Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 431: The Joys of Insignificance | Ron Siegel

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Many, if not all, of us have a nonstop, ambient thought-track running through our minds of: how am I doing? How do I look? Why did I say that? Am I running behind? What do other people think of me?How did we get this way? And what do we do about it? Ron Siegel has thought a lot about this, and has plenty of practical answers, including the notion that we should lean into our insignificance. Many of us grew up being told how we were special. But Ron argues that the words, “you’re not special,” constitute extremely good news.Dr. Ron Siegel is a part-time assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and a board member at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. In his private clinical practice, he provides mindfulness-oriented psychotherapy. He is also the author of the new book, The The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary: Finding Happiness Right Where You Are.The episode explores:The notion that we didn’t evolve to be happy.Why we self-evaluateThe downsides and upsides of self-assessment.Strategies for dealing with this often irrational self-grading criteria, which include mindfulness, self-compassion, and gratitude.What it means to “lean our ladder against the right wall.”Content Warning: This conversation includes brief references to mature topics, including sex and addiction.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/ron-siegel-431See 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. Dan Harris. Hey, everybody, as we were preparing this episode, I was thinking about a story that a meditation teacher, friend of mine once told me. I'm not going to name him because I didn't actually ask permission to tell the story, but the gist of it was that my friend was on a retreat doing walking meditation, you know, walking super slowly and trying to be mindful. And he noticed how after each step

he was assessing his own performance. Did I do a good job with that one? Was I awake for the whole step, et cetera? As I recall the story, my friend broke down and wept when he suddenly realized that he had spent basically his whole life engaged in compulsive self-evaluation. If that sounds familiar, welcome to the human condition. spent basically his whole life engaged in compulsive self-evaluation. If that sounds familiar, welcome to the human condition.

I think many, if not all of us, have a non-stop ambient thought track, or you might call it a self-directed diss track, running through our skulls of how am I doing? How do I look? Why did I say that thing? Am I running behind? What do other people think of me? And blah, blah. How did we get this way?

And what do we do about it? My guest today has thought a lot about this and has a ton of practical answers, including the notion that we should lean into our insignificance. Many of us growing up being told how special we were, but my guest argues that the words, you're not special, constitute extremely good news. Ron Segal is an assistant professor of psychology,

part time at Harvard Medical School is a board member at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. He also has a private clinical practice in which he works with low income children and families and treats adults with chronic pain and other stress-related disorders. And he is the author of a new book called the Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary. In this conversation, we talk about his contention that we did not evolve to be happy. We talk about why we self- evaluate so much. We talk about the downsides and upsides of this self-assessment, strategies for dealing with our often irrational self-grading criteria, including mindfulness, self-compassion, and gratitude. And we'll talk about what Ron

means when he uses the phrase, leaning our ladder against the right wall. Heads up if you've got kids around, this conversation includes brief references to mature topics, including sex and addiction. We'll get started with Ron Siegel 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 McGonicle 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% calm. 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 did 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. Ron Siegel, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

You tell an interesting story that you got interested in the subject of self evaluation in a kind of humbling way because you realize that even after all these years of therapy and meditation and professional development, you were doing a ton of it. Can you say more about that? Yeah, you know, I was in my 60s and I started doing meditative practices when I was about 17 or 18

and I was interested in psychology as a college student and became a psychologist early in my life. So in my own therapy, and certainly doing therapy with other people for many, many years. And you would think that meditative practices, especially the ones that I was doing, which derived from Buddhist traditions, have as their goal a lack of self-preoccupation. And the ability to be present and not be attached to self-image or even be attached to pleasure over pain. And certainly Western psychotherapy, you'd think that a goal would be to have something like a coherent

secure sense of self, where you're not going up and down regularly and not feeling insecure and countless situations. And yet, if I was honest with myself, which I was from time to time, I realized that I was constantly going up and down. In fact, as I was honest with myself, which I was from time to time, I realized that I was constantly going up and down. In fact, as a good friend of mine, put it, who's similarly an experienced psychologist, he said, yeah, my appraisal of myself as a psychologist is only about as good as my last session. If it went well, I think I'm a brilliant clinician with years of experience and training. If it went poorly, I knew I should have gone into something else. This isn't my calling. I was noticing that my own psyche was going through these constant

fluctuations, and at least a big chunk of the time, it was unpleasant because I was feeling bad or inadequate or like I hadn't lived up to some inner standard or outer standard that I had. I was quite frequently stressed out trying to keep myself a steam of float basically, trying to continue to feel good about myself. And a little reflection, I realized that I really wasn't alone in this, that virtually everybody that I was seeing as a client was struggling with something in some way related to this. Now, that could be because it was my issue, and that's the issue I was seeing in them, of course. But I had the sense that it was really there.

And stepping back and looking at the culture at large, my God, the number of things that we're selling to one another with the promise that this will make you feel good about yourself. This will make you feel successful. This will make you feel popular. This will make you feel in some way like you're a winner rather than a loser or a good person rather than a bad person. Realize that this is water that we are all swimming in. Periodically, I would have my doubts that it's just because I was picked last for teams in elementary school and wasn't very tough when it came to adolescents. But upon reflection most of the time, I came to the conclusion that there's something universal about this and maybe it would be good to find some ways to work with it so that we could all

suffer a bit less. I tend to agree with you on the universality. Why are we like this? Well, it's Darwin's fault. It's basically an accidentive evolution as I understand it. It's basically an accidentive evolution, as I understand it. Many, many species, certainly all social mammals and certainly primates are very concerned with hierarchies. Largely dominance hierarchies, who's going to have more resources, who's going to have more access to things,

to take care of themselves and their kids. It's somewhat gendered in primary troops where basically they're dominant males who associate with reproductively promising females and there are certain females that get to be with those dominant males. And indeed, they get to generally reproduce more and their kids have a better shot at living.

So if we think of how natural selection works, we could imagine that there were happy hominids, holding hands, not concerned with dominance, not concerned with competing or being on top of any kind of heap, enjoying themselves and singing kumbaya. However, they weren't the ones that got to reproduce quite as much as the ones that struggled for resources and got those resources.

So we've developed a genetic proclivity to organize ourselves in this way. And the way it shows up in us as the monkeys with a little less hair and a little bit more intellectual sophistication is with concern over self-esteem, thinking how am I doing? Which always includes an implicit comparison to others. Because if I think of myself as intelligent or attractive or kind or honest or even for that matter more spiritual and less concerned with self-esteem, implicitly I'm comparing myself to others and saying, how do I do compared to them? So this concern for where we are in the primate true, which we share with so many different species, shows up in us as thoughts about,

am I doing okay or not? And it seems that we are either feeling crummy about ourselves and trying desperately to come back to neutral or feeling good about ourselves and trying to hold on to that feeling to avoid feeling crummy about ourselves. You have said that humans did not evolve to be happy. Is the foregoing all the words you just uttered, is that what you mean by humans didn't evolve to be happy? Yeah, I mean, there are many examples of it, in fact, because the best we know from evolutionary science is that the brain evolved as an organ of it, in fact, because the best we know from evolutionary science is that the brain evolved

as an organ of survival, as all of our organs did, and that through natural selection, if there were certain qualities or propensities or skills or abilities that were going to help us to survive, well, those organisms that developed that, they were more likely to survive, so more likely to pass on their genes. Well-being is actually not particularly relevant to survival and to reproduction. Now, you might think, well, wait a minute, what about all those stress-related disorders? What about the way in which being a type A personality means you're going to have a heart attack at a young age? Well, that's true currently, but historically, it didn't really matter much because stress-related disorders tended to kill

us after we had reached the age of reproduction. And so, they're actually not that relevant in our genetic history. So, what do we do about this? Ah, that's the big question. Well, for one thing, we start, I think, by being kind to ourselves about the whole thing, that we're not particularly troubled by this because there's something terribly wrong with us individually. This is, indeed, a quite universal problem, and we can take refuge in the fact that others

are suffering from it. And I think of particular import that it's not a sign of our failure. We have a kind of mythology in, I think, in American culture at least, that if we were really successful, if we were really good, if we were really winning at these various games, we wouldn't feel any insecurity about it. We would just experience the joy of being a competent, lovable, good human being. And it's only people who have these weaknesses that suffer with this. And indeed, some people do suffer with it more than others. I mean, one can have crippling social anxiety where you feel anything I say people are going to

judge me negatively. And that's worse than the run of the mill level of preoccupation with this. But realizing that preoccupation with this is pretty universal. And if I discover it in my own consciousness, it doesn't mean that I'm particularly broken or particularly bad. I think that's an important place to start. Then we need some tools to work with it. I've spent a lot of my career teaching and working with mindfulness practices. I know that you've engaged with mindfulness practices, and I imagine many of your listeners have as well.

It's really important to be able to see each time we get caught in one of these self-evaluative moments. We're so engaged in it, and there's so much social support for the idea that if only you could be better, if only you could be more successful, you'd be more happy. We often don't notice ourselves going up and down, how often we feel either good about ourselves or not so good about ourselves. I'm here watching you as we do this podcast. And if you nod or smile, no pressure, but when you do, I start to feel this is going, okay,

oh yeah, he understands, oh, this is going to be meaningful to him and perhaps meaningful to his audience. If you're looking a little distracted, oh, oh, maybe it's not working. Maybe this is just me. Maybe this isn't such a good idea. As an example here and now of the sort of up and down and these kind of self-appraisals that are happening all the time, it's really helpful to catch ourselves in the act. It's also really helpful to begin to look at what are the particular criteria we each use

to feel good about ourselves. Personally, okay, so I was picked last for sports teams in elementary school because I wasn't terribly coordinated nor did I have a mom or dad who was teaching me athletics very much. And that felt terrible, but words came easily to me. And I was able to talk in class and have teachers like that. So I started

leaning on the thought of I'm intelligent and articulate to float my boat and somehow get me through those painful moments in gym class. Starting to notice which of the qualities each of us has relied on to try to feel good about ourselves and how does it feel when we're feeling validated about that, when it's going well, and how does it feel when we fall, when it's not happening, to really get a sense of how all this works. And one of the things that I like to explore with my clients or patients, and as in the book

I've recently written on this topic is looking at all the different realms we can get hooked on because we can get hooked on the level of what we're wearing, what we own, the whole conspicuous consumption realm of trying to signal that we're somehow successful or likable or part of a certain group or something else. We do this every time we get dressed in the morning. We're sending out signals around this. For others, it's the social media realm which amplifies this tremendously. Every time we get a like on social media, the psychologist studying this say, there's a little squirt of dopamine in the nucleus of combs, which is the reward center of the brain that feels like, ah,

yes, I'm okay. And it's the same part of the brain that's activated with cocaine, with sex, with gambling winnings. It's very easy to get addicted to this. So the first step is really observational. And then there are many other things that we can do that turn out to be antidotes to this. Can you say more about the basic blocking and tackling of how we can bring self-awareness to our self-evaluation so that we're not so owned by it? Well, let's start with having a mind from this practice. So what is mind from this practice? It usually involves picking a sensory object of awareness, such as the breath or the sensations

of the feet on the ground or perhaps sounds, and bringing our attention to it. And every time the mind wanders off into the thought stream, gently and lovingly bringing it back to the sensation. And in the process of doing that, we develop a few skills, a few abilities. One of them is we attune to what's happening in the body. We start to notice really what's happening moment to moment physiologically when we're interacting with other people when we're doing different activities. We notice pleasant and unpleasant sensations and that can be very, very useful for tracking this because as it turns out,

we can do a little exercise with it. I mean, I just invite our listeners right now and you, you know, think of a moment where you felt kind of good about yourself. You felt like you were doing a good job or people liked you or some quality that matters to you was being validated. And how did that feel in the body? And even play with exaggerating your posture a little bit. We sit a little bit taller We sit a little bit taller or stand a little bit taller. You can feel it as a physiological state. And then I'm sorry to say,

I invite you to imagine the opposite, you know, a time where you felt defeated or rejected or not good enough where you weren't living up to your own standards or someone else's. And that kind of feeling of collapse, the tale between your legs, you know, we get shorter, our chest goes in. Now, I'm exaggerating them right now as we talk about them, but these things happen in a very subtle way all throughout the day. And we can just use doing some formal mindfulness practice during some of the day where we follow the breath or do walking meditation, then sensitize us to start noticing this during the rest of our time. And that's enormously useful information.

I will say for my own experience with this as well as some people that I've guided through this, it's a horrifying exercise. It could be subtle, but we may start to notice that there's some elevation or suppression, some boosts or crashes happening all day long. You know, every email can be an opportunity to either feel a little bit better about myself or a little bit worse about myself. Every text message can have the same effect. Oh gosh, I should have responded to them sooner. I feel like I'm a bad friend. Collapse. Oh, they really liked what I said the other day. Rise, starting to monitor just how frequently this happens. Number one, Suskari, you know, humiliating because we realized that we're kind of insane. But number two,

it starts to give us a little bit of a space to observe this and maybe not fully identify with it and maybe realize that, oh gosh, this roller coaster isn't me, even though, boy, it's a big part of my experience. Are you saying we should never feel good about ourselves? Or bad? No, not at all. I don't think this is gonna stop happening, right? And there's certain utility to it, right?

I mean, a person who has no shame, we say, oh, they're shameless. Well, that's a problem, right? There are many times where self-evaluation is useful. If my skills in anatomy never got past the Thanksgiving turkey, I probably shouldn't take a part surgery, not right now, not without some training. So self-evaluation in terms of what are our strengths and weaknesses absolutely necessary. And we need to correct, right? We want to grow and get better of things. It's the differential valuing of ourselves, though. The thinking that because all I can do is carbureturky and not very well, I'm inadequate compared to my friend who's a surgeon. That's the place where it's probably not very helpful and it certainly causes a lot of suffering. And it's probably not very helpful. And it certainly causes a lot of suffering. And it's very interesting to notice which of our self-evaluations

are relevant useful information that we can use to be a good person in the world and engage in the world. And which ones are getting basically addicted to self-esteem boosts to ward off the pain of self-esteem collapses. And that dynamic, which to ward off the pain of self-esteem collapses. And that dynamic, which speaking is one human being, can be pervasive in a life. That dynamic, I think, caused us a great deal of unnecessary suffering. But it's not gonna go away.

Maybe this is a good analogy. We have an evolutionary propensity to like fat and sugar. This is why donuts and their equivalent across cultures are so very popular because in our historical past, that was associated with nutrition as was sugar. Nowadays, it's associated with early death, but it was once associated with nutrition. So I don't think I'm ever gonna evolve to a point

where seeing a donut or maybe even a more sophisticated version of a donut isn't going to rouse some feeling of desire in me, it will. I may evolve to a point where I can choose to not always eat it, especially if I've already had one, to maybe not eat the second one. And I think that this is similar, that we're going to go up and down, but we can begin to get it that just structuring our lives to try to maintain the highs and avoids the lows may not be the most nutritious way

to structure our psychological lives. So there are structural issues here, you know, like how are you gonna live your life? But then there's also the mindfulness as a moment to moment way to surf this stuff. Those seem to be separate endeavors, related, related to separate. They are, they inform one another.

One of the things that we learned from mindfulness practice, and particularly from observing how it applies to this self-esteem rollercoaster, is we start to see why we never win. Why this doesn't actually work very long. There are basically two principles. One of them is something that we might call narcissistic or self-esteem recalibration. Something that floated our boat once, no longer floats our boat because we've gotten habituated to it. And we can think of this in our own lives. Remember what it was like to figure out how to put those multiolored donuts in different sizes

onto a pole so that they formed a cone, right? You know, many of us played with such a toy as a toddler and it's like, hey, I got it. I know how to do that. That felt like an accomplishment. At the moment, if you were I were to do it, it might not float our boat in quite the same way. Same thing with learning to walk,

riding a bicycle, graduating from high school. You know, they're having a first boyfriend or girlfriend. Oh my gosh, what that does for our feelings about ourselves, or perhaps getting our first job or owning a car or renting an apartment, all of these things, they work for a while, and then we habituate to it. I often teach groups of psychotherapists and I've had workshops on this topic, and I'll often say virtually all of you worked really hard to get an advanced degree,

and then to get a professional license, and it felt like a big deal, you felt really good when you accomplished that goal. How many of you woke up this morning feeling, I feel great about myself, I have my professional license and everybody starts laughing, right? Except for one newly minted psychotherapist who raises their hand and says, why is everybody laughing, right? Because they haven't habituated to it yet.

So this exists across everything. No matter what it is, I don't mean to make too many assumptions, but I bet when you got this podcast going and it became popular, which it has for good reason, you felt pretty good about that. I bet there are mornings where you could wake up and not feel so great about yourself, even though you've got this great podcast, just as an example. Yes, 100%. 100%.

Well over 10%. Okay. So we're all subject to this. The other problem, the other reason why this is so unreliable as a pathway to well-being is Newton, you know, what goes up comes down. So let's say we're really good at something. Let's say you're an Olympic gold medalist and you actually win the gold. What are the chances you're going to do it again in four years?

In eight, in 12. And ultimately, we all face a really big self-esteem crash. You know, the scene in the nursing home where there's a woman in the wheelchair having difficulty holding her saliva in. And somebody says, oh yeah, she was a really well-known nuclear physicist. Well, you know, whatever these building blocks are that we're relying on to feel good about ourselves, they're time limited. I mean, everything's time limited, but if there's somewhat more reliable building blocks,

wouldn't it be nice to be discovering what they are? So our mind from this practice actually helps us to see that this isn't working. Without mind from this practice, we might just stay addicted and we might just go on, well, the last time I felt crummy about myself, what did I do? I accomplished something and I felt better about myself. So I'll keep doing that. And we don't actually notice how we habituate to our accomplishments and how what goes up comes down because everything's impermanent. So the more we can notice the reality of how And we don't actually notice how we habituate to our accomplishments and how what goes up comes down because everything's impermanent. So the more we can notice the reality of how this works, the greater our opportunity is

to not be so addicted to it. Coming up Ron explains how we can become less preoccupied with ourselves. Why are inner critics grading criteria make so very little sense and how practices such as self-compassion and gratitude can get us off the self-esteem roller coaster that's his term and that's coming up right after this. Hey, I'm Arisha and I'm Brooke and we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newer series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles.

After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance, but the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threatened to veer Rue off course. In our series, Rue Paul born naked. We'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere.

Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. you get your podcasts, you can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. You said that there might be healthier building blocks upon which to rest our whatever self of steam, self worth sense of self, what would those be? Yeah, well, interestingly, they're not so much about bolstering our sense of self or our self worth, but they're more about being somewhat less preoccupied with ourselves period. And one way to be less preoccupied with ourselves period is to be in relationship with others, is to make safe, real, intimate connections with others. A phrase that I'll often suggest to my clients

around this is try making a connection instead of an impression. So often we go into some new interpersonal situation, particularly if it's a high stakes one, like a job interview or meeting the future in laws, or for that matter going on a podcast. And my first impulse is, how am I gonna make a good impression? Well, knowing where this leads and knowing how this just feeds the addiction, I might shift and say, how might I connect a little bit to this person? Well, part of why I'm asking you questions here and there

is I kinda wanna connect with you. Cause I know that if I feel a sense of safe connection with you, I'm going to feel like where are we just for this moment, but where are we? And if I feel like where are we, this whole enterprise is going to start losing some of its intensity. When I'm with a good friend and we're talking honestly and particularly when we're able to share our foibles and say, oh gosh, you know, I fell on my face here, I fell on my face there. That was a mess. When I'm in that situation, all of this preoccupation starts to relax. It's not because my sense of self is so different. Well, it is, but instead of being so concerned with me, I'm part of a week in this moment. And that

sense of interconnectedness is a very, very powerful antidote to this. And it's very interesting because it's actually by directional. Connecting to others safely, softens our preoccupation with self-evaluation, and to the extent to which we can soften our preoccupation with self-evaluation, we're actually freed up to connect to others. When I'm focused on me, and what are you thinking about me, I can't connect with you because I'm showing off in some way. I'm trying to, you know, posture in some way that I think you'll like, and then I'm not really with you. Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher who I quote all the time, says that one

way to think about enlightenment is the reduction in self-centeredness. What we like to be around those people. Absolutely. I mean, it's so interesting. Where with somebody who is narcissistically vulnerable and is compensating for that by puffing themselves up in various ways, at least my experience is I wind up feeling more inadequate, more insecure, my competitive juices get going.

It activates this whole system of where are we each in the primate troop and how do I compare to you? When I'm with someone like Joseph, for example, who, by the way, I'm 100 was my first retreat teacher back in the mid 70s when they opened IMS. When I'm with somebody like Joseph, who's really done a lot of work on himself and does not do a lot of this, I immediately relax

because I feel like this whole domain is less active, is less important, and it's much easier to be a wee, filled with foibles, filled with inadequacies, but okay, being together. So it is very interesting that way. Let me go back to a few things you said earlier. You talked about this self-esteem roller coaster. I think you said there is no roller coaster or the whole thing is an illusion in some way. Well, the whole thing is an illusion in the sense of how do we construct the whole idea that I'm better than you or you're better than me based on what, right? That actually becomes

very interesting. Another one of the antidotes to this is let's just examine cognitively for a moment how we construct our sense of being good or bad. Well, first of all, there's a question of, where did we come up with a criteria? Like, where did we learn that whatever it is, being smart, winning its sports, being a kind person, having more friends, being a selfless meditator, where did we learn that that is the criteria which is relevant? And that's the one I should go for.

And most of us have many of these, but it's interesting we get it from peer groups, we get it from messages from the culture, sometimes we get it from parents or teachers. It is very interesting to see where we picked up on these things. Another interesting thing to examine is things that were relevant once and aren't so relevant anymore.

Like it used to matter to me in elementary school, what my skills were like in kickball. I'm happy to say not so much anymore, because they weren't very good. So some things do gain or lose relevance at different points in time. When I was worried about kickball, I wasn't worried about whether other people

will think of me as wise and compassionate. Now I worry whether people will think of me as wise and compassionate. So it's interesting to see how it changes. And something that I find absolutely fascinating and my clients have found really useful is to look at what's the timeline for the grading system? Like, is this a cumulative grade point average since birth? Is it only since adulthood? In other words, how long ago did I have to be a good person to be able to still feel like I'm a good person? How long ago did I have to feel like I was intelligent to still feel like intelligent?

How long ago did I have to be sexually attractive to feel sexually attractive? It's so interesting how this works because past positive experiences don't have that much staying power. We recalibrate and then it's like, I could have been a good person for a lot of my life and then I do something where I hurt my wife's feelings and boy, I feel like a really bad husband and it's really quite vivid.

So the grading system is like, you can't even accumulate a decent GPA. You're constantly being tested and realizing that, you know, just seeing how it works. Like, where did I get the criteria and how do I maintain this system of being good enough or not? The more we look at it, the crazier it seems and the more the roller coaster actually does seem like it's an illusion, but it's a very powerful illusion. I think the word you used where the roller coaster is not me. And that is really interesting, right?

One of the fruits of mind from this practice, as I understand it, and I think as Joseph would describe it, is to really see how we construct a sense of self. So interesting, the history of social psychology is a guy by the name of Kool-E who is often called the father of social psychology, who round about 1900, coined the term the looking glass self. And this was the word looking glass as the old word for a mirror.

And he said, what happens is we go through life, seeing our self reflected in others, basically whether they're smiling kindly upon us or scowling critically. And we create the sense of who we are based on that cumulative experience. One of the things that happens through mind from this practice, and I think good introspection generally, is we start to see, oh my God, the whole things constructed. It's constructed out of these reflections. And Lord knows the reflections say something about the other person as well as us, right?

My old friend, Dr. Mark Epstein, whose work I suspect you're familiar with was on the show recently. And well, he made this observation in the book he wrote recently, the Zanith therapy that we all have this kind of maybe subconscious discomfort with this suspicion that we're not real. On some level, whether we've thought about it consciously or not, we have a sense of our own insubstantiality. And as a consequence, he argues, we have these two seemingly contradictory responses.

One is a tendency toward defensiveness. Another is a tendency toward self-puffery. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, no, it does make sense to me. I mean, there's a way that if we look clearly at consciousness, we don't find a me there, a very simple exercise that we can do takes less than a minute. And let me invite you and our listeners to do it if you like. Just close your eyes.

And just quietly, silently, slowly count to five. And now let's do that again and see if you can identify where in the body is the counting occurring, where the number is happening. So do it again, trust you where the numbers are happening. And next, where is the me, the volitional entity, if you will, the eye that is doing the counting, right? Where's the me that's doing the counting? Obviously we're counting.

Where's that me that's doing the counting? Try counting to five again slowly. And now, where's the me or the eye or the witness? That's experiencing the counting. So try counting to five again and find out, where's that me that's experiencing the counting. So try counting to five again and find out where's that me that's experiencing it? And you can open your eyes again. It's a little weird, isn't it? I mean, it's a cool exercise. I've done others like it, not this specific one, but exercises like this bump you up against what may be the greatest mystery, which is consciousness.

We know that we are knowing stuff, but we can't find what it is that is doing the knowing. Exactly. And yet we're constantly thinking, I'm constantly thinking that runs either good or bad smarter dumb, successful or not, but where's this run? That is being evaluated in this way. It's the me that's thinking and talking, right? But where is that? So I think, yes, I think Mark is onto something here. And one of the things that can help loosen this up for us is to the extent that we can have moments of experiencing ourselves as simply an organism unfolding where the narrative about me, mine, and I, and how I'm doing is just seen as this narrative. We're much freer.

This happens to me all the time, like, right now, as we're doing the podcast, it's fluctuating, right? There are moments in which, yeah, I'm concerned with how I'm doing and how it sounds. And there are other moments where the words are simply happening. I couldn't tell you who is talking exactly. You ask a question and the mind, whatever that is, responds. Words come out and they flow. My sense of Ron is almost a sense of simply observing while participating in this organism doing its thing. It's nice the way I saw a chipmunk

at the bird feeder a little earlier this morning. And I thought, how cool watching this chipmunk, be a chipmunk, not evaluative, not nicer chipmunk than others, prettier fur than others, none of that. Just the unfolding of the chipmunk is itself marvelous and wonderful, but not in a valued sense. And I think at moments we can live this way. There are times where it's just kind

of flowing and the organism is engaged and there isn't a lot of a value of soundtrack going on. And I love those moments. It's a delight to do whatever I do, whether it's teaching the dishes, whatever, because finally, finally, I have a bit of space where I'm not tormented, try to keep myself a steam of float. And what would you say the rest of us could do to make ourselves more prone to these flow states?

Well, I think there's a lot of things we can do. One thing is to have a mind from this practice. I think that helps provide a substrate, if you will, in a set of skills that are helpful. Another thing is to really try to make a connection not an impression. This helps a lot because almost all of the situations where we're struggling, at least where I'm struggling,

I'm struggling because I'm imagining another evaluating me. I'm imagining you or our listeners thinking about how I'm struggling. I'm struggling because I'm imagining another evaluating me. I'm imagining you or our listeners thinking about how I'm doing or even when I'm writing, I'm imagining my audience evaluating me. And if that's about I'm trying to craft what I say in order to be useful, fine, that's wonderful. But if it's mostly about what do you think of me, not so useful. So part of it is kind of monitoring this and thinking about all the different things we do in our lives, whether it's parenting, whether it's the work we do to earn a living,

whether it's being a child to someone else, whether it's being a friend, whether it's going for a walk in the woods, what all the things we do, can we notice what it feels like to do it in a way which kind of feels like the organism is unfolding versus doing it with the self-consciousness. You know, masters in Johnson, the sex researchers,

coined this term the inner spectator. What did they discover in their research on sex? Well, other animals don't seem to have a big inner spectator when it comes to sex. And as a result, they don't have a lot of sexual dysfunctions. But we, when we're engaged in sexual activity, very often are involved in how am I doing? And ironically, the inter-specator gets in the way of the organism unfolding as it naturally would. And it happens

with sex, it happens with public speaking where, oh my gosh, my voice is shaking. Oh no, how do I get my voice to stop shaking and you lose your train to thought? You can't do it. It happens with going to sleep. I've got to get a good night's sleep. I'm going to be on 10% happier tomorrow.

I want to be well rested. So start worrying about getting enough sleep. So something else we can do is just notice, right? Like notice when this inter spectator is prominent and think what are the ways I could do everything I do in a way that's more about engagement, because typically we can find ways that work. Something else, this really comes from,

you know, my background is a clinical psychologist. When I think of what makes particular self-esteem or self-evalued of moments poignant for people, it's often because they relate to earlier moments that were painful in some way. So if I've had the experience as many people have, many of my clients have of feeling rejected, let's say even in my family of origin, and it's most painful, I think, when it happens there, then I'm going to go through life and I'm going to be reading the tea leaves, reading other people's facial expressions, are you rejecting me? Are you not rejecting me? If I felt inadequate in some way about my mathematical ability or my verbal ability or something, I'm going to be going through life,

reading indicators of either having math skills or not or being verbally fluent or not. When we have self-esteem crashes, it's almost always related to some previous experience that was really painful. Some of the work we need to do is when we're in a current situation and we feel our self-esteem plummeting. We feel ourselves having a crash. Take a moment to reflect what does this remind me of? What's this feeling? How is this feeling familiar? And for me, for example, when that's happening, let's say I've got, well, what the heck, I'll be honest about it. So I'm planning a workshop and, oh, looks like it's going to be canceled because not enough people signed up. Oh, deflation. Oh, I really like teaching workshops. Oh, this is the end of my career. Oh, yeah, I can get a little hysterical about these things, but not, but nonetheless, there's an experience of deflation that we're going to have to cancel. Oh, no, it's cause of COVID. Yeah, but people signed up for the other one. Okay, so there's this moment of deflation.

If I go inward and I say, okay, what does this remind me of? Well, it's interesting. I mean, for me, it's like, oh, there's that rejection from that girlfriend early on sitting there still kind of hurting. Oh, there's that experience with this group of kids at the bunk at summer camp where they were from a tough neighborhood.

I wasn't and I kept trying to bolster myself and make it with them, but I started to realize that this hurt around the workshop is actually resonating with all of that. And we kind of have to do the psychological work of going back and revisiting all of those, I'll use the word trauma, advisedly here. These aren't necessarily big tea traumas of horrible things happening, but the little things

that are painful to us that happen in the course of a life that we push out of awareness because they were too painful at the time and we didn't want to feel that much pain. But now that we're in a ladder situation, which in some way resonates with that, the pains back. And in a sense, self-esteem challenges these crashes become a wonderful opportunity to rework all of this. I have a friend and colleague, Michael Miller, he's a psychiatrist in the Boston area. And he once said to me, I know a lot of people that have been ruined by success, not that many that were ruined by failure.

Because when we have a failure, sometimes it helps us to rework all of these past injuries to revisit them. Yes, it's humbling, but also we heal it a little bit when we go back to it. So one of the things we can all do is to instead of scrambling for how do I build up my self-esteem again? How do I win again? How do I use each time that I fall flat as an opportunity to rework these past injuries so that maybe I'll be a little bit less vulnerable to it in the future

and a little bit less addicted to having to boost my self-esteem to avoid the feeling of failure that reminds me of those earlier failures that I've never processed. So that's something else we can do. Another thing that we can do is practice self-compassion, as I mentioned. That is really, really helpful when we're having one of these crashes, because when we have the crash, if we're not going to be addicted to puffing ourselves up, we're going to have to be able to tolerate crashes. And if we can, in some way, hold ourselves with a sense of, it's okay, sweetheart.

This happens to everybody. We're going to be able to tolerate it. And I'm particularly interested in the difference between enhancing self-esteem as a pathway here and enhancing self-compassion. And if we think of this in child development, think of a moment where a parent is dealing with a child who's crestfallen. Let's say I'm a dad and let's say my daughter has come home and she didn't make the basketball team and she's crestfallen and she's feeling terrible.

Now if I thought that self-esteem was important and Lord knows there have been hundreds of programs to enhance kids' self-esteem, none of which have worked to make kids happier. But if I think self-esteem is important, I'm gonna say, oh, sweetheart, I know that's disappointing, but you know, you were really great on the math team. You did fantastically at speech and debate last year, and in fact, you know, you're doing really well at tennis. So maybe you'll make the basketball team again next time, but you know, you're a terrific kid.

If I was trying to teach my child self-compassion, I'd say, oh, sweetheart, I'm so sorry. That can be so painful. You know, I was into drama as a kid and I didn't make the school play. And when I didn't make the school play, I moked around for, I gotta tell you, it was a few weeks. I felt so defeated by it because I felt all inadequate and everything. It's so painful when we lose these things. I love you. Let me give you a hug.

Very different way of working with it. It's really about how can we be with the pain of the fact that we win some and we lose some and this is hard when it happens in life, but not reinforce the addiction to thinking the answer is, let me think of how I'm special and better than other people. And yeah, it's hard because we so often, you know, head off in that direction. So cultivating self-compassion, the ability to say, it's okay, sweetheart, there's a universality to this. We all have this experience of falling and being hurt. And let me hold your hand during this experience. I think that is super important.

One other that I think that's really powerful is trying to cultivate gratitude. Moments of gratitude are very interesting. The positive psychology literature is replete with stories about gratitude being the most powerful thing to practice in terms of feeling better in the world. Question I have is why. And I think I have an answer, at least as a hypothesis. I think the reason why is number one that when we're feeling grateful, we're grateful toward or for something.

It actually connects us to something larger than ourselves. For some people, it's being grateful to God. For others, it's grateful to the universe. We're connected to something larger than ourselves. For some people, it's being grateful to God. For others, it's grateful to the universe. We're connected to something larger than ourselves. And the other thing is that in a moment of gratitude, we're not focused on desire. On, this is what I need in order to be happier. This is what I need to feel better. We're actually appreciating what we already have. So it gets us out of the sort of deficit model and out of the model of feeling like we need something else. And I think that helps to really soften the whole self-esteem preoccupation as well.

Those are just some greatest hits of tools that I think are helpful to us. Coming up Ron explains what it means to lean your ladder against the right wall. He argues that we should embrace our insignificance and he has a memorable lesson that involves the King of England from the year 1343. That's coming up after this break. You've touched on this a little bit but I do want to go back to the notion of success. You write about the failure of success.

I think that's the name of a whole chapter. One of the ideas you talk about in that chapter is something you call leading up against the right wall or having alternative aims. Can you hold forth on these notions? Sure. Joseph Campbell, who was a student of the world's mythologies and was very interested in wisdom traditions and what they have to teach us, he said, many people climb the ladder of success only to discover that it was leaning up against the wrong wall. And that seems to be true. I think what happens to us is we so easily become addicted

to pursuing forms of success that make us feel good about ourselves temporarily. And the reason for this is because as we were talking earlier and kind of embodying what it feels like, mindfully, to have a self-esteem booster, a self-esteem collapse. The boost feels so good compared to the collapse that feels so bad.

And anytime that there's a big gap between something that feels really good and something that feels really bad, it's an opportunity for addiction. Crack cocaine, my understanding is, feels really, really good for a little while. Crack cocaine, wearing off, feels really, really bad for a while. And when there's that kind of gap,

what do you want? I want more crack. And there are so many things that take this form, right? And I think, in my experiences, that self-esteem boosts, take this form, right? And I think my experience is that self-esteem boosts take this form. So we wind up leaning up against the wrong wall, climbing the ladder of success, thinking that if only I can be more special, more famous, more rich, more light, that's going to work for us. And the problem is it does work for us for a little while each time, which is what continues to convince us that this is what we need to do.

So it's not the wrong wall in the sense of necessarily morally wrong. And you know, maybe it's not hurtful to others, maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. But it's wrong in terms of not being sustainable, really not being a path that's going to work in the long run. And it's a path where it's going to be subject to the hedonic treadmill, right, where we're going to need more and more and more, just to experience the same level of well-being that we had before. You know, I once had a client, it was early in my practice. He came in and he had just sold his defense contracting business for $30 million cash.

And he kept using that expression, $30 million cash. And I kept imagining the wheelbarrow, you know, what is that? What's that like? And he was kind of bereft because he had actually spent his whole adult life in international arm sales. And the question was, now what? I was thinking, oh, this is so exciting. This is going to be an interesting psychotherapy.

This is going to be about the meaning of life, because clearly he has all one could need materially. And I'm trying to inch the conversation in that direction. And he's not at all interested in that. And as often happens, when a therapist has a clear idea of what they'd like the therapy to be about, we weren't connecting very well. And then maybe three or four sessions and he comes in and he looks transformed.

Instead of looking kind of anxious and despondent, he looks energized and happy. And I said, what happened? And he said, I've just come up with a business plan by which I think I could parlay my $30 million into a $50 million enterprise. And I think if I could earn $50 million, I'd feel like I had succeeded. And you're laughing. I laugh. How absurd. But we all do this. We all do this in other ways where we think, oh, just the next increment.

That's going to do it for me. That's going to make me feel better. I'm going to go for that next increment. This isn't a polemic against achievement or working hard of things, but thinking that the next increment is going to work for us probably not because once you're 50, you're going to need something more than that. So it's really a suggestion to notice what we're hooked on and really evaluate which of those things are valuable, are sustainable, are in line with our values, and which of them are basically attempts to make the bad feeling go away by replacing it with another feeling

of somehow winning or being good enough. So how do we find the right wall at how do we identify what you call alternative aims rather than just trying to get high in the roller coaster? Well, I think one good place to start is to examine our values. To ask what really matters to me? Sometimes this is constructed as an exercise. What do you want it to say on your tombstone? What matters?

Interestingly, when we ask ourselves that and when most people ask themselves that, the answer often is about connection. The answer often is, I want to be a good friend, a good parent, a good child, a good human being in the world. Sometimes it's about creativity. I want to use my talents to produce something useful, something interesting, something beautiful. We can also think of it as the right wall, as which aspects of our instinctual nature do we want to favor and cultivate? So there are many, many instincts that we have toward cooperation, toward sharing, toward justice, and I think that we can recognize that these instincts

will flourish if we feed them some, if we actually try to act in a just way. If we actually try to share and be generous, and here not so I can think I'm a good person being generous, although it's going to be part of it. But with that, not being our main thrust, but because we get it, that living this way feels better, that it actually doesn't feel good to be constantly worrying about me, and it feels good to be connecting with other people in this way. You know, I'm talking about this like it's some discovery, but it's all the stuff that the world's religious traditions have been telling us for years would be where we should

put our energies. It turns out that they're mostly right. All the cliches are true. As we vectored toward the close here, I want to get you to talk a little bit about, you have a nice phrase, the joys of insignificance. Same war, please. Yeah, you know, it's not an accident that many of the world's religious and wisdom traditions have invited us to contemplate the fact that we're going to die. A lot of useful learning comes

from that. There's so many people who have some kind of life-threatening experience where it reorient their values. They have this experience and suddenly they realize, oh gosh, all this energy that I was putting into building me up, that's not what really matters to me. That's not what's most important. And it comes in part from realizing that I'm not going to be here forever. And in fact, this whole enterprise, I'll put it in the first person, this whole enterprise of edifying Ron, may be working against what is both most gratifying and most important.

And if we can embrace the fact that this podcast someday, I don't know, it'll happen, but digital media will change, and there probably won't even be a way to listen to it. If we can embrace the fact that books I've written I don't know what'll happen, but digital media will change, and there probably won't even be a way to listen to it. If we can embrace the fact that books I've written are going to decompose and go back to the earth in some way that the same's gonna happen to this body, there's a certain freedom that comes from that.

There's a certain realizing that, oh gosh, all of this preoccupation with me and how am I doing is fundamentally quite silly. A little question I have that I find helpful around this, which is, you know, do you know who the King of England was in 1343? And most people say no. And I say, I don't either, but in 1343, he was a really big deal. And everybody in England really knew who he was. Now, not so much, right? And this is so true.

I haven't heard an argument against this. What if we actually lived each day as though it were so? And thought, so what do I want to do with this day? You could branch off into nihilism when this happens. Oh, nothing matters, you know, et cetera. But that's not actually mostly what happens. Mostly what happens is we start to lean more against the right wall. We start to think, you know, I'm not going to try to be so successful. I'm going to try to do something useful. You know, I've had moments writing a book, well, you know, writing a book there's all

sorts of attachment to what are people going to think about the book and all of that not to mention Amazon ratings. And sometimes, and this is a fruit of having written the book and think about this, sometimes on a walk or something. And I think, I don't know how many people are going to read the book. And I don't know how many people are going to like the book. But if this book is useful to even just a few people who can lighten up with this thing and can actually live their life a little bit more

insignificantly and feel more okay about being ordinary and connect a little bit more deeply with friends or family or for that matter, the clerk in the store, wouldn't that be lovely? I'm not saying I always dwell there. I'm not saying I'm enlightened, but when I have that experience, oh, what a relief. How sweet, how nice, how intuitively right in terms of the wall that feels.

And it really comes from embracing ordinariness. It really comes from embracing insignificance and the fact that we're all the temporary little blip. And in fact, you know, the whole solar system's going to be gone after a while. It's quite counter-cultural, though, because at least I remember for being a kid who lectured about how special I was. And I think that's reinforced in the age of social media.

Another thing you say is you're not that special and other good news. This notion of not being special and not being more significant than anybody else is for some I would imagine hard to swallow. I start the book with a quote from a friend who says, you can't have a title that's about being ordinary. Nobody wants to be ordinary. Nobody would possibly read the book, right? We do live in a bizarre time where there's this idea that ordinary or average is failure. And unless we happen to be in a certain part of what is it Minnesota, like Wobegon, where all of the women are strong, all of the men are good looking, and all of the children are

above average, we're doomed because we're going to be below average half the time. And if we've got to be special, oh my God, what a painful and difficult burden that is. And as you say, social media has so amped this up. How many times do you see an Instagram post or Facebook post where the person's basically saying, woke up this morning, had the runs again, afraid I'm going to get a bad performance review at work. And I think my girlfriend'm going to get a bad performance review at work and I think my girlfriend's going to leave me, right? No, it's like here I am at this fantastic place with a fantastic party with curated beautiful people and you're not here. That's what we see all day long.

You know, if we were nation-states, it would be as though we're reading our own crime and poverty statistics and looking at other people's travel brochures, but this is the world of social media. And I found adolescence hard enough without social media, just imagining what it would have been like to be alone in eighth grade or ninth grade and watching images of all my friends who were at the party that I wasn't at or even kids who weren't my friends,

but just the people at the party. Oh, the horrible pain of that. So it's gotten much worse. Roy Baumaster, who's studying self-esteem as an academic psychologist for years, he said, after decades of research, I'd say forget about self-esteem, put some money into self-discipline and effort and engagement. That's a pretty good place to leave it. Before I let you go, can you please plug your book and any other books you've written and any other content you put out into the world that you think people might want to access? Well, if you're interested in exploring this further, the book is the extraordinary gift of being ordinary,

finding happiness right where you are. There are instructions in the book on cultivating a mind from this practice, but if you want to go more deeply into that, there's another book I wrote some time ago called The Mind From The Solution Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems. It's really a practicing psychologist look

at how to apply mine from this practices throughout your life. So those are probably the two that are most relevant to our discussion today. Ron, thank you very much for coming on. Great job. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to Ron Siegel. Thanks as well to everybody who works so hard to make the show a reality. Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria, Whartell, and Jen Poient. Also, our friends over at Ultraviolet Audio, who do our audio engineering. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members.

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