The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #60 Jim Dethmer: Leading Above the Line

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

Jim Dethmer, founder of The Conscious Leadership Group shares practical advice about becoming more self-aware, ditching the victim mindset, and connecting more fully with the people in our lives.  �� Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we first start working with leaders, years ago, we did a little bit of measurement around this, and we saw that most people in organizations keep somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of their agreements. Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish, and this is The Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, and mental models that help you learn from the best of what other people have already figured out. You can learn more and stay up to date at FS.blog slash podcast. We have a newsletter. It comes out every Sunday called Brain Food. It's free and packed with all the best content we've come across this week that's worth reading and thinking about. It contains quotes, book recommendations, articles, and so much

more. You can learn more at fs.s.blog slash newsletter. On the show today is Jim Dethmer. Jim is the founding partner at the Conscious Leadership Group and has worked as coach and advisor to over 150 CEOs in their teams on conscious leadership. He's also the co-author of the 15 commitments of conscious leadership. I was first introduced to Jim at the recommendation of my friend Graham Duncan, and I was hooked right away. As you'll discover, Jim is full of practical advice on what you can do to be better versions of yourself, better partners to the ones you love, better colleagues to those you work with, and better parents to your kids. We're going to deep

dive on cultivating self-awareness through pausing and reflecting as well as understanding the role of feedback. We discuss how awareness needs to lead to acceptance and not self-criticism in order to change behavior. We talked about the victim mindset and how to get out of it, getting out of fear-driven motivations like anger, guilt, and shame, and moving to more powerful and sustainable motivations like love and play. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Time to listen and learn. Jim, I'm so excited to talk with you today about leadership. Me too, Shane. It's my favorite subject, and I love to have conversation about it.

When I was looking for a place to start, I think the best place to start is about the line, a single black line, and why that's the most important model for leadership. Can you explain that to us? Sure. So when we work with individuals and teams and organizations, we're looking to start the conversation with a simple model, kind of a simple, on-ramp that can be immediately applicable, like within 15 minutes of the conversation. So like any simple model or simple on-ramp, it's open to being oversimplified, and I totally get that. But the model itself is just this. There's a line. And at any moment in time, and we can talk about that, but at any moment in time, you're either above the line or below the

line. So when you're above the line, you're open, curious, and committed to learning. You're in, you're actually in a sense of trust, able to trust yourself, able to trust the environment, able to trust who you're ever in relationship with, able to trust the universe, wherever you're placing your trust. And when you're below the line, you're contracted, you're in a state of threat. So now you're closed, could be closed-minded, your literal body posture could be closed, Very often your heart is closed. You're defensive. And the big idea is you're attached to proving you're right.

So what we're simply saying is that the first key skill of conscious leaders is self-awareness that leads the pack. And the first act of self-awareness is, can I locate myself? In this now moment, am I hoping or closed? Am I in a state of trust or a state of threat? because we believe that ability to locate yourself really does start a powerful conversation inside of yourself and with anybody else you're doing this work with. Let's dive into that for a second.

When you were talking about above the line being open and curious and below being defensive, the natural translation in my head was sort of like outcome over ego. Great. Yes. Beautiful translation. What does it mean to be self-aware? Well, in its most simple terms, it's the ability. to accurately, and that needs to be in air quotes, accurately or as accurately as possible,

see yourself. Now, of course, this has been in the parlance of leadership for a long time, the Center for Creative Leadership, when they first brought out their 67 core competency, self-awareness along with learning agility and communication and influence. We're the top four competencies that trumped all others. So in the world of leadership, we've been talking about self-awareness, the ability to see oneself. So we're making it specific in not just can I see my strengths, can I see my weaknesses, can I see my style, can I see my thinking patterns, but in this moment, can I see the state of my consciousness? Can I see whether to your, I like your word, can I see whether I'm totally in service of outcomes or am I contracted in egoic defensiveness?

Can I see that? And growing in self-awareness, in our experience, you know, there are three ways you can grow in self-awareness. One is to become more self-reflective, actually pause and bring almost like the lens of attention back at yourself as though there was something outside of you looking back at you and there are practices around how to do that. The other way to grow in self-awareness is to use some instrument. You know, you could use a technical instrument like the MMPI or a person.

personality instrument. We love a tool called the enneagram because it's like a cat scan in terms of self-awareness. And the third way to grow in self-awareness is to create an incredibly feedback-rich environment where the people around you, the most direct form of feedback, are giving you feedback. So we talk to leaders all the time about are they creating a feedback-rich environment? And of course, once you get that feedback is not just what people are saying to you, that you decide you're going to live in an open system mentality where you're constantly getting feedback. Now you're on a rocket ship ride of self-awareness. Those things work in concert as well as individually, I would imagine?

Absolutely. Yeah, very much so. So can you walk me through a little bit about, I think I'm most interested in one and three. So like one being, because those are things you can sort of do without a tool or sort of like somebody else. you need feedback you need people to give you feedback but I mean in terms of pause and reflection what does it mean to actually like pause and reflect so in my experience most people live most of the time in kind of an automatic pilot they're just in a trance sleep walking through life at the effect of their personality and at the effect of their ego structure we can talk about what ego is is there really such a thing how does it show up so let's just keep it simple

at the effect of their personality. So the ability to become self-reflective is the cultivated skill to pause, quiet the mind a bit, and then turn attention back on itself. And this can be done. So the quieting part, let's get there first. So all the leaders that I work with, I don't work with anybody

who won't have some sort of mindfulness practice. I think the research is pretty compelling about the efficacy of it at multiple levels. But to our point right now, the ability to still mind, just slow it down a little bit so that I can create a bit of empty space. The mind's not going to get totally quiet

unless you do your practice six hours a day for 20 years. But at least I can slow it down to where I can get quiet enough to ask a question. Like here'd be a self-reflective question I might ask a leader to ponder over the course of a week as she's or he is in their self-reflective time. Get still and then ask yourself this question, what do I want? And then just notice what comes up, notice what comes up.

And then as that begins to populate your consciousness, ask the question, what do I really want? So this is getting still, noticing, and populating the moment with a question or an inquiry. There are other ways to do it other than a question, but when people start, I like to start with something like that. That makes a lot of sense. I'm curious as to you other examples of sort of self-reflective questions you give people. And also, are there like context-specific ones? Like, I made a decision or I had an interaction with a person. What sort of prompts would you offer to reflect on? Sure. Let's go with I had an interaction with a person. So I have an interaction with a person.

You can do this. We finish our interaction. before we run off to our next thing, just get still for a minute. And then a question I might ask would be something like this. In stillness, I might ask, was there any place where I got reactive in that conversation? Was there any place where I got self-protective? Was there any place where I got more interested in control and approval and survival, the three core wants of any ego structure? So was there any place where I got more interested in control and approval and safety and security than I was in learning? If we have a deep, authentic conversation and you go wherever you want to go and you ask questions, there might be moments where fear will come up. It would be the natural, normal response.

And so in reflection, I might go back and say, where did fear come up? So I worked with an investment team outside of London last week. And, you know, at all, they've checked most of the great boxes. They're really clear about their vision and their values. And they've got a very clear investment philosophy and even an investment process. We were working on how to have world-class conversations. So in the midst of conversations, we would just pause at times, just literally pause. Too much sound, too much fury in most conversations.

Pause, get still, I'm just talking about one breath. And to ask the question, in this moment, am I genuinely open to creating a win-for-all outcome in this conversation? Or have I literally constricted such that the most important thing right now for me is defending my ego? And in my experience, Shane, this, if you're willing to just practice, cultivate some self-awareness, this information becomes obvious fairly quickly. It shows up first in your body. You'll know in your body. There'll be certain somatic signatures.

And then it shows up in your thinking structures and it shows up in your emotional state. So that would be you brought up the bucket of, you know, in relationships or in conversations. What would be some of the questions? Those would be some. There'd be many others that I might ask to help people grow in self-awareness. Okay. What about I want to actually, before we go on to the next sort of question on decision-making, what sort of prompts you could reflect on?

what do you do with that information when you find it? Like, before we hopped on this call, I was, you know, I was just reflecting as you were talking about my interaction with somebody over email and how it was more curt than I would have liked. And do I reach out and apologize now? Or do I just let it go and acknowledge that it happened and sort of like move on and do something different next time? Like, what do I do with that information once I have it?

Okay, great question. So we say that the first act of consciousness is awareness. So we're in that big bucket right now. The second act of consciousness, so the first question is, where am I? Am I above or below the line? The second question is an odd one that needs a little bit of exploration. The second question is, can I accept myself for being where I am? So you finish that email.

You pause and you say, where am I? And in our language, you might notice, wow, I'm a little curt. I'm probably a little contracted, a little below the line, and you could explore what that's about for you. Now, the second question we'd ask you to pause and consider for just a moment is, can I accept myself for being reactive? So what we've discovered is that awareness needs to be followed by acceptance. Most of the people that I work with, most of the people that you talk to and you and me,

tend to be really driven people who want to optimize for success, who want to be the best we can possibly be. So when we start to really grow in self-awareness, what often follows a burst of insight, a burst of awareness, is self-criticism. Kind of, oh, crap, I shouldn't have contracted. I should be above that. I should, you know, I was a little too curt. I shouldn't be curt. And in our experience, when you're already contracted, curtness comes from contraction, as opposed to openness. And then you pile on with self-criticism or self-judgment. You actually contract further.

Now, here's the deal. If in a more contracted space, you wrote an email talking about your current response, the probability is very high that the outcome that you want wouldn't be achieved because there's a context, a bigger thing than the words, in the email, there's a context you're speaking from, which is still somewhat contracted or fear-based. But if you pause and you say, okay, you know, today's Friday. And when I fired off that email, I was a little contracted, a little below the line. So you could just, we just say, there's some fear running in your system. You can explore that. And then you just say, could I just

accept myself for being scared right now? Scared natural, normal human response. And we teach all of our clients to actually pause and take one conscious breath, a deep breath down into the belly, which begins the process of changing your blood and brain chemistry, because when you're below the line, there's a certain chemical cocktail that's working you that has upside, but also has real downside. And when I take a conscious breath, that starts to change. So you realize you're curt, you take a breath of acceptance. And by the way, self-aware, is easier to train in world-class leaders than self-acceptance. Most of them have a superstitious belief that if they granted themselves a moment of self-acceptance, they'd lose their edge,

that absent being constantly self-critical, self-evaluatory with a slightly negative spin, absent that, I'll lose my edge. And we find the opposite to be. true, that the more I can do whatever it is I'm doing from presence rather than reactivity. So send that email from presence rather than reactivity, the more is available to me to be my highest and best self in the moment. So first question, where am I? My second question, can I accept myself for being where I am? Now, excuse me, you come back into presence. And now you ask yourself, what do I really want to communicate when I respond to this email? Am I willing to be with this email from above the line?

Now, what that might look like is being authentically vulnerable, transparent. It might look like revealing what it was you were contracted about in the first place. You know, we say that candor is one of the key indicators that I'm above the line. When I'm above the line, I reveal and I don't conceal. So you write this email and you say, I noticed that the last email I sent, I was Kurt. And when I tune into what that's about, I think it's because I was attached to an outcome and I didn't think we were getting the outcome. So I just want to tell you that. And I want to see if we could have another conversation and see if we can create something that might be more of a win for all of us.

You don't know yet how you're going to communicate from above the line. You're just willing to shift the context of the conversation before you start dealing with the content. I like that a lot. I think that's a powerful sort of means to walk through it. I want to come to one thing where like four layers deep, we're going to come back, I promise. You keep track. I want to talk about acceptance. And one of the comments that you made that was interesting to me is that a lot of world-class

leaders have problems with self-acceptance because somehow they feel like they're driven by this. Is it a chip on their shoulder? Am I understanding that correctly? Like what is sort of driving? What do they feel or perceive as driving them? And then what's actually driving them when you change the self-acceptance lens? Okay, great question.

So what's driving so many of them is down deep, way down deep. There is a belief that says, it's not okay just the way it is. I'm not okay just the way I am. Now, there can be many variations of how that shows up in a leader based on their personality structure. But down deep, there's this sense that I'm not. okay, it's not okay. Something needs to be different. Now with some people, the age old story might be something needs to be different in order for me to get the approval that I want from fill in the blank, you know, a primary caregiver, you know, my siblings, my family of origin, my original

community, my first coach, whoever it is or myself. Something has to be different. Just the way I am isn't okay. That would be one form of this. Another would be it's not okay just the way it is and I'm not okay just the way I am because I've got to even the score. Something was done to me. Something happened and there's a fuel in my belly that says I am going to overcome this. And if I pause for a moment and take a break, I'll lose that fire in the belly that is driving me to overcome. And we could just keep exploring and keep exploring and finding these core beliefs that sit, I believe, that were developed before we were six years old that have driven us. And by the way, I say to all the leaders that we work with, they've produced wonderful upsides. You know,

they've produced fantastic capacities for achievement and accomplishment and mastery. But whenever we've been driven primarily by the belief in the experience that something at the core, is missing, that belief leaves a toxic residue. And when you get close to these leaders and they talk openly and honestly, when you're in a circle with six or eight or ten of them, which is where I spend most of my time, and we create an environment where people can feel safe and they start talking, they might say, you know, this fire in my belly has driven me to this incredible sense of accomplishment, which has been wonderful, but that same fire keeps me from being.

intimate and close with my significant other or with my children or I can't sleep at night or what I would give, you know, when people get later in their development, what I would give, I would give all of my fame and all of my money to have peace. So this is what I mean, that the very thing that has created the consciousness that has made this great contribution to themselves, to the world, is the very thing that keeps them from saying, I give myself a moment of acceptance? Now, you ask a question that I talk about with people all the time, which is, if that doesn't motivate me, what's going to motivate me?

If that goes away, then what? That is fire, fire that I feel like he's driving me. Exactly. This half-to energy, this core fire. And I say, I'll really do it simply. I say, there are five things that can motivate us. The first thing that can motivate us is fear, guilt, and shame. And by the way, fitting in there as well as anger and rage.

And the question is, does fear, guilt, shame, anger, and rage motivate? Absolutely. You don't have to look very far to see that it motivates. The deal is that if you're self-aware at all, you know that eventually fear, guilt, and shame, and anger, and rage leave a toxic residue. many of us have motivated our children with fear, guilt, and shame. I thought, I would have thought better of you. Or, you want something to be scared of.

I'll give you something to be scared of. I'm disappointed in you. I'm disappointed in you. And, you know, as a parent, you pause and you say, does it work? Well, yeah, sure, especially depending on your kid's personality and temperament. It's going to work a little bit. You'll get a short-term return. But eventually, that's going to leave a toxic residue, which is going to look like broken

trust between you and your child. So once I start to move to another level of motivation, the next level is extrinsic reward. So does money, fame, perks, does it reward? Does it motivate? Sure. Absolutely. Does it leave a toxic residue? Yeah. You know, if you're motivating your team solely by extrinsic reward, one of the things you know is you've got to keep increasing the capacity to keep feeding the consciousness that you've created. And it also creates people playing a zero-sum game, which creates tremendous win-lose consciousness and all this kinds of stuff. Then the next level up is intrinsic reward. Now, this is when I start to live from a sense of purpose or calling, when all of a sudden I start to discover what we call our zone of genius or what it is that

lights me up to do in the world. And this is when I start motivating people in my world with authentic appreciation. So these are intrinsic rewards. And they actually are the first level of motivation that doesn't leave a toxic residue. And then the next level above that, this is fascinating. The next one above that is play. All mammals are motivated by food, play and learning. So I say to leaders all the time, when you can, when work can start to feel like play, And, you know, this was misunderstood because there was a period, you know, when people would look at some of the classic startups of old, like Google, you know, they'd go to their office in New York and they'd see a slide or they'd see Fusball labels or whatever, you know, and people would go, they'd misunderstand, they'd go, okay, I need to have play in the workplace. Right. Play means it all. It's a million miles from that.

What it means is that when I'm coding, it's like a child at play. I love it. When I'm deal-making, I'm a child at play, which means there's a low level of self-consciousness, there's a high level of learning, there's sustainable, rechargeable energy. You know, with my children and I have seven grandchildren. When they're playing, you don't have to reinforce, motivate. They're in the game. So when we can start to live life as play,

which I think we started playing children, then we got really serious someplace along the line, largely because of that fire in the belly. And then we're going to return to play at some point. And I say the leaders, the soon you return to play, the better. And then the highest form of motivation is love. And I don't mean by that some touchy-feely thing. I mean the love of the thing.

The love of the thing. I love landscaping. I love playing chess. I love, I love, you know, doing analysis before investing. I love the thing itself. So here's the deal. As you decrease, you'll never take it all away, but as you decrease being motivated by fear, guilt, shame, anger, rage, and by extrinsic reward, people need to find a new

motivation source, whether it's I'm motivating myself or you and I are a team. But the organizations, the teams of the future, they are motivated by intrinsic reward play and love. You watch great professional sports teams. It looks to me, now what comes first, winning, or what I'm about ready to say, but there seems to be a deep, profound alignment of purpose, that's intrinsic, a commitment to have everybody on the team play in their zone of genius. What are they best at? We're going to figure that out and release and empower you to do that. Then we're having fun. This is fun. You hear great. contributors, athletes all the time say, it's not fun anymore.

Well, then what's going to motivate you if it's not fun? And they love the thing itself and they love each other. Now, again, not in a touchy-feely way, but in the way that Marines love each other. I think when people start to get motivated by that, an entire different sustainability and impact starts to occur. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. How do we shift?

like is it an awareness issue to shift from something like fear or guilt maybe you're staying in a friendship or a relationship out of fear or guilt like is it an awareness alone or is it replacement with sort of something higher up on the list that you mentioned like even extrinsic or intrinsic and then play and love is are we shifting it are we just acknowledging it like how do you walk me through that thinking a little yeah great so again it's always going to with awareness. So one of the things I'd ask a leader is, I'd give them like just these five options as a starting point. And I would say, just get still, practice stillness, and then take whatever it is you're doing, you know, and what are you doing right now? And just get

curious, what's motivating you right now? Is it this fear, guilt and shame? Is it extrinsic, intrinsic, intrinsic play, love? So a lot of us are so motivated by wanting approval to be like, love, value, esteem. We're motivated by wanting control. We're motivated by wanting control. We want control of our world and we're motivated by wanting safety and security. Those all weave in in those first two, fear, guilt, shame, and extrinsic reward. So what's motivating you? Get aware, self-awareness. Now, on those early two motivations, the most extrinsic and fear, guilt, shame, anger, rage,

those are coming from a core of fear. Now, again, when I work with leaders, and I say, can you feel the fear underneath at all? When I started coaching people 25, 30 years ago, that was a totally inane question. You know, I might be able to feel my passion or I could feel my anger. That was acceptable. Once in a while, I could feel happiness or joy. But fear and sadness, why in the world would I want to feel those? They're a complete waste of time.

But underneath these incredibly driven successful people, this is a funny way to say it, is a scared little five-year-old kid or a nine-year-old little girl. in there who is terrified. So this is why I come back to, after awareness, can you give acceptance? The antidote to fear is not courage. The antidote to fear is acceptance. You know, I have these little grandchildren, you know, and it's so fun having a second bite of the apple around caring for little ones. You know, I had two girls of my own and then four step-sons who I was in their life when they were very young. And, you know, I parented the best I could, just like everybody who's listening to is doing the best we can. But, you know, to do it again, 30, 40 years later is such a

treat. So, you know, like when my kids would get trapped in their egoic structure, you know, I parented in a certain way. And now when I have these grandkids, it's so different because I'm not invested. My identity isn't tied to how they turn out. You know, if they have a tantrum in the frozen peas section of the supermarket, I don't take it as a reference. I don't take it as a reflection on me. If they're standing on the soccer field, you know, looking at daisies and not kicking the ball, I don't have to yell, kick them all because I'm afraid that people are going to think, I'm a bad parent, or I'm not going to get them a scholarship to play D1 soccer. You know, I'm just a guy standing there loving my grandchildren. So when they get triggered, I'm in such a

different place. When they get scared, I can say to them, oh, golly, you're scared. Grandfather gets scared too. Let's just sit together for a minute and just, three, be scared, just be as scared as we are, which of course is what Dan Siegel, who I think is fabulous about brain research and children and parenting and the whole brain child and all of his work. That's, of course, what he is saying, children most need in those moments. Now, I say all that to say, inside of each of us is a scared little kid. I get these leaders in circle, Shane, and after, you know, a day, day and a half of trusting each other, they're willing to start talking about that kid. And then the question.

is can they give that one a little bit of acceptance? And that is not easy to do. So until I can give a little bit of loving kindness, a little bit of acceptance to the scared, terrified parts of me, then it's not going to stop because my mind is going to believe the only way to succeed is to keep scaring the shit out of myself unconsciously. This is mostly unconscious. Keep scaring the shit out of myself, keep believing that I don't have enough approval yet, even though I've got any of the following things, including adulation, adoration, number of followers on Twitter, you know, trophies. I still don't have enough approval, approval. I don't have enough control over my world, and I'm still not safe and secure enough. So until that little one who's driving the show can

experience some acceptance, they won't calm down. By the way, this is two of my grandchildren You know, when they're throwing temper tantrums, in my experience, I can, you know, the big adults can always overpower them. Your ego structure can always overpower the scared part of you. But I can get the kids to sit down, but they don't get still on the inside. And until they do that, they can't let go of their belief that they need to be motivated by that. So that's why awareness comes first.

What's motivating me? Acceptance comes second. And we just do tons of work on how to cultivate a little bit of acceptance. This is not ours. I'm talking about a couple of breaths. And then from there, I can start to shift. This is one of our words. I can start to shift to starting to motivate myself with intrinsic reward, play, and love.

But until I can cultivate awareness and acceptance, the shift moves required to be motivated by intrinsic rewards, play, and love aren't there. I won't trust them enough. I'll go back to what's made me successful up to this point. That's really insightful. I do want to come back to kids. I just don't want to lose track of the thread and where we're at. So we're talking about sort of self-awareness, and we had three sort of concepts,

one of which was pause and reflect, two, was instruments, three was feedback. Just want to go back to pause and reflect for one second because we went down a rabbit hole in terms of talking about a conversation with a person and how to reflect on that. I want to also super important to our audience is how do we reflect on a decision that we made within an organization? maybe that decision worked out well and maybe it didn't, but what are the prompts that we can sort of do for almost a guided reflection

to go back and get better at making decisions? Yeah, great question. So I've listened to a couple of your podcasts where my story was, I love the podcast, and you had people who were expert at asking that question in a way that I think most of your listeners are going to be served by it. I'm not expert at that. So I want to be clear. my expertise is how to become self-aware around the state of your consciousness.

So again, I listened to a couple of podcasts where people had fabulous input about that. I was long way by it. Here are the kinds of questions I want to ask you. From where did I make the decision? Did I make it from below the line or above the line? Another question, did I make the decision from, I'm going to introduce a new model here, from victim, villain, or hero? Victim is, did I make the decision

from feeling like I was at the effect of a person's circumstance or condition? Was I in a victim consciousness? Did I make it from villain where I was making the decision from blame, judgment, criticism? Did I make the decision from hero? Which is, did I make it to rescue people?

Did I make it to relieve temporarily their difficulty? they're upset. This is the famous Cartman triangle. It's not new to us. That almost all life is lived from the drama triangle of victim, villain, and hero. So in a, when we're thinking about our decisions, did I make it from above or blow? Did I make it from a consciousness of victimhood, villain, or hero? Another question we would ask is, did I allow all of my emotional intelligence to totally inform this decision. So we do a lot with leaders around the difference between IQ, EQ and VQ, IQ being the gray matter, the thinking capacities, all that. EQ being emotional intelligence. And BQ, this new field, I think, that's coming online around

body intelligence, the wisdom of the body. So one of the things we see when people make decisions or have World Rights conversations is, of course, most of the people we're working with, have a bias towards IQ, data, analysis, which is fabulous. We're not in any way diminishing that. That needs to be developed, honed, beautiful. But we've discovered that unless people are equally valuing EQ, the best decisions don't get made. And there's tremendous wisdom that comes from emotional intelligence.

We teach that there are five core emotions that are healthy, life-giving, natural. And those are anger, fear, sadness, joy, and creative energy. By the way, that creative energy is actually sexual energy. We don't call it that because of all the obvious reasons. All these emotions actually occur in and on the body. Emotions are not thoughts. They are literally sensations in and on the body. Now, that doesn't mean I don't have a thought.

So I'm, you know, I live in Chicago, I'm driving down the Kennedy Expressway. Somebody cuts me off. I have a thought, you shouldn't do that. That thought charges an emotion, anger. But that emotion doesn't show up in my thinking pattern. It shows up as a set of sensations on my body, heat in my face, you know, tension in the back of my neck, radiating on my shoulders, down to my fists, pulsing in my, that's anger. Badness is in the chest and the neck in the face, fears in the belly, all these things locate

in the body. And creative energy, which is an incredibly powerful tool, actually started out as sexual energy that starts in the body in the erogenous zones and then circulates all throughout the body. And quite frankly, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex. A lot of people have sex without sexual energy. They have sex with anger. They have sex with fear.

They have sex with sadness. But sexual energy is part of the key to being creative. It flows through the same pipe. So one of the questions we would ask, going back to your original question, is were all of the emotions welcomed in the decision process? And did we get the wisdom of them? The wisdom of anger is that something isn't of service and it's a boundary energy. You need to be able to say stop. The wisdom of sadness is that there's a loss here and we're not fully facing and feeling the loss.

the wisdom of fear is that something's not being paid attention to. So I'm going a little deep on emotional intelligence, but that would be a category. Another question I would ask is, did we reveal everything we had to say about this? So we have these 15 commitments, and the fourth commitment is about candor. And we find horrible decisions get made when people don't reveal their thoughts, their judgments, their opinions, relevant data, facts, information, their feelings, their deepest wants and desires. So what we find is that when trust is low in relationships, teams, and organizations, people start withholding. And when people withhold, decisions become far less effective.

And they get muddied up. We call them sludge. And so they get slower and wrong decisions get made. So that'd be another one. Did I say everything. I had to say, we call it blurty. When we're teaching people how to have world-class conversations and make decisions, we want to get all the relevant facts out on the table, and then we want to create a few minutes, depends on the depth of this decision, how long we have to make the decision, for everybody in the room to blurt and to say everything they have to say. And there's a particular way we teach people to do that. That would be another question. Another question we would ask is, are there any integrity breaches that are touching or affecting this decision?

decision. What does that mean? Yeah, great. So integrity is many things, but one of it is, integrity is about my agreements, am I impeccable around my agreements? So an agreement is anything I've said I will do or anything I've said I won't do. Being impeccable is being clear about my agreements, keeping my agreements, and we see that people who really have high states of integrity, keep about 90% of their agreements, renegotiating agreements I've made before they get broken, And when I break agreements, cleaning them up. So here's what we discover. A lot of decisions get made where people don't acknowledge that they're making this

decision on top of a broken agreement. Wait a minute. If we go back under here, we actually have an agreement here that we didn't keep or somebody made an agreement with us. They didn't keep. So if I don't get back into integrity around my broken agreements or my unclear agreements, this investment team I worked with, one of the, the things we worked on was how to make clear agreements. Teams waste so much time not making

clear agreements. You know, it's like we make an agreement and you and I are having a conversation. Well, I thought we were going to talk at 8 in the morning. You said, I thought we were talking to 745. I thought you were calling me. I thought I was calling you. I thought I was supposed to get you that report by 5 o'clock. No, it was 2 o'clock. I thought the scope was this. And absent these incredibly clear what we call impeccable agreements, teams waste unbelievable amounts of time. So I'd want to bring that question up. And then I would just keep going with these kinds of questions that are about the state of consciousness in which the decision was made. Well, there'd be a whole set of questions here. I don't know whether that's useful to you and what

you're thinking around this compared to the other people I listen to on your podcast. But that's the way we'd teach teams to. Oh, yeah. This is fascinating. I was like so happy to geek out on this stuff. There's a couple of rabbit holes here before we like go back up to the top. I want to I want to talk about how do we make clear commitments to each other? Like, what is it you encourage people to do beyond sort of like basics and specifics? Like, what does it mean to make a clear commitment? How, what are examples of ways that we unconsciously make unclear commitments? And what does a clear commitment look like in those situations?

Okay, great. So first I want to use a different word because commitment is a technical term for us. I want to use with you the term agreement. Okay, yeah, sorry. An agreement is between two or more people, although, by the way, you can make agreements with yourself. When we start working with leaders, we discover they're not making clear agreements with themselves and they're out of integrity with themselves, right?

So, you know, one of the agreements that I have with myself in the month of March is that I'm going to do a certain number of high intensity interval trainings, you know, per week and I'm going to do a certain amount of strength and balance and training, and I'm going to meditate a certain amount each day and so on and so forth. These are all agreements that I've made with myself. So we can make agreements with ourselves. We can make them with each other. You and I had an agreement. We're going to have a conversation at 8 a.m. Central time. We had an agreement. An agreement, first and foremost, to be clear about your agreements, it's between people, and it's anything I say I will do or anything I say I won't do. So an agreement could be,

we're going to talk at 8 in the morning. You asked me at the beginning of this, Are there anything that off limits? And I said, no, but let's imagine I'd said, yeah, you know, me as a grandfather's off limits. We would have made an agreement. And it would have been clear you couldn't ask me about that. So an agreement between two or more people, anything I've said I will do or won't do. Now, I'll give you one big idea. One of the keys to agreements is they need to be incredibly clear.

Every agreement needs to have a who is going to do what by when. And agreements that don't have a who and a what. N-O-N are sloppy. And we all have a million of these, you know. It can be as simple as, you know, you walk in the door and, you know, your partner, your significant other says, hey, I thought we made an agreement to leave for that party at 7 o'clock. And you go, oh, golly, I didn't think we're going to leave for the party at 7 o'clock. I thought we're going to meet here at the house and get ready for the party at 7 o'clock. Or, you know, I don't think it really matters whether we leave at 7 o'clock. You know, they don't care about that. And all of a sudden, you're in drama with your

intimate partner because you don't have a clear agreement about who's going to do what by when. I think, yeah, another good example that we've all probably experienced is the meeting we've been at where something has decided, but nobody knows who's doing what. We just sort of like leave the room. It's so true. So when we watch world class teams, not only do they make clear agreements, who's going to do what by when, they capture all their agreements. You know, we're huge fans of a technology like a sauna. You know, I love the sauna group because, first of all, they built their entire technology, I think, in a commitment to a certain kind of consciousness. And then they, in my experience, developed an elegant, simple way for individuals, teams,

and organizations to track all of their agreements. So if it's done masterfully, drama minimizes. We're not wasting time on these agreements. So now, so clear agreements. Who's going to do what by when? Now, here's the next one. And I'll give you this one. This one is huge in organizations.

We say, only make agreements. that you have a whole body yes to. That's a funny term. It basically means check throughout your whole body. Check your head, check your heart, check your gut, check your whole system. Do you really have a yes to making this agreement? So what happens in most organizations is we don't create an environment where when people are asked to make an agreement, they get to really check.

Or, and instead of checking, people don't go, I didn't really check. I just kind of gave the corporate not like somebody. asked. So I said, okay. And then they actually think underneath. They think, don't worry, they don't write down. They aren't going to check anyway. I just want to get out of the damn meeting and go do something. So now I'm making agreements I don't really want to make. Well, when you make agreements, you don't really want to make a couple of things are going to happen. One, you won't do it. Or you'll really struggle to do it because you didn't want to do it in the first place. Or you'll do a crummy job. You'll be passive aggressive. It'll show up late. It'll be

done half-assed. So in our world, we want to teach teams to make agreements where everybody gets to check and see, do I really have a yes to this? Now, if I don't have a yes to it, then I might say to you, Shane, I don't have a yes to having our call at 8 o'clock in the morning. I might want to renegotiate the who, the what, or the when. I might say, you know, wow, you know, if we could do it at 7.30, that would be a lot better for me instead of just nodding my head. Or I might say, I don't like the what, you know, we're recording this on Zoom, Zoom sketchy for me. Can we just do a phone call? In those, I get clear.

So you can trust that if I make an agreement with you, I'm in. I'm in. Now, we teach leaders that they also need to know how to use command and control as a viable style. They need to know when to issue edicts instead of agreements. That's true. But when you're really asking for a bilateral agreement, you want people to totally buy in. And the next, write it down. Just write down your agreements and then keep your agreements.

We say to people all the time, it's unbelievable how many leaders I work with and I say, show me the agreements you're currently working with in life. And then I say, are you lined up? Are you in integrity with yourself to keep the agreements? And when we first start working with leaders years ago, we did a little bit of measurement around this. And we saw that most people in organizations keep somewhere between 40 and 60% of their agreements. Well, can you see where that would be a massive amount?

That's going to cause a whole bunch of like you're going to be problem solving all day. There's a lot of friction involved in that, a lot of trauma, I would imagine. Yes. So I get really serious with myself around, you know, Tom Peter said a long time ago, there's no such thing as a small breach of integrity. To me, broken agreements are breach of integrity. By the way, it doesn't matter if I say to Debbie, my partner, I say, I'll pick up a gallon of milk on the way home.

And if I don't pick up a gallon of milk on the way home, That's an integrity breach. It's not a whoops, which leads me to the next piece, which is whenever I break agreements, I go to the person with whom I broke the agreement and I say, let's imagine that, you know, I was late for this call. I show up 15 minutes late. I would begin by saying, Shane, before we get gone, I want to cover that I'm out of integrity with you.

I made an agreement to be on the call at 8 o'clock and I wasn't there. So I want to take responsibility for that. and I want to see if I need to do anything to clean that up with you. By the way, notice in doing that, I'm not making excuses or justifying. I'm not explaining. I'm just taking responsibility because that act of taking responsibility is the commodity of trust. So that would be some of the stuff I'd say about agreements.

By the way, I want to speak just for a minute. My mentor in this was Gay Hendricks, Dr. Gay Hendricks, and his wife, partner and co-facilitator of life, Katie Hendricks. And he's the one who taught me about being impeccable around agreements, and it transform my life. What sort of agreements do people have that are maybe unstated in their direct personal relationships with their partner or spouse that cause friction in that relationship that are maybe unsurfaced and you're unaware of? Yeah, great. Well, here's the deal. most people in their intimate relationship, they haven't gotten conscious around this, have

all kinds of unstated agreements. So you know, you're coming home from a party that you went to and all of a sudden it gets icy cold in the car, right? And then one partner turns the other and said, what's wrong? Well, you talked a long time to so-and-so, and it looked like you were flirting. And it looked like you were touching the person inappropriately on their arm. Boom, now we're off to the races, right? Well, we say all the time that all drama in relationships, personal or professional, is caused by unaligned commitments. That's that word commitment. We're not headed in the same direction or unclear and unkept agreements. So like in coupleness, one of the things we say is, you know, you ought to get really clear about what your agreements are about how you're going to be

involved with people outside of your couplenance. It could be as simple as, are we going to be monogamous or are we going to be polyamorous? Are we going to have an open relationship or are we going to have a closed relationship? Is it okay for me to have, you know, to flirt? Is flirting okay or is flirting not okay? Unless we get clear about all these agreements, they're just going to keep recirculating in drama. We say that unless you get aligned on your commitments, a commitment would be I commit to be candid in our relationship. So that, notice, that doesn't have a who, what, and by when. A commitment is more a moon launch. My North Star is that I'm going to reveal and not conceal in this relationship. I'm not going to hide and manipulate information, my thoughts,

feelings, or judgments. I'm going to be transparent, authentic, and reveal. Well, can you see that in an intimate relationship, if one partner holds that view and the other partner goes, nah, not so much. I'm going to reveal as much as I need to reveal in order to maintain what I want to maintain. Well, we say that that unaligned commitment will cause constant recurring drama. Because it'll show up around money. It'll show up around sex. It'll show up around the in-laws. It'll show up around the children. It'll show up around free time. It'll show up around the credit cards. It'll show up every place. And people will think that the issue is the in-laws. You didn't tell me that your parents were coming. But the issue is not the in-laws. The issue is that

we are not aligned in how transparent and candid we want to be with each other. So unaligned commitments and then unclear and unkept agreements are the source of most drama in most intimate relationships. And by the way, you brought it up in the first life. It's absolutely true in the workplace as well. People aren't aligned in what their commitments are. What are we really up to here? And how are we going to be, behave, believe with each other?

And then we have sloppy agreements. So sometimes people say, what do I do? What does our company, the conscious leadership group do? In the most simplest terms, we help leaders, teams, and organizations minimize drama. Because drama is deeply entertaining. By the way, it's addictive. But it's a massive waste of time. Just one question that came up as we were talking about relationships.

Since you deal with a number of people that are sort of like learning to become self-aware, I would imagine my hypotheses would be like part of that would be, I'm in an unhealthy relationship with my partner or spouse. Absolutely. So what do you do if you realize that? Okay. So again, I'm going to say, let's say I conclude that I'm in an unhealthy relationship. Again, after awareness comes acceptance, a breath of, like the Buddhists say, that's just the

suchness of it. Today is Friday. And my experience of my relationship, it's unhealthy. Okay. So now I'm present to that reality. And I say that because most people are unwilling to fully face what's going on in much of their life. Fully face it. They turn away from it. They partially glance at it. And one thing they're not willing to fully face is the condition of their intimate relationship. And they don't fully face it for lots of reasons. One, they think if I fully face it, That's going to create a ton of mess.

And right now, my prioritization is my work or my prioritization is, you know, my friends, or my prioritization is taking care of my sick mother. I do not want to open up Pandora's box about the health of our relationship. Or I don't want to hurt the other person, right? That was going to be the next one. I don't want to fully face what's going on because I don't want to hurt my partner. Now, I'll just pause there for a second. If we were really talking honestly here, I would say, let's just say that that's true.

You really do care about this person and you don't want to hurt them. So I'll grant that. Let's be with that for a minute. But for many, many people, especially who are in what you said is a unhealthy relationship, what they really don't want to do is live with the effect and the consequences of when their partner gets hurt. So a typical thing would be, you know, some person in the relationship is unfaith. And let's say they broke an agreement. Not all relationships have fidelity as part of an agreement, but let's say they did.

So somebody's unfaithful. And now they realize, uh-oh, this is a problem because now I've got a secret. And, you know, like they say in the recovery groups, you know, only as sick as your secrets. And that's true about a relationship as well. If I'm really committed to closeness and now I've got a major secret, it's probably going to be a barrier to closeness. So then when we start coaching and, you know, I say, you got any secrets in your intimate relationship, yeah, I got this one. and then we start talking about what do you want to do with that and we started laying out the options and one option is to become authentic and reveal i don't necessarily always say that's the

solution that i'd want to have a whole lot of conversation but when we get down to having that very short conversation it's not a long conversation it's pretty short hey i made an agreement with you to you know only be intimate with you and i broke that agreement and i take responsibility for that. Most people don't want to see the look on the other person's face. Because if they don't care about them at all, if they haven't hardened their heart, which by the way, often they've already hardened their heart, so they actually don't care that much. But if they still care, they don't want to see that hurt, that pain. They don't want to see that anguish. But they even more don't want to live with what's coming back their way. How dare you? You know, I knew you weren't trustworthy. This

explains everything. So oftentimes when we say it's because we care, and by the way, that's totally legitimate. Often what's really true is we want to keep controlling the other person, and we don't want them to see us for who we are, because we don't trust that we're going to be okay if they have their reaction. I've sat with countless couples, for example, when they've had that conversation, I've been the third party in the room, and I say to the person who broke the agreement, who wants to return to a genuinely close relationship that they believe they cannot get to as long as they have a secret. I've sat there when they've said that 30-second thing. It's never longer than that. There might be more details that come out later. And then what I say to him is,

now you have to stay here in presence and be with your partner while they feel all their feelings, while they express all that they have to express, while they experience their hurt, their betrayal, their mistrust because there's no possibility for rebuilding a relationship unless you can be authentic and you can be present to your partner while they have their experience. So, I mean, I went kind of deep with here. That's not true of everybody, but that's the kind of thing that needs to happen in an intimate relationship when agreements have been broken. I imagine that would be a really difficult conversation for both, obviously both people to have. It's incredibly difficult, painful, messy. That's why people avoid it. But what's true is, if I really want to have an authentic

relationship where we practice being revealed and candid, by the way, in my judgment, you can't have a truly intimate relationship, and I don't just mean sexually, intimate close relationship without being authentic. You just can't. It's not possible. You can have a buddy. You can have some fun. You can have a playmate. You can have somebody, you know, who to co-parent with. You can have somebody to have a social representation in your community with. But if what you really want is closeness, candor and closeness go hand in hand. So I can only be as close as I'm willing to be revealed. Every single thing here is unless you really, really know me and I have the guts to reveal myself, I can never trust that you really love me. Because if you know,

In my mind, I'm thinking, if you knew this about me, then you wouldn't love me. So how can I ever experience full love and acceptance unless I'm fully revealed? It's always going to be in question. Now, this is the mess. You know, this is why when I start working with couples at the very beginning and they're thinking about coupling, even getting together in relationship, one of the things I do is I just go through, what are you really committed to? What do you want?

Let's make sure you're aligned and committed on that. Again, this is a lot of the stuff that I learned from Gay and Katie Anderson, we apprenticed with them. They wrote a fabulous book called Conscious Loving that is all about this stuff that transformed my relationship with Debbie. And it's transformed countless relationships. By the way, the same stuff is true on a team or in the business environment. What are we committed to? How real and authentic do we want to be? I'm going to have to check out that book. I want to go one level up in the rabbit hole that we had gone down here. You talked about victim, victim, villain, and hero. And I want to explore the victim mindset just a little bit.

Is that akin to like a passive mindset where you feel like life is happening to you and you're out of control of it and these things keep, you know, you don't take responsibility for anything. You sort of don't see your role in things. That's exactly what it is. It is living from the belief, it's not always a conscious belief, that life is happening to me. So I'm at the effect of people, circumstances, and conditions.

So, you know, I'm in Chicago. It's sunny today, but it's 35 degrees or so in March. So there are people, you know, when I walk around the city and talk to people who say, you know, God, the weather is so cold. When is spring coming? I know it's officially spring, but when it's really going to be spring? Well, in that moment, they're reflecting victim consciousness. They're at the effect of the weather.

what I'm saying is my happiness, my effectiveness, my joy is contingent upon people's circumstances or conditions. So if the weather's nice, I'm happy. If the weather's bad, I'm unhappy. If my intimate partner treats me kindly, remembers that it's my birthday, gives me a gift, kisses me appropriately, appreciates me deeply, I'm happy. If they don't, I'm unhappy. If the deal goes through, if the investment pans out, if we win the game, I'm happy. So now in psychological terms, we've moved the locus of control outside of ourselves and we're living in victim consciousness. By the way, we say that this is where the vast majority of people live, the vast

majority of time, because I want to say something, Jane, when I'm living in victim consciousness, it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm having a bad day. In other words, imagine that it's 80 degrees in sunny in Chicago in late March. Now you walk around town and people go, I am having a fantastic day. It's gorgeous. It's sunny. And I played 18 holes of golf and shot two over parts, the best score I've had in the springtime in my lifetime. And my kid got into an Ivy League school.

Well, they're happy, but causation is still outside of them. Right. So now it's just going to be I'm a victim of people's circumstances and conditions. When I move from victim consciousness, which happens below the line, to above the line, I move into what we call creator consciousness. And creator consciousness is basically this. I choose, and it's an active conscious choice, I choose to be responsible for my experience. In other words, the weather doesn't upset me.

I upset myself because I'm attached to beliefs about the weather. Like, I believe it should be sunny and 80, not 34 and cloudy. I'm the source of my belief. I'm attached to being right about my belief. And when the world doesn't cooperate with my constructs about how it ought to be, I upset myself. So, you know, when this really gets going, you start to see that, Nobody upsets you. You upset yourself. Nobody angers you, saddens you,

happiest you. You do that to yourself because it's literally because of the cognitive, mental, and emotive, emotional structure, your thoughts about the world are creating your experience of the world. So when people move from victim to creator, they start taking 100% responsibility for having their experience. How do we do that? Like intellectually, I think I understand everything you just said. And if you ask me, like a question, I could sort of like repeat that, but putting that into a day-to-day practice where you're giving up this sort of desire for an outcome or you're letting these things sort of dictate your happiness is much harder. It requires a ton of consciousness, maybe more energy than what we have. Yeah, I actually

don't, my experience, it doesn't take more energy because I think living in a victim consciousness requires massive amounts of energy. Okay. When we start to live in creator consciousness, it actually is energy replenishing. Okay. Because in cooperation with life, I'm no longer resisting what life is bringing.

It takes an unbelievable amount of energy to resist reality. I agree. Yeah, totally. So in the energy, I guess in the context I was bringing it up, is like you need the energy, in the moment to sort of like within that split site it might save you a ton of energy later but you

need to find it in that moment to like be conscious of your thinking yes step your thinking and then to shift your thinking yes i agree with you actually when you're in victim consciousness we now know that there's a chemical cocktail adrenaline and more epinephrine and cortisol which is running through your body and that cocktail gives an energy surge so many people are unwilling to move from victim consciousness to creator consciousness because they're addicted to the chemical cocktail and its results. So at that level of energy, I totally agree with you. If I start to live as creator, I'm going to give up my attachment to living in a constantly adrenalineized state. That's a big deal. So in my experience, it's not that people even don't know how to change

from victim to creator, it's usually that they're unwilling. But having said that, let's say that you and I are talking, we're out, you know, we're buddies, we're out having a beer together. You know, you're telling me about some issue in your life. You're telling me about something that you're complaining about in life. Let's stay in the personal relationship. You're complaining about a personal relationship. You know, something that's happening in your personal relationship.

You're not getting the amount of appreciation and respect that you want. Okay. So I'd say, great, super, tell me about it. And at the end, I would say to you, well, let me, just ask you, are you in victim consciousness? Do you feel like this is happening to you? Or are you in creator? Do you feel like this is happening by you? And if you're like most of us, you know, you take a sip of your beer and say, this is happening to me. My interim partner doesn't get it. They don't get what a great job I'm doing, how hard I'm trying, all the contribution I'm making,

all the things I gave up to be in this relationship, all the things, they don't get it. So it's happening to me, right? Then you start keeping score. and now you're in the downward death spiral of a relationship. It's two people below the line in victim, villain, and hero. By the way, they move all over that triangle. One day, you're the victim and your partner's the villain. And the next day, you're trying to rescue your partner from their bad feelings. You're on hero.

And we're just running around on the victim triangle. And we're keeping score. Okay. Now, if I were talking to, it's just you and me. It's not your partner. But I'm talking to you, and I say, I get it, man. You make sense to me. You're triggered and reactive.

It makes total sense to me. Are you willing to shift? Are you willing to stop blaming your partner for being the cause of your experience? And are you willing to start taking responsibility for being the creator of your experience? Now, that is not a small question. That is a radical question. And many people will say, well, I'll shift if she'll shift. Or something like that.

Or what if I shift, you know, it gets messy. all that kind of stuff. But let's say we're having that beer and you're willing to shift. Then here's what we'd say. We would ask you to create a recipe. And we do this with teams, organizations, individuals all the time. We would say create a recipe for us. And I would say to you, Shane, if I wanted to have the exact same relationship with my intimate

partner that you do with yours, like where you're underappreciated, undervalued, not respected, how would I need to show up to create that? What would I need to do? What would I need to not do? What would I need to say and not say? What would I have to believe and not believe? How would I have to see them? How would I have to see me? And in a matter of moments, if you're willing to start taking responsibility and seeing that you're the creator of your experience, you would be able to write out the recipe for me for how to create that experience. I was working with a team in a company the other day. And like so many teams, they were in complete overwhelm. And they were, you know, in the victim, villain, hero triangle. And they were overwhelmed because of scarcity of resources. They were overwhelmed because of the competitive advantage that they were losing. They were overwhelmed because they had some product design flaws, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They were an overwhelmed.

And, of course, they'd been doing this work for a while. So I said, are you above or below the line? They said, we're below the line. Great. Would you be willing to take responsibility for overwhelming yourselves? Notice the change in language. We're not being overwhelmed by something out there. we are overwhelming ourselves.

So it was great. We were in a room with big whiteboards. And I said, teach it. Imagine there's a new startup that's coming to the world. And they come to you and they say, we want to live in constant overwhelm too. If you can teach us, what do you have to do to live in overwhelm? And they laughed. They got up and they started writing all over the walls, how you'd have to see reality

to live in constant overwhelm. Because in my experience, being overwhelmed is actually optional. and it's useful in the short run, but very destructive in the long run. It gives initial energy burst, but not long-term sustainability. So they were starting to take responsibility for being the creator of their experience. So you ask practically, what do you do? Well, first you locate yourself as in victimhood. Then you take responsibility for putting yourself there.

Then you check and see, am I willing to shift? Then you create the recipe for how you've created the situation just the way it is. And lastly, in the very creation of the recipe, you've given the prescription for how to change it. Let's go back to my illustration with an intimate relationship. You're complaining about not being appreciated and respected enough. And when I say teach the recipe, teach me the class how to do this. One of the questions I'd ask you is, I'd say, let me ask you this. Do you give a lot of articulated appreciation to your significant other?

Are you giving as much appreciation as you like to get back? and you look at me and you go, no, I'm not going to appreciate her until she appreciates me. Okay, then you'd write that down. You'd go, here's a formula for having a relationship where we don't have enough appreciation and respect. Don't give appreciation to my partner. So I'd say, great, if you're really willing to change this, just go home and do the opposite. Next, I'd say to you, you're still committed to thinking that you're valuable if your partner

likes you. I want you to move the locus of control inside yourself and generate your own sense of value from the inside, and here are three things to do that. So now you start to change, and I guarantee you, as you start to change, you create a totally different context in your intimate relationship with a much greater possibility of having appreciation and respect be a cornerstone of your relationship, because you chose to shift from victim consciousness to creator consciousness. Does that make sense?

Oh, it totally makes sense. I think that's great advice. Shifting gears just a little bit here, going back to you, you had brought up EQ and BQ, and I'm curious as to how we develop, hone, augment, accelerate, our sort of EQ, and, like, tell me a little bit of a BQ, but more in terms of, like, EQ, what is it that we can do to consciously improve or be aware of where we're at? And what is it we can do to develop that in a way that's going to bring us closer to other people, to have more meaningful relationships, to be more empathetic towards them and more sensitive to maybe the context in which they're operating.

Okay, beautiful. So I'll just give you some steps. Step number one, decide if you're willing to develop your emotional intelligence. That's not a trick question. Most people that, you know, we're interfacing with and you're interfacing with have a serious question about the validity of feelings and emotions. And let's for now say that's the same thing. So the first question I ask you, do you want to? Let's say you've lived enough life that you go, or you've read enough of the research that says that EQ Trump's IQ long term. So you go, yes, I'm really willing. Great. Then the first thing I'd say is before you can become emotionally intelligent, you have to be emotionally literate. And emotionally literate is just the ability to know what you're feeling

in any moment and name it, which sounds so simple. It's something we should be teaching our kids when they're three, four, five, six years old. Because actually, our kids come hardwired to know how to do this. And then we have to teach them not to do it. They come with tremendous emotional intelligence. And then in order to socialize them, we teach them not to do that. But the first thing is, can in any moment, can I just pause and ask myself, what am I feeling right now?

Right. Okay, good. So if I pause right now and I go, what feeling is here right now? I go, there's joy and excitement, there's peace, and there's fear. That's what I'm feeling. And if I say to you, what are you feeling? I'm not sure you want to play this game with me here, but is there a feeling here right now for you? And what is it?

Overwhelmed, happy, and sad. Do those even go together? I don't know. They do. They're beautiful. Well, here's what you find out about feelings is. It's never a question of whether they go together. They just occur.

Right. It seems have feelings. Now, if I were coaching, I'd say, overwhelm is actually not an emotional state. It's an intellectual state. Okay. Or it's an energetic state. Happy, and was the other one sad?

Happy and sad are emotional. I learned this years ago when I first got in marital therapy, many, many, many years ago. It was in marital therapy. And the therapist said, Jim, what are you feeling? And I said something like, I feel that she's wrong.

Yeah. You know, I've said this to people in the business room. What are you feeling? Well, I feel like he's an asshole. That's not a feeling. Anytime I feel isn't followed by an emotional state, like the five we use, sad, angry, scared, joy, or creative energy. If it's feeling, if it's followed by a thought, it's not a feeling.

This is why I say the first thing you have to learn is emotional literacy. So can I pause at any moment, take a breath, and name my feelings. Right. Yes. Then next, can I feel my feelings? Naming a feeling is different than feeling your feelings. Feelings are actually energy. That's all they are. They're a set of sensations that are occurring on and in the body. And research, I first read this from Jim Bolte Taylor in Stroke of Insight, with a great TED Talk and then the follow-on book, the Harvard brain researcher, who said that feelings last less than 90 seconds. And that's true. In my experience,

they actually often last, far less than that. If I don't feed the feeling with more thoughts, if I just tune into the body, the energy will go out of the body in less than 90 seconds. Is that why you sort of advise to just take a deep breath and feel like in that moment, just be there with that feeling? That's exactly right. So am I willing to just feel the feeling? even big feelings like my older brother just died, just transitioned out of this reality a couple of weeks ago. And so as I'm letting grief move through my body, there'll be times when I'll be sitting and a wave of sadness will show up. And what that feels like is kind of a weight in the center of my chest, a weight in the center of my chest. And I can feel pressure coming to the front of my

face. And it's not long before some wetness starts to fall out of my eyes, some tears. Now, I've could deny that, shove it down. Real men don't feel sad. I could do any of that. But all I do is I just, first of all, I have gratitude for that because to me, that just is my love for my brother. It's just our connection. So if I don't do anything with it, if I just let my heart feel heavy, if I just let tears fall out of my eyes, it goes through in less than 90 seconds. Now, in a big case like that where you're grieving the loss of a loved one, there might be waves of feelings that will come through. But each of those waves, if you learn to do this, will last less than 90 seconds. Then there'll be a troth where there's peace, equanimity. And then the next wave will come

through. And that's true with anger and it's true with fear. So emotional intelligence is the ability to know what I'm feeling in any moment and have a receptive relationship with the feeling. So it goes through my body. It doesn't get stuck. See, because if the feeling gets stuck, which is what happens with most people, it ultimately calcifies and turns into a mood. So anger that isn't felt and released in less than 90 seconds, that calcifies in the body and turns into bitterness and resentment and hatred. So over the years, I've coached a few professional athletes and golfers are a great place to experience this. So let's say that the golfer hits a shot. And it doesn't go where he had visualized it going. And one of the first things I teach

them, if they want to play conscious golf, and I'm not arguing that this is the best way to create peak performance, but it's something to be considered. If they want to do this, the first thing they would do is they would notice the flight of the ball, you know, it's headed out of bounds. And then they would notice that a feeling comes into their body. Let's say anger, and it comes like a white, hot flash into their body. Now, there are many views in this in sports psychology. One of the things that I see as a possibility is I don't resist the anger. I let it come into my body. Now, I learn to express it, to let it flow out of my body in ways that are friendly to me and friendly to the environment. If I'm on national TV, I might want to let that anger move out of my body in one way. If it's me, my buddy's playing,

you know, I might let it move out another way. But I don't resist it. Right. Actually, the first thing I do is let it all flow out of my body, again, in less than 10 seconds. Then I come back to presence. And what I teach is, having done that, I begin to walk. And part of my walking is to come back into presence. It's my pre-shot routine begins the move at I put my club in the bag and start walking to the next shot. My pre-shot routine begins then because I'm coming back into presence. I'm centering myself. By the way, this equally needs to be done if I stick at 18 inches from the hole. I need to let that joy, that excitement go through my body because I don't learn how to let those vibrations of energy move through my body with breath, movement, and sound, they'll affect my

next shot. By the way, the same thing is true if I'm investing. If I get too high, if I get too low, if I don't let the emotions flow, then I will be open to all sorts of cognitive biases. So, emotional intelligence, can I mean what I'm feeling? Can I move it through my body? And then last, can I pause and get the wisdom of the emotion? In other words, we're mammals. We have these limbic brains, these emotions have incredible intelligence. So once the emotion is moved through my body, one of the things we teach people to do is pause and ask, what is that emotion here to show me, to teach you that invite me to face, to become aware of, to learn from. Now, that whole process is individual emotional intelligence, greatly skinny down. Emotional empathy, which you brought up

is I can only be as empathic or compassionate with another as I can be with myself. I say this to parents all the time. If you're not comfortable feeling your sadness, your brokenheartedness, you're not going to allow your children to feel theirs. So when they don't get invited to the dance, when they miss the game winning field goal, when they get shunned by their peer group and they come home and they're sad, instead of being with them in their sadness, which again, all the best work on conscious parenting says be with them first in their sadness. Instead of doing that, you're going to say stuff like this.

Oh, honey, that happens to everybody. You'll get over it. You'll make the next shot. There's a better group of friends anyway. And because you're not comfortable just being with your sadness, you have no capacity to be with your child's sadness or their anger or their sexual energy. A lot of people are uncomfortable with their sexual energy. So they start denying and repressing and suppressing their sexual energy. And when it starts to show up in their kids, they shut it down in a heartbeat.

So it's the same in the workplace. I can only experience emotional empathy and emotional compassion and being emotionally connected to people to the degree that I can be with my own emotion. Now, once I can do that, then the next part of emotional intelligence is I can feel what you're feeling. I tune into it. And emotions are just another data set. This is what I tell, you know, like hard-edged investors who are interested in data sets. It's just another data set.

And if you want to make the best decisions, you want all of the data available. So when you're with your analysts, you want to know what they're feeling. And one of the big problems I think that's existing, so many times in the investment world, we want people to have conviction. but so much this conviction is occurring at an egoic state from below the line. Now, what I mean by that is, in order to get the PM to believe that my research is viable and to pull the trigger, I've been told I have to have conviction. But what I end up doing is denying contrary opinions.

I deny my instinct, my gut. I don't bring forward all relevant information. I think that conviction below the line looks very different than conviction above the line. Conviction above the line says, wow, you know, I say to people, I ought to tell you all the reasons I want to make this investment, and I ought to be able to tell you all the reasons I think it's a bad idea. I ought to be tell you all the reasons I'm excited, and I'll be able to tell you all the things I get a little nervous, apprehensive steer about. And given all of that, and by the way, we haven't talked about B you, I'd want to bring my body intelligence in as well. After we've talked about all that, I want to be able to look you in the eye and say, I want to make the investment.

Now, that is not some stopping my feet, pounding my hand conviction. It is a quiet, grounded conviction that comes because I have faced, felt, and dealt with all the data sets. That's what I want. So that's what emotional intelligence is to me, a basic prime run. Does that give you what you want around that? Yeah, I think that's amazing. I really appreciate you going into such detail. on that. I want to come back to self-awareness and get into, we're talking about the three things,

pause reflect instrument. I want to talk about feedback a little bit and then I want to sort of get into parenting a little bit in terms of what we can do as parents. So walk me through feedback in terms of self-awareness. How can I use feedback? How can I set feedback up? How can I get people to give me feedback so I can become more self-aware? Yeah, great question. So one of the questions I work with leaders on, we work with teams on all the time, is how feedback riches the environment. And again, a lot of times I'll talk to leaders, you know, the higher up they go in their trajectory, it's not uncommon at all that they tell me they're getting less and less feedback. It makes sense based on power dynamics and structures and fear and all that. It makes total sense.

But when they first start talking to me, they want to talk from victim. They want to say that they're at the effect of the environment that's giving them less feedback. And I say, would you be willing to take responsibility for being the creator of your reality. In other words, you're getting as much feedback as you're committed to getting. So stop anybody around you. And then I say, would you be willing to create a feedback rich environment? And that's a real serious exploration. We really want to play with that. Let's say the person says, yes, I want to create a feedback rich environment. Good. Then the next thing I would say to him is, let's identify your feedback filters. So a feedback filter is anything that completes this sentence.

In order for me to value your feedback, I would need you to blank. So when I ask these, they might say, well, in order for me to value your feedback, I'd need you to be a subject matter expert. In order for me to value your feedback, I'd need you to give it to me in a certain way at a certain time. I'd need factual data supporting it. I'd like feedback early in the mornings before noon. in order for me to be open to your feedback, I know that you have my best interest in mind. In order for me to be open to your feedback,

and they just start identifying all their feedback filters and making them conscious. And basically, I always want to make sure they have one in there that they often skip over or wait to the last, and it's this. I would be open to your feedback if I agreed with it. Because all those others are really a cover for that. And the deal is, the more feedback filters,

unconscious ones that we have in life, the less feedback we're open to. So what I want to work with leaders in around is becoming conscious of their feedback filters and deciding thoughtfully which ones they want to have. Now, this is a deep and meaningful conversation. It creates a very, very powerful sense of self-awareness. So I'll stop there on that. Let me keep moving. So let's say I decide, okay, what do I really want my commitment to be?

Now we're back to that word around commitment. Well, I've worked with leaders, especially some young people at the beginning of their career, who've gotten to the point where they say this, I want feedback given any way, any time by anybody. I want feedback-rich environment. Now, I always help them differentiate between receiving feedback and agreeing with feedback. I just want to get a feedback-rich environment. Now, for most people, that's too open of an aperture. But I want them to clarify what is their aperture about how much feedback they want in life. Okay, so I want to get clear about that. Then a real simple thing is ask for feedback. Right. So, you know, a real simple

thing is you get a presentation to the investment committee. At the end of it, just if you have time to me, great, if not, go to everybody afterwards and say, I just gave a presentation. Would you give me a number between one and ten? Ten being, I absolutely killed it, hit it out of the park, it was exquisite. One being it was torturous, a complete bust. You know, with most investment professionals, you're not going to get any tens. A rare nine. Hardly ever do you get a one or a two. Right. So you might say, take seven out of the mixture just for now. Give me a number. Any number less than 10, I don't just say give me a number. I say, tell me one thing I could do to improve. And here's a real key to creating a feedback rich environment. I would say this. Shane,

give me a number between one and 10, anything less than a 10. So let's say you give me an 8. I say anything less than a tent. Tell me one thing I could do to improve. And Shane, don't worry about being right about your feedback. Don't worry about being constructive. Don't worry even about it being actionable. In fact, I say this at the beginning of creating a feedback-rich environment. If you don't have anything, make something up. Because I want to get the pipeline flowing. And anything greater than a one, tell me one thing I did well, I should keep doing. Well, golly, if I want feedback, there you go. Go home to your intimate partner and say, hey, when we have a glass of wine tonight,

could you tell me three things I could do better as a father and one thing you think I'm doing well? Send an email to your siblings or get your siblings on a phone call and say, hey, this is going to sound really funny. And I'd like you to think about it and maybe see if you'd give me feedback. What's one thing I could do to be a better brother? So create a feedback-rich environment. I'll give you one more thing. I have loads on this one, but I'll give you one more thing. When you get feedback, now this is advanced, okay, but people who really want to be high-speed

transformational learners, when they get feedback, they do not ask the question, is it true? Okay. They ask the question, how is it true? Like, what has to exist in that person's mind for this feedback to be true? Nope. how is their feedback about me true about me? Okay. Right, right.

Obviously, we could talk about their projections because all feedback is projection. This is what we teach teens, which parentheses, anytime I give you feedback, let's say I say to you, you know, I find you quite self-absorbed and self-centered. In the world of psychology, that's projection. And the one thing we can know is that I probably am self-centered, self-absorbed. it's you know 12 steps they have such great way of saying this stuff they just say if you spot it you got it right which is a fabulous learning tool if everything you're complaining about really complaining about and people in your world if you were willing to eat the projection and see how the things you're complaining about about other people are true about you you would increase your learning agility

exponentially but most people want to keep making it about the other person so pause for a second so you give me feedback and you say, Jim, I don't think throughout the podcast, you really got present enough. Let's say that was your feedback. And I go, first of all, I say thank you. And then I go, how is it true about me that I wasn't present? And I go, well, one thing I can see is I notice the rate of my speech. It was very fast. I noticed that I've been sitting forward almost the whole time. I noticed that I've been excited and playful. I like doing this with you. And And so throughout this time, I haven't gotten still very often and backed up and taken a breath and dropped in. Thank you.

Your wife says to you, you know, I don't think you're spending enough time with the kids. Instead of going, well, you don't spend enough time in them or you don't know how busy I am or you don't appreciate me. What are you going to learn from that? Zero. Right. Instead, you might say, thank you. You also, by the way, might say, ouch. And then you say, I'm going to grab a cup of coffee with myself and I'm going to look at how it's true about me.

Well, what you'll often discover is you can't find a way that it's true about you. By the way, if you want to be a really high-speed learner, you can either go back to that person or you can go to three other people and you can see, you know, my wife gave me a feedback that I wasn't spending quality time with my kids that every time I was with them, I was looking at my device or I was distracted. And I get defensive and told her all the reasons that wasn't true. So you go to two of your buddies and you say, you've been with me with my kids. Can you tell me how it's true that I'm not spending quality time with my kids?

I'm not looking for you to defend me and tell me why my wife's wrong. I'm asking you to tell me how it's true. Right. Well, can you just see if you wanted to create. That's so much more powerful. Rich, learning environment, goodness gracious, let alone this gets supercharged when we do it in a relationship. In your intimate relationship, if you decide we're both going to be open to feedback and we're both going to ask how it's true, not is it true? And we're both going to be curious from above the line.

We hold the possibility of creating an unbelievable relationship. And in the organizational world, I say to people all the time, if you create feedback rich environments like we're talking about here, you can let go of most formal feedback tools. You don't need to do a semi-annual or annual feedback things, which, you know, still gets right as one of the things most people hate the most because you've created such a feedback-rich environment. Right. So that's, you know, that's something I really want to stand for in this world of becoming

a high-speed curious learner is what does it look like? create a feedback-rich environment. Yeah, I think that's super important. And I think it's something we don't consciously think of it a lot, right? Like, how do we get better feedback? How do we acquire better information about ourselves and our impact on other people and our knowledge of ourselves? Yes, absolutely.

So get more incoming feedback. And then I would come back to, if you want to really, really grow in self-awareness, eat your projections, which means anything you're complaining about out there, take it in and see how it's true about you. Now, that's graduate school stuff, but when people do that, their whole life changes. Yeah, okay. I don't think we have enough time to dive into that part of it. We'll have to do a part two maybe next year to get that for sure, because I definitely do want to have that conversation with you. I want to get to parenting before we sort of like wrap up here.

I know you have a time stop soon. Tell me how we can use the stuff we talked about today to be better parents. You had six kids. that must have been crazy. Well, it actually wasn't that crazy because I have two daughters. They're 10 years apart. So think about that. And then I ended a marriage and started a new relationship.

And Debbie, my wife, had four sons. So if she were here, you could talk to her about the craziness of raising four boys all within five years of each other. But when I joined that constellation, the youngest of the kids was probably 10 or 11 or 12. Now, you could still say it's a little crazy because we're blending a family, which is a master skill in consciousness or not. Talk about drama. And, you know, I'm deeply committed to my son and loving them. So, yes, but not as crazy as it sounds. Okay. So all of this, every bit of this applies to parenting. So just go back to where we started, the line. So one of the questions I

as parents all the time, you know that interchange you just had with your 16-year-old? Were you above the line or below the line? Because if you're below the line, the possibility of having a meaningful conversation that produces tangible lasting results is very slim. Furthermore, if you're below the line when you're interacting with your 16 year old because they just got a traffic ticket or got busted for marijuana or whatever, there's a real probability your kid is going to go below the line too. So now you've just got too reactive, contracted, scared, people trying to prove their right. Well, that's where most parenting occurs from when we're triggered.

And by the way, it's the same thing. Are you, you know, when you're working with your 18-month-old who only eats two dietary things and you're not willing to give them that in the restaurant and they're throwing a temper tantrum, are you interacting with your child from below the line or above the line? And again, I'll circle back to it. Let's say I'm in a restaurant and my kid's throwing a temper tantrum and I'm interacting with my kid. Most parents, this is natural and normal, are not really interacting with their child, with their child at the center of their consciousness. They're interacting with their child

with themselves at the center of their consciousness and their embarrassment. So my anger at my child is largely fueled by my embarrassment that I'm outsourcing my sense of approval and okayness to strangers surrounding me at Chuck Echee Cheese. I probably wouldn't have my chucking cheese, but, you know, at a restaurant. This goes back to your grandparent comment earlier where it's almost easier to be a grandparent than it is to be a parent. Absolutely. So, you know, if you think about conscious parenting, one of the primers that I give parents

is, you know, most parents think that their children came here to learn for the parent to teach them how to be a human. Well, there's a lot of truth to that, and that's a lot of what our job is. But I'd say it's equally, if not more true, that our children came here to teach us. So for example, these little children in my life, all of them are under seven years old and some babies and stuff. Whenever they show up in the world, I have a talk with them when they're little infants, write them a note that says, thank you for coming here to teach me. Thank you for coming here to remind me who I am that I've forgotten. And I believe that if we make that contract

with our children, they will teach us all the way along. So these kids come hardwired to know emotional intelligence. They feel feelings. They're in their bodies. They express the feelings. Their anger comes out if their diapers wet. Their anger comes out of their tummies. If they start to feel the falling sensation, their fear comes out. Their sadness comes out. And every time they did that, if you said, would you teach me again how to reconnect with my body and have an authentic experience of the life force of emotion, would you teach me that? Or let's go back. You know, when you're sitting with your 16-year-old, they just got busted for marijuana. And you say, you know, before I get over there in your business, which I'm going to do, because that's

part of what I think my responsibility is, I just want you to know that this whole situation is a gift for me because I really stake my reputation on being a good parent and having you be an A student and a star athlete not do anything. And you've cooperated fantastically for these first 16 years. And now you're giving me a test. You're giving me a test of whether or not I'm going to see you as an extension of me and whether I'm going to get my validation from how you perform or whether I'm going to source that inside myself. So thank you. Furthermore, you're giving me a chance to face what I went through when I was 16 years old because, you know, I was breaking all kinds of rules and I didn't have a parent who loved me enough to step in. So I'm going to face that and I'm going to step in

with you. Or, you know, I had a parent who was so damn controlling. They smothered me. So I'm going to face all that and be with you. So premise number one, your kids. have come here to teach you as much as you're supposed to teach them. And by the way, if you buy into that, that changes the whole game. And then ask yourself, am I parenting from a bubble below the line? Am I treating my kids as victims? This happens all the time. I can't tell you how many parents see their kids as victims.

The villain is the coach who isn't giving their kid enough playing time. Oh, yeah. Parents steps into the role of hero or the kid is a victim at the effect of their teacher who doesn't understand their learning differences. So the parent steps into the role of hero. And every time we do that, we're treating their kids as disempowered victims. And they'll learn that. So again, you can parent from that victim, villain, hero, triangle, and it creates all kinds of backlash.

So all of this applies to parenting. How candid are you with your kids? How much do you reveal? How authentic are you? Or do you just put up a shield? There's all kinds of stuff here. Do you live in a state of appreciation with your kids? children? Do you give them, you know, that old coaching thing, do you give them five to one

appreciation to constructive criticism? There's so much here about, in fact, that's one of the next books we're going to write is conscious parenting and conscious partnering. Yeah, I think there's a whole world. I mean, this applies outside. It applies to all aspects of your life, right? And it's so important to those are the most important things. Often we don't realize they're the most important until it's too late, right? We're 70 or 80 and all of a sudden we want more time with our kids. We wanted to invest more in our relationship. And letting that hindsight of other people be your foresight is super powerful.

But then it's a matter of like, what do we do with that information? How can it be a better spouse? Like what aspires me to do that? How can I be a better spouse in a way that, or partner in a way that my partner recognizes and appreciates? Not necessarily in a way that I necessarily want to give. So that we're communicating in sort of the same language. And it's the same for kids, right?

If you have multiple kids, the way that you communicate with each kid might be different. And the way that they receive that information has to be sort of optimal for them in order to get the message across or to learn from them or to sort of like have that dynamic with them. And I think that we're just, we're so busy in day-to-day lives that we rarely step outside of ourselves and understand that now is the time that we need to be investing in this because there's no like metaphorical window when we're. you know, 80 that we can just go up to and like solve these relationship problems that we're creating right now. I'm saying yes to everything you're saying. Just before we get off, you mentioned sort of the blended family thing. And I know we have quite a few listeners out there with blended families. What are some of the lessons that you learned as a parent in a blended family situation? Yeah, great. A couple simple ones that help us. We've got a fabulous blended family.

It really is. It's fabulous. A couple things. Number one, we made the decision to prioritize our relationship over our relationship with our children. What does that mean? Well, the deal in a blended family is, you know, Debbie has a biological connection with her boys. That is her offspring. That is her life force. And when the shit hits the fan, when it gets conflictual, when her kids are in conflict with my kids, I'm in conflict with her kids. The natural tendency, and I totally get this. And by the way, it's a legitimate choice. I'm just telling you what we did. The natural tendency is to prioritize the parents' connection with the child. Right.

In our experience, that creates long-term problems. Because those kids in a blended family are going to want to know, my daughters are going to want to know that Debbie hasn't taken primacy over them. They're going to be terrified of that. But if I give them primacy over her, it's going to create a whole downstream set of consequences. So we decided we were going to prioritize our closeness first. And we did all kinds of things around that, around the amount of time we spent together and being each other's allies and things like that. And that was a game changer.

And I've seen lots of other couples do this and they didn't do that. And it might be one of the reasons that the statistics on second marriage divorces are so much higher than first marriage divorces. Because now there's not the primacy of that relationship and all the stress of blended families blows the marriage apart or blows the intimate relationship apart. So that was one thing we did. And then the other thing we did. And this is fairly common. But we really were good about this is Debbie has primary relationship and decision making. rights with her children. I serve as support to that system. Now, if there's something that kids are

doing that's affecting me, I'm going to talk to Debbie about that first. Doesn't mean I'm not going to talk to the kids, her kids, but I'm going to talk to Debbie first to make sure we're aligned, and then we'll talk to the kids together. Now, there's a whole lot more around this, but that's another one. She has primary decision-making responsibility with her children. My job is to support her. How does that not end up in a situation where different kids have different rules? Different kids have different rules? Yeah. Oh, I wish we had time because I would say, what's wrong with that?

Oh, no. Okay. That's a great sort of question. So is that okay? Like if your daughter came up and said, you know, one of her kids did the same thing as I did and the punishments were completely different or the consequences. I don't want to use the word punishments, but the consequences were different. This would be a whole conversation on parenting.

One of my views would be that part of being a conscious parent is to be so present and so tuned in that you know that your six-year-old needs an earlier bedtime than his five-year-old sister. Now, the six-year-old is going to say, and you can react to that from below the line or you can come from above the line. You can say, listen, I know that pisses you off. I know you hate that. So if you want to beat a bag for a minute, let your anger out, that's great. I'll just sit here and witness and be with you. That's perfect. And at the end of the day, when I tune into you, I think your sleep needs are different. So we're going to have different bed times.

And by the way, that's just one tiny illustration. I think that can be illustrated over and over and over again. And by the way, that doesn't mean that there aren't family rules. We could have a family rule that you can have your room, be a pig stye if you want, but everybody cleans up the common space. Right. You know, so I would question the belief. that we need to have the same consequences and expected agreements. By the way, parenting is all

about making clean agreements with your children. Most parents don't make agreements with their kids. They give them edicts and that creates a rebellion. I talk about how to make clean agreements with your kids around things like room, clean, and bedtime and homework and stuff like that. We're going to make clear agreements with our children and those agreements can be different. Keep going with the other sort of lessons from blended families and we'll follow up in part two of this. So lesson number one, we prioritized our relationship. Lesson number two, the primary parent had decision rights and the secondary parent was an advisor consultant and stood as a unified field in the decision making that went on. And another one I would say is have a long

time horizon. Because when families blend, depending on how you blend, there's so many different ways to blend out. There's almost always a tumultuous adjustment period. I tell parents count on it. Here's what's going to happen. Your kid's job and your stepchildren's job is to test you. It's going to get messy. So have a long time horizon and understand that when you decide to end your first marriage and take your kids into a second marriage or a second intimate relationship, part of what you're choosing is a tumultuous period of time. So that's no one. And then another big one, which again we could go into intensely is how we as me as an

individual, me and Debbie, and me as a system choose to relate to the former spouses and the co-parents out there is critically important because there's a whole energy field here and they're all part of the energy field. And the degree to which we can, and it's not totally up to us because there are the people involved, the degree to which we can relate to the co-parents and the former partners from above the line, which is not easy to do because usually we're ending the relationship for a reason, which usually carries some toxic residue. But the degree to which we can relate to them from above the line is a great, great enhancement to our blended family.

You know, what's her name? It'll come to me. Who did conscious uncoupling, Gwyneth Paltrow and Goup and all that. You know, it came back up because I just saw something and I think it was New York Times about it. Esther Perel, wasn't it?

Was it Esther Perel who came up with the idea of conscious uncoupling? I don't know. I know she's talked about it before in terms of like, I remember reading an article a few weeks ago that she wrote on sort of a couple that was breaking up

and one of them was feeling guilty because he had had an affair but he didn't want to be in the marriage anymore and he had moved on but he was really feeling guilty about his spouse and so part of the conscious uncoupling was like he was acknowledging that he was feeling guilty

and then that was okay. That's fabulous. Yeah, I love Esther's work. It's unbelievable. And Gwyneth came up with this idea of conscious uncomplettling. I think she got it from somebody back in the 70s and gained Katie Edwards

and she got a ton of crap for it. And this was years ago. But I want to say, you fast forward. to this weird thing that, you know, in social media, I don't really do, but I hear, she gets a lot of crap for, you know, that her ex-husband comes on honeymoon with her and her new husband and the kids. Now, we can all see why that, we can make up a story why that's absurd. But it's the ultimate experience of if you want to minimize the drama in the lives of those children, be conscious about your relationship with your ex-partner and their parent. And the most thing I'd say about that is prioritize your kids. kids' well-being. So prioritize your relationship with your spouse, prioritize your kids' well-being. So it's so easy to want to, you know, trash the other person, so on and so forth. And all it does is leave a destructive, you know, wasteland in your kids' consciousness and soul. So those are

some of the lessons we learn. I think there are lots more. Jim, that was amazing. This whole conversation was mind-blowing. So we will follow up for part two. I really appreciate you taking the time today. And I think we covered a lot of ground and there's a lot of detail. I'm so pleased with how this turned it. Oh, you're so welcome. It's great fun for me, Shane. I really enjoyed the collaboration of playing together. Great fun. Hey, guys. This is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at Farnham Street blog.com slash podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-E-T-B-L-O. log.com slash podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript.

And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnhamstreetblog.com slash newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening. Thank you.