Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Dharma of Work | Matthew Hepburn

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

The office might be one of the most difficult places to not side with yourself, but it’s a concept that can help you navigate challenging situations at work.Matthew is a meditation and dharma teacher with more than a decade of teaching experience and a passion for getting real about what it means to live well. He emphasizes humor, technique, and authentic kindness as a means to free the mind from unnecessary struggle and leave a healthier impact on the world. Beyond Ten Percent Happier, Matthew has taught in prisons, schools, corporate events and continues to teach across North America in buddhist centers offering intensive silent retreats and dharma for urban daily life. In this episode we talk about:How to change your relationship to your thoughtsHow to navigate the highs of praise and the lows of blameHow to handle relationships at work when giving or receiving feedbackHow to bring your mindfulness practice to your workplaceFull Shownotes:https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/matthew-hepburn-workSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. Some of the worst fights of my life have happened at work. Most of them, I hate to say were my fault, which is embarrassing, but true. However lately I have been trying to use a little phrase I picked up from my meditation teacher and friend Joseph Goldstein. The phrase is this, don't side with yourself.

Today on this episode we're going to talk about how to do one of the hardest, but most rewarding things a human being can try to do to get over yourself and see contentious issues from somebody else's perspective. In my experience, not siding with myself is especially hard in a work context, it's hard in any context, but especially hard at work. In the office, I can find my ego digging trenches

and then just like refusing to cease fire. In fact, work can be one of the most difficult places to apply any meditative concept like mindfulness or patience or kindness. Many of us are diligent or semi-diligent or simply aspiring meditators, and we might find that once in a while we get on a good streak of practice, but then our humble to find out that we are subconsciously ruling out work as a place to bring our practice to apply it. However, work can be an amazing crucible or testing ground or dojo for your attempts at meditation and other forms of self-improvement. And we have the perfect guest today to discuss all of this.

Unlike many meditation teachers, Matthew Hepburn has spent a lot of time at work. He has worked at Apple. He's worked in the service industry. He's also a long time leader at the 10% happier company. In fact, if you go to our app and click on the podcast tab, you can hear Matthew's podcast, which he cheekily entitled the 20% happier. In today's episode, Matthew talks about how to change your relationship to your thoughts and in so doing, 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 cup of coffee. We actually recorded this episode a while back, but we are bringing it out of the archives today for two reasons. First, because it's one of our top 50 most popular episodes ever. And second, because it's a great fit for the two-week work series we're running right now on the show, which we're calling Sainly Ambitious. On Monday, we heard from Simone Stahls off about the myth of the dream job. I was intriguing and provocative

episode. And next week, we have two more excellent episodes lined up, including one about how to manage big emotions in a work context. One quick little plug before we dive in, I have a live show coming up. It's on November 3rd in Colorado in Lakewood to be exact right outside of Denver at the Mile High Church. If you're not in the area, don't worry, there will be a live stream. You can find a link to buy in-person

or live stream tickets to the event in the show notes. As you know, we're in the middle of a big series on work here on the podcast, which feels like a good time to point out that even if you love your job, you will experience stress. However, stress does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. Can actually be something you harness to your own advantage. To help you navigate, stress to this fall, we've taken one of our most popular courses from the 10% Happier app, a course called Stress Better,

and we've turned it into a meditation challenge. You will learn from a renowned stress researcher at Columbia University, Professor Madupa Akanova, and from the amazing meditation teacher, Seven A. Celasi, they'll teach you how to use stress to your advantage. It's a seven day stress better challenge, and it kicks off on Monday, September 11th, and can join over on the 10% happier app right now.

Every day you'll get a short video followed by a free guided meditation to help you establish or reestablish your meditation habit. To join the stress better challenge, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. that's all one word spelled out. If you already have the app, just open it up and follow the instructions to join. If you're not already a 10% happier subscriber, you can join us by starting a free trial that will give you access to the challenge along with everything else on the app. I'm Anna, and I'm Emily, and we're the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes

you behind the velvet rope and inside the lives of our most iconic stars. This season, we're going to spice up your life, diving into the world of Victoria Beckham. From her disastrous first Spice Girls audition to her fateful meeting with a certain footballer, say you'll be there, listeners. Okay, that's enough. You're going to want to be listening, stop that immediately. Listen to Terribly Famous, early and ad-free on Wondering Plus. T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t- on my podcast. In this series of Bride and Anne, I talk to among others, Harry Hill, Ben Elton, Charlotte Church, Steve Cougan and Dame Harriet Walter. And that's just a few. We

tend to chat for about 45 minutes to an hour, never longer. It's terrific conversation, reminiscent, sweat appropriate and exchange of anecdotes. So do join me Rob Briden wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of Briden and are available early and ad-free on Amazon Music, or by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. 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 and suck

and how we can make it suck less. And even whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that seems like way to dismal 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 to be thinking about this issue of overwhelm. How do you deal with that personally? And how would you recommend others deal with it? overwhelmed. 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, you know, 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 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, you know, 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, you know, 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

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.

Are you set a lot there that's very intriguing? Overwhelmed is that I'm probably not going to reproduce this 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 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 so 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, name ever come up, doesn't feel like much of a palace, usually feels like a dungeon. But, but, you know, 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 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,

and 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 constructiv 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 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 you know 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 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 get 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, 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, you know, 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 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 them. 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 a guy named Sean Acor 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. Yeah.

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 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 is as I've become an 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, well, 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 that 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 an altruistic, generous, and spirit is one that frees up the mind and feels good to us. And as I practiced 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, yeah, I want everybody to be doing a little bit better. All of a sudden, it was like, oh, if I am 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'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, 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 in my own mind was that I had 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 Tuesday 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, 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 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 for meals and things like that? And if I don't, then I might say, oh, I'm gonna 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 gonna 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. Think about those six days, whenever you need to think about them and plan out, do I have enough breaks? Am I gonna 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 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 and 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, Chester Kapoil 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? 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.

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, 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 730. You only have to worry about 730 to 731. 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. Coming up, Matthew Hepburn talks about handling relationships at work,

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You can listen to the big flop early and add free on Wondering Plus. Get started with your free trial at Wondering.com slash plus. 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 sugarcoding, but like 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? talking in mind while I'm also giving them clear feedback. Yes. 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, Hepburn, I'll ask the question's here. Okay. There's a real, real honest question on this. I'm just a sweaty 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 got to 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, well, how do I bring this up without hurting this person's feelings? And it's going to 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 a name dropped on the show many times. Their names are Moodytah Nisker and Dan Clirman, their sort of Dharma-inflected communications coaches. And they often talk about when you're gonna 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,

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 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 and 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 thing 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, 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 wanna 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 wanna sit on this thing and then later tell you that I didn'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. It's some people in positions of power and some people in positions of relative disempowerment in the context of their roles at work. And it's not a small thing because if 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 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 really strong ways. 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, right? 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, right? 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 so 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 of ethical conduct that a person might make. 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, And so what I would wish for anybody who is thinking about, you know, 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 the 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 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? Coming up, Matthew talks about the Buddhist concept of praise and blame, bringing mindfulness to the workplace even in the smallest of gestures, and the idea that any part of your life can be turned into a meditation practice. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think of tales of epic on the field glory. But the new podcast Sports Explains the World brings you some of the wildest and most surprising sports stories

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You can listen to sports explains the world early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. And just to say that this notion of how to be clear with people in feedback is a Buddhist concept called praise and blame. Can you hold forth on that? Well, 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. It'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, you know, 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. 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 Dhamma teacher or Me as a person in terms of my character my mind can start getting into imagining 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 this obsession 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 gonna do whatever I'm gonna do. Right? 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. 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. The core underlying theme 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 gonna 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 interpersonal intensity, the

creative demands, 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've been a working stiff

and in my heart really 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, dude. Yeah, we're just gonna 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 you were all mammals, right, 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, right? 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 a 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. Right. 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 ton of voice. And if we notice that, sure, we can reach for the coffee cup, enjoy 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. Reassure 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 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. 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 used to work for the man. That's right. Working for the man and spreading well-being and mindfulness.

That 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. It was 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 it PG is about having a kind of self-awareness of what may be some of your own blemishes or the areas in which you're not as strong or you may be struggling or still learning or growing, having some self-awareness about these in 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 were, you know, 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.

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 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. Thank you to you for listening. Don't forget to check out the link in the show notes for the live event coming up in Colorado. And thank you most of all to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Justine Davy, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere as our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman as our senior editor,

and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of ultraviolet audio and Nick Thorburn of Van Eyelens, what are theme? We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. 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

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