The One You Feed - How to Start Living Effortlessly and Focus on What Matters Most with Greg McKeown

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

In this conversation with Greg McKeown, we discuss how you can learn to reshape your perspectives towards life and bring a fresh approach to dealing with everyday challenges. Greg explores why it's important to embrace gratitude and prioritze what truly matters. His comprehensive approach to life and work has inspired countless individuals to create better, smarter, and easier strategies for growth and success. In this episode, you will be able to: Learn to cultivate deep listening skills that effortlessly align your life Acknowledge the far-reaching ripple effects of expressing gratitude daily Dive deep into the essence of forgiveness and its impact on releasing long-standing grudges Merge insights derived from Eastern and Western philosophies, amplifying your body of wisdom Uncover how language shapes your mindset and plays a pivotal role in living with ease To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us, or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize we have years of incredible episodes on our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Greg McKeown. If you focus on what you lack, you will lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you will lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you will gain what you lack. 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. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door 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 really know really dot com and register to win five hundred dollars. A guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really know really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Greg McKeown, an author, public speaker, and leadership and business strategist. Greg often speaks on how to live and lead as an essentialist. His books include 2010's Multipliers and 2014's Essentialism.

And today, Greg and Eric discuss his new book, Effortless, Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. Hi, Greg. Welcome to the show. It's great to be with you. Thank you, Eric. I am really happy to have you on. We are going to be discussing your book, Effortless, Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with a parable. And in the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter. And 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 other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops. She

thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather. She says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. an experience a few years ago where we moved to quite an idyllic area just north of Malibu. It's this area that was built in the 1950s. The whole world moved on and no one told anyone here. So it's got white picket fences. It's more horseways than roads. And our four children really seem to thrive, especially one of my daughters who was always climbing trees and naming our chickens. Yes, we had chickens and just always writing journals, reading constantly, interested in animals, voluminous in her talking. And all of this is how it was until she turned 14. And then she started being slower in doing her chores. She'd answer as in more sort of one-word answers.

And we just thought pretty age-appropriate behavior until in a routine physical therapy appointment, the therapist pulled my wife Anna aside and said, look, I don't want to alarm you, but she just failed a reflex test. And so I just think you should go see a neurologist just to be sure. And you don't have to be warned twice. What began that day was a, let's call it an agonizing experience because she had a free fall in her capability, like just every single day. We were watching it differently now, so we were seeing it differently, but also there was more to see. So eventually, you know, within a couple of months, she was maybe, it would take her 45 seconds to write the last three letters of her name, two minutes to write out her whole name,

hours to eat a meal. Her personality, once so vibrant, just full of light, just became monotone, loss of emotional complexity. And to make it even more challenging, neurologists, some of them 35-year experts in their field, just shrug their shoulders. All tests coming in in the normal range, they didn't even offer as even the beginning of a diagnosis. So in the midst of that, what I experienced was the opening of two paths. It became clear that there were two paths. I think it's probably pretty analogous to the two wolves. One wolf is saying, worry, panic, blame doctors, get so obsessed about these things that we can't control about. It just puts you in a state of anxiety and fear, a scared state,

in a state of anxiety and fear, a scared state, let's call it, if you feed that wolf, that just makes everything harder. The problem itself isn't served by that. So you've taken a problem which is already immensely challenging and you just make it worse. Or on the other side, we found that there was this other path, this other wolf to use, the metaphor that you introduced, which says, can we be grateful in the midst of this? Can we still focus on what we can control? Can we still have a lighter spirit? Can we adopt a lighter way of living life where we'll still laugh together, we'll still get around the piano and sing, we'll still play together and pray together and go on walks? sure. That was the path of least resistance. But quite fortunately, early on, I felt inspired to read a chapter of a compilation book by Gordon B. Hinckley. And there was a chapter in that about cultivating an attitude of happiness and a spirit of optimism, something like that. And I felt quite inspired to listen to that every day. And for the next four months that. And I felt quite inspired to listen

to that every day. And for the next four months I did, I think I listened to it almost every single day for four months. And I felt that that was in a sense feeding the right wolf and rewiring my brain in the midst of this extremity. And what I saw happen almost immediately was almost magical. There was a positive force, a sense of hope, of faith that was tangible in myself and in our family. Now, there were plenty of tears along the way. We're not talking about positivity here where you just pretend everything's okay. No, we're facing the facts, but we weren't taking a hard situation and making it harder. And that really is what sent me down the path of researching and writing effortless is just this idea that just because something's essential doesn't mean you have to then do it the hard way. Something can be essential and then you

still have a choice to make. You know what really matters. We knew what really mattered in this case was helping our daughter to become fully well again. So the goal isn't ambiguous for us, but there were still two paths, broadly speaking, of how to handle it. And if we'd taken the harder path, the heavier path, if we'd fed the wrong wolf, then we would have been burned out in half a minute. We'd have been in such a state of anxiety that we would have burned out our own mental state. Well, then what happens to your marriage? Well, okay, then that gets harder and that life isn't even almost worth living if your marriage is just hard enough and gets tough enough. And the culture in the family that we'd invested so much in could easily have been demolished too.

And then what does that do for our daughter? I mean, if you're in that state of exhaustion mentally, emotionally, in that kind of traumatic state, well, then you can't help her either because you can't make good decisions. Your discernment is gone. And so your chance of actually being successful is lower. All of that goes with the first path. The second path, we just saw so much good come out of being in what I now would call the effortless state. So much good came of it.

And we were able to, in the end, it was a long journey. And that's an important part of the story. It took two and a half years, ups and down along the way. But we had the energy and the light. We fed the right wolf so that we were able to be there and we saw her come back to full health and now to be thriving and to be moving forward in her life, you know, superbly. That story is what comes to mind when you ask me a question about the one you feed. I'm glad you went there right away because it's kind of at the end of your book and I was going to bring it around to the front of our conversation.

So I'm glad that you did that. I'm curious, as you were early on in that process and you talk about that eventually that led you to sort of seeing this easier path versus the harder path. I'm curious, would you have been able to define it that way early on or would there have been a different way you looked at it or phrased what you guys were choosing to do? I think we could have defined it as something close to the lighter path and the darker path. I'm not sure I would have said easier versus harder in the moment. But it reminds me a little bit of that movie. I can't remember the name of it, but it's the story of a spy from Russia who's here in the United States.

And it's his story. And he has this extraordinary ability to maintain equanimity in the midst of all of these crazy ups and downs. And the phrase he uses all the time when he's asked, why are you so calm right now? the phrase he uses all the time when he's asked, why are you so calm right now? And he said, well, would it help to get all emotional, to get angry? Would it help? And I think that that's the right beginning place is you say, well, would it help to overreact? Does it help to get all negative? Or does it just take a hard situation and make it harder? Life is hard. I've got no questions about that. Life is full of challenge. And every person listening to this is dealing with something pretty hard right now,

or maybe many things that are hard right now. And even if they don't share it with other people, even if it's quite secret, people are suffering. And I think that that is true for most people, most of the time, in a hundred ways. You don't write a book on effortless if life is effortless. You write a book on effortless because it's full of challenge. And so to me, the key decision in every moment is whether to make it harder than it needs to be or whether you can at least open yourself up to the idea, well, is there a better way? Is there an easier way? Is there a lighter path?

And as soon as you start to open up, you find that there are all sorts of simple strategies. There are all sorts of better approaches. And so you still achieve results that you want in life. You still get to focus on the things that matter most, but you find yourself better able to do them, better able to cope. You can achieve even breakthrough results. I mean, imagine if you can start training yourself to look for effortless solutions. Then let's say someone who is already on the edge of exhaustion, somebody who has burned out with the challenges of life.

And maybe they're overachievers, but they've just run out of space, they're already working effectively as hard as they can. So what if they want to achieve, as many overachievers do, 10x results, much better results? Can any of the people listening to this who want that level of results work 10 times harder. Nobody listening to this can work 10 times harder. They wouldn't even put in the effort to be here. So for those people, my brother Justin calls the hit squad, hardworking, intelligent, talented group of people. For those people, they can't work 10 times harder. So suddenly you say, well, if you can't work 10x harder, let's find 10x easier way to achieve the results. Then you can achieve extraordinary things and still without

burning out. That sort of becomes the value proposition of effortless is that impossible things start to seem within reach because we don't have to do them the old paradigm way of just through grinding effort. I'm fully in favor of effort, but it will only take you so far. Past a certain point, you just have to find better, smarter, simpler. In fact, yes, easier strategies. And so what would you say are some of the things that were most important as you applied this idea to you and your family's life? Because I think a lot of people listening to this, certainly people who are listeners of this show on any kind of regular basis are going to be people who at least go, yeah, I don't want to make

life any harder. We talk on this show all the time about all the ways we make things worse. Sometimes I feel like everything I teach people is about how to not make things worse, which sounds kind of pessimistic, except we are incredibly good at making lots of things in life worse. And sometimes simply not adding to the burden is a really big deal. So what sort of things helped you guys to either not add to the burden or actively lighten it sort of in your family life. And I think then we'll, you know, I'll turn our attention to some of the strategies in the book that I wanted to hit on, but I'm kind of curious, which of them were closest to sort of you and your family's experience that were useful? Well, let me offer two. I mean, we've all heard surely that thankfulness and gratitude are important,

but it's a principle that is unique among principles because there's no way to overdo it. Most principles have a point of breaking where if you do it too little, that's not good. If you do it too much, now it's a problem. Most principles, most characteristics are like that. Most truths are like that. I have not found a place that gratitude breaks. I haven't come anywhere close to that point. It's enormously powerful. It can be applied far more broadly and deeply than is obvious. For example, so I've done for years a gratitude journal. I'm past 10 years now, I think we're probably at 11 years and I don't think I've missed a day in 11 years, right? And in that journal, I'm writing all the things I'm thankful for. So I'm way past 10,000 items now.

That's great. I mean, it is so centering and all the way through this situation with our daughter, I was doing that. That's level one, let's say. What's level two? It's what do you do in between? You know, what I describe is a ritual that means something to me, right? That's more than a habit. A habit is a thing you do consistently. Ritual is something you do that you enjoy the doing of it. The way you do it matters. A ritual is a habit with a soul. And so writing my journal in the way that I do is a ritual. I enjoy the process of it, not just the fact that I've done it later.

Oh, good, I've written today. That's a good feeling. Doing it is good. But in between that ritual, you've got the real life, right? Most of life is not in the journal writing process. It's in between. So how does gratitude play in that? And one of the habit recipes that we began that is still a part of our family culture woven into the fabric of it now is that after I complain, I will say something I'm thankful for. And what I noticed when I started doing that myself is that

I complain much more often than I realized. So I think of myself as quite positive, quite grateful person in some ways. It was just the easiest thing to walk into the other room and you see a child doing the wrong thing and you focus on that. The meeting goes too long or the temperature is too hot or too cold. I mean, endlessly, just begin with the complaint. Well, this recipe accepts that as a sort of natural tendency in humans and builds on it. You just take advantage of that. You turn, let's call it a negative tendency into a positive tendency. So every time you complain, you say something you're thankful for. I mean, even if you change the ratio to 50-50, the impact is instant. And what begins as just a nice new technique

quickly changes the culture and dynamic around you. Barbara Fredrickson called this the broaden and build theory. And it basically means that if you can get into what I call now an effortless state, but into a state of gratitude in this moment, positive emotions, that it creates a natural upward momentum. So it doesn't just say, oh, I feel better, which gratitude will instantly do. You will instantly feel happier. You will instantly feel better about your life and about yourself and about circumstances. Well, that means that you show up differently. It means the next interaction you have with somebody is more positive. So that increases your optionality with them. It improves your relationship with them. And that materially improves the resources you have at your disposal in life. And so, this is why she calls it broaden and build. There's an upward momentum. And it all begins by just catching yourself when there's something, you know, you complain, you catch yourself, and you say something you're thankful for. I've done it now with our children. I remember one time doing it. The auntie would say, if you complain, that's fine. Now you have

to say three things you're thankful for. And I remember my son at the time, I said, okay, now let's give you three things you're thankful for. Okay, number one, I am so thankful that my dad wants to play this game where we have to say three things we're thankful for every time we complain. And he said it just like that. And here's what's powerful is that it didn't matter. We all laughed and it worked. matter. We all laughed and it worked. And seriously, a principle or characteristic that is so powerful that you can do it with a degree of cynicism and it still works is powerful stuff. And that's exactly what I found. It almost doesn't matter your attitude. It just has this disproportionate effect. I'll summarize the effect this way. If you focus on what you lack, you will lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you will gain what you lack. Benjamin Hardy, who I had on the What's Essential

podcast not very long ago, he said, are you living in the gain or in the gap? If you're in the gap, you're looking at all the things you haven't achieved or you don't have what everybody else has, the gap between what you are now and what you would like to be. Well, that gap always exists. That's never going away. So if you live in the gap, you could be making great progress actually in your life, but you'd still be miserable. Alternatively, if you get in the gain, you're looking at all the progress that's been made, all the good that's happened, the successes that you've had. And in this moment, I think you'll achieve more, but you'll certainly be happier in the journey. This, I would say, is one of the great lessons that we learned and are still applying and still building into the culture in our family. It makes me think of slightly different

contexts, but same sort of principle, which is Stephen Covey's circle of concern versus circle of influence. The idea is we've got this big circle, which is everything we're concerned with. The small circle is our circle of influence. The more time we spend in our circle of concern outside our circle of influence, the more our circle of influence actually shrinks. We wear ourselves out by worrying about stuff and what we can actually affect and change shrinks. Whereas if we flip it and we spend our time in our circle of influence, spend more time there, it actually starts to grow and we begin to be able to affect more things. It's a very similar idea to that when you focus on what you lack,

you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack. Yeah, I really agree with that. Gratitude is always within your sphere of influence. So I think it would fit within Stephen Covey's be proactive habit within the seven habits. It's a concrete, immediate thing. And you saying that just makes me want to just say one more thing about it, which is this principle is so ubiquitous. You don't just use it for the things that are good. This pushes people past where I think they would generally see the edges of gratitude. It's not just that you are grateful for the things that are going right. This is deeper. Be thankful in everything. When something

goes wrong, I'm thankful this thing went wrong. And you don't know why when you begin that sentence. You don't know why. Really, you're not thankful, but you're pushing yourself to go through a pattern of thinking that suddenly opens you to the idea that the thing that you're calling bad could be good. And that life, let's say it this way, isn't just happening to you, but for you. That the bad thing so-called is also happening for you. That in each challenge, there is an opportunity and you just haven't seen it that way yet. It becomes a way of living whatever's going on. And so immediately something doesn't happen the way you want it. The flight is delayed. The flight is canceled. Somebody's not helping you.

Be grateful in it. And suddenly, as soon as you are, I'm thankful for this situation. It's sort of almost positive irony or something, but I'm so glad that that person isn't helping me right now. Why? Oh, because I can develop in this moment, greater compassion and understanding of how the world works and what they might be dealing with. I'm thankful because it's an opportunity to develop my character. And maybe this just seems a step too far for people, but to me, a person who can receive all things with thankfulness will achieve not 10x results, but literally 100x, and it will start to flow to them. The power of what we're talking about, I think, is difficult to overstate.

Makes me think of the old Taoist story of the farmer who has a horse and his horse runs away, you know, and his neighbor comes over and says, I'm so sorry about you losing your horse. You know, it's the most valuable thing you had. And he goes, well, it could be good. Could be bad, you know, and then the horse comes back with five horses. I won't go through the whole thing, but I think sometimes, you know, if we can even get to where that farmer was, which was where he was, was, eh, could be good. Could be bad. I don't know. Right. But I'm not going to rush to judge this thing as good or bad because I don't know how it's going to play out in my life. I don't know how it's going to play out in making me be the person that I'm going to become.

Let me at least move from this is awful to a place that holds open the door of possibility that says, okay, this seems bad to me right now, but let me at least move to a neutral place where I say, okay, I'm going to be open. And then if you can, even where you are, which is that, that extra step beyond, which says, I'm going to be thankful because in some way this can be worked for me. It's that phrase I think I've often heard that things happen for the best. You know, I don't believe that, but I do believe we can make the best out of everything that happens. And I do believe that in everything that happens, there is a seed of our future growth. It's in there if we look for it. I certainly think that's true. And at some point,

I mean, C.S. Lewis put it this way, that we have to decide, and of course, he was an atheist for a long time, became a Christian, and in the journey, started to write some of the most eloquent modern writings on what it really means to be a Christian and what it doesn't mean and how it would apply in a modern context. And one of the things he observes, and somebody can take this whether they have an active faith in God or not, but he says we have to decide at some point whether God is a vivisectionist or whether all things are there to work for our good. You know, that every test is really with purpose and might even be analogous to that New Testament idea. Well, I mean, it's a story,

but there's an idea in it too, where Jesus is brought to the most agonizing part of his entire ministry, this atonement, this moment of total suffering. And he asks, if there's any way for this to pass from me, let it pass from me. And I've often wondered why that's even in the account. from me, let it pass from me. And I've often wondered why that's even in the account. Are we really saying that now the manifestation of God in the flesh, this Superman embodiment of all that is good is actually saying, hey, listen, I'd rather not do this if you don't mind. I'd rather not do the big challenge. And one thing I think it illustrates is it puts in the record that there was no other way. It gives opportunity for the writers to be explicit. There was no other path. There was one way to being able to achieve this mission. And I do think that that is a helpful idea to all of us when we're dealing with things that

would otherwise or are causing us suffering or otherwise would keep us in total misery is to just go, well, what if there was no other way? What if the only way to have learned what we need to learn in this life to progress the way that we do in this life is to go through this path? Where you start to do that, you can get out of so much of the self-recrimination and also blaming and actively grudge keeping about other people and well, I'm a victim of their thing and this awful thing and so on and just go, well, what if this is the path? What if this is the only way for us to become what we need to become? It's the only way for us to gain the good things that are just around the corner. There was no other path. There's

something about that that I think can be very liberating? And again, builds on this idea of like, yeah, let's just get back to the effortless state. There's a whole chapter on grudges in Effortless and the importance of being able to let go of them. I talk about a way that we make life harder than it needs to be. There's no number of opportunities for us to pick up a grudge, to hire a grudge, we might say even. I like that language, echoes Clayton Christensen's question of like, what do we hire this product or service to do for us? And if you do that with grudges, it opens the whole subject up because you say, we have grudges for a reason. What did we hire them to do for us? We hire a grudge,

maybe we hire a grudge to make us feel one up with the relationship with the person that hurt us. We go, well, yes, well, I see, look at that, and I'll hold them to it. And that terrible thing they did see, there's a concrete thing, and I can point to it, and I can point to it 100 times, they did this wrong to me. And we do it to kind of make ourselves feel superior. But does it, do grudges actually make us feel superior? Do they make us more powerful? You can evaluate a grudge like a job evaluation where you say, okay, well, I hired you to do this. How are you doing your performance evaluation? Are you making me more powerful or do you make me endlessly feel like a victim, endlessly feel weaker.

Grudges make us feel weaker. They don't make us feel more powerful. Maybe we do it to get people to feel sorry for us, provide us sympathy. They might give us things, opportunities, benefits might come to us. And that's true too, but it's a short-lived benefit because in general, people get quite fatigued with that kind of victimhood story, which is one of the reasons we have to keep finding new people to tell our grudge story too. It's because people only have so much time for it. And so if you go through and evaluate it, you find that grudges don't perform their duties well.

And so it's time to fire grudges. And when you do, when you fire a grudge, you just find your life comes back to you. You can move forward in your life. I asked Tim Ferriss on his podcast, what percentage of your mental and emotional energy have you given to grudges and anger in your life? And he laughed. He said for about a 15-year period of his life, he probably gave between 60% and 70% of his mental and emotional capacity to grudges and anger. Think of that. You'd never think of firing grudges as being the ultimate productivity hack. No one's ever said that. I mean, maybe I have now, but you don't find that in the average productivity book. And yet, what else can you call a return of 60% of your capacity, 70% of your abilities come back to you? That's all being siphoned off. That's all making us, putting us in a state of suffering instead of an effortless state.

And the moment we get it back, we can take all those resources and we can actually put them to use on things that really are essential, things that really matter to us, get back to our mission, get back to the purpose of our lives. And that to me is a worthy change. As women, as humans, really, the world can trick us into believing we're doing life wrong, which keeps us small and separated. But we don't have to play along. Let's make a plan together, shall we? I'm Jenny Gay. And I'm Brandi Lust. And we host a podcast called Something to Normalize. As best friends and experts in mindfulness and adult learning, we've done the hard work of courageously engaging in self-exploration, healing, and self-expression.

In our podcast, you'll be a fly on the wall for intimate, safe conversations where we share our life experiences, collective wisdom, and research from experts to help you breathe that big sigh of relief that comes from feeling seen and understood. When we join forces in honest conversations, we find the very thoughts, experiences, and feelings we often keep to ourselves are the very ones that are most likely to connect us. This leads to more self-trust and greater connection. This is the power of normalizing.

Join us. There's nothing off limits. It's all just something to normalize. You can listen to Something to Normalize wherever you get your podcasts. 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. People have often asked, you know, how do I forgive?

How do I let go? I often think the very first and most important step is to do exactly what you just described, which is to see what it's costing me. You know, to really see what's happening by me holding on to this. You know, it's attributed to the Buddha, but I don't think the Buddha said it, that resentments are like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. You know, once you really sort of see the nature of a grudge, as you've said, I love your framework of it. What did I hire this grudge to do?

And is it really doing it? When we get clear on that, these things are a lot easier to let go. I think you're absolutely right. And I mean, forgiveness is a foundational principle across every religious tradition. It's part of the wisdom of every generation of every societal culture that survives over a long period of time. Why? Because if you burden yourself with the kind of costs you're just describing, then you can't progress well. And if you make the error, as societies can definitely do, of then teaching those grudges to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and sharing it around, the cost is absolutely enormous. It can lead to war,

to civil wars. We've seen these things. We do still see them sometimes even now. And I do agree with you too that a key breakthrough is to realize it's not a selfish thing, so I can't say it that way, but there is a self-interested reason to do this. The forgiveness is not saying, well, I'm just going to do something good for this other person. It may do good for the other person, but it isn't the point at all. I just interviewed Chris Williams. I think he'd be a great person for you to talk to. Chris Williams had a catastrophic situation in his life where he's driving his car and his car is hit broadside by a drunk teenage driver, kills his wife and their unborn

child, kills a couple of other members of his family that were with him that day, injures another. And then one of his children wasn't in the car on that day but of course has all the massive emotional trauma of the experience so he's in there he says he hears a sound right there it's in the middle of like this in the middle of the winter freezing cold he's in this car broken bended metal everything and he just hears this sound, this screaming. It takes him a moment to notice it's him. He's in this absolute true agony. You can look across his wife, you can see that she's not breathing. And in the moment, he discovers the two paths. He has two choices, two wolves, pick your metaphor. And that's what's so profound

to me is that it happens so fast for him. And he realizes, path one, I will add to this trauma, bitterness, revenge, anger, hate, all of that. And then that will then destroy what's left of us all. hate, all of that. And then that will then destroy what's left of us all. It will then take the rest of my life. It will cost me everything that remains. Plus, it will cost me all of the possible upsides and opportunities and blessings that still exist in life. So, it won't just cost me what I already have. It will cost me all the things I could still have. cost me what I already have, it will cost me all the things I could still have. Or this other path, it's not like suddenly this is an easy path, but it is, he recognizes even this moment, an easier path is to forgive that person, whoever they are in that car right now. And if he does that, it doesn't mean that all the problems that he now has in his life will disappear, but it does

mean he won't add to them these unbearable burdens of resentment. Well, he does make that choice. And within a very short while, word spreads about that. And he's interviewed somehow by the media. I suppose it's quite a major story in the moment. He gets asked about it. So, he makes this comment. He says like, yeah, please, just someone, everybody here, just forgive someone. We're coming up to February 14th, Valentine's Day. Do something for someone as an act of kindness in the name of my broken family. Just do something to forgive or to do good.

He got thousands of responses all over the world where people did that. And so you see already that his choice is turning a negative into a positive. And a person who can turn a negative into a positive can never be defeated. I mean, so many good things have already come. He went on to write a book about it, to teach about it, to talk about it, to share it. He continues to do it. Well, he got remarried. He had more children.

They've built good and good has come from it. And here we are talking about it now. That's the power. He let go. He made another, though though important distinction. I think this matters. He did the forgiving right there. And now that doesn't mean he never felt bad again, of course, that's not right, but he still made an important choice. But he said, if you make forgiveness conditional, then you're trapped. Because even in his case where he forgave the person and has had a

relationship with them, a positive relationship with them since, like the person still went to jail, they still had their cost. He says, if you make it at all conditional, you are trapped by that decision because he said, like, what's enough? At what point has that individual, in his case, actually paid the full price to society? What's enough? He goes to jail. What if the person actually says sorry? Well, he did say that. Is that sorry enough? Was there enough remorse in him on that day? Has he really been truly remorseful enough? Does he understand the intergenerational impact that that moment had? Like, you can go on forever, even if the person is trying to make amends. So you can be trapped forever if you make it conditional.

You make your forgiveness unconditional so that you can be unconditionally free from the burden. That doesn't mean that someone else isn't responsible. It doesn't violate the responsibility that somebody else faces for what they have done to you or wrongs that they have done. You just don't self-harm over it. I think that's such a great way you just ended that, which is to think about what we are doing, which is the self-harm we're doing to ourselves. I think it's really important. We've had several interviews focusing on forgiveness, and this is not an easy thing to do. I think it comes from where we set our intention. Our intention is to unconditionally forgive. That's what I want.

That's where I want to be, knowing that we don't always feel that, but that that's what we're aiming at all the time. I think it's similar to the idea of after I complain, I will say something I'm thankful for. In this case, it's I will say, after I feel frustrated with someone, I will say the words, I forgive you. Like treat it like a checkbox, not a once I feel a certain way, I will forgive you. It's exactly the opposite order. You say, I forgive you. Even when you don't feel it at all, you just say it. You start to try to make that checkbox moment and the feeling will eventually catch up with the decision. That sort of is the phrase that I think might be the most common one on this show,

which is sometimes you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking. And so that's exactly what you're saying. I decide the action I'm going to take is every time this comes up, what I'm going to do is say, I forgive you and do my best to forgive you. And I hope that by taking that action, by checking that box, that then the feelings come along. Words are so much more powerful than is obvious. The words we choose are not descriptors. I think that's how they would typically be thought about by people, that we use words to describe the world we live in, to describe what's happened to us. But I think of words as creators. When we speak, we're creating, we're breathing. Our words create the future. Yes, I will say it that way. There's another biblical reference. And again, you can read that as literal as somebody wants or as symbolic as somebody wants. But if you think about the creation story, even if somebody thinks about this as a myth, as stories that frame the Western world, there are all sorts of symbolic benefits. And one of them is the idea that God says, let there be light, and there was light.

There's something really important about the order that you use language to create, that language is a creative force in our lives. As a writer, I feel perhaps especially conscious of this. I'm writing the future into existence. When I'm writing, it's quite a profound process. I mean, sometimes it can be just a messy process. It often is. But it also is profound as you try to weigh up words, aware that it could be that a million people or millions of people will end up reading what you're writing right now, that this is not just describing something in the past, that you are breathing something into existence in your words. But similarly, in our own lives, I think we use

the power of words quite unthinkingly sometimes, a little thoughtlessly. I mean, that can include something as obvious as saying something rude to someone in your own family, you know, saying something a bit too bluntly, saying something a bit worn out, you're a bit exhausted, and you say it, what are you going to get back? It's so predictable. Mimetic creatures, people tend to return exactly what they're given. And so, you do that. You have now created in your future an argument. You have created an unpleasant conversation in the future. So, words, I mean, wordsmithing is one thing for writing, but I think it's a similar process in our lives to be so careful to use words that help create the kind of life you want. There's a great book,

classic book, As a Man Thinketh, and it's all about this, right? As a man thinketh, well, the verse it's from, also biblical, is a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. That's the rest of that phrase. Well, that's interesting too, because it suggests that thinking isn't something that you just do in your head. Thinking is something you do in your heart, which I think is quite a profound change. The thoughts are derived from your heart. Well, I think words are similar to that, that they derive from your heart and they come up and they create. And so, trying to work out how can I use words intentionally to try and create the kind of future relationships and results that I want is a non-trivial change once people start to discover power in those words. 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 brian kranson is with us how are you 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. at your podcasts. As you were quoting that, I was thinking of more my spiritual tradition of Buddhism and the Dhammapada are some of the first sayings of the Buddha. And it's basically, you know, something to the effect of, you know, mind is the forerunner of all states. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, it can be translated a lot of different things. Suffering will follow just like the wheel of an ox cart when the ox pulls, you know, it's the same basic idea. It starts there. And as you were saying that, I was thinking of another guest we had on a guy by the name of Christian Conte, and he had a phrase that I've reflected on a lot lately, and I used it in the

spiritual habits course I teached recently, which was basically inflammatory words lead to inflammatory emotions. And you can say that externally. But but for me, where I've noticed that the most is internally, you know, and one of the things that I've noticed that I've gotten way better at is my brain is an exaggerator of internal state, my brain will say something like, my back is killing me. When I finally tune into the thoughts, I'm like, that's what it's saying. And then I'll check in with my back and I'll be like, well, I mean, I've got a little twinge back there, I suppose, you know, but I'm bringing that into life with these words. I'm creating a state of mind by the description that I'm giving something. And that description isn't

even accurate. This is so true. And I think somebody with any Buddhist training will read, well, both essentialism and now effortless with different eyes. It's really rich whenever somebody is reading it who has had some Buddhist exposure because the whole idea of effortless state, I mean, I think it's represented in all the major religions and, of course, across positive psychology and beyond, but it's like not emphasized in certain cultures. And this is one of the great benefits of the Eastern philosophies and Eastern cultures is that it helps us to rediscover things that actually are in Western philosophy, but just somehow we just don't emphasize it. And so we

don't see that it's right there hidden in plain sight. Effortless state leading to effortless action. I mean, that's Taoism, right? I mean, that idea of effortless effort or, you know, to act without action. These are all not just consistent with what I'm writing about. Like, they're right there. They're what I want people to get to. But I'm trying to do it in a way that would be palatable, let's say, to people that are working in corporate environments and so on. So that, you know, that they can still absorb them so you don't have organ rejection. But we're definitely looking for this deeper wisdom and we need Eastern as well as Western. Oh, we absolutely do. There's so much to learn. There's a group that used to meet at Harvard. I think it was the Dean of Divinity at Harvard that started the group and they would have these people meet to discuss. It was basically inter religious dialogue. And one of the rules they had was you can't compare the best of your own faith

to the worst of someone else's. So that seems like a good rule. That's a good rule. But a second is that we should allow ourselves, the phrase he came up with was holy envy. Yeah, yeah. So that you can say, even if at first or even ever we say, well, I'm not going to actually absorb that, that's not what I believe, but I can see why that would be so good to believe. I can see why that would be so advantageous. And I think out of holy envy grows an even deeper thing where you say all truth, wherever it is, can be

circumscribed into one great whole. All truth is interrelated. And this idea that all truth is in one tradition or in one group or one philosophy, maybe this is too blunt of a way of saying it, but to me, that's an appalling idea. What we need is to pursue truth wherever it is, to discover it, to try. It takes a lot of a certain kind of mindset and heartset to even approach this. I'm working on a new book now about deep listening, and I'm so excited about this work. I've spent 20 years thinking about this and working on it, and it's finally time to do it. But one of the very first things you have to conclude to even want to get into deep listening is to just discover how little you know, how truly, you know, use that word again, appalling it is, how little we know compared to what there is to be known. And so suddenly you

stop being in a mindset of, well, I think the way I see the world is probably about how it is. And instead say, every person you talk to, in the Uber car, you're asking questions and learning. And there's a lot to learn from the person who's driving you in the Uber car. Because, well, just speaking literally, the chances are, not always, of course, but the chances are that this is going to be an immigrant. And that person has made really powerful choices to be able to be where they are with you. And they've made trade-offs that are serious trade-offs. And they've come from a culture very different to your own. And if you listen and ask questions, you might be the only person that day, that month that's

doing it. So you have a lot of opportunity and richness to have somebody describe under what circumstances they left and why and what they're achieving and what family is where. And that's just one tiny illustration of, I think, what starts to happen once you discover you don't even know what you don't know in life. Yeah, I think that's a profound place to operate from is grasping just how little we actually know. Makes me think of a couple of things. As you were talking for a minute there, I was thinking about my spiritual director is a Christian priest. That's not my faith tradition. I'm primarily Zen, but he has a

saying that I love. He says, every time I find something I love in another tradition, because he's been a big interfaith guy for years, He's like, I run back to my own tradition, and I look for it, and I always find it. It's always there. And I just think that's such a beautiful mentality. And then I was also thinking, you were talking about deep listening. I don't know when I completed it. It's been a little while now, but I did an interfaith spiritual direction training for 18 months, and that was the heart of the entire thing. You know, if I was going to boil the entire thing down to what, what did they teach for 18 months? Primarily deep listening. And give me an example of how they taught that. Well, it was really a lot of it. I would say in some ways you can sum it up so quickly,

and yet it's a constant practice. the practice was constantly recognizing when as you're trying to listen you're being pulled into your habitual reactions thoughts comments responses all the different ways that you move from listening into reacting internally and learning to notice that movement as it happens and just shift back into listening. You know, it's one of those things that again, you sort of describe it and you're like, this is very easy. Like, okay, great. Just, you know, just listen. You're doing podcasting now. So, you know, you know a little bit about what it's like when you're trying to interview somebody. You're trying to really listen to what's going on with what they're saying. You want to respond. You've also got an idea of where the conversation might go. You've got your notes. You're sort of juggling a couple different things,

right? And I think deep listening for me was learning to juggle this, like listening to the person and giving them my full attention. But the other thing I'm juggling is what's going on inside me at the same time, and learning to sort of not get stuck or lost in that, because that's where typically we stop listening is when we start wanting to either respond, now we're formulating what we're going to say, or there's an emotional reaction happening inside me. Like they're talking about this thing and I'm thinking, do I agree? Do I not agree? What do I think about that? Or there's some feeling coming up, but it's all sort of pulling me away. So I've got to be listening really deeply to the person, but I also have to be listening to what's happening inside me, not to give it a lot

of attention, but to notice that it's happening so I can shift back. Yeah, it sounds, as you describe it, like a meditative practice. 100%. That's often the way it was phrased. So it was interfaith spiritual direction. And deep listening was framed as A, the heart of what spiritual direction is, but B, as a contemplative practice. I relate to so much of what you're describing there. I think deep listening is the closest experience I have on a regular basis to meditation. I do meditate, but I find deep listening when you, to use the Gottman's phrase for this, that you shelve your agenda. You have an agenda, but you shelve it so that you can even be here, so you can even give attention to something. And then when you get into not just

surface listening, which I think surface listening can be quite hard, but deep listening, I think, once you develop the skill, what you're doing with it is easier than surface listening because it's so much more interesting. Surface listening is painful. If you're just listening to somebody, they're just rambling on and rambling on and you're not really paying attention and you're not really there. It's just a tax. You're not getting much from it, but you're still having to give something. So it's kind of like a pound of flesh. But deep listening, everybody's so interesting once you get beyond the surface there's so much going on in them so much to relate to there's so much to absorb it's the richest journey of life and my observation

currently is that it is missing in fact i just put on twitter i'm gonna pull it up because i thought this was really interesting i just did did this yesterday. I asked the question, do you ever feel we have lost the ability to deeply listen? And there's just tons of responses. I wasn't expecting to people to really write responses to it. It was more of a rhetorical question or something. But I just had so many people talk about this lost art. I mean, certainly I put out a poll on LinkedIn where I'm quite active. And I don't know, it's a non-scientific poll, but 1,600 people or so responded immediately. And 90% of people believe that we either have lost it or we never had it to begin with. It wasn't a very robust poll, but that means that just only 11% of people think that we haven't lost it.

And that speaks to something. Somebody was just talking to me just a couple of days ago. I was doing a TV appearance and I was talking with the director afterwards for about four to five minutes. And he said, when you told me you were writing this new book, and you sort of said the approximate title of it, he said, I just realized there was something missing in my life. It named something missing in my soul. The deep listening just isn't there.

It's not a part of life. Everything's interrupted. He said at home, everything's interrupted. There's always something, someone, some input, digital input. Of course, if you have children, it's definitely going to be inputs there. Somebody knocks on the door, something's on the radio, something's on. You know, there's always something. And that's even to not even to mention the phone.

This, you know, makes a useful servant, but a poor master. And I sense it's just mastering so much of our lives and still too much of my life. It just makes deep listening rarer. And yet this is what we yearn for. Maybe it is the deepest human need is to be known, to be heard, to be seen. I mean, what happens, Eric? What happens psychologically to a person who has never been deeply listened to? I haven't done the research yet, but I'm doing it and beginning it to try to answer this and many other related questions. But I'm so curious to actually identify what research we have about what happens when people are never deeply listened to. I mean,

we can hypothesize that they feel no value, that they feel not fully human. You know, there's a lot of childhood attachment theory around attunement, right? We could say that the process of attunement between parent and child is a process of deep listening. I think so. And we know all the ways that when that doesn't happen, that things can go wrong for children. Well, the disorder attachments can be some of the most catastrophic psychological issues that people then live with for the rest of their lives. They don't trust humans. Yep.

I had Josh Shipp on the show. He wrote a book called The Grown-Up's Guide to Teenage Humans. Yeah, we've had him on. Been a long time, but yeah, amazing man. Josh Shipp was left by his mother, abandoned. That's how certainly he felt about it. And what he learned from that experience for years was that you couldn't trust adults. And so he never did. And of course, that causes incredible dysfunction. Yeah. was this incredible dysfunction. Because every time anyone does something, even if they're trying to do something good, will be distrusted by him. Even if they are sincere, even if they're genuine, even if they're reliable, they are trustworthy, he won't trust them. And so, it does create a

detachment that it took somebody coming along and being so consistent with him for years for him to just question the paradigm that he'd gained. And so, I think maybe there's a miniature version of that going on for all of us now because of this, what we would call it disconnected, wouldn't we? We'd say, you know, technology has made us disconnected rather than connecting us. But isn't that not much of a stretch linguistically from disconnected to detached? I wonder if it isn't true that for many people, they're suffering with a sort of lightweight version of detachment disorder. They just feel disconnected from people. They've been isolated for the last 18 months because of COVID. But then even in normal life,

when they're in a big group of people, it's almost worse if you're in a big group of people and you feel detached and disconnected. That's a greater form of loneliness if you feel that separation. And so, I mean, I think we could probably tie up all these threads into a single idea, which was shared with me by a friend. He said, in life, we have to shift between being in the scared state and the sacred state. Yeah. And I love that because, again, linguistically, just one letter difference. Right, right. Scared and sacred. And to really get into that mode where you're listening deeply past the surface

scared state, which I think is sort of at the periphery, and get deeper so you can start to feel that, you know, whatever the language we choose, that wisdom, that conscience, that guidance. And that I think produces somehow a certain ability, confidence, ability, not sure the right word, to be able to even listen to other people, to even be, to even know what is essential to us, to know what's essential to other people, and then to do it, to be more aligned is so much better than this state of suffering makes everything harder, makes it harder to even know what is essential to us and what is not, makes it harder for us to engage with other people because we distrust them and we're out of alignment with them. And all of this, I think, adds up to a life that makes everything much harder for ourselves and the people around us. I think that is a wonderful way to bring it all around and sum it up.

There's about 75 ideas in the book that I wanted us to talk about, and we've run out of time. The book is called Effortless, Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. There's so much great stuff in it. Encourage listeners to check out your What's Essential podcast. Yes. Check that podcast out. And Greg, thank you so much for your time. I've really enjoyed this conversation. It's been really rich for me. It's been a pleasure, Eric. It's great to be on the One You Feed podcast.

If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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