. So if you think the first century of psychology, you have been as steeped in this as anybody in the last 10 years, Piaget with linear childhood development, Freud, psychosexual stages, Ericsson, the eight stages of moral development,

Ericsson in fact says that it was modeled on the conveyor belt, okay? And the five stages of grief development, Erickson in fact says that it was modeled on the conveyor belt, okay? And the five stages of grief, the hero's journey, these are all linear constructs. And this reaches its peak with Gail Sheehy and passages. She takes some flimsy research done by Dan Levenson at Yale where he interviewed 40 people, only men, Roger Gould at UCLA about San Austin questioners

about a midlife crisis. And she popularizes the idea of a midlife crisis She says everyone does the same thing under 30s and their 40s and then everyone has a midlife crisis Literally, Dan this says it must start at 39 and must end at 44 and a half Dan Levin's an only interviewed man, Elliott Jacques originally came up with the midlife crisis idea He said he didn't even talk to anybody. He did this in the 50s. He only read biographies of famous men. And he said, I couldn't do women because menopause throws the whole thing off. That shows you that it's absurd. I can't say because I didn't do these conversations in the 70s that it was totally bunked then.

Passages land is because divorce was just becoming popular dislocation and there was a lot of this going on. But now I can tell you that it does not apply now. It's just flat wrong. But even more important, we now know that chaos theory and complexity and neuroscience, we now know that life has periods of stability and periods of instability, periods of periodicity,

they call it a non-periodicity. With the web and complexity and network theory, we now know that we understand that the world is complex and non-linear, but we haven't updated our view of our lives. And that, I mean, you asked me at the beginning of this, you know, kind of my theme, kind of my mission in some ways, is to My theme, kind of my mission in some ways is to Open up the possibility that our lives can take all different shapes That's an empowering thing in our lives and then what I want to do in the toolkit is to empower you to then Take control of your life transitions and I will tell you this book. I've been doing this for 30 years. You know this I've never had something like this.

And then this will reaction people have. And what they're saying is, I feel relief. I feel like I'm not alone. You have given me permission to have the crazy, difficult upsetting nonlinear life that I've had. And I've been suffering in silence because of it. So this shape thing is absolutely central. And the last question I asked in each of 225 three-hour interviews was, what shape is your life? And people had all sorts of shapes. Some were lines, some were circles, some were objects, and it turns out people's shapes reflect

their priorities, kind of which of the ABCs of meaning that they care about. You know, I'm a lion. I mean, so I'm going to ask you what shape is your life? I was just thinking about that. I have no idea. I have no idea. Okay, so tell me, what's the first thing? Don't think about it too much. What shape in bodies are like? The word circles coming to mind, but I don't have any data to support it. Sounded like a nice thing to say. So what happened to me, why I got into this is I have a friend, Michael. He grew up a kind of abused kid in New Jersey, was always interested in the arts and creativity. He became a, he went into the beauty business

and the hair business and he is an artist. And so when I'm talking to him, I've known him for a while and I said, what shape is your life? Because I was obsessed with this question. And he said, a heart. As you know, I'm asking you, what shape, what's the ups and downs of your life? He's like, no, the heart is the shape of my life. I'm like, Michael, you don't understand.

He said, Bruce, you don't understand. I'm telling you, I don't look at my life as the ups and downs of my life. Relationships are the most important thing to me. That's why it's hard. And if I have these relationships, then the ups and downs of my work life, I don't care about as much. And I was like, woo! There's something going on in the world that I have not been thinking about. And I need to like adjust my classes, you know? And so this is what is what happened. I would ask people and this was the hardest thing for me to figure out. People would say everything.

They'd say butterflies. They'd say, my wife Linda works with entrepreneurs. She said, a light bulb. People would say twists and turns and hearts and houses. I was like, this is like a party game. It's like you're drunk at three in the morning and nobody cares. I eventually realized that we have these ABCs of meaning and the shape corresponds

to the ABCs of meaning. So people who tend to be work oriented or creators, that's why you threw me a little bit. I would have guessed you would have said a line, like I would have said a line up and down line because I think of my life. I revised my answer. It's an up and down line, but that trends upward inexorably.

Yes. It's a trend supper, okay? Because you're a creator and a writer and that makes total sense. up and down lines, but that trends upward inexorably. Yes. To trends upward, okay? Because you're a creator and a writer, and that makes total sense. You've had some ups and downs. But some people, because we're agency oriented, you're agency oriented, I'm agency oriented, but there's a lot of people out there that are relationship oriented. My wife, Linda, as you know, works with entrepreneurs around the world.

She is selected, my life is a light bulb. I like to help other people make their dreams come true. And some people could be a boxing, like if you're someone said lettuce because they're into plant-based medicine. So we all have these ABCs within us. I'm an ABC. So I would say agency first, I'm incredibly belonging-oriented.

I'm a very handsome dad, very family-oriented. I work by myself, I have a lot of friends. I'm less cause oriented. Linda is a CAB. So she's caused first, and then agency, and belonging is at the end for you. So how would you rank your ABCs? And think about your friend Michael, the who said that his heart, his life was shaped like a heart. I'm writing a book right now. And one of the things I'm writing about, my thoughts on this are not fully formed, and when they are fully formed,

I'm most likely to just stolen from other people. But this notion of individualism, rugged individualism, having a pretty pernicious impact on the Western mind, particularly Western men, where for me, my self-worth, my mood has for so long been caught up in the ups and downs of my career, whereas I was very moved, and I think you were too,

by what Michael said, whereas things can go up and down, but I'm not so buffeted by those particular wins because it really rests on relationships. And that's a more collective view. I don't have the answer yet to the ABC question, but that's what's on my mind as I listen you speak. Most of the answers and most of the ideas in my book were not gendered, I would say.

We talk about the phases of transitions, which we're going to get into in a second and the tools and the lifequakes. Most of these were not gendered. There were a few things that were gendered, and I would say that the people who identified belonging as their primary pillar of the ABCs in meaning did slightly favor women over men. Not entirely, Michael's a man, he's a gay man, but he is a man. But what happens in the lifequakes is that we shape shift, is that we imagine. So maybe we've been working very hard and either we've been, we choose to or we've been forced to leave a job and we say I want to spend more time with our family.

Or maybe we've been a primary caretaker and we become an empty nester or a loved one who, you know, an aging parent that we're taking care of, dies and we say we want to give back. Or maybe we've been giving back and we burn out and we say we want to do something for ourselves. So some people are cause oriented from the beginning, but later on might want to do something more for themselves. So the way I think about this visually, and maybe this, you know, we'll affect you as you're thinking about your book, is lady justice, right? But the two scales, think of Lady justice as having three scales

One of those is agency and one of those is belonging and one of those is cause and in various times in our life We have take pebbles and we move them from one to the other to rebalance Because we tend to either choose to or get forced to be too too oriented Toward one of those at various times in our lives. And if we get too overweighted in one, we just naturally gonna wanna change. So that's the point I wanna make with the ABCs. Though people tend to, I'd say, have a kind of a core construct here to use the psychological term. There's one that's kind of our defining one.

We do all have all three of them in us, and but we also change. Back to the idea of non-moneyarity, I'd like to completely reject the idea that you're one thing or the other, that you have one love language forever, or one trait that you need to exercise in your work life, or one aspect of your personality that you need to display. I think that that is a legacy to use the construct of this conversation of the linear life. That you take a test at 22 and determine a bunch of things about yourself and that can decide every decision

that you make the rest of your life. That is a real disservice we've done to people. Because in fact, we evolve, we change, we're not linear, and that's something that we should embrace. And I wanna reject the idea that it's one thing, and that's who you are, and you're stuck there from 22 on. Yeah, that jabs with the core thesis of everything. My team and I do under the 10% happier banner, which is that the mind is trainable.

And that's radically empowering good news. I would answer along those lines your question to say that I think I am an ABC endeavoring to gently transition to BCA. Interesting. I'm everything I know about you. You're a public life and you're writing. It totally makes sense with me. Well, I think I am acculturated and wired to be pretty selfish. And I don't believe

the change happens effectively or successfully with a sledgehammer. I think it happens through the pleasure centers of the brain. And I think that was the root the Buddha took to the extent that I understand the root the Buddha took. And so, seeing that the B and the C make me happier than just the A has been the root that I'm taking towards structuring my life in that direction, and also doing a lot of meditation practices that incline you in that direction. So again, I'm a Mr. 10%, so it's not an overnight transition and I don't think it's something I could bully myself into, but it's a worthwhile project. So I want to say two things about that, but that was very well expressed. I want to highlight what you said.

Throw a line that I want to put some attention on the second, which is that the brain is wired that way. When I was talking earlier about where do these paradigmatic shapes come from? They come from how we look at the world, right? So in the agricultural age, we thought it was cyclical. In the middle ages, which was a religion-dominated age, we thought we followed a certain path. And the idea of science and kind of linearity, an idea which is sort of fundamental to the beginnings of the Galileo and the beginnings

of the whole idea of Western science, a change, and I said it's changed, right? We now know that life is not linear and one of the ways we know that is because we can look inside the brain. And it turns out that the brain is not how they talked one of the reasons we know that is because we can look inside the brain. And it turns out that the brain, just not how they talked about the first century of psychology, has mirror neurons, has the capacity to change, has the capacity and the desire to remake itself. That is fundamentally a non-linear way

of understanding the mind. And I think neuroscience has helped us to change how we view the world, but we are lagers in changing how we look at our lives. That's the first thing I want to say. And the second thing will tee up the conversation that you've been teasing along, which is that what we've learned, and you've been at the forefront of this conversation for conversation for the last decade is whether it's happiness or habits that we can break down these essential tools of our lives into these small components, into small wins and small victories and 10% movements here or there, and that can have a big change in our lives. So we know that our souffle is not going to get souffleier. Our tennis game is not going to get better.

We know that we have to work on our bodies. We know that we have to work on our relationships. Transitions like how we get through these turning points in our lives have been left out Life is in the transitions like we're talking about this book that I wrote Like this is the first major book on my transitions in 40 years This is the first new model that we're about to discuss in 50 years You can actually say even almost a hundred years This is something that's been out of favor. And so I've been sitting on this story for, as I said, five years, right? We need to be telling my transitions. Like everybody

needs to understand, like, this is a skill we've got to have and no one's teaching it to us. And I've been bursting at the seams to tell people this. And then for something that I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand, it lands at this moment where everybody knows that we're in a life quirk and everybody knows we've got to make some change and no one's going to do it. And that's why there's this visceral hunger to this. That's why this book is on every best subtlest. It's why I went to six frintics in the last 12 days. It's like people have a hunger for this and the moment has demanded it of it. And so that attitude that you have about micro

medium-sized changes as the route to big changes, that is singing my song. And I'd like to add transitions to that group of things that we know can get better with 10% incremental change here or there. More of my conversation with Bruce Filer right after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast.

Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times.

But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. So let's talk at long last about the tool kit. Oh, we're out of time. Thank you very much for having me. I think people by now are probably very interested in learning. So what can we do to handle these lifequakes better?

So you get into a lifequake and I would say kind of one or two things happen. I'm kind of guessing where you would be. So I'm going to ask you that you're welcome to chime in. We either make a 217 item to do list. Like we're going to be manic and we're going to get through it and we're going to like, you know, like master this moment or we get stuck frozen in place and are in a people position in our in our in our bed. Look at enough of these as I have done and certain patterns become apparent. So the first thing to know is that there's going to be part of this process that you're good at. So transitions have three phases. The first phase is what I call the long goodbye,

where you were sang goodbye to the light that you left behind. The second phase is what I call the messy middle, where you're shedding certain habits, mindsets, lifestyle, and you are creatively inventing this new self of yours. And then the last phase is the new beginning, where you're finally going to unveil this new self to the rest of the world and update your life story. So there are three phases. So for the first century people talked about this because I know you like the geek out on the science. I want to geek out on the science for a minute here.

This idea was invented by a guy named Arnold Van Gennep, who was a German anthropologist a hundred years ago, who invented the phrase rights of passage. We would have thought that would be a phrase you invented. In fact, his translator says instead of rights of passage, it should be rights of transition. And he said that there are these three phases and you must do them in order. Because hello, this was the linear life moment. First you must say goodbye, then you must go to,

called it the twixed in between, and then you have the new beginning. He'd likened it in fact to leaving one room, walking down a hallway, and then entering a new room. Turns out this is totally wrong. So there are these three phases. one room, walking down a hallway, and then entering a new room. Okay? Turns out this is totally wrong. So there are these three phases. I think that's very well captured, but you walk out of the one room, you're in the hallway,

oh, you forget something in the old room, you go back, you know, then there's a new room, you peek around the corner, but you're not ready for it, and you go back to the mess, and I imagine if you're divorced, let's just say you're a divorced person with children. You can be starting a new relationship in that new room, but you're still parenting with your old spouse. In the old room, your constantly going back. So it turns out that people do these out of order. Okay. So, and everybody is good at one of these three phases. I call it your transition superpower and one of them

your bad at your transition crypt in my okay. So for example, some people are bad at saying goodbye. Maybe they're people, pleasers, maybe they don't want to disappoint people, they stick around too long, they're overly scared of what's going to come and so they stay around, but some people are good at saying goodbye. Okay, I talked to a woman, Nina Collins, whose mother died, she's a mixed-raced daughter of a black mother and a Jewish father. The father is not in the picture. Her mother dies at 19 and Nina has to raise her younger brother. She's gone on to have three marriages and twice as many jobs.

She said, my mother died. I'm very good at saying goodbye. Like, my therapist says that I underattached the things. So some people are bad at goodbye and some people are good. Same thing with the messy middle. When I originally called it the muddled middle, and I was talking to a woman in Rosemary Danielle in my hometown of Savannah, Georgia, who had a really tough childhood.

Her mother took her own life. She had three marriages and her first husband was abusive to her. The second husband confessed to incest on their honeymoon. The third husband leaves her. And then she said, I'm tired of being with these kind of artsy people. And she said, I want a macho man. And she went and she wrote a memoir called Sleeping with Soldiers. She lived on a world tanker. She dated only soldiers and bikiers. She lived on an oil tanker, she dated only soldiers and bikers, and she married an army trooper,

and they'd been married for 30 years. And so when I said, how was the muddled middle? And she's like, what are you talking about? I loved it. I was sexual freedom for me. I finally got over all of my childhood hangups, and it was difficult, but I loved it. I talked to a guy, Rob Adams,

who was a man from consultant from the Midwest. He was hired to run the Simon Pierce Glass Company, a family owned glass company in Vermont. You may have gotten something for your wedding from the Simon Pierce Glass Company. He starts work a month after the Great Recession, sales drop by a third in the first quarter. And it just wasn't gonna work.

And he said, he said, he stuck around way too long before it finally. He said, I was bad at saying goodbye. I like being a leader. I like being a mentor. I'd moved my family to Vermont. Once I finally said goodbye, I'm a consultant like I like the messy middle. I made lists. I consulted with 20 people. And a few months later, he moves his family to Africa and he starts running a nonprofit. So the most difficult phase for most people in the messy middle, some people are good at. Even in the new beginning, would you think that most people would be great at?

It's actually difficult for some people. I talked to one named Lisa Lutavichu. She was born in Pennsylvania. She came from a broken family, but no one in her family even came to her college graduation from Penn State. She was homeless, lived in her car for a while. She works radio and she takes a job at this new company

no one ever heard of called America Online. Selling ads. 15 years and 10 re-orges later, she's a powerhouse ad executive in New York City. She also has had three migraines a week since she was three years old. She logs onto a conference call one day early. No one knows she's there and her colleagues are talking She also has had three migraines a week since she was three years old. She walks onto a conference call one day, early, no one knows she's there, and her colleagues are talking about how sour she is.

She goes home, combs through her amics bills, walks in the next day, quits on the spot. Stop's going out to eat, stops shopping, cuts her cable, says, I can live for a while. Like, ten days in, she's watching local access television. She sees a conversation with somebody and she says, that's what I learned. I wanna help people get better. She enrolls in the life coach school. She flies to Santa Fe, three days in her head

on the table, the teacher walks in, why is your head on the table? Lisa says, oh, I've had three migraines a week since I was three, don't worry, this is nothing. Teachers just come with me. Takes her to her office, puts her in a chair, hypnotizes her. Lisa has never had a migraine since today. She's the country's leading medical hypnotist.

She works with VA students, veterans. She says she's made this change. She is embarrassed to unveil her new self. She sits over her computer writing and rewriting her LinkedIn profile for six months because people are going to think it's weird. I had this powerhouse job and now I'm like a medical hypnotist. And finally she presses it and she feels this incredible relief because she's finally sure with others that she's in the new way.

So everybody is going to be good at one of these phases and bad. And so kind of my first advice is running as I do in the book is walking through the process of figuring out which one you're good and which one you're bad at. Let's start with the one you're good at. You don't have to do them in order. They are not linear. Start with the one you're good at, build some confidence, because some phase is going to be difficult.

And we want to work our way there as we go through these transitions. You talked earlier about in terms of the toolkit about ritual. Yeah, there's seven tools. It turns out most of these ideas, as I said, just came out of these things. They're not little in the literature. They just came out of this incredible analysis

idea of all of these. So the first of the tools is accepted, right? It's like, accept that this is an emotional thing. I look 225 people in the eye, and I ask them when I'm going to ask you, think of some life transition, you have been in the past, or that you're in right now. What's the biggest emotion you struggled with in that transition? So now I have aging parents takes up not a small amount of my bandwidth and time sadness. Sadness.

Okay. I have aging parents too. In fact, I'm going to leave this, I'm having this conversation with you in my hometown of Savannah. I'm really going to leave and go see my dad who's in hospice as we speak. Oh, I'm sorry. So the number one emotion that people struggle with is fear. Okay.

Fear of the unknown, what's going to happen? How can I live without money? Like, how am I going to get through this? What's it going to be like to have a child with special needs? The number one is fear. Number two, Dan Harris, welcome to the club. Sadness. I'm sad. I like that old self. I liked that life with vibrant parents or a living spouse or having legs or having a job. The third, back to your male female thing, the third is shame. By the way, most of the literature of shame suggests that it's gendered and it is not gendered. Just as many men feel shame as women feel shame. I'm ashamed that I lost my job. I don't have status.

I'm ashamed I have to ask for help. I'm ashamed that what I did when I was drinking too much, I am ashamed that I have a child with an addiction or a child with special needs. And when I walk in the grocery store, people don't know what to say to me. So they turn around and they walk away. Fear, sadness, shame.

So step number one, what I call accepted, is to accept the facticity of your situation. Like say out loud that this is one of the reasons I asked you the question. Okay, to say, I'm sad. That's incredibly empowering. At least to the second, so how do people deal? So then I would say to you in these conversations, okay, well, let me ask you, how are you dealing with your sadness? I talk about it with my wife and my brother. So some people talk about it. A lot of people like to write it down. There's some power in writing it down. A lot of people do kind of what I do, which is I call buckle down, like shut up and go to work. You know, when I feel fear, I would say it consumes me a lot. It's like stop

complaining, go to work. 80% 80% use rituals in some way. Some external gesture. They hold a memorial service. They bury something in the backyard. They hang up a flag. They wear a particular piece of clothing. They get a tattoo. I talked to woman Lisa Ray Rosenberg. She went through an awful year. She was a bone marrow donor to her brother. She had a fight. It became estranged with her mother. She went on 52 first dates. She actually made a spreadsheet of everything that she wore on the first dates because she only went on seven second dates and she didn't want to wear the same thing. I thought the second day was one person,

and she had done with the other one. And she just like, this isn't working. So she said, what's my biggest fear? Heights, she jumped out of an airplane. I talked to a guy in Kansas who'd been in a loveless marriage for 30 years. He got out of that marriage, came out as gay, went to a sweat lodge. It's literally out of that marriage, came out as gay, went to a sweat lodge.

It's literally kind of sweat out, shfitz out, if you will, the old life. So what these rituals are, is that they are gestures to yourself and to those around you that you're going through a life transition. And that it's difficult for you. It's almost like a statement to everybody involved that you're now doing this and you're saying goodbye to that old life. But here's something interesting, Dan.

I actually think it may be that cultures, I'm not even going for this, I'm not stating it, but I'm speculating. I actually, maybe that cultures have something that are good at and bad at, because I think when the pandemic first hit, that we've all been bad and saying goodbye. That we all clung to the idea that we were going back. And that's why I think that this has been more difficult than it

necessarily needs to be. And I think that now that we realize that we're not going back, I feel like what the country needs collectively is some ritual. To more not just the dead. If we were mourning the dead, that would be an opportunity to amorn all of our lives that are not coming back. The in-person school, the seeing our loved ones, the going out to eat, the feeling like you had some agency in control of your lives. We have this need for ritual. the feeling like you had some agency in control of your lives. We have this need for ritual, and I think it's aching

because we have not been doing it in the pandemic. It's one of the tools that's very powerful, a way to say that old life, as much as I might have liked it, is not coming back, I need to put it behind me. There's a reason that religion for 3,000 years has been built on rituals is because it has worked and as someone who's interested in religion, I feel like saying we've lost something by turning our back on religion the way we have, but people seem to understand it into that their bodies seem to crave it, which

is why people do these rituals even though they often don't identify them as rituals. That's super interesting. So you mentioned seven tools, I think we've touched on at least two. Yeah, we've done two. So these two were associated with the long goodbye. Let's go, let's just stick with it chronologically. So then you're in this messy middle and you said goodbye, but there's still habits and patterns of your old life that are sticking around.

And we got to get rid of some of those. Okay? So that's why the next one is shedding it. Okay? And so people shed certain things. It could be an attachment to money. It could be getting up every day and putting a tie or a pair of high-heels shoes and going to work. It could be sitting down with a loved one who's not there. It could be walking if you don't have your life.

So you have to shed certain habits. And what's interesting about this is some of those habits the people like that they just can no longer do. You can't see your aging parents if they are not there anymore. Or you can't have a conversation if they have mental impairment. Or you can, in my case, walk when I had cancer

when I was on crutches for two years. So there were lots of things that I couldn't do. You have to shed it, but people also, it turns out, shed things that they didn't like about themselves. So there might be a habit that you have that you didn't like. Maybe you're a people pleaser. Maybe you drank too much. I talked to a woman Lee Wins,

who went through a really difficult year. It compelled her back to my pile up to leave a marriage that she was unhappy with, and then she ultimately left a job, and she said, I had to shed the habit of every time I walked in the door because I was so unhappy, I opened the fridge and started eating.

And so she said, I'm in a pile up, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna have something in the pile that I wanted to change and she finally stopped yo-yo dieting, broke her patterns and lost 60 pounds. So peek something about yourself that you didn't like and use this as an opportunity

because you're in this state of change, you're in this life transition, say I'm gonna get rid of that. That's what comes next and what that does is open your way. So one of the things. I mean, maybe I should have seen this coming, but it was a bit of a surprise to me, astonishing acts of creativity. People at the bottom of their lives, I mean the bottom of your life. I mean, think of everything that's gone bad for you and like multiply it times 10. Turn to incredible acts of creativity.

They sing, they dance, they paint. You know, I talked to a woman who was involved in a faculty scandal at Emory, lost her job, lost her relationship, she started painting bird houses. And she went to the local corner art fair and she started selling them and now she gives them to galleries. I talked to a woman who was a writer at Fox News, left Fox News, toounced her conservatism, changed her political beliefs, went through a depression, she said she started playing ukulele because it was forgiving.

And everything sounds good on ukulele. And she ukuleled her way through her depression. I talked to a woman Helen Kim, an Alabama, who had stomach cancer. She was the caretaker. Her husband didn't want to take care of her. She believes the husband retires from her job teaching chemistry at a university in Alabama. Remember that you had a childhood dream of being a ballerina, that her hard-driving Asian American mother didn't want her to do, and so she starts taking adult ballet.

I talked to a man named Zachary Herrick. Ruth Warren Black in Kansas and adopted by a white family. Wondered through life, ended up in the military. He had his face shut off by the Taliban. 31 surgeries between the tip of his nose and the tip of his chin, including having his tongue sewn back on. He was multiple times suicide ideation on the urge of taking his own life. His mother moved from Kansas to help him recover and the mother says,

you should start cooking, Zach. So he starts cooking. It's like, I'd be examined now. Like the girls love it when I go in days. Then he starts writing poetry and then he starts painting and he's describing this splattering paint on the canvas. He's like, you know, that guy Jackson Pollock, like him. I'm like, whoa, if I talk to your high school football playing self in Indiana and said, like, you're going to like start writing poetry and and poaching salmon and like splattering paint on the canvas. He was either thought it was stupid. So I used to get out my hostility by splattering the enemy with bullets. Now I splatter the canvas with pain So people turn to incredible acts of creativity and it's what creativity has met from the opening

phrase of the Bible. There's chaos and then God creates order. We are creating ourselves new and people mostly people I would say who don't think of themselves as creator? What do we do when the pandemic first hit? It was almost like the cliche of cliches. What do we all do? We baked. So do Brit. Yeah.

Bingo. We sourdoughed our way through the pandemic. And I have to say, I'm not sure I was the only person in America who was not surprised, but this is creativity, like getting your hands in and making something new is again, your mind and body is and souls way of saying, you have imagination. You can imagine that bread or that birdhouse or that

splatter-painting being good. It's the same beer, back to the Muren-Uran's, of imagining that you can make yourself a new. Incredible, acro-cretive. You should create it. Try something new. There's one of these tools in this toolkit of having to have a gap transition. You want to just keep going with the other ones? I don't even need to throw questions at you. Just keep going. Well, it's funny because I said something earlier. I wanted to, I'll get to the last two in a second because they're kind of two tools. We each have the phases. So we have accepted and market with the first one and we have shed it and created. And we'll get to the last one in a second But one of them is not associated with time because people can do it all three

Or they just do it once and that is share it find someone to go through it with because one of the thing that I remember this one had cancer down I Would sit in my home in Brooklyn. I was in crutches for two years I didn't leave it bad for a year because I had so much chemo. And my body was just being destroyed in order to save itself. And I'd look out the window and I'm like, you're not on crutches. You don't have cancer. You don't know what it's like. You feel incredibly alone and isolated and scared.

You just feel alone. Don't be alone. Find someone to share it with. But here was the revelation. Again, I was asking people about to ask you, like, what kind of advice from a friend or loved one was most helpful? And before I tell you the categories that turn out, let me just ask you, the moment you're in here right now, have you gotten a piece of advice from a friend, mentor or loved one?

That's been especially helpful for you. Yes. My friend, Josh, who has already buried his mother and has an aging father, when I was at a particularly difficult moment of my parents aging, he said something to the effect of, do not overlook the sweetness. That there is sweetness in this, that you will feel for your parents as disorienting and horrifying and as it often is, don't overlook that part. That's been a really great way to reorient myself. So what I discovered in this answer to this question is that people have

different kind of phenotypes for advice. What kind of support from friends or loved ones or mentors they respond to? So I ended up kind of coding for this because that's kind of how my mind works. And so some people like comfortors. I love you, Dan. You'll get through it. I believe in you. Some people like what I call nudgers, which is what you just described. I love you, Dan, but why don't you think about this? I know maybe you should start dating again, or maybe it's time to go on LinkedIn and start

looking for a job, right? Or maybe you need to exercise a little bit more. Or maybe you need to reach out to that person and reconcile. So some people like nudgers. Some people like, and I'm a bit like this actually, some people like slappers. And I came up with this work because I was talking to someone and she was saying, yeah, I was, I'm with this period. I lost both my parents and I thought I was going to take over this company and I didn't get the job. I was just whining to a friend. The friend just slapped me upside the face like a share to Nicholas Cage and Moonstruck twice and said, get over yourself and stop complaining

and move on with your life. Some people like that, I love you Dan, but enough. I'm tired of listening to this. This is the fourth time we've talked and you need to go to this and stop complaining all the time. People have these phenotypes and so kind of my advice to people, my nudging people, is don't assume that the kind of advice you respond to is what the person you're talking to wants.

The best way I could describe this is to talk about me as a dad. So I have identical girls as you know, even in Taipei. It's even for the Cardiodeon in Taipei for Taipei Island in Georgia where I grew up. And I'm a writer. It's been for a long time. And now they're in high school and they want nothing to do with my advice. But when they were middle school, they would bring their papers to me.

And I could never guess what they want. And finally I started to say, well, what do you want? And so I would ask this question. Do you want me to tell you how good it is? Or do you want me to help you make it better? And kind of we went through every iteration and then finally we discovered that like the best answer for us was both. Like, I want you to, I want you to come for me. I want you to tell me that it's good. And then I want you to nudge me and make it better. So my advice to people is, don't go alone, but don't assume and feel free to say to somebody, I don't need advice,

I just need love. Or I don't just need love. I need help pointing me in the right direction. But again, think of this as a thing and let's break it down into the component parts and try to get better at it. So share it is one of them. And so the last two are mostly associated

with the new beginning, and one is to unveil it. You're through it now. We finally have this new you. So let's come up one of the things I ask people where tell me three personal projects, right? Three things now that you're back found in a group again, like start some new projects, okay? Rich rules turn out to be very powerful at the end,

not just the beginning, as a way to mark that you're through it. I talked to a lawyer who was a high-powered voter was diagnosed in his 40s with Parkinson's. And in the beginning, he wanted to fight it, he needed to exercise. He ran, I'm not making the stuff, seven marathons on seven continents in seven days as a fundraiser for the Parkinson's Association. He got a team of people and they hired a plane and they raised a lot of money. And at the end, he was through this,

he now, because for a long time, he suffered quietly. Didn't let anybody know, then he did this big gesture to raise money and decide, you know what, it's time to tell my colleagues, my dad has Parkinson's and he went to this too. For the beginning, he didn't want to tell anybody because he didn't want people to know or to treat him differently and he got to a point where he couldn't keep acquired anymore. So in the case of this lawyer, he got a tattoo that at the end of this, it was a way I got through this period, I'm now accepting and I'm now going to share it. So people use all sorts of rituals. I liken it, I don't know if you know the Japanese, I used to live in Japan, as you know.

And they have that Dorauma doll, those paper mache red and black dolls, and you buy them blank, and you paint with ink one eye when you start a project, and then you paint the second eye at the end. It's called opening the second eye. So that's when you unveil your new self, think of Lisa Lovici with the LinkedIn profile. So you're now going through it. And then the last one gets us back to where this whole conversation started and it's

update your personal story. It's to understand that you have fundamentally a story about your life that you were telling yourself. And as you get through one of these life transitions, you want to add a new chapter of your life that says you went through a difficult time, you got through it. And the key there is to find something constructive from this time. It sounds like finding the meaning in the situation is important. A lifequake is fundamentally a meaning vacuum. It kind of sucks all of the basic ways that we make meaning in our lives, out of our lives. So a lifequake is a meaning vacuum and what a light transition and fundamental is, is a meaning making exercise. It's a way to construct the meaning out of the meaning vacuum.

I like this kind of minor old fashioned, I call fashion things bringing that back, but a minor idea from sociology from the 1980s called an autobiographical occasion. The reason it was a minor thing is because the person who came up with a Marburton Amendment said that an autobiographical occasion is a job interview. It's the first time you see a doctor. It's the first date when you have the occasion to tell your life story. Any life transition is an autobiographical occasion. 80% of the people that I asked this question have said that it was a narrative event where they had to re-think

and be visit the basic way that they tell their story. I used to be this and now I am that. I used to be a person with a living parents. Now I have dying parents or dead parents. I used to be a married person. Now I'm not a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, I have a family, on in your head, like who you are, where you came from.

I said to you right now, you have to rush to the hospital because you have a loved one there. You would be telling a story, like who that loved one is and how you know them and what they mean to you. That's the story you tell yourself about who you are. That's not part of you. That is you in a fundamental way. Life is the story that you tell yourself.

That's one thing is we've learned through neurosciences that our brains are wired to create stories. But we think of these stories. Oh my God, we think of these stories as a hero. You know, and there's a happy ending. Because we want our like to be a fairy tale. But the wolf shows up. It's the wolf that makes it a fairy tale. That halfway through the story, it's a wolf or a dragon or an ogre or a pandemic or a tornado or a downsizing or a death. You can't banish the

wolf and you don't want to banish the wolf because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And the hero becomes the hero because the hero figures out how to defeat the wolf. So lifequakes are feature not bug. Oh, absolutely. That's why this book is called Life is in the Transition. This is a William James line back to my idea of kind of revive outdated ideas. William James, the father of modern psychology, says a hundred years ago, Life is in the Transitions as much as in the terms connected. And that's what I'm saying. Because here's the thing we haven't talked about, just how long these take.

Let me answer five years. And I talked to incredibly articulate people, and I would say how long did this transition take? And everybody, uh, uh, and the people got incredibly tongue tied. And they were cutting three years, five years, seven years. And I'm like, guess what? The average and the most common answer was five years. And so here's the thing.

If you're going to go through three to five of these life breaks in a year and they're going to take four or five, six years, that's 25 years. That's half of your adult life. You're going through a life transition. If you look at it as a period, you have to grit and grind your way through, you are wasting half of your life. And so yes, it is a feature, not a bug. If you look on it as a bug and you get angry at it.

By the way, that's why I'm grumpy about the word resilience. Because actually, even the word resilience is an industrial charm from a spring. A spring would pop out and how resilient it was was how it went back. And part of my grumpiness about resilience is it kind of normalizes the idea that we're going back. And some people may go back, but more of us are going sideways or forward or a different place altogether. And if we look at it as a period that we just have to suffer through until we go back, we are missing half of our lives and we are missing what every great scripture, every great mythology on Moses leading the Israelites, the Buddha goes into the wilderness, Hindi's go into the forest, you name it Odysseus, Orpheus,

and Hercules, they all go out into the wilderness, that's where the growth occurs. So I'm saying life is in the transitions. If you look at this period as one you're going to suffer with, you're going to suffer, and you're not going to grow. If you look at it as this opportunity, it's going to be painful. I'm not trying to talk it through. I don't want to be polyanna at all. It's going to be tough.

The messy middle is going to be messy. The long goodbye is going to be long. The new beginning is going to be hard. But these are opportunities for growth and renewal. This is when the heroes are made, and if I've learned one thing, it's that we all have to be the hero of our own story. So we have to look at these periods as vital periods of our life. And instead of being overly excited or intimidated, understand, here we are. We're back at 10%. You can take small steps, you can accumulate small wins. I have seven tools. Everybody does some of them naturally. Nobody

did all of them and everybody wanted to get better at it. And so what I'm here to say is whatever you're going through right now, I was where you are. And I met these people and a lot of them were in worse, some of them were better, some of them were different, some of them were similar. They didn't just give me hope, Dan, they gave me practical things that I can do. Tonight, tomorrow, one a week from now and one three months from now. This is one of the number one things people are saying, I'm going to put this on my shelf because there's something I need it now and I'm going to need something different three months for now. So whatever you're struggling with,

you come on this journey with me, you're going to find people that are where you were, you're going to find things you can do so that whatever you're dealing with, whatever life transition you're in, we could do it a little bit better and a lot more effectively. Like we can get through this,

there is knowledge out there. We can be back to worlds together. Well said, that's a beautiful place to leave it. Bruce excellent job. Thank you very much. Thank you Dan. It's great to have this conversation with you. Thank you for all you're doing. Big thanks to Bruce and big thanks as always to the team who work incredibly hard to make this show a reality. Samuel Johns is our senior producer. Marissa Schneidermann is our producer. Our sound designers are Matt Boen and Ania Sheshek from Ultraviolet Audio. Maria Wert Johns is our senior producer. Marissa Schneidermann is our producer. Our sound designers are Matt Boen and Ania Sheshek

from Ultraviolet Audio. Maria Wirtel is our production coordinator. We get a ton of wisdom from our TPH colleagues, such as Jim Point, Nate Toby, Ben Rubin, Liz Levin, and as always, big thank you to my ABC News Comrade, Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan. We'll see you all on Wednesday with a deep dharma take on this subject of life transitions.

Our guest is Philip Muffet. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUT and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at 1-3-dot-com slash survey. you