Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 396: Don’t Side With Yourself | Matthew Hepburn

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Work can be one of the most difficult places to apply meditative concepts such as mindfulness, patience, and kindness. But work can also be an amazing testing ground for your attempts at meditation and other forms of self-improvement.Unlike many meditation teachers, Matthew Hepburn has spent a lot of time in the professional world. He has worked at Apple and in the service industry. He’s also a long time leader at the Ten Percent Happier company and is the host of the new Twenty Percent Happier podcast. In this episode, Matthew talks about how to change your relationship to your thoughts; how to navigate the highs of praise and the lows of blame; how to handle relationships at work, including relationships that require you to give and/or receive feedback; and how to bring your mindfulness practice to your workplace, starting with something as simple as a cup of coffee.And be sure to join Matthew in the seven-day Work Life Challenge, where you’ll get the chance to practice a meditation related to your work life, led by Matthew or Dawn Mauricio, another TPH meditation teacher and recent podcast guest. Download the Ten Percent Happier app now to join the Challenge for free.The "Healing Ourselves, Healing Our World," online benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center is on November 13 and 14. Register here to participate.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/matthew-hepburn-396See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, today we're talking about how to do one of the hardest but most rewarding things for most human beings to get over yourself and see contentious issues from somebody else's perspective. My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, has a pithy little exhortation that sums this up nicely. Don't side with yourself.

I love that expression. In my experience, not siding with myself is especially hard in a work context. I find my ego has the habit of digging trenches and refusing any offers of cease fire. In fact, work can be one of the most difficult places to apply any meditative concept, including mindfulness, patience, or kindness. Many of us may be diligent meditators or semi-diligent meditators or aspiring meditators, and we

might find that we get on a good streak of meditation practice, but then we're humbled to learn that we are consciously or subconsciously more likely ruling out work as a place to practice. However, work can be an amazing crucible or testing ground or dojo for your attempts at meditation or other forms of self-improvement. And we have the perfect guest today to discuss this. Unlike many meditation teachers, Matthew Hepburn has actually spent a lot of time in the professional world.

He's worked in the service industry. He's worked at Apple. He's also a long time leader at the 10% happier company. Most recently, Matthew is the host of a new podcast called 20% Happier, which is available exclusively inside the 10% Happier app. He's here today, though, to provide the final interview in our five-part work-life series here on the podcast, the 10% Happier podcast. In today's episode, Matthew's going to talk about how to change your relationship to thoughts and in so doing, how to reduce your sense of overwhelm, how to navigate the highs of praise and the lows of blame, how

to handle relationships at work, including crucially relationships that require you to give and or receive feedback, and how to bring your mindfulness practice to the workplace, starting with something as simple as your coffee cup. Just to say even though we are today wrapping up the work life series here on the podcast, there is still time to join the work life challenge over on the 10% happier app. In fact, Matthew is one of the featured meditation teachers in the challenge. It's free. It runs for seven days.

Every day you get a brief video of me in conversation with either Matthew or Don Mauricio and other meditation teacher who was recently on this show. The video will then slide seamlessly into a guided audio meditation from either Matthew or Don, which will help you put into practice, which you learn in the video. The challenge is running this week. There's still time to join and complete it. Download the 10% happier app right now to join the challenge for free. Alright, we'll get started with Matthew Hepburn right after this. Before we jump into today's show,

many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher

Alexis Santos to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my 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. Matthew Hepburn, welcome back to the show. Why, thank you Dan. Good to be together again. Likewise, yes it is.

So we're talking about all the many ways which work can suck and how we can make it suck less. And even- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That seems like way too dismal a start to me. Do we have to start so depressing? I'm meeting people where they are, Matthew. That's fair, that's fair.

Work is not easy. That's for sure. It can suck. It can suck. It can also be glorious. And I think the point of this conversation is to move us more into glory than suckiness. I hope so. Like a couple increments or at least like get some momentum and let the trajectory build because hopefully work doesn't have to be a slog for the rest of all of our working lives. I agree. All right, so let me ask you a question that I think is going to be top of mind for you

personally. You're at a point in your career with 10% happier, whereas I understand it, you feel a little bit pulled in many directions. You've got a lot of new things you're trying. You're hosting a new podcast. You're, you know, taking on increasing responsibilities within the company. So that gets me thinking about this issue of overwhelm. How do you deal with that personally and how would you recommend others deal with it? Well, let me just start by talking about it personally, because I know that I can just speak to my honest experience. It may be useful to some degree for some people,

and for others, my personal situation won't be a analog for yours, but I'm not somebody who can complain about my work life at the moment. And so that's really important for me to say first and foremost is that I'm actually pretty lucky and that I got a lot of exciting things to try out. Now, that said, what I expected my career path to be within 10% happier and more broadly, is not what my current set of job responsibilities is actually looking like today.

And so, you know, a year ago, I was managing a small team of people at 10% happier and I was really enjoying growing and learning how to be a great manager and support people to do great work. That's really fulfilling for me. And today I'm not managing anyone. And in fact, I'm not managing anyone.

And in fact, I'm working on very disparate projects every single day. And so my attention is being pulled from one thing where I'm working consultatively on a project to another thing where I've got to put my name and voice and identity on the line as a host of a new podcast, which is pretty vulnerable for me and not something that I would have been drawn to. I wouldn't have created the circumstances for that on my own. I wouldn't have put that kind of pressure on myself. And so anyhow, what it has meant for me is really leaning into a lot of uncertainty

and new things. And I'm doing jobs, for instance, like podcast hosting, which I have no business doing based on my resume. And so I'm also in a position where I'm not just leaning into uncertainty and trying new things, but I'm also finding ways to get comfortable and at ease myself and my professional life with learning publicly, being willing to be only okay. Right now, I'm probably the worst podcast host that I'll ever be, and I've got to be okay with that. So anyhow, a lot is changing and it can feel overwhelming at times. But that's only if I feed thoughts in the mind that say, I've got to be able to do more. I've got to be able to do what I'm doing better than I'm doing right now.

And you know, that's basically a mind constructed world that's a world of misery. And the more that I feed in it and live in it, the overwhelm grows. And the more that I actually relax back into the relationships at work that I trust to the skill sets and aptitudes that I've developed over time that I can rely on in myself that I can trust. And the more I stay willing to learn and humble and willing to grow, you know, just doing the best I can, and taking it moment by moment, then I don't have to be overwhelmed. super faithfully, but something like a mine-created world that's a land of misery, and I don't have to feed it. Okay, so that sounds right.

How do you do that? How do we mortals do it given that we don't have the meditation training that you have? Yes, well there is a key skill that I have developed in my own meditation practice. And that practice has taught me how to recognize that a thought in the mind is not a real truth. It's not some kind of universal law of how it is handed down by the universe itself. For instance, the thought could be, there's no way you're ever going to get all

this done, or the thought could be, you really screwed that interview with Dan up. You're never going to be a successful podcast host, right? Or it it could be you're over committed. It could be a simple thought like that that actually sounds like it has my best interest in heart, but the flavor of the way that it's spoken in the mind and the intention behind it is just to sow panic and fear. And so in my meditation practice, one of the trainings has been to start to recognize that a thought is just a fabrication of the mind that represents one potential perspective to take on our lives that we can choose to take or not.

And for me, in my professional life and beyond my professional life, overwhelm is usually a palace constructed of thought. And the more overwhelmed I feel, it's usually because the more I'm missing the fact that these thoughts are perspectives that I can choose to believe in or not. And it's not always easy to not go live in a overwhelmed palace. It's the most hilarious metaphor that ever come up. Doesn't feel like much of a palace. Usually it feels like a dungeon. But when we recognize that it's all fabricated and constructed, and we actually have the inclination,

the desire to come back to something simple and real and not panic-inducing, then we don't have to stay stuck in the dungeon. But let me just push on that a little bit, because as you know, I have this magical ability to channel the thoughts of listeners, even though nobody's yet even listening to this.

But even in the future, I can channel there. I can interpret it back. Has this come from your meditative acumen? You've developed this prescient telepathic capacity. Well, in the Buddhist scriptures, advanced meditators are said to have the capacities develop all sorts of superpowers. This is just one of many that I've developed. I don't usually talk about it publicly,

so now it's a little embarrassing. But anyway, I do have this particular ability and one of the things that I'm imagining people might think after hearing you say, well, overwhelmed as a palace constructivist thoughts, but some of those thoughts really are true. Like a deadline is a deadline. And a negative review I got from my boss is what it is.

So it's not like I can or should put overly positive spins on these things. Yes, yes. Well, what I want to say is that the thought may in fact represent some truth. But the way that I said it is that the thought may, in fact, represent some truth. But the way that I said it is, that the thought is just a single perspective that we might take on life. So imagine you're walking down a path and you come across a huge roadblock in the path

and it's six miles tall, goes way into the stratosphere. You can't even see the top and you crane your neck and look up and think, how the hell am I going to get over this thing? That's one perspective. Another perspective sees that there's soft grass on either side of the path and if you walk 10 feet to the right, you can just walk around the thing. And both are true. And so maybe that deadline is looming,

but maybe I've got enough of a trusting relationship and goodwill built with the person that I'm accountable to for this deadline that I can say, listen, I need a little grace on this. If you can't give me any grace, I need some help on this. That is a different thought that may be just as true, same situation, different perspective, and the consequence of feeding that perspective

is not one of overwhelm. It's actually one of creative engagement with the situation, which may be no less difficult, ultimately, but it totally changes our inner world. And when our inner world is one that's balanced, creative, engaged, responsive, usually the outcome is going to be way better than when the inner world is defined by overwhelm. So I'm hearing at least two operationalizable pieces of advice there. One is interrogate your thoughts or just don't take them as the be-all and all.

And two, and you mentioned this earlier, falling back on your relationships with the people with whom you work when you're in a state of overwhelm to see if you can get help or grace. Yes, yes, yes. I think one of the easy ways to stay mindful of thoughts in the midst of our days is just to see how painful is it. If you have a thought and you notice you're getting real stressed out, real worked up, it's like, oh, that's actually a really painful thought to have. That should be the alarm bell. That should be the mindfulness bell. And then you can simply ask yourself, what else is true? You can keep asking that question until you find other thoughts that are true about the

situation that change your attitude and approach to it. And one of the things that I absolutely recommend is taking on perspectives that incline us towards tapping the relationships that we've built with other people. Most of our work is not completely isolated. Even if you're a writer working on a book alone in a cabin, you can call up even to mind the mentors you've had, the people who've been supportive and feel a sense of connection to the relationships that have been supportive and feel a sense of connection to the relationships

that have been in your life. I don't live in a cabin, but I am a writer who mostly works alone. And as you were talking there, I was doing what I think is quite a natural thing to do, I was just filtering it through my own experience. And I feel a lot of overwhelmed about being in the middle of a book, hopefully toward the end of the book, and knowing that I have this enormous amount of work to get done, and what's the order in which to do it, how good is it, all these thoughts that can be very painful when they come up.

And yes, it is very helpful to try not to take every negative thought at face value. It's also helpful to kind of talk to myself like a good coach and it is really helpful to recruit thought partners or interlocutors or just other human beings I can talk to, but primarily for me it's my wife because then it gets it out of my head and into a conversation with somebody I trust. And why does that work for you? What's actually, what's the shift? What happens right before you have that conversation?

And then as you have it, what changes? I once heard about a study from again, I'm Sean Acore who's been on the show. And the study was something to the effect of when you took people and had them look at a mountain or a hill and you asked them how high it was, you got a certain answer. When you put the same person next to somebody else and ask them to gauge the height of whatever was in front of them, it didn't seem as big.

And I just think, given that we are a collaborative species, it's wired deep into our DNA to work with one another. That's how we became the apex predator on the planet was not that we were strongest, but that we can communicate and collaborate. I think it's just something deep in our evolutionarily bequeathed wiring that feels relaxed when you share a burden. Yes, yes. I can totally relate to this. And just to say, I can mostly relate to the opposite. I mean, I really grew up in circumstances where I ended up internalizing the conditioning that

the most laudable thing that I could do was to totally of my own power take care of all my responsibilities and succeed in a way that was attributable to me and me alone. And getting that message somehow through the culture growing up, I showed up in my life as a working professional as an adult, really trying to achieve everything under my own power and missing the opportunity to build meaningful relationships to ask for help to bounce bounce ideas off of people, to really utilize the benefit of being a human who's connected to other people. And it was really painful for me for a long time. And frankly, I'll say that I've seen that conditioning in myself way outside of work as well. And it's been one of the things that has been a growth edge for me that I can say that has changed a lot over time as I've become adult, I've learned how to have a conversation

with a good friend or a therapist or a boss when something's really troubling me. And that's not something that is naturally easy for me. And so one of the things that I just want to nod to is that for anybody who's like me, that really may be very uncomfortable to do. And the first times that you do it, while it might be scary, ultimately it really pays off because, as you say, all the mountains get smaller. I think I heard you say something recently.

There's a way which you can think about asking for help as a kind of generosity because when people help you, it actually feels good to them. So you're giving other people an opportunity to feel good. Am I restating your view correctly here? You've got that right. And like, this is pretty counterintuitive. I really had to learn this from my own experience. I don't know that I could have taken it on face value,

it's just pretty words from somebody. But this is one of the most foundational values in the Buddhist tradition. And so in my own journey as a contemplative learning about Buddhist meditation practice, one of the things that I was taught, and that I learned is that when the Buddha taught meditation to people most of the time,

the first thing he taught before meditation or even ethics was generosity. And he taught this practice of giving freely of yourself to others. And all of his teachings, supposedly, are about freeing up the mind from struggle and suffering and creating more well-being. And so the idea there inherently is that the act of giving and also the internal feeling of being and of altruistic, generous, and spirit

is one that frees up the mind and feels good to us. And as I practice that, I saw that for myself. And then eventually, as I started to have a really authentic wish for everybody around me to be feeling good, to not be struggling, to live with a little more ease in their life, as I was starting to learn that it was possible for me to live with a little more ease in my life.

And it felt like that wasn't a finite resource that I needed to hoard for myself. And really, I thought, like, yeah, I want everybody to be doing a little bit better. All of a sudden it was like, oh, if I'm wishing well-being for the people around me, then I wish that they have the opportunity to be incredibly generous. And all of a sudden I started to see a behavior of mine in a new light. And this behavior was when people would offer me something particularly help. I would say, oh no, no, it's fine. Don't go out of your way. I don't want you to feel put upon.

You don't need to do anything extra to help me out. And here's this conditioning. Again, I'll take care of it on my own. I don't want you to feel put upon, you don't need to do anything extra to help me out. And here's this conditioning. Again, I'll take care of it on my own. I've got it under control. And all of a sudden I saw that conditioning in totally new light. I saw, you're just Matthew,

depriving this person of the opportunity to offer something freely, to offer some generosity to you, to say like, hey, can I help you out? And to be met with, yeah, absolutely. You want to know what? I'd love that. In fact, I'd really appreciate that. You know, if you think back in your life, any time that you've authentically wanted to help somebody, and they've actually taken that in graciously, somebody and they've actually taken that in graciously, it feels really good to help people. And so I had this shift in thinking that was like, look, may I never obstruct another person's generosity? And in fact, may I give other people opportunities to express generosity, to me and to anybody else. So if anybody wants to come over and do my laundry, you're welcome.

That is how you will make many friends. Another thing you said to going back to the first question I asked you about overwhelm and how you deal with it is it's easy for this to lapse into the realm of cliche, but there's a reason cliche has become cliche because they're true, is you said something about taking things one moment at a time as an antidote to overwhelm. Can you unpack that a little further? Yeah, I mean, this is another thing that didn't show up for me as just some good idea that I tried to map on to my work life.

It came out of just watching how the mind was making my life hell in the way that I was working and just asking the question, how can I not do this if it hurts so bad? And just to say generally, in the enterprise of making our work life actually a source of well-being, there are so many places where we see that we're actually just making it much harder on ourselves. And one way that I noticed a tendency to think about some period short medium term in the future and imagine all the things I had to do. So let's say it's a two-stay afternoon, I open up my calendar and I just look and I see, well I've got this interview with Dan and I'm not prepared enough.

And then I've got to write these scripts for this meditation. I'm teaching a day-long meditation on Saturday. I've got to meet with these students in the evening and I've got these other deadlines in the middle. In that moment, my mind often will try and take on all of that time and say, can I do this? Can I handle this? I'm collapsing about four or five, six days into one moment and asking, can I handle four

or five, six days right now? The emotional idea of four or five or six days of work. And no, in any given moment, I actually probably can't handle six days of work, right? But in some way, just the future thinking habit that I had developed in relationship to work, did this little emotional, optical, elusive thing to my mind, where I would feel like I had to relate to six days worth of work in a given moment, and I'd feel instantly overwhelmed, instantly, overwhelmed. As opposed to thinking, look, between now and Saturday, I've got countless moments to meet whatever is needed for me in that particular moment. Then I can ask, do I have enough time to sleep for eight hours a night and break from meals and things like that?

And if I don't, then I might say, oh, I'm going to get real worn out by Saturday. And actually, I may need to move some things. But I don't have to worry about doing all those things right now. I'm only going to have to do one thing at a time. And seeing that suffering freed me up to say, look, do your planning whenever you need to do your planning. Think about those six days whenever you need to think about them and plan out, do I have enough breaks?

Am I going to get all the things done that I need to get done in this time? And once you're done planning, take each moment as it comes. You'll see the mind jumping into future thinking, but it may feed overwhelm and simply recognize when the overwhelm is being fueled by trying to get your, wrap your mind around six days worth of tasks. And really, you only need to wrap your mind around six days worth of tasks. And really, you only need to wrap your

mind around the next five minutes. Do you think the capacity to do what you just described is supercharged by a meditation practice where you're training in waking up to whatever's happening right now over and over again? I do. And the reason why I think that it is trained in a simple mindfulness practices, that much of the crux of the practices, seeing a compelling train of thought that we've gotten totally absorbed into, a mentor of mine, Chastakapua likes to say that we inhabit a mind-made world. And we get into these compelling realms of thought. And as our mindfulness practice, we practice just letting that go, not feeding the compelling narrative. And instead, then asking, what do I notice that's happening right now?

And instead, then asking, what do I notice that's happening right now? It might be really simple. Feel the cool air on my skin. I might notice that after that compelling thought, I actually really just want to take a deep breath. And I breathe for a moment, and I can feel it. I can feel the body relaxing and then boom the next incredibly compelling series of thoughts pop up and then I practice again. Oh, I don't have to feed that And then there's an openness. Hmm. What's happening now? And you practice that over and over and over again, and it's a skill you develop it And so when you're at work and you think oh my god God, I can't believe that I'm going to have to tackle

all this stuff today. It's 7.30 a.m. and this day seems overwhelming already. That's just a compelling thought in that moment. Right now, it's only 7.30. You only have to worry about 7.30 to 7.31. You know, what am I going to do? I'm going to drink a glass of water and maybe I'm actually

going to take a deep breath before I put my shoes on and walk out the door. Much more of my conversation with Matthew Hepburn 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. We've dedicated the first part of this conversation to overwhelm

during which time you talked about relying on relationships with your colleagues. I want to drill down on relationships with colleagues because it can be the best part of work. It can also be the worst part of work. And so I'm curious how you as a Dharma teacher who's deeply enmeshed in the work world, how you manage giving feedback or as I believe you phrase it, expressing yourself without exploding. What do you want to know? How do you do that? Because this is an edge area for me.

This is a growth area for me where you've seen me do this where I can get so caught up in my anxieties around us doing things poorly or what I believe to be poorly that I get snippy as opposed to just being clear and nice. And by nice, I don't mean unclear or sugar-coating, but actually having the best interests of the person with whom I'm talking in mind while I'm also giving them clear feedback. Yes. Well, have you ever done it well? A few times.

Yeah, recently, yes, I'm getting better at it. Well, what happened? Why were you able to do it well? What was it like? Look, Cameron, I'll ask the questions here. Okay. There's a real real honest question. I'm just a spinning man. Yeah, tell me, tell me. Last night, I had an experience where I realized that a work product that I was looking at wasn't up to snuff from somebody who I really trust. One of the bad mental habits I've been trying to undo is I have a habit of putting people in the good bucket or a bad bucket and I could feel myself spinning off toward wow this work that I'm looking at here is no good. I gotta put this person in the bad bucket.

They were here too forward in the good bucket. And I was like, oh, no, no, that's silly. There's probably some whole story for why this didn't go well. You should just bring it up. But then I got into the headspace of like, how do I bring this up without hurting this person's feelings? And it's gonna be hard for me to do.

Maybe it'd be better just to sit and stew on it. Then I realized, well, no, that's the way you've always done things. That's not worked out very well. So I remembered a piece of advice that I've gotten from some communications coaches that I've worked with for many years. So I've referenced and named dropped on the show many times. Their names are Moodytun Niskur and Dan Clirman. They're sort of Dharma and reflected communications coaches. And they often talk about when you're going to be delivering any message to somebody, especially if it's a tough one, to think about and express your, and this is their term here, positive intention.

So then I call the person up and I said, look, I have a little bit of feedback. I'm giving it to you because I care about this relationship. This is a really important relationship and I don't want to be stewing on this in my own head. I want to just get it out there because I'm sure there's a good reason for why I'm seeing what I'm seeing. So here's the feedback. And it went really well.

Yes. Yeah. Well, what I hear that is so valuable there is that if you're going to say something that may be difficult for somebody to hear, if they're in the midst of feeling like between the two of you, you got each other's backs foundationally. That's going to be much easier to hear than if you're just coming in hot from left field and they don't have any idea what your commitment to their overall well-being is, their relationship to this project is, your relationship between each other, and so

it's not, I think, just about establishing a positive intention. I think, just about establishing a positive intention. I think that that's really important. But for me, I've learned that also reaffirming and establishing the relationship. And I heard, actually, you articulate that. You said, like, I want to share this not just for the benefit

of this project, but for the benefit of your and my working relationship. And that, anybody can get down with, you know, they may disagree with you, but people are going to appreciate if you're thinking about that relationship as something to be invested in over time. And if you can communicate that in an authentic and real way, you know, people are going to be open. And you may say something, they don't agree with it. They may fire right back. And you may end up in a heated discussion. But if you know, if you both know that you got

each other's backs from the jump with this whole situation, then you're going to be able to arrive at some sort of solution that doesn't spiral out into an explosion or a bunch of drama or, you know, somebody feeling totally resentful and needing to walk away and the things simmers under the hood for a year or something like that, right? You mentioned that you used to manage people now. Now you're not managing people so much, but you're working directly with people in a collaborative way and a really deep way. So how do you handle it when you've got some critical feedback to deliver to people? It depends on the relationship. That's for sure. I think that I have heard, I don't think

this is true in all my work relationships, and I have room to grow, but I have heard from people that I work with that they have appreciated that I kind of talk straight that I'll tell people if I'm having trouble with something or something didn't quite work out right. And I have made mistakes in that realm, even here at 10% happier, I can think of times where I had some critical feedback to give and I delivered it to a colleague in a way that really didn't land. And then they had to follow up with me and tell me like, that wasn't cool the way you said that. And usually it's because

I wasn't thoughtful enough about the timing and how I delivered it. So one of the main things that I've learned from my mistakes is that it's really important to check in with people about, is this a good time? Is this a good place? And what's the way that you want this feedback? But giving people some agency in how they receive difficult feedback, it levels the power dynamic of who's giving difficult feedback and who's receiving it. So that's one thing that I do. But more than anything, you know, I did

exactly what you were talking about a moment ago, which is center the relationship and make sure that we know that we got each other's back. And if I have a very close working relationship with somebody, I don't have to do that much groundwork around that anymore. And I can usually just speak freely. But with people that I don't work with as closely, then I may have to start the conversation by saying, Hey, I'm thinking about this project we're working on and I want to work together. And I want this thing to go well. I don't want you to hear about this from somebody else. I don't want to sit on this thing and then later tell you that I didn't like it. I want us to be able to talk openly and then we have to feel it out together.

But if you center the relationship, it's all possible. That's the main thing that I've learned. So, we've been talking about giving feedback. How do you manage that when there's a power differential? Do you feel comfortable and would you recommend others? Feel comfortable giving feedback up the food chain, up the hierarchy? It's really tricky. I'll say two things.

And this is just really my opinion. I'm one person, but I'll bring my work experience and my lens as a Dama teacher, also as a contemplative teacher, to bear on this, which is that most workplaces are structured in a hierarchical way. And that puts some people in positions of power and some people in positions of relative disempowerment in the context of their roles at work, right? And it's not a small thing because if we're talking about work, we're talking about how you make the money that you make to pay for your medicine, to pay for your housing to live. And so when you're in a position of any relative disempowerment around things that are as necessary

and basic as medicine, food, shelter, that's not something to be taken lightly or cavalierly. And so in response to a question like this, I'm not going to say, it's really important just to speak up and say whatever you feel and you've got to be authentic and those things are true to a certain degree. But I also think that it's important for anybody in a disempowered position to be thoughtful and careful and really they do need to take care of themselves. And that includes me to certain degrees at work. There are relationships that I have at work

of relative disempowerment. And so it's important to make sure that I'm thoughtful and taking care of myself and my needs in my life. And certain work relationships, it can be really tricky to give feedback, to say things that are hard to hear. We all know what it's like to hear something that's really painful to hear, and we totally reject it. Maybe we disagree.

Maybe we feel attacked. Maybe we feel it's unjust for somebody to have said this to us. And when we react, we react out of wanting to totally reject the experience of hearing this difficult feedback. And if we're in a place of a lot of power, sometimes we react to the way that other beings treat us, come at us in a really strong way. Let's say you're in a position of power because you're a human and a mosquito flies up and sucks some of your blood. You might just totally destroy the thing. That's a relationship of a power imbalance or one being came up to you with a need, expressed it.

And you didn't like it and you just crushed their life out of existence. It's something that many of us do often. And so I use that example. It's very extreme, but it represents some of the worst of how we can unconsciously relate to each other in a pitched power dynamics. And so it's important if you're just empowered

to make sure that you're thoughtful and careful. And there may be a situation in which there's a relationship at work where it's not actually that safe for your overall employment to just say anything. So I guess the first answer to your question is, I wouldn't say at any time just give any feedback that you have no matter what the power imbalance looks like. Now on the other hand, it is really painful and really detrimental for our overall well-being. If in the relationships in our life, we don't feel like we can be honest and authentic. And, you know, add in from a Buddhist lens, honesty in itself, is held as an incredibly high value. There are many qualities that are very esteemed in Buddhism, and many kind of faux-paws of ethical conduct that a person might And it's said in Buddhist lore that over the Buddha's many lifetimes before becoming a Buddha,

he actually made all of the ethical faux pas that a person can make except one, which is saying that which is not true. And so there's a real high esteem for the importance for our well-being and that of others of not creating more delusion in the world by not speaking truthfully. And so if we're in a relationship at work or anywhere where we don't feel like we can be real, it may have tremendous consequences for our well-being and for the well-being of others. And so it's really important to look at,

hey, should I be staying at a workplace where I don't feel like I can be honest and forthright? And so what I would wish for anybody who is thinking about what often people sometimes refer to as managing up in some ways, in more direct ways. Sometimes we do it in softer ways, but specifically in giving feedback to somebody

who's in a place of relative power over us in a workplace, is that I would wish for you to build a relationship with this person over time where there's enough trust that you can give honest and direct feedback. And the thing that matters is the thing that we already talked about, which is centering the relationship first. And if there's a trusted mutual commitment to supporting each other as professionals, and both people trust that, usually it's safe, even within a hierarchical pitched power dynamic between one professional and another to say what you really think, even

if it's somewhat painful to hear. And so my overall encouragement is, if you feel like there's people in your work life that you can't be real with, then number one, it's important to try and start to build the foundation so that one day you can. And if you don't think that's possible, you'll have to decide for yourself, is it okay for me to stay in this role in this place of work with people that I don't think that I can be truly honest with, or do I need to find a group of people that I can work with where I can be real? And just to say that this notion of how to be clear with people in feedback is something that we're going to be talking about and practicing in the work-life meditation challenge with Matthew. Another thing we're going to be talking about in the challenge is a Buddhist concept called

praise and blame. Can you hold forth on that? Well, one of the things that I wanted to talk about in this challenge that we're going to do, we're going to try and develop a little bit of a healthier relationship to work, and to feel a little bit more balanced in the midst of our work life. And one of the things that I really wanted to focus on was a tendency that I notice in myself and in the people that many of the people that I've worked with, which is a tendency to crave after praise that we haven't even gotten yet and to fear blame that similarly we haven't gotten yet. And these factors of praise and blame are talked about in Buddhism along with a set of six other polar experiences like gain and loss, pleasure and pain, and fame, and

disrepute. That's not a word that people use very often, but you know, it's like having a reputation tarnished. But so, praise and blame are talked about alongside these other pairs of experiences that happen in a social context, often, not all of them, pleasure and pain happen socially and not socially. But their experience is that we can't run away from. If we're alive for long enough, and usually it only takes a month to run through all of these experiences in some subtle way, but you're going to experience pleasure and you're going to experience pain, you're going to experience gain and you're going to experience loss, you're going to experience praise from people and you're going to experience blame. And there are things that the mind can really wrap itself around.

And the thinking mind loves to try and use these things as ways to navigate and decide what's important and what's meaningful in our lives. And in fact, there are just things that are going to come and go no matter what. And often not totally dependent on our actions sometimes, but not always. So this lens that comes from Buddhism is one that sees these things like weather patterns that come and go. They're all going to be ever present and changing in our life. changing in our life. And with that kind of equanimous or balanced understanding suggests that maybe we don't need to define

what's good or what's bad in our life based on how much praise or blame we're getting. And I noticed this tendency in my own mind not just to love getting praised and hate getting blamed, which is how most of us relate to these two phenomena, but more than that. If I'm working on a project and it feels like it's representative of me as a professional or me as a dama teacher or me as a person in terms of my character. My mind can start getting into imagining this is not going to go well and people are going

to think that I'm terrible. Or I hope this goes so great and people love me. People will think I'm so exceptionally brilliant that I'm so hard working, that I'm so capable. And both of these very juicy and compelling trains of thought totally derailed my capacity to actually focus on the work, to be excited about the project that I'm working on, and actually bring my creativity, bring my insight, bring my skill sets, my experience to bear on the work that I'm doing.

And so what's so funny is that the succession with the outcome and the social reverberations that will come for it undermine the ultimate quality of the work that I'm doing in the first place. And so I wanted to highlight and talk about these tendencies to get into craving after praise we haven't gotten and fearing blame that we haven't gotten. Yes, all that. And if we think of praise and blame as impersonal as the wind, could that lead to some passivity or resignation, Do we not need to do some affirmative reputation management on our own behalf sometimes? I think it's good to care about how we are received in the world.

We don't want to say it doesn't matter how my actions or my work impact other people. So no matter what praise I get, no matter what blame I get, I'm just going to do whatever I'm going to do. But there's a real difference between saying, hey, I hope this is helpful. I hope what I'm doing is beneficial and that people tell me and I really don't want this to harm people or To just mostly piss people off although sometimes It can be actually a positive intention in our work to piss people off You know, and that's actually a helpful and good thing to do in some areas at some times

but That recognition is very different than the feeling of cowering from potential blame that might come if we make a misstep or we do or say something that's unpopular in our work life or elsewhere. Much more of my conversation with Matthew Hepburn right after this. The core underlying theme of the Work Life Challenge and of this interview is any part of our lives can be turned into practice, meditation, Dharma practice. And there's a way in which, speaking for myself, and I don't think I'm alone, you can make the meditation into this precious thing you do in the special quarantined time, you know, the 15 minutes a day or whatever it is you do,

but you're not bringing it into the hurly burly of your life, especially what for many of us at the most chaotic, stressful part of our life, which is work. So anyway, do you think I'm on to something here in terms of pointing to an important theme? I think you're pointing to an incredibly important theme. We don't want to spend our life, most of our hours doing something that feels detrimental to our well-being, just to try and cram in self-care, you know, in the time slot after work and, you know,

between dealing with the kids and all of our other responsibilities, we want a situation in our lives where we feel like generally our life is in balance in supporting us to live well and to be who we want to be in the world. And I mean, you could just stop and think right now for a moment, if your relationship to work, we're not completely, but just somewhat, some significant amount, more balanced, more peaceful, that there was a little more joy, a little

more humor, a little more patience in your work life alone. What would that do for the rest of your life? Overall, work is where we spend a lot of our time. If we're going to try and put time into not tripping ourselves up so much, to being a little less anxious, to having our energy be a little more balanced, to feel a little more free, a little more generous, then work is a really, really rich area. And it's an area where we have a lot of consternation and frustration and on we and all the rest. So I frankly just see it as one of the most high potential areas of our lives to invest in as people who want to be happier or as serious contemplatives and wherever you

fall on that spectrum. I totally agree. I'm given all of the messiness of work with the I totally agree. And given all of the messiness of work with the interpersonal intensity, the creative demands, the demands on our time, the stress, the high stakes, the power dynamics, it's just a great opportunity for growth. And doing that will probably improve your work life in the process. You've got a few little practices that I thought were interesting for turning work into a meditation practice. One of them has to do with noticing how often you reach for the coffee cup. Can you talk about that?

Yes, I have so many because I have been a working stiff and you know in my heart really a serious contemplative practitioner. And I've wished that I could spend my time just doing meditation, but needed to punch the clock and pay the bills for, I guess, all of my adult life really. And so I found all kinds of little ways that I could undercover be working on free in my mind, even while I'm on the clock, working for the man, as they say. Officially, that makes you the man, didn't it? Yeah, we're just going to say I'm the man. So there's a million ways. Once you start getting creative, you'll find a million ways. But I'll

give you an example of one, which is this coffee cup example, is that as we're all mammals, is that as you were all mammals, slaking our thirst is something that is inherently pleasant on a biological level. It's reassuring and it's pleasant and it's soothing. Particularly, if you're a coffee drinker, you got some serious neural pathways that kick in and give you a lot of reward every time that you take your sip of coffee. And so if you take a cup of coffee into a difficult work situation, you may be somebody who has meetings on the calendar regularly, so it could be a difficult meeting. You may be putting your coffee under the counter at the point of sale and checking people out or something like that.

But if you've got something like a glass of water or a cup of coffee, you can just bring it with you. And for some period of time, that's maybe a little more stressful than another time at work. Notice every time you reach for it, what's happening. Mindfulness and all the contemplative practices are about becoming more aware. The value system underlying these practices

say that nothing is too small to learn from and pay attention to. And we never pay attention to something as ordinary as how and when we reach for our coffee cup. But often, if we pay attention, we'll see that we reach for it in order to soothe something that was on a very subtle level, a little challenging for us. Maybe we feel a little nervous after we spoke up in a meeting or maybe there is some difficult tension between one customer and coworker of yours. And we reach for the coffee cup.

And when we start to notice that, we all of a sudden get tuned in to a much more subtle level of fluctuations in our well-being during the work day. And when we're tuned into a more subtle level of how we're doing, we can actually care for and respond to the more subtle level. Usually we only pay attention to real big spikes. Things go really bad. We ask the boss for a break, we go take a walk. But otherwise, we're just trying

to grid our teeth and make it through the day. But if we start paying attention on a very subtle level, all of a sudden we can see, oh, I get a little bit nervous when my boss talks to me in that tone of voice. And if we notice that, sure, we can reach for the coffee cup, enjoy a sip of coffee, but then we can also take a deeper breath. Right? Drop our shoulders away from our ears. Recognize that our boss makes us a little nervous in that situation. Resture ourselves. You know what? They're just having a rough day. When we're attuned to a different level of subtlety, all of a sudden we can be creative and responsive about how we take

care of our well-being throughout the day. And that usually gives us a lot more staying power through the ups and downs and the difficulty, a little more grit. It also makes us feel like we're actually on our own team. We become our own ally at work when we start paying attention to how we're doing on a moment-to- to moment level. And the reaching for the coffee cup thing, it's just one doorway in to getting attuned on that level.

You made a reference to this before, but I might be worth saying just a little bit more about it. As I understand it in your 20s, you got very interested in the Dharma. You wanted to be somebody who was a Dharma bum. That's an affectionate term, a Dharma bum. Somebody who's really just going from long silent retreat to long silent retreat, but you had student loan debt, so you needed to work and you worked at Apple, you did all sorts of jobs. I did all sorts of jobs, yeah. I mean,

I was a statistic coming out of the 2008 financial crisis with over six figures of debt. And I was in a position where I needed to work a lot. And I didn't have a lot of earning power. I had left music school unfinished. I didn't graduate from college. And so I took a job in a cafe for a while. I worked in unpaid internship, very long hours in a recording studio, hoping that that would turn into a career for me. And I did

anything that I could really to start bringing in some dollars. Eventually, I worked in Apple retail, which was actually a great gig for me to teach technology on a small team of really bright people. But I was doing whatever I could. It took me a long time, actually, to really get on my feet after leaving music school early in a economic recession. And I just took working for the man. That's right. Working for the man and spreading well-being and mindfulness. It could be worse.

I want to talk about, we recently at 10% happier had an opportunity to come up with some internal values that we use on the team internally for how we do business. And a few of them struck me as maybe worth exploring here. In particular, this value don't side with yourself. That's what we named it. Would you mind sort of describing what that value is and why we chose it? Well, this is a value that, you know, it really, I think it's sorely needed at this time in our country in the US, but also in the world more broadly as people are becoming more and more polarized and

entrenched into camps of us and them. But this shows up in the workplace often, which is that the moment that we have a strong opinion we hunker down dig our heels in and say I've got to advocate for this opinion against, you know, all-comers. And unfortunately, that creates a very combative and competitive, usually not in a good way, kind of environment in the workplace. So as we were talking about what some of the So as we were talking about what some of the Good things about working at 10% happier are at times and that other times go south and don't work so well We noticed that when things are going well

people are actually holding strong opinions but very lightly and they're able to perspective take and listen to other people and listen really deeply, listen authentically, not just waiting to pounce on, you know, the weakest part of somebody's argument, but actually to build out their idea with them and then come back to their original opinion and share it. This value is more than anything about having some openness and flexibility even when we have strong opinions. And this actually has real Buddhist roots in some of the oldest,

historically, teachings that are preserved in Buddhism, particularly a collection of teachings called the Ataka Vaga. One of the core values that the Buddhist teaching about served in Buddhism, particularly a collection of teachings called the Ataka Vaga. One of the core values that the Buddha is teaching about is not being attached to views and opinions. And he points out that people who are locked into debating views and opinions are suffering a lot more than people who feel like they can have some space around any given view. And to give credit where it's due here, the phraseology of Don't Sight with yourself that

comes from an obscure meditation teacher by the name of Joseph Goldstein. That's right. Who's one of our founding teachers at 10% happier? Let's just do one more of our corporate values because I also think this is a really interesting one. I'm going to make it more family friendly than the phraseology we use. Own your crap. We use a different word than crap, but owning your crap.

What does that mean to you in a work context? How is that useful? I think this is really undervalued in a lot of areas in the world, in my world, at least. And I think what we're talking about when we're talking about owning your crap to keep is about having a kind of self-awareness of what may a way that is really undefended. And this is a real powerful way to approach our work relationships and our life in general. You know, we use the phrase, warts and all to talk about understanding that not everything and not everybody is perfect. And, you know, it's actually, it makes me think of a story from my own work life.

It's coming to mind right now. And this was before I worked for 10% happier. I worked for a tech startup that had grown pretty significantly over the time that I was there. And my department was being restructured and all the different employees were being moved on to new teams and a totally new organizational structure. And the folks who architected this change, who are at high level positions in the company, generally had a sense for the place that each person would be best suited and where they would go.

And each person was called into a meeting with senior vice president and a director, just to talk about where they would be going in the company. And there was some openness to where did each employee want to go and a little bit of discussion about what made the most sense. And when I came into the room for that discussion, I had somewhere that I really wanted to go and it was different than what my boss and this other colleague had in mind. And I didn't know that yet, but I came in and the first thing I did was I acknowledged what one of my biggest weak points was as a employee.

And I said, here's where I want to go in the company. But you know, I think that there's one thing that I struggle with that you all need to see me really turn around for me to be able to go there. And the moment that I said that, totally unsolicited, it changed the tenor of the conversation where the two people I was talking to said, oh wow, this is actually somebody who we don't have to do the brave work of giving difficult feedback to. He already sees it. He's already got it under control. And that changed the quality of listening that they had for me in this moment. And I was able to share like, these are the stepping stones. I think I need to get to this place. And I know it may not be what you have in mind for me. But I think this is how I'll get where I need to go. And the conversation went, well,

that may not be the only reason why the conversation went well. But in that moment, I had an experience where I did something really vulnerable. I saw in myself something that was unbecoming and I led in the conversation with just naming it because it's not personal ultimately. It doesn't make me a bad person, but it's an area that I struggled at work. And as soon as I shared that, it opened up the dialogue in a completely different way than it might have opened up before that. I love it, that's a great story. And it is very powerful to own your crap.

It really is disarming, especially if you actually mean it. Well, I mean it when I say, I know you feel a little overwhelmed these days, but you did a great job with this discussion and I really appreciate your time. if you actually mean it. Well, I mean it when I say, I know you feel overwhelmed these days, but you did a great job with this discussion, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you. It's great to talk to you, Dan.

I'm sure we'll talk again. Thank you, Matthew. That was really, really good. Thanks again to Matthew. Always great to talk to him. Before we head out, let me mention that today is the final day to join the free Work Life Challenge,

which will teach you how to navigate your life at work without losing your mind. Download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps right now to join. And lastly, one additional note about an upcoming event that is definitely worth your time and your support. It's called healing ourselves, healing our world. It's an online benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. And it's taking place this Saturday and Sunday, November 13th and 14th. It's online so you can join from anywhere. Speakers include TPH stalwarts such as Joseph Goldstein, Joanna Hardy and Dora Williams.

I actually will be in conversation on Sunday with a really good friend, mentor, fascinating author, psychotherapist, Dr. Mark Epstein, who's got a new book coming out called The Zen of Therapy. So I'm really excited to talk to him to register. Go to nyimc.org. nyimc.org will put a link in the show notes. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartelle, and Jen Poehant with audio engineering from Ultraviolet.

Audio, we'll see you all on Friday with a little bit more Matthew Hepper. We're going to give you a sneak peek at a new episode of his 20% Happier Show. 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 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 Wondery.com slash Survey.

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