The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self by Martha Beck

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self by Martha Beck "This radiant book will not only change your life, but perhaps even save it."--Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author "Martha Beck's genius is that her writing is equal parts comforting and challenging. A teacher, a mother, a sage, she holds our hand as she leads us back home to ourselves."--Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author Bestselling author, life coach and sociologist Martha Beck explains why "integrity"--needed now more than ever in these tumultuous times--is the key to a meaningful and joyful life As Martha Beck says in her book, "Integrity is the cure for psychological suffering. Period." In The Way of Integrity, Beck presents a four-stage process that anyone can use to find integrity, and with it, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering. Much of what plagues us--people pleasing, staying in stale relationships, negative habits--all point to what happens when we are out of touch with what truly makes us feel whole. Inspired by The Divine Comedy, Beck uses Dante's classic hero's journey as a framework to break down the process of attaining personal integrity into small, manageable steps. She shows how to read our internal signals that lead us towards our true path, and to recognize what we actually yearn for versus what our culture sells us. With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach and human being to help readers to uncover what integrity looks like in their own lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that not only will change the direction of our lives, but bring us to a place of genuine happiness.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to refer the show to your family, friends, relatives. Get them involved in the show. Tell them to go to iTunes. Hit that subscription button to see the video version of this interview. You can go to YouTube.com, for which that's Chris Voss. For an unlimited time, you can click on the bell notification,

use subscribe for free, and see all the wonderful interviews of the brilliant authors we have on the show. You can also go to Goodreads.com, for which that's Chris Voss, all the groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. So there you go. Today, we have the most brilliant multi-book author on. She's the author of the new book that just came out two days ago, April 13th, 2020. You can order the book now and be the one of the first ones to tell your book club you read it first. Martha Beck is on on the show with us the name of the book is the way of integrity finding the path to your true self that sounds like something i really need

right now when it comes down to it and this episode is brought to you by a sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature is a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience.

Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. So let me tell you a little bit about her. She is a best-selling author, coach, life coach, and speaker who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She's the author of nine non-fiction books and one novel, and she's contributed monthly to O! The Oprah Magazine since its inception. She holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard, and welcome to the show, Martha. How are you?

Thank you. I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. We are so happy to have you and all your brilliance and wisdom and everything you've done with all these books. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and look you up. Oh yeah. Go to my website, marthabeck.com. I'm on social media also as like the Martha Beck on Instagram, but just go to the website. It will send you everywhere you need to go. marthabeck.com. There you go. And you've written a lot of books. What made you want to write this one? It's interesting. I've been writing self-help books and articles for about 30 years now. And I've also been a very avid reader of self-help because I needed it. So I started thinking of ways to be happier many years ago and people started paying me to report

them. So I thought this beats working. So I started writing books and articles and after 30 years and going all over the world and coaching people, beggars in third world countries, billionaires and everybody in between, I finally realized that the single cure for psychological suffering is integrity. And by that, I don't mean like a Sunday school version of tell the truth and whatever. Integrity is from the Latin word integer, which just means intact or whole. It means being one thing. So what happens to us when we lose our integrity is simply that we're not the same person all the way through. So part of us feels something at a deep level,

and another part of us believes something different. And we don't even know that we've split ourselves, but we are then not in integrity, which is one thing, but in duplicity, which is two things. And that shows up as psychological suffering. When you fix it, all the suffering goes away. It's amazing. Yeah. I think I did some writing on this on Facebook the other day, but yeah, yeah. It's sometimes just fixing that, like you say, connecting the two, but you're, you're fixing what you're suffering. And I don't know that, like you say, connecting the two, but you're, you're fixing what you're suffering.

And I don't know if, so this is really a curious discussion. I love the premise of this. Is that, give us a bigger arcing overview of the book and what you discussed and how you flushed out these ideas. Okay. So I, as I said, I read everything as self-help. And one of the things that I read as self-help when I was about 17 or 18 was the Divine Comedy by Dante. My very first self-help book started out with a quote that I had modernized

where Dante starts out saying, in the middle of my life, I came to myself in this foggy, dark, scary place. And I don't even remember how I got there. And I couldn't find my way to the truth and to the true path. And I don't know what's going on. And that really, that rang true for me. And I read the whole thing as a metaphor for the journey of the psyche. And it worked really well for me. And so when I came to write this book, I just have gone back over and over over the years. And I really see the divine comedy as this metaphorical map for going from confusion and lostness and suffering all the way to a life that is like magically blessed. So this book is based on the divine comedy. I follow Dante through starting in what he calls the dark wood of error, where you're just confused and you're like,

my life wasn't supposed to go this way, but I don't like my job and I don't like my relationship. And what's wrong? What happened? The only way he gets out of the dark wood of error is to go into the inferno. And I see that as going into ourselves. If you've ever had any therapy, this is what, or coaching, this is where it goes. You go in and you find the parts of yourself that are stuck, that aren't happy, but can't get moving. And those inner demons need to be released by the way Dante does. He questions the demons. And I see us as having inner demons. And if we question them, for example, you might have an inner demon that if your father told you, you're no good. You could have this voice inside you saying, I'm no good.

I'm no good. I'm no good. And you will suffer. And the reason you will suffer from this is that it's a lie. So when you go in and you say you meet that part of you that says, I'm no good. Then you say to that part, are you sure? Can you absolutely know that's true? And in every single case, if a thought is causing suffering, it will not be true.

And as you realize that it's not true, it frees itself from hell. It just goes away. It's torturing you. Yeah. And I've been doing this for decades with clients, with myself. And then Dante goes through this purgatory where he has to he has to walk his talk now he's all clear on the inside he has to start acting in a way that resonates and aligns with his deepest truth and not with what's happening around him so

we have a true nature that we regain when we tell our truth, but it runs into our culture, into our family culture, into our ethnic culture, international, religious, whatever. And in every case, what pushes us off our true nature is cultural pressure and sometimes trauma. Sometimes you can go through a trauma that will do it too, but those are the only two reasons. So as you start to walk your talk, sometimes the people around you don't like it very much. And you have to learn to be true to yourself, even against social pressure. And if you can get that to work, then you get all the way to a life that is where you're, I like to say, you're feeling what you really feel. You're knowing what you really know.

You're saying what you really mean. And you're doing what you really want to do. Would that be called living your truth? Yes, it is. That's exactly what it is. And at that point, Dante goes off into this place called Paradise where all these wonderful things happen. And he says, don't even try to go here. You're not going to believe me.

I think he had an actual experience that in Asia they call awakening or enlightenment. And now in the West, we know that it changes the brain so that the brain begins to perceive the world as much more beautiful, much more harmonious and much more peaceful and gratifying. And there's no fear left. There's no suffering left. And I actually believe that's attainable for any normal human who wants to actually walk the way of integrity. I believe it. I think I've lived it. There's some trauma in my childhood that took place. And sometimes I remember seeing on Oprah, the secrets that you keep are the poison inside you. And I used to have a lot of issues with anger and managing the thought process. And as soon as I told my secret, the anger was gone. The torture

ended. But there was something you said in what you said about when people tell you lies, they lie to you, like you're not good enough. And it's usually a lie. I think that's really important. I think that's a great aspect of your book because people need to recognize that's what it is. Like you said, most of the time, but it's that lie. And until you address it and stuff, you just, you're constantly tortured by it and, and being able to identify that. Why am I hurting? And what's this? How do we identify what those lies are? What's really sometimes tearing or eating us alive inside? You just said it, it hurts. Like somebody once said to me, I said, it's like, you've got a

porcupine quill stuck in you somewhere. And, um, they said, how do I know where it is? And I said, you've got a porcupine quill stuck in you somewhere. And they said, how do I know where it is? And I say, poke around, see where it hurts. That's where it is. So it turns out that suffering is actually our greatest ally. Without it, we would never question anything that anybody told us. We'd just go along believing what we were told and doing everything that everybody else does. And we might never achieve the real deep, full richness that our lives are meant to be. Fortunately, when we leave our truth and we start to believe something that isn't

really true for us at a deep level, we begin to suffer. And the further we go, the more we suffer. One of the things I talk about in the book is that the first response, when we find out that life isn't working, is that we try to be better. We try to do what we're doing better. So like when I didn't, I was raised by a professor's family. And I thought if I got really high achievement in intellectual circles, I would be happy. So I went to Harvard and I got my BA and I wasn't happy. So I went back and got a master's and I wasn't happy. So then I went back and got a PhD and I still wasn't happy. And I, at that point I was like, Hmm, maybe this isn't maybe the whole idea of intellect as happiness isn't really true. And, and then I had a child with down syndrome and,

and had to choose whether or not to terminate that pregnancy. And I found that the idea that happiness comes from intellect was a huge lie that I'd been sold in my family, but especially in the school system and certainly at Harvard. And I would look at the people, the doctors who said it's like having a malignant tumor, he's going to ruin your life. And I am pro-choice politically, but I would look at them and I think, you're not happy. You're the smartest person I've ever met. You're not happy. And how do you know he can't be? Like, what is the reason for being alive?

And I decided that it was the experience of joy. And these people weren't joyful. And so that lie broke for me. And it broke in a big way when I was really quite young. I was 25. It opened everything up to me so that I started questioning people and the pressures that everybody gets from their culture, which may not be right for us.

Yeah. Yeah. What was the decision that you made? I kept my baby, who became, he just, oh, my gosh. If you've ever read the Chronicles of Narnia, as a kid, did you read the Chronicles of Narnia? I didn't, but it's a beautiful story. Yeah. Have you seen the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? There's a magical wardrobe, a closet where usually it's just a closet with some coats in it. But sometimes when these kids open the

closet and they go into it, the coats just keep going and they go on and on into this magical world called Narnia where the animals can talk and everything. My son, Adam is a lot like that. Like most of the time, he's just an ordinary dude with Down syndrome. Awesome human being. Oh my God. So easy to be with. So great. So classy. But sometimes he does something that is blows the hinges off my mind. And there is magic around that young man. I was going to say kid, but he's a man now. And yeah,

that really got me on a different path too, because I was experiencing all these, what I thought were psychic phenomenon. Now I would call them spiritual experiences. And that was not part of the Harvard scene either. He really broke open my life in a thousand ways. And I'm so happy. My sister was born with cerebral palsy and lived a life of challenge, but still she's a

beautiful one. She was a beautiful, wonderful person until last year, but she got, they sent her home to pass away after three months in the hospital and she lived for, I think almost 40 years. Wow. Yeah. She got it right. But yeah, these, these people are beautiful. They're human beings too. It was interesting to me what you said, and that's a beautiful story, by the way, it was interesting to me what you said about how you looked at the doctors and stuff and you analyze them from the aspect of not happy. Do you, can you give us a little bit more depth on that? Cause I thought that was really interesting how you use that aspect. There's such a push for achievement. And there were five doctors at the University Health

Services there, and they all thought that I should terminate the pregnancy. And by the way, the diagnosis came really late. So it was like I was very close to the third trimester. The head obstetrician really tried to talk me out of my decision. And he said, you'll be throwing your life away if you had this child. And so did my advisors in my PhD program. And the fact is that it's absolutely true. I did throw away the life that I had planned, but Joseph Campbell, the anthropologist says we must give up the life we had planned in order to have the life that is waiting for us. And when I threw away my life, I threw away a life that wasn't making me happy. And what I got instead was a life that made me incredibly happy. And I wish the best for everyone who gave me that advice, who said either terminate the pregnancy or put him in an

institution. You've got to do this for your career. And I'm like, dude, my first bestseller was about my son. Like the kid is a total cash cow. Are you kidding me? So yeah. Yeah. One of the things that culture tells us is this is the way to be happy in Dante. He calls it this golden mountain that everybody's climbing, but it never makes anybody happy. We can never get to the top of it. Yeah. And yeah, the only way to paradise is to go through hell into our own demons and out the other side. I love this. This is a beautiful story and it's a beautiful ending. The, I went through the same process.

I grew up poor and I want, I was like, okay, if I get rich and I get the stuff I always wanted, I'll be happy. And then I got rich and I actually was more unhappy because everyone was unhappy with me. And it just got worse. All my bad juju, all my bad glass and razor blade trauma and issues, they just got amplified as opposed to, I thought you could throw money at it and it would just be like, oh, money, I'll go away now. No, it was actually worse because sometimes with money or success, it will justify you, justify those issues and your broken crap. And it justifies you.

And then you're just like, I've insulated now so I can deal with this. And I'm just going to get worse. It makes it so much worse. Yeah. But that happiness was really important. Yeah. And there's a quote in here from a friend of mine named Sonia Alar. And she gave this advice to men in the bedroom if they want to perform well with their wives.

But she said it works for all life situations. And here it is. If what you're doing isn't working, don't do it harder. And that's what we do. We see that we're leaving the freeway and the car is drifting and we hit the gas instead of the brake. More money, more success, more whatever. And I've coached people, billionaires who were absolutely in hell and who are on massive amounts of opioids and stuff, just trying to medicate themselves into feeling okay.

And because they had so much money, they could afford a lot of opioids. And so they went far off their path of integrity. And yeah, I'm just grateful that I collapse very quickly whenever I leave my integrity. I don't have a high tolerance for it. What was interesting too is you talked about how you're trying to use intellectualism or intellect. I'm not sure if intellectualism is right, but basically intellect to find happiness through your schooling, your work, your PhD, all that sort of stuff. Is the way to find happiness through emotions or emotionality or is there a balance of both? It's an interesting question.

I've seen, they've found now with brain science that without emotion, we can't make decisions because we don't know what's important. So it's not a logical process that makes decisions. It's emotion. But a lot of cultures divide the self into four different segments, body, heart, mind, and spirit. And I've studied a lot of like pre-modern or non-Western cultures. And what I say in this book is that when all four of those ways of

confronting reality, when they all four align, that's when you're in integrity and you feel a click or a chime or an aha or a light bulb goes on. And it's when it's really interesting. The reason polygraph machines work is that every time we lie, even if we don't know we're lying, we tense our muscles, our immune system drops, our blink rate goes up, our heart rate goes up, our perspiration goes up. The moment we start doing or saying anything that's not right for us. So the body is actually my first go-to advisor. And I got really sick when I was like 18. I developed all these autoimmune diseases that kept me almost bedridden for about 12 years. And those did not go away until I started finding my truth and living it despite any pushback that

I got. So the body has to do it. The emotions have to agree. The spirit, if you believe in the spirit, there's a feeling of being set free. That is what I think of as the spiritual response. And then the mind has to say, yeah, that tracks the math works, but it's all lined up and there's, that's integrity. I love it. Wow. Now I know what integrity is. I used to, when I was a real estate agent, we used to go to all these ethics classes and they were really interesting. I love the art of it and identifying ethics. And I always wanted to be a person who operates from a point of integrity. In fact, years ago, I had a dating coach or something. I overheard them saying,

if you really want to find someone good to fall in love with or be in your life, the values that you're talking about, people establish, I think Anthony Robbins was one of the first person I heard about this. He talked about how what's most important to you is your value. As you mentioned earlier, my value is trust and integrity. And that order of your value will make the difference in your life. My father's first one was freedom. He was a good man. But if you have a family and kids, freedom probably isn't the best choice, but that was his and he lived it. And what was interesting was these values, they shape us, they move us. And I think it's really brilliant what you're

talking about, the mind. So now I'm not going to think of emotions in these two 50 percenters. I'm going to think of the mind, body, spirit, and what's the fourth one I'm missing? Mind, body, spirit, and heart emotion. Heart. There you go. Heart emotion. And so that's really cool. You've got to make sure there's that balance. There's that cleanliness. Do you find that a lot of people, what are some of the techniques in the book that you work with or that you talk about that you teach in the book? Let's tease some of that out. Yeah, there are exercises all the way through the book to try to make it really actionable. Let me add one more thing about integrity. I don't think of it as moral so much or even ethical so

much as mechanical. So if an airplane is in structural integrity, you can get a jet plane that has 4 million parts. And if all of them are pretty much working together as one big machine, it can fly and carry people anywhere. If it falls out of structural integrity, that is it's misaligned, it won't take off or you won't be able to steer it or it will crash. And our lives are the same way. And it's not because we're not trying to be good people. We are. It's just that when things get out of alignment, when we're not in keeping with reality, our lives don't work.

But it's a structural, it's not judgment. It's just physics, right? That's a great way of looking at that. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that's a really way of looking at it. There's no judgment.

Most of us are like, a lot of people don't know that Dante's Inferno isn't full of a lot of evil people being punished. They are going through suffering, but there are people who don't know why they're there. They were trying to be good and they accidentally did something that was wrong for them and they can't figure out why. So there's very little judgment and there's no judgment at all for me with people who don't deliberately leave integrity.

We just do it because we're trained to. So the very first thing, I have so many exercises in here. The very first thing, the first step on the path to integrity is to notice that you are not perfectly attuned and to say right out loud, you know what? This doesn't feel perfect. Like sometimes I'm alone. Sometimes I'm lonely. Sometimes I'm tired. I'm exhausted from this. I woke up the other morning and I'd been doing a lot of book publicity and I was lying there and I thought, okay, this is what I do every morning. What am I feeling? What do I know? I'm really tired. And the idea of getting out of bed when I was so tired, didn't feel like it was aligned. So I went down, got a cup of coffee and said to my family,

I'm exhausted and I need help. So that I'm exhausted, I need help. That was me telling the truth, which I would not have done in past years, like stiff upper lip. And then they all rearranged the schedule and everybody made sure that I got enough rest. That's what happens when you just speak the simplest truths. This is not a great day for me. I really miss so-and-so or whatever it is. And just relax into the truth of it's not perfect and that's okay. That's the first step. It's a powerful step. If I can just dial back to what you were talking about, the structure of integrity. That's the first step. It's a powerful step. If I can just dial back to what you were talking about, the structure of integrity. That's really brilliant because I've always thought of integrity as being a moral thing. Am I good?

Do I follow maybe a book, a tome that different people have that do different things? Am I following that or am I following some sort of the golden rule, do unto others, whatever your thing is. But I've always thought it from a moral concept. And then I've also often wondered why do good people do bad things? And they think they're still doing something good, but for some reason it's a blind spot or a skitoma to them where they don't understand what's going on. But I love your structural integrity thing because it makes sense. The plane that's going through the sky isn't sitting around morally going, well, I really need to get these people here. If I just tried harder, I could fly straight. Yeah. They're like that. What was that true train that goes up the mountain for the kids? Yeah. That's really brilliant. But it also sounds the riddle for me why I meet people that they make

mistakes, they make choices. And I suppose the, what's the old line? Good intentions are the pathway to hell. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yeah. There you go. So yeah, I think that's interesting, but I just wanted to make a point of that. So let's, we can jump back to where I interrupted you at. No, you didn't interrupt at all. I was giving one example of an exercise. Another one, speaking of the airplane, much later in the book, I talk about once you've found what's true for you, the way you change your life. So say you decide you got up and you think, I'm really tired. I don't want to do this.

Or we could use one from your life if you want to do something. Like I start with a list of things you have to do like in the next few days. Okay. And see if there's anything on the list that you think it's not super gratifying. I'm trying to write a book. So I'm trying to write an hour a day. How about that? Okay.

And how does that, when you talk about writing it and you don't force or judge anything, what's the reaction in your body to writing? It's like work. Oh, God. Yeah. So your voice sounds like, bleh. Yeah? So on a scale, if negative 10 is the worst you've ever felt and positive 10 is the best

you've ever felt, where 10 is the best you've ever felt where is this coming in like negative one maybe negative five yeah maybe negative five okay yeah i hear you writing is the hardest scariest thing i've ever done don't get me started it never gets easy so all right so first of all you notice all, all right, there's less than total satisfaction here. And yet you want to get the thing done. So what you have to start doing is looking at the reasons why. There are two reasons it might not feel good. The first one might be that it's the wrong thing for you to be doing right now. And I've had days like that. I remember when I was making a book who would become a lifelong friend, I was distracted and I was unable to write. And I picked had days like that. I remember when I was making it, who would become a lifelong friend, I was distracted

and I was unable to write. And I picked up a writing instruction book and opened it so that I could get back to writing. And at the top of the page, it said, friends are more important than writing. That was the first sentence I saw. And that became a lifelong intimate relationship that still stands to this day. So it could be that today writing is not what your true path wants of you, or it could be, and I suspect, Chris, this is going to be true for you. When you go to the

blank page, it is terrifying because every negative voice, every self doubt, every, is it good enough? Fear comes up. Tell me where I'm wrong about this. I don't do that, but a lot of people do. I think 99% of people do for me. What do you do that makes it less than total joy? I go, wait a second. I just got a notification on Facebook and Oh, I need to go answer this email. Oh, I need to go to this. Oh, I need to go answer this email. Oh, I need to go to this. Oh, I need to go write like some angry political post. Oh, I need to go write some, I got to post a picture and, and, oh, I got to go eat. Yeah, I got to go eat right now. Yeah. Okay. Oh, this is great. This is great. Okay. What we're going to do is we're going to freeze frame on that moment

when you become distractible. I used to work with active heroin addicts on the street and I would ask them what goes on right before you go and rob a store and get a fix of heroin. And every single one of them said boredom and irritation and agitation. Usually that I should go do something else is masking something deeper. So what I want you to do is just freeze frame at the moment when you're thinking someone on the internet is wrong. I need to stop writing my book and go fix this. And don't let yourself leave the blank

page. Force yourself to stay there and see if anything else pops up. I don't like this. It'll be food. I'm really creative at coming up with all sorts of stuff. I probably should go eat or, oh, I should, I'm going to need some water if I'm going to write.

I need a new coffee. So I'm going to go top that off. So once you don't get any of those things, like you don't get to have them, you can't distract yourself. You have to face the task of writing. What is the resistance that's pushing you off to get food and get other things going on? Is it mad, sad, glad, or scared? Those are the four categories of emotion. It's the work. So I'm lazy. Maybe deep down, there's some sort of

thing where I'm afraid that what I'm writing won't work, but I speak and I talk and I do comedy. So I don't really afraid afraid but maybe there's something in there's a box mad sad or scared it's one of those three categories so a little anxiety would count as scared i think i'm mad because i have to work because i'm lazy could that be it yeah yeah absolutely there could be a voice in your head that's saying why do i have to do this there and do this task that you don't love. And you could be like, F you. I'm going to go have some coffee, right? Yeah.

I don't want to do this. I can go make some money doing something else. For you, there's more anger. And it's probably based on, and I'm going to guess, and you tell me where I'm wrong. Because you know the truth about you. I don't. But I'm going to guess. So I bet at some point you learned you can't just do what you love.

You got to sit there and do the hard stuff. Yeah. My dad. Now, when you say that, no, I can't just make myself happy. I have to do the hard stuff. What's the feeling in the body? Don't judge it. Just notice it. I think it's like anger repression

pushback so does it tighten your muscles and probably yeah you feel it in your gut or in your head or in your throat or i'd have to probably go experience it but yeah it makes me i think that's why i'm going for a release like in like coffee or whatever i'm trying to release that tension so i think you're right yeah and you're also in a certain way, defying the rules to say, I am free. Like my son used to have to go to, he went to, he had a very tough teacher in school once. And, and on the way home, he was like nine or 10. He said, I'm not wearing underwear. I was like, what? I'm not wearing any underwear. I said, don't you have enough clean underwear and he's no that's not it i said is it in what do you do in gym class he says no nobody knows

i said why are you not wearing underwear and he said because i'm free that reminds me of somebody i know that would be so that's yours That is where you've split from your integrity lives like a Labrador retriever. You do comedy. You do this show. How do you feel about those things? I love it. Why in the world?

I love performing for people. I love making them laugh. Why in the world would you make yourself right? Instead of doing things you love. That's true. Yeah. It's not in your integrity. Yeah.

Integrity, it feels like joy. Integrity makes people bubble up with happiness. When you're doing, yeah, it's fun. Yeah. It's fun. When I lived in California, I read about the original people that were there, and they lived for 6,000 years. And what they did was hunting, fishing, gardening,

basket weaving, making stories, making songs, making, and I thought, and then of course the Europeans came and destroyed all that. But I thought these people lived for 6,000 years doing things that we only let ourselves do on vacation. In other words, the happiest things hunting fishing gardening basket weaving storytelling what they lived in joy and we know that because we still do that stuff when we want to be happy but the rest of the time we live like automatons because we're a product of the industrial age and we literally are trained to be parts of a machine don Don't even get me started. I'm a sociologist. Don't get me started. Why they put kids in rows of same size kids doing the same task over and over. It was meant to create factory workers.

Yeah. And we are not factory workers. Yeah. I think you should stop writing and just do more comedy. That would be my integrity adjustment for you. There you go. Maybe I'll just throw out the book and do the thing, but I want to get more performances. I think too, would it help if I somehow map that emotion

and attached it to the book writing? Yeah, you can do that. I am terrified of writing, but what I do is I attach it to relationship. So I always picture like three people, like one of them will be Stephen King because I admire his writing. One of them is Dante because I admire his writing too. And I once heard that a warden at a women's prison told me that when they tossed the cells, one of the things they found most often in the women's cells were copies of my article in Oprah magazine. Oh, wow. So one of the people who's in front of me every time I sit down to write is an incarcerated woman. And if I'm like, I don't, my, my desire to help people is

so overwhelming that when I'm looking at these people, I can't not try. It makes me desperate to communicate with them. And that what, that's what gets me riding is my love for other people and my desire for them to feel whole. That's my thing. That's my jam. And yours is making people happy, making people laugh. Yeah. And part of it's saving people too. This is like perfect timing.

Last night, I was struggling with my riding. And one of the problems is I've always been one of these social justice people that's always trying to save the world. And I was talking to a friend about how I'm really passionate about saving the world. And like you said, with the people that are incarcerated. And the problem is I just look at my book as writing a business book. It's very static. And I was talking to her about that. And I was like,

I need to somehow find the passion piano thread, that vibration that I can hook to for the business book that I hooked to writing giant social justice things and anti-racism, things like that, and get fired up. And that's what I'll write all day. And I won't write the book. And I had this epiphany that what I needed to do, and this is what you were saying, is I need to make an analogy that there's business people out there that need me. The people that I'm using, writing about on social justice or abuse, they're downtrodden, they're people who are being bullied and I'm out fighting for them. And I need to realize that there are business people out there that need my technical knowledge, that need my experience, that need my stories. And they're beaten down and they're downtrodden.

They need help. They need Chris Moss' help. And I had that epiphany last night and I just started writing. It just started flowing out of me. And the passion came with it too. It really gets me juiced in writing. That's you finding your integrity. That's like amazing. Exhibit A.

Isn't this amazing? This happened last night. It went down last night. That's really cool. Yeah. You're like serendipity that you came along with this. So yeah, this is a beautiful thing. What other techniques do you want to tease out in the book? Okay. So the one we just did, and we went off for a while because I was having a lot of fun talking to you. But what I would do if you were a client is I'd say, okay, pretend your life is an airplane. You want to steer it to your favorite destination. If you turn your airplane just one degree to the right every half hour or so, you'll never even notice that you're turning, but in 10,000 miles, you'll be in a completely different place. So a lot of research shows that when people try to make big changes in their lives,

radically, it doesn't stick. There's just too many moving parts. Like you can't just force it all to be different in a day. So the most effective change strategies are things that we contemplate for quite a while. And then we start to move one degree at a time. So I would say to you, okay, keep writing and struggling in the same way you're doing it, but move toward thinking about that business person who needs your help the way other people do in social justice, like move inch, inch closer to that every day, do a little something that changes the rank just a bit. And then the next day, maybe just a bit more. So those one degree turns, that's the way we turn our lives entirely around.

Yeah, that makes sense. There's a lot of people use the analogy of the ship or the plane and how you're always zigzagging and stuff and you're trying to reach that destination and find it. But it makes sense not to go crazy because you're like, I'm not completely on course today. And to just let yourself have that sort of space to slowly make the adjustment. And I guess that builds maybe some better habits. Yeah. Another analogy, you mentioned ships as well. Those big cruise ships, they're huge. Have you ever seen one of those? Oh my God, they're enormous. They're like a city block long. and the ship is so big that if they were just to turn the rudder the power it takes to turn the rudder would sink the ship the engine would have to be too big so what they do is on the back of the rudder they

have all these little mini rudders and some of them are only six inches long and they're called trim tabs and when the captain turns the wheel the only thing that turns are the trim tabs. And when the captain turns the wheel, the only thing that turns are the trim tabs and not even all of those sometimes. And what that does is it changes the water pressure and then the rudder as a whole can start to move. And then the whole ship turns around, but it's these little six inch trim tabs that move first and they bring this massive thing to completely turn around. So I always say, make trim tab turns. Don't try to just jump to your left or whatever. That should be something that's on a shirt or something.

Do you use your trim tab? I always put it on a shirt. No one would know what the hell we were talking about. This is interesting because I've been posting my pictures that I did years ago, the Queen Mary and walking through it. And one that will be on Instagram really soon there's is the engine room and there's like a whole mess of these different handles that I imagine some of it does some of that. So that's really interesting. That's on my mind right now when you're talking about ships, the Queen Mary. So what haven't we discussed that you want to

touch in on your book or tease out to readers? Let's see. There's one of the things is that I really do want people to know that I understand that as you start to regain your truth and set out to live it, you might be frightened because here's what happens. We were born with our true nature and we're pushed off it by our culture. Then we're miserable and we suffer. Then we come back to our truth and to live our truth. You can go to your therapist and find the truth. That's the hell part, the going through hell. Is it the billing from the therapist or is it the telling the therapist? No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. When the bill hurts more than what you're

doing in the office, it's time to say goodbye. But actually walking the talk is really tough. So one of the things that I did, I did this thing called an integrity cleanse, which means you don't do anything that's out of integrity. And the first one was the year I was 29. And I'd been depressed for a long time and anxious and sick, physically sick. And I decided, everybody kept saying, the truth will set you free. The truth will set you free. And I was like, okay, wow. So I decided on New Year's Eve that I would not tell a single lie for the upcoming calendar year. Not even a little white, polite, social lie. And I kept my resolution.

That's tough. During that year, okay, so I came out of my lifelong depression. My illnesses, which were supposed to be incurable, started resolving and going away. I felt happier at the core than I'd ever been. But on the outside, here's what happened. I left my religion. That meant losing my family of origin, all the friends I'd ever had before the age of

20. You're in Utah. You know what Mormonism is like. So I quit my job, quit my career in academia academia which i'd been building toward my whole life left my home fled the state realized i was gay left my marriage like it was i was my ex-husband and i co-parented for a while but basically the marriage was over so i lost pretty much everything but my kids and i didn't have an income after that was completely cut off from the people I loved forever. And some of them have come back around 30 years later. But if you've a lot of

people say, I know what I would do if I were going to be in structural integrity, but it's going to upset people. And I can't do that. And I'm like, I hear you. I really hear you. Because I am a born people pleaser. And for a people pleaser to do that and have that many people think I was bad and evil and wrong just about killed me. But the part that was left, it was like chemo because the part that was left was whole and it was true. And the life that grew out of that honesty has brought me immeasurable joy. And yeah. That's really beautiful. That's a hell of a thing to go through. That's a hell of a surgery where

you're cutting off all the parts and you have to sometimes because they don't want anything to do with you. You don't want anything to do with them, divorces, et cetera, et cetera. And yeah, I've, I, my, my family was Mormon and i left and i'm the horrible satanic black sheep of the family so hey see you in outer darkness where the fun people go i am hey lids up one's gonna be in hell and jimmy hendrix and stuff so i know and i've got so many friends i'll introduce you around we're gonna have a blast we'll have a blast i think i get a suite according to different religions chris you will have a suite and I think I get a suite according to different religions. Chris, you will have a suite. And I'm like, yeah, it sounds good. As long as I get good seats to

Led Zepp when we're in Metallica. Awesome. All the funny people are going to be there. It's awesome. This has been a great discussion. Anything more you want to plug on the book before we go out? Go to my website. It's just here. All the talk about Dante and the harbor and all that make you think it's an intellectual struggle. I like to tell stories. I like things to be funny. I like things to be relatable and I like things to be easy to take in. So yeah, I hope that the book is really digestible and I think your listeners are your style of easy laid back, smart, funny. I hope that'll, the people who love your stuff will love the book too so i think

i want to definitely read it right now and it's really weird this serendipity of how i've been going through some stuff this last week and having a few epiphanies like just matched everything we've talked about i'm just like wow this was the moment that i needed to take and have and you've got some incredible reviews listen elizabeth number one, New York Times bestselling author. This radiant book will not only change your life, but perhaps even save it. That's an extraordinary testimony. We're good friends. And during COVID lockdown, we would talk to each other on the phone and I would read her what I'd written and test out the exercises on her. And then she would return and she'd read me her stuff. And we got through that COVID thing together really in great shape emotionally because we were doing this work.

But yeah, I love her and I'm very humbled by her praise. There you go. And I think books like this are really important right now because we've gone through a whole cathartic thing here in the last year and a half, and we're probably still carrying some pain, some baggage, some hurt. And so it would be really important for people to grab your book, share it with friends and everything else. Give us your plugs so that people can find you on the interwebs and where to order the book again. Yep. Just go to Martha Beck.com all one word and that should do it. It's not complicated. Order the darn book already. So there you go, Martha. It's been wonderful to have you come on

the show and it's serendipitous and you've shared with me some brilliant stuff and kind of giving some insight and just what I was going through. So thank you very much for spending that time with us. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. And congratulations on the new book. Pick it up. It just came out two days ago, April 13th, 2021, the way way of integrity finding the path to your true self by martha beck uh do you want to put a quick plug in for your other books real quick yeah i wrote other books go get them first one was finding your own north star i wrote a book about my son called expecting adam and a bunch of others just wrote a novel called diana herself which is about this also like weird and funny and I had a blast writing it. So yeah, if you like

this book, maybe you'll like the others who can say. Yeah, just put that credit card down. Get them all. There you go. There you go. Steal them. We're going to hell anyway, Chris and I. Well, yeah, Dante's Inferno. Let's go. We're just going all the way. All the way down.

So thank you very much, Martha. Thanks. Thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com to see the video version of this. You can go to goodreads.com for us. That's Chris Foss. See what we're reading,

reviewing over there. You can also go to Instagram, Facebook groups, LinkedIn, wherever we're in those groups that we're just search for him and all that good stuff. Grab the book, wear your mask and we'll see you guys next time.

Cheers.