The One You Feed - Dr David K Reynolds

Episode Date: February 24, 2015

This week we talk to Dr. David K Reynolds about Constructive LivingDr. David K Reynolds is the creator of Constructive Living. Constructive Living is a Western approach to mental health education based in large part on adaptations of two Japanese psychotherapies, Morita therapy and Naikan therapy.He is the author of Constructive Living, The Constructive Living Handbook and Water, Snow, Water: Constructive Living for Mental Health among many others.For more information and show notes visit our website....See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sonny, while you can, you'd better get done the things that you need to do in your life because you don't want to be someday lying here in a bed like this, regretting what you didn't do. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is David K. Reynolds. David is the creator of Constructive Living, a Western approach to mental health education based largely on adaptations of two Japanese psychotherapies, Marita therapy and Nikon therapy. David is the author of countless books on the subject, and he lectures around the world. Here's Eric with a quick message, followed by the interview.

with a quick message followed by the interview. In this episode that you're going to hear, we talk an awful lot about taking action regardless of the feelings that we have, but often for some of us, that's really difficult to do. If you're interested in getting some one-on-one help with that, send an email to eric at oneufeed.net. Thanks. You're welcome.

Hi, Dr. Reynolds. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. We had a particular listener, Paul from Ireland, who was a real big fan of what you did. And we also had Dan Millman early on, and he's referenced your work a couple different times. So I'm happy to get you on here to get it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. So our show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says,

in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he asks his grandfather, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you how that parable applies to you in your life and in the work that you do. Constructive living is about doing, and I love the notion that feeding is the key term in that parable. It's what you do that influences how you feel, what your orientation is, whether you're doing good or bad, feeling good or bad.

So I'll be talking later on about specific people who've come to Constructive Living and what instruction, what advice, what assignments they got. And perhaps inductively, the folks who are listening can get an idea of what constructive living is about from that. Do you want to give us a brief definition of constructive living before we go into that piece? Constructive living is just about living realistically, sensibly. There are some basic principles of constructive living. For example, you're not responsible for anything that you feel. You can't control your feelings.

And so whatever you feel, you need to acknowledge it, to recognize it, not to deny it or pretend it's not there. And get on with, then, what is your purpose and doing what needs to be done. Those are basic principles in constructive living from the action side of constructive living. And the other side of constructive living is based on a Japanese psychotherapy called Nikon, which suggests that we're supported. The word in Japanese actually is ikasariteru, which means to be lived, literally. It means that although we Americans may think that we're self-made people and that we've made it on our own, it just isn't so. The reality is that reality keeps supporting us, whether we recognize it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we say thank you or not.

That's just the way life really is. And I'll be asking your listeners to check out what I'm saying on the basis of their own experience. This is not wild, oriental, religious philosophy. This is about just being practical and realistic about life. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that really attracted me to your writings and your thinking was really the realism around it. There was something you said about, this is a book about outgrowing your problems, not

making your problems go away. Yeah. And you've got another line that talks about where anybody who promises a whole lot more than that arouses your doubts, which is absolutely the case for me, too. I get skeptical very quickly with anything that sounds like an easy answer. Right. You want to grab your wallet. Exactly. You suggested that maybe a good way to go about it would be for you to talk about some examples of people who came to you and you treated them with the constructive living approach, and we could maybe investigate a little bit about what

that approach entails by going through those, I'll call them case studies, for lack of a better word. Yeah. I'll use really simple ones, and you can jump in any time if you think I'm rambling on. The first guy comes and says, I wasn't motivated to do my housework. And I said to him, you mean you didn't do it? And he said, well, I couldn't make a clear decision to do it. And I said, you mean you didn't do it? Another guy came in saying, I seem to resist doing the assignment. And I said to him, you mean you didn't do it?

So these fellows had in mind that they had to do something with their mind. They had to sort of feel like doing something before they could get themselves to do it. And I'm more interested in whether they did what they said they were going to do or not. So the constructive living approach focuses in on, magnifies the importance of the doing itself rather than figuring out some sort of motivation or prior feeling state that a person thinks he needs in order to get something done. We live in an American culture, we have two big problems. One of the problems is that you should feel happy all the time,

that you should feel confident all the time, that you should feel like doing something before doing it, that you have to fix your feelings before you can do something important in your life. And that's just a waste of time, actually, because I don't know how to fix feelings, and I don't know anybody else who knows how to turn on and off feelings at will. We have a lot more control over what we do, our behavior. That is what I could see someone doing, as opposed to what goes on inside the mind.

Another fellow came in. He was a young medical student who gave his first pelvic exam to a pretty young lady. And he came in because he felt shy and nervous while giving that first pelvic exam. And he wanted to work on his shyness. And I told him, as you can expect by now, the shyness is perfect. There's nothing wrong with that. You want to do well. You feel self-conscious about it.

That's terrific. We're not going to work on your shyness at all. We're going to work on your giving the best pelvic exam that a young, shy medical student ever gave. So I want him to get his attention on the exam rather than on himself. That's the problem with most neuroses, actually. The focus gets turned in on the self. How am I doing rather than on the task that's right in front of them that needs to be done? It's the same sort of problem that you run into with people who get nervous before speaking in front of a crowd. When you start thinking about how am I doing, am I making a

mistake, do they notice that I'm nervous in this situation and so forth, the focus has turned away from the content of the speech and getting that speech across to the people who are listening, that speech across to the people who are listening, and it's turned in on the self. It's that self-focus that's a big problem. It's the other problem that I run into in American culture, the problem of feeling focus and the problem of self-focus that distracts one from the task at hand. You've got a phrase, it's one of, I think, Marita's maxims that, you know, behavior wags the tail of feelings. You know, I say on the show a lot that you can't,

sometimes you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking. And I think that's really what you're getting at is taking the action anyway and then turning your attention really what you're getting at, is taking the action anyway, and then turning your attention to what you're doing in the present moment, that thing itself, being back in reality, the reality, which is the real world versus so much in our, maybe not spending so much time in our head. Exactly. And Morita also said, effort is good fortune.

He said, dorio kusunowachi kofuku in Japanese. But he was saying that the doing itself, whether it fixes your mind or not, whether it succeeds or not, whether you get the result

that you desired or not, there's something about the doing, the wholehearted doing, losing yourself in doing that's important in itself. That's already success, however things turn out in the end. I love it because it's so, there's so much common sense in it. And my life has certainly been in, you know, my life has always gotten better when I have taken action, regardless of how I might feel about it in that moment. But I think that is a very challenging thing for people.

You're right. I think culturally, we're raised that way here in America to a great degree. So is there some advice or tips or things that you can, you know, help bridge that where someone goes, well, I agree, I should take behavior, or I should do certain things regardless of my emotions, but you know what, I've followed my emotions around for all these years. How do I start to move in the right direction? Well, the first thing we need to do is help people get clear on what's a feeling and what's a behavior. So, for example, a person comes in and says, I have a problem with overeating, I feel anxious, and that makes me hungry.

And they think that's their problem. And I ask them, what's the difference between hunger and eating? See, they haven't thought that, that there's a difference. They know intellectually that there's a difference. that there's a difference. They know intellectually that there's a difference, but they think that there's something about hunger that forces them to eat, and that's a problem. So the first thing that people need to do

is get clear on what's the difference between an emotion or something that's going on in the mind and a behavior, an activity that I could actually observe you doing. And then for people who come in early on, they need some help with getting things done, even though the feelings, the anxiety, the fear, the jealousy, the rage, whatever, is interfering.

And some of the short-term band-aid suggestions that we have in constructive living for folks. The first one is weight, for example. That's one sort of thing. We all have the experience that whatever feeling we've had never existed over time at the same intensity unless something came along to re-stimulate it. So when my father died, Mom felt extreme grief. And then, as the weeks and months passed, that faded to some extent. And then came the day that was our anniversary,

and she felt that sadness rear up again. It was actually a new sadness, by the way. It reminds her of the sadness she felt when Dad died, but it's not exactly the same. We change moment by moment. And then the day that she gave away his clothes to the Salvation Army and so forth, those events re-stimulated her feelings. Now, that's the good news.

The bad news is, of course, that the feelings that we like are like that, too. news is, of course, that the feelings that we like are like that, too. So when couples come to me because they're having problems with their relationship, whatever that is, and I'll say, well, what did you do when you were courting, when you were dating? And they'll say, well, we cuddled and we said sweet things to one another and we had delicious dinners and we gave each other gifts and so forth. And now it's 10 years after we got married, and the relationship isn't as strong as it used to be. And I say, well, are you doing those things anymore?

And they go, well, no, we're not doing those things anymore. Well, of course not. Then the love, the affection, the intimacy that you felt in your courtship days, of course that's going to fade over time unless you do things that restimulate it. So the first hint, if you're having trouble with feelings that we give in constructive living, is to wait a while. The second hint is to distract yourself. In my books, typically I write about how I'm afraid to fly.

I'm scared to death to fly. I'm sure that every time I get on a plane, I'm going to die. And I really believe that. I put my affairs in order before I get on a flight. And I have to fly to Japan. I spend some spring and fall in Japan every year. And there's no bridge between the U.S. and Japan, so there's no chance for me to drive.

But when I get on a plane and we hit turbulence, especially, that's when I get really scared. And that's just fine. Being afraid doesn't stop me from flying. The only thing that stops people from flying is if they don't buy airline tickets. You can check that out and try to get on a plane without an airline ticket and you can't do it. But you can get on a plane feeling scared to death. And so when I get

on a plane and we hit turbulence, what I want to do is I want to get up and sweep the aisles. And the reason why I want to do that is because when you're upset about something, it's easier to do activities that involve big muscle activity. It's easier to polish your shoes or wash the dishes or clean your house than it is to do your income tax or to read a book. And if you want to distract yourself, the best way is to use big muscle activity. And so when I sit in my seat, because it won't let me get up and sleep plain, I sit in my seat with the seatbelt fastened and I paint little postcards.

And sometimes while I'm painting flowers on postcards, I forget about the fear. And that gives me some temporary relief. But the important thing is that it's okay to be scared to death to fly, as long as you can get on the plane and do what you need to do anyway. I need to get to Japan. I need to get back to the United States. And I can do that, scared to death or not. That's one of my membership cards into the community of folks who are imperfect and sometimes neurotic. So when somebody talks to me about phobias or anxiety or whatever, I can talk to them from my experience. In some ways, I'm rather glad that I have a fear of lying. That's one of the stimuli that helped me to write those 30 books really fast. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. for a second, because I always explore a lot this idea of the gray line between experiencing an emotion and, you know, sort of on one end of the spectrum is wallowing in your emotion. On the other end of the spectrum is I just don't think about them. I repress them. I make them go away somehow. And I think you're describing more of a middle ground there. So what do you see the role of emotions to be? And, you know, I don't think you're advocating just trying to pretend that they exist. So how does that fit in? Because I see that the behavior is the thing that you're saying, let's focus on that. But what do we do with the emotions?

I see that the behavior is the thing that you're saying, let's focus on that. But what do we do with the emotions? Yeah, feelings give us information. And feelings are real. They're reality. And if there's anything in constructive living, in the Morita therapy or the Nikon side of constructive living, it's to be realistic. And so you don't want to deny or ignore important parts of reality that are giving you information. So, great, whatever feelings come along, you pick up the information from them,

but that's not the only information that reality is sending you. It's sending you information about what other people desire from you, from what the situation that you're in requires of you, what your purposes are. So you take into consideration all those things, and then you decide on what needs to be done and go ahead and do it. But you don't let feelings be the only piece of information that guides your behavior.

You don't want to do that. For example, I had a person come to me piece of information that guides your behavior. You don't want to do that. For example, I had a person come to me and said she was having trouble. She wanted to be a designer, but she didn't have confidence, and she felt insecure about becoming a designer. And I told her, you know, that lack of confidence is normal, natural. It's information that you haven't been a successful designer. And the way, if you want to get confidence about being a designer, what you need to do is start being a designer. And if you succeed at it, the confidence is going to come. She

thought that confidence ought to come first. And confidence was the most important criterion for becoming whatever it was you wanted to become, a designer. Confidence is a byproduct of trying something and succeeding. My guess is the first time that you gave an interview with somebody, you weren't absolutely full of confidence. You hoped you wouldn't make too many mistakes.

And as you went along, the confidence grew because you had experience and you succeeded at what you do. One of the things I thought was really interesting was, and again, you've written 30 books, so I've only gotten parts of them. So if any of this has evolved since any of the things I've read, certainly let me know. But one of the things I got was that the point of taking action, so I feel this thing, I recognize it, okay, now what's the next thing to do? The point of that is not necessarily to make those emotions go away.

The point is to take the action itself. Right. To use those emotions. You might as well use them because there's nothing I don't know of anyway of erasing them except if you take enough drugs or try to pretend

that they're not there and so forth. That's just a waste of time. You're better off just taking advantage of those emotions that come up. What you don't want to do

is you don't want to focus so much on the emotions that you lose track of whatever else is going on in your life. One of the things that you talked about that was really, really hit me, and I'll just read it, was that you said some people who haven't got their conduct under control are afraid of their feelings. They're worried that if they allow their passions to well up, they're going to behave themselves into a lot of trouble. So they sit on their feelings, try to ignore them, try not to feel. Such people usually come in for therapy complaining that life is gray and meaningless. And that really hit me as somebody who used to not have my behavior under control earlier in my life. I was really struck by that fear of having a feeling because I don't think I'll be able to control it.

I don't know about that so much from experience because I grew up in a rather strict environment where behavior was really important. And so I hope that people understand that whatever uncontrollable feelings appear, that behavior is still controllable. No one said that constructive living is easy. It's really easy to understand. I think it makes a certain amount of perfect sense. It sounds almost like grandmother's common sense. And you can find this kind of wisdom in Sufism,

and you can find it in Milton Erickson's work. You can find it in a lot of different places. Now that I know about it, I know where to look. But nobody suggests that developing these habits of holding to your purpose and doing what needs to be done is easy. And nobody that I know does it right all the time, including myself. Yeah, it is a challenge, and I think it's a habit to definitely, a behavior to work on. And I think that's the, I think for me,

the realization that I didn't need to feel a certain way to take action really was a big one. I think that's like a lot of things. It's one thing to intellectually know it and another to be able to implement it, which is kind of why I was asking earlier, what are, what are some ways people can, can work to retrain that. It's a pretty dominant way of thinking at this point for an awful lot of people. Yeah, we have some hints about how to make behaviors easier. For example, there are common sense sorts of things. If you have a big project,

you break it up into little pieces and do it one piece at a time. Or you might tell other people, for example, you want to quit smoking, you might tell other people that you're going to quit smoking. If you make a public commitment about that, it makes it a little easier to do. If you start, one of the hints that Morita suggested is get yourself, get your body up and moving, and it's easier to get a task accomplished rather than sitting on the couch.

For example, we had a lady whose house needed to be cleaned. Her house was completely messy, and she would sit on the couch for an hour or so trying to figure out the best place to start cleaning her house. The kitchen was messy, the bathroom was messy, and so forth. And so when a constructive living instructor went to her house, we don't have to always do constructive living in an office situation. Sometimes we go to our students' facilities, and the constructive living lady showed up and just started cleaning right in front of

where the lady was. And the lady caught on that once you get started, you start looking around for, oh, this part needs cleaning too, and this part needs cleaning too. But sitting on the couch trying to figure out mentally the best place to start is really a waste of time. We suggest that if you haven't decided where to clean your house after 10 minutes sitting on the couch, you do it in alphabetical order. Anything is better than just sitting. That's right. And that sitting can become is just, you know, can become very paralyzing. I was having a conversation with somebody about a week ago, and we were talking about the idea of decision fatigue, how for some of us, we spend so much time thinking we have to come up with the right decision.

We spend so much time thinking we have to come up with the right decision, and that's why routines can be so valuable, because we're not spending cycles on trying to decide, am I going to the gym, am I not going to the gym? Am I getting out of bed, am I not getting out of bed? Those are, I think at least for me, those wear me down versus just getting in motion in some way. Yes. The whole half hour or 45 minutes of my morning is just automatic. But the other side of that is you have to be flexible enough to know that when the situation, when reality presents you with something different that needs to be done, that you're flexible enough to step out of the routine for a moment and then get back to it later when you need to.

Somewhere in one of your readings, you talked about your icy Ohio birthplace. Where are you from in Ohio? That's actually where we're from. We're out of Columbus is where our podcast is produced. Oh, I'm out of Dayton. We lived in Oakwood, which is a suburb of Dayton. Dad worked at the NCR at the big factory there. And Mom worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

And I grew up not knowing anything about college or the difference between a B.A. and a master's degree or whatever. So it was a long, long journey that got me to become a PhD. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcasts. Let's talk a little bit about the Nikon work, because I don't really understand. That's a concept I'm not real familiar with, so can we spend a little bit more time on that?

Yeah. We were taught, as I was growing up, that any success that I had in my life was thanks to my own efforts and that any failures that came up in my life were the fault of other people. My parents didn't raise me properly or the boss didn't like me or the teacher had a different teacher's path or whatever. friend, teacher's pet, or whatever. So in the United States, it's convenient to believe that our successes are thanks just to our own efforts. Unfortunately, that just isn't realistic.

For example, we're talking now on a telephone that neither of us actually created. We didn't invent it. We didn't invent it. We didn't produce it. We're talking because somebody went to the trouble to teach us this English language that we can communicate with. We're talking using energy from food that other people produced

and truckers that we never met trucked produce to a supermarket. And we bought that food with money that we call our money. But the money that we call our money to buy that food was given to us by other people because of work we did. And the work that we did was we learned how to do from other people, and other people hired us to do the work that we did, and so forth. So when I try to trace back anything in my life that's strictly mine, thanks to my own efforts,

I have to run into hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of folks that I never met. One of the things I fondly, I have a class that I teach here in Coos Bay on Mondays for elderly folks that are local residents. And one of the things that we're fond of saying is that when you come into the class and you sit down in the chair, as soon as you sit down in the chair, you think of it as your chair. Of course, you didn't produce that chair. You didn't design that chair. You didn't carry it up into that room or set it up.

But all you had to do was rub your rump against that chair, and it became your chair. And if we take a break and go out of the room and come back and somebody else is sitting in your chair, you might really be upset. So there's this funny notion in American culture that we can ascribe things as ours thanks to just our own efforts, our own efforts, even though it's all borrowed. Our whole lives are borrowed from our parents, of course, but then other ancestors going back and back and back and back in history. So the good news is that even though I'm sometimes a really fine fellow,

and sometimes, to use these technical terms, I'm a jerk, reality keeps supporting me whether I deserve it or not. People still keep producing food for me, and the telephone system continues to work for me. And the car that some factory workers that I never met made continues to move me around from place to place. So any notion that I need to be full of confidence about myself, knowing that sometimes I'm a good guy and sometimes I'm not, that goes by the wayside.

And in replacement for that is something that we call reality confidence. It means that whether I deserve it or not, whether I recognize it or not, whether I'm thankful or not, whether I say thank you or not, whether I say thank you or not. The reality is that in concrete, specific, ordinary ways, the world keeps supporting me. Help me understand how practically you use that with people to apply to the challenges they're having. Okay. Here's some assignments that I'll give folks to help them understand what that's about. A quarreling couple comes to me, and one of the things I'll give them is the assignment individually.

I'll see them individually, and I'll give each of them the assignment to give their partner 10 thank yous a day. And you can imagine the resistance that comes to me from that. They're quarreling, and they don't want to thank that other guy for anything. They're busy looking for the problems that that other person is causing them. They're sort of like lawyers. They're working on that. But in order to get the 10 thank yous out of the way, that's your assignment. They'll keep track.

They'll actually make little marks. And because the assignment is 10 thank yous, they have to look for occasions when that other person is doing something for them. And they wouldn't give an 11th thank you to that person for the world because the assignment was 10 and they don't feel like giving them the other one.

But sometimes they surprise themselves by discovering that it's not all that difficult to get the 10 thank yous out of the way. And of course they don't want to say thank you for nothing. They have to find something that that person actually does for them. And so what I'm trying to do is get them to see the other side of things. to see the other side of things. Also, I'll give a lot of folks an assignment to clean out a drawer. And the way they're to do that

is to take every item out of the drawer and as they polish it, as they wipe it off with a cloth and put it back into the drawer, they're to thank it for something specific that it did for them in the past. And I always warn them to tell their family that they've got this assignment first, because if somebody walks in the kitchen, for example, and finds them talking to the soup ladle, they could be in a certain amount of trouble.

and talking to the soup label, they could be in a certain amount of trouble. So we're nearly out of time, but there's one last of Marita's maxims that I wanted to talk about just because I thought it was really, really interesting. It was give and give until you wave goodbye. Can you unpack that one for us? Breaking up with folks. Can you unpack that one for us? Breaking up with folks. Some people shut down because they know that that other person is leaving.

Our suggestion in constructive living is to keep doing what you can to work on your debt with that person until you can't do it anymore. The good news, for example, about folks who you owe who have died is that there are still lots of ways that you can work on that debt on repaying what you owe them, even after they've passed away. The common ways are visiting their gravesite and bringing flowers to their gravesite and so forth. But there are other ways, like taking care of some plants that that person valued, or passing along stories. For example, one of the debts that I'm working on with my mother is just

before she died, we did audio tapes of her childhood. Now I can pass along, after she died at 99 a couple of years ago, I can pass along to other people stories from her childhood about her. I actually wrote a book about her in Japan that's used for high school students to study English in Japan. Ways that you can actually repay people who have passed away. And that's an important problem, especially for folks who have been grieving and need to be able to do something for a person who's not even still around to personally appreciate it. It's another version of what we call a secret service, which is an icon assignment, which means that you do something for someone

and you don't let them know that you did it and you get no social credit for doing it. You shine their shoes, for example, and put it back where they were and without being seen. And in order to do those secret services, if the person is alive, you've got to pay attention to when they're not around and when you can get away with doing something nice for them. Yeah, I really liked that give and give until you wave goodbye. Because like you said, I think that it's a lot of us see something, an example that came to mind for me was I'm going to, I know that I'm only going to be at this particular job or consulting assignment for a

particular amount of time. And there's a tendency, certainly for me, there's always been a tendency to start to disengage and do less and less. And I really like the idea of you say, we aim at doing everything well until we begin something else. And then we do that well. But I just think it's that, that well, but I just think it's that, it's that, um, it's the behavior there, regardless of, of how I'm feeling about that particular relationship, that it is, it's living in a way that feels good to me. Yeah. I interviewed dying vets in a, in a hospital, uh, ward where old, old guys were sent to die, essentially, and they knew that when they got placed in that ward that they wouldn't be ever discharged

from that ward except on a gurney and they'd be carried out dead. And the old guys, independently, I'd sit by their beds and they'd independently say the same sort of thing. Sonny, when I was your age, there were things that I needed to do but I didn't get around to doing them because I was too lazy or too busy or having too good a time. For whatever reason, I didn't get around to doing them. So, Sonny, while you can, you'd better get done the things that you need to do in your life because you don't want to be someday lying here in a bed like this, regretting what you didn't do. Well, I think that is a wonderful, wonderful place to wrap up.

So I want to thank you, Dr. Rounds, for taking the time to be on the show with us and share some of your thoughts on constructive living. Thank you for your time, Eric. Okay, take care. Bye-bye. All right, bye. Bye-bye. You can learn more about David K. Reynolds and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash Reynolds.