The One You Feed - Tony Wrighton on Managing Your Energy

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

Tony Wrighton is a regular on Sky Sports News, the author of 3 books, and the creator and host of the Zestology podcast. In this episode, Eric and Tony talk about managing and optimizing your energy, ways to build fun into your day, techniques from Neurolinguistic Programming to help with anxiety and a lot more. This conversation is all about being intentional and smart about how you structure your days in order to support and promote your own well being.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Tony Wrighton and I Discuss Managing your Energy and …Trying to meditate with a 4-month-oldHow there’s not a good and evil wolf – rather, many different wolvesHis training in NLPThe role of control in our livesParentingWhy he named his podcast Zestology – and what it means to himThe idea of managing energy – without it, you can’t do anything. With a lot of it, you feel you can conquer the worldThe thing that helps with energy and well being as well as what counts as a “fun” activity for him.Meditating, sleep, good food, intermittent fasting, exerciseThe thing that, when he didn’t do it, caused his daily energy level to decrease by 30%How he tracks the variables that contribute to his energy levelsHis books: Confidence in a Minute, Persuade in a Minute, and Relax in a MinuteThe NLP technique of anchoring in addition to managing your inner voice.How we get used to anything in life so it’s important to switch things upAcceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)AuthenticityTony Wrighton Links:tonywrighton.orgTwitterFacebookInstagramNetsuite by Oracle: the world’s #1 cloud business system. Netsuite is a business software that handles every aspect of your business in an easy to use cloud platform. Get Netsuite’s free guide, 7 Key Strategies to Grow Your Profits, by going to www.netsuite.com/wolfNimble: Get great electronics you can feel really good about. Nimble makes premium, everyday tech products (like portable chargers, wireless chargers, protective phone cases and more). They use only sustainable materials, work with ethical factories, and ship in 100% plastic-free packaging. They’ll recycle your old electronics, too. To get 25% off your first Nimble order, go to  www.gonimble.com/wolf and enter promo code WOLFPhlur: Eric created his own sampler set that you can try! Get this curated sampler set or create your own. Get 20% off your first 3 Phlur samples at Phlur.com/wolfSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Control has served me quite well in a work capacity in some ways, but it's a work in progress when it comes to relationships and kids. 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.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign. 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. Our guest on this episode is Sky Sports presenter Tony Wrighton, who is also the author of three books and the creator and host of the Zestology podcast. Hi, Tony. Welcome to the show. Hey, how are you doing? Thanks for having me on.

are the host of a podcast called Zestology, which I'll also be appearing on, and we'll talk a lot more about that here soon. But let's start like we always do with the parable. 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 other is a bad 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 looks up at his grandfather and he 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. Well, first of all 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. Well, first of all, I really like the way that you've kind of based your podcast around this. I think it's, I always like it when a podcast has a title that it doesn't make it immediately apparent what the nature of the podcast is all about. You know, I thought, oh, is this like a charity podcast? Do they feed lots of people in third world countries? What's going on here? Is it a cooking show? Yeah, exactly.

It's a nice idea and it works really well. And I think in terms of the multiple personalities that I've got inside myself, the one I feed is very relevant. I've been looking into this parable before coming on your show and there's lots of different interpretations of it, aren't there? And it's appeared in lots of films and it's been told, retold in different ways.

And sometimes it's not there's not necessarily a good and evil wolf, but there's just two wolves. And but but the parable still applies. You know, I mean, which one you feed kind of grows inside you. And I think one of the things that I've been very interested in, very much looking forward to talking to you about is in terms of habit, habit forming and habit building and building good habits and staying on the straight and narrow. It's very hard sometimes to remind yourself, you know, just before we started recording, I was telling you that I'm a new dad and I've got a four month old. And one of the things that I know works really well for me is meditation I know I've got quite a distracted mind I'm easily distracted and just 10 minutes of kind of calm every morning does work really well but when you've got a four month old you can't control anything and if they're up at

five o'clock in the morning you're looking after them and there's no time for meditation so I've desperately been trying to feed the meditation wolf inside me. But to me, there isn't necessarily a good and evil wolf, but there's lots of different wolves inside me, all kind of pursuing slightly different agendas. And I have to work hard to be disciplined to kind of follow the path that I know makes me feel a little bit more calm and balanced. It's definitely true that there's two wolves inside of us is a definite oversimplification. But I get your point around the parable for me just is basically about choice, right? It's just about what choices are we making. And so we were just talking a minute ago about how

having a newborn suddenly makes you have a lot less control. And so, you know, that is one of the sort of challenges in life or one of the things that I always think is at the center of my questions in life, which is about accepting things the way they are and trying to make things better. And I think that, you know, life is a skillful dance between those two poles, so to speak. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would certainly veer towards the control side, I think, and that's something I've worked on. You know, I mean, my day job is I'm a TV presenter here in the UK, and I worked really hard for that job.

And I trained in NLP for, you know, I started training that about 15 years ago. And a lot of neuro-linguistic programming skills are based around goal setting or outcome setting, as you say and you know with the with the job at sky sports i really wanted it and i wrote it down and i did self-hypnosis around it and i um set all these anchors and goals and outcomes and i did everything i could i modeled the presenters that were already on there and in the end i got the job But then when it comes to many things in life, like relationships and children, I wasn't so good at that part of it, because I couldn't control it. And therefore, and therefore, I wasn't very successful in that area.

So yeah, control has served me quite well in a work capacity in some ways, but it's a work in progress when it comes to relationships and kids. Hopefully Hopefully I've got a bit better anyway. I hope my girlfriend would tell you that anyway. Yeah, well, no, relationships and children and all that stuff, you're right, is an area that control doesn't really work. And I think as I've gotten older, you know, I was sharing with you, my son is in college. So I'm, you know, I'm obviously a little bit older than you are. And I think for me, it's really been in the later years for me that I think I've gotten a deeper sense of the value of letting go of control. I think that I have a tendency too, to very much be about control, right? And very much be about, well, if you just do this and you do this and you do this and you do that, then you'll be happy, then you'll be mentally healthy, then you'll be this, then you'll be that.

And there is no doubt that there are lots and lots of things that we can and probably should do in life that give us the greatest chance of happiness and fulfillment and meaning and all that. And life just does its own thing sometimes, no matter how hard we try. It just throws stuff at us that a lot of times is just beyond what we can control. Yeah, the apple of your eye, your child is college age, you really have to let go because they're going to go and do their own thing anyway, right? I think that's, I was talking with a coaching client earlier today. And one of his sons, I think is like 10 now. And I was talking about how, you know, I feel like when my son turned about 12 or 13, I started really asking myself, like, how much control do I have? I mean, obviously, I can be like, come home at this time, do that. But it seemed like more and more at that age, it was like what his peers were saying to him was so much more important than what I was saying. And, you know, as he, as he got older through his teenage years, I think I made a very conscious effort to try and sort of let the leash out a little bit more and more and more knowing that, like you said, once he turns 18, the leash is kind of gone.

I know you've had Gabor Mate on your podcast, haven't you? We have. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, I wonder if he spoke at all about parenting because he's got some fascinating he's actually written a book called i think it's time to parent or something like that anyway he has some really fascinating thoughts about parenting and i read his book whilst my partner faith was pregnant and um i found it quite daunting actually because uh because there's so much to learn but again you know i mean okay you learn so much and then try not to control it and provide a loving home and then send them off into the world and hope for the best, I suppose. That's right.

Yeah. No, it's not something Gabor and I talked about or Dr. Mate or however we should refer to him. You know, we mostly focused on addiction. But funny enough, in this earlier conversation with one of my coaching clients, we were talking about that very idea. And I was saying that, you know, to me, parenting is one of those things that you just never quite feel like you do good enough. Like, it doesn't matter what you try. You can only do so much, right? We just inevitably come across our own limitations. At least I did kind of over and over and over again. And yet, and you know, thankfully, knock on wood in my son's case, he's, you know, so far, he's doing really, really well. And I think you kind of said what to me is the most important part, which is sort of this idea of providing a loving and supporting environment, you know, not a lenient, coddling environment, but definitely a loving and supporting environment. Well, Eric, I have to tell you right now, I have provided a very loving and supportive

environment for my four-month-old son. And in a distant corner of the house, he's screaming his head off, not wanting to go to bed. So you can only do so much. You can only do so much. Well, the good news is I can't really hear him, and I hope the little guy gets to sleep here soon. Good. Oh, thank you. Yeah, he'll be all right. So your podcast is called Zestology. And, you know, as I understand it, it's primarily around energy. But tell me why you named it that and what it means to you. Well, I, as I said, I was a kind of TV presenter and I've been doing that for quite a long time. And I'd written these books around NLP, you know, how people do things well, neuro-linguistic programming.

And then it turned out I wasn't doing things very well, particularly when I got ill. I went to the jungle. I went on holiday to the Philippines and we stayed in this beautiful place in the middle of nowhere. It was a retreat called The Farm, kind of an hour or so outside Manila. And we had nothing more to worry about than what smoothie we were going to have for breakfast and the kind of squawk of the parrots in the trees. And then I got quite ill, quite seriously ill. I picked up this virus that was so rare that the doctors that I saw when I got back, they were specialists. And they said, you know, we know you've had a virus, but we can't tell you what the virus was. We just know that there are some viruses that haven't been discovered yet. And I ended up spending a few months in bed and I wasn't working in TV.

And I didn't really ever know if I'd get out of bed. And in the kind of deepest, darkest recesses of those few months, I thought, if I start to get back to full health, it'd be great to do a podcast on energy. And I thought the name Zestology then. So that's kind of how it was born. I thought, you know, without energy, you can't do anything. And when you've got loads of energy, you feel you can take on the world. So that was the basic premise behind the podcast. And now it's become quite a fun adventure. I've traveled around the place. I've been to your country loads of times and, you know, been to various health conferences and retreats and thankfully got back to full health as well and tried some fun, unusual kind of wacky experiments for more energy along the way. Some of them work

and some of them don't. What would you say for you are some of the key principles for managing energy? Not necessarily like the exact thing you do, but like, how do you think about, or how do you advise people to think about if they want to have more energy in life? What's, what's the process? The first thing to say is that all the really fun stuff is what people want to talk about. They want to hear about the cryotherapy. Have you done cryotherapy? I have. I have. Yeah. It's. It's good fun, isn't it? Well, it's cold. That's the answer of a man who didn't love his cryotherapy session.

I didn't have a strong feeling about it one way or the other. I didn't really notice. I found it invigorating and refreshing, but I can't really say that like I left there and like three hours later I was still like, yes, this has changed my life. I just didn't have a ton of an impact on me that I could tell. I mean, you know, I think it's probably like a double espresso or something. It gives you a little boost, but it's kind of not the end of the world. But I tell you what, it does make a very good Instagram picture for anyone considering doing it. Because you kind of pop your head out the top of this tank and it freezes your body down to minus 200 and something degrees

um so you can you can do all the fun stuff and in fact just before we did this podcast i took five minutes or so to meditate in front of an infrared light device which is really lovely helps in the morning with kind of bright light and with energy and it helps in the evening to kind of calm you down a bit. But the truth is that a lot of the things that help with energy the most are actually slightly boring, which always comes as a massive disappointment when carb and higher fat diet just seems to work really well. Intermittent fasting is not necessarily the kind of the jazzy cryotherapy and the infrared lights, although people do like hearing about that as well. Right. And those are kind of the basic fundamentals, right, that you're describing here is basic fundamentals to well-being. And I think they help with energy. They help with health.

They help with mental health. I mean, that's the thing I love about the things like exercise, meditating, good diet, and good sleep is that they're positively indicated in so many different areas that I can feel pretty good about doing them because I know it's helping me in multiple areas of my life. And plus, the main area that I pay attention to is I just feel pretty good about doing them because I know it's helping me in multiple areas of my life. And plus, the main area that I pay attention to is I just feel better. It's funny, actually, when you spoke about control earlier on, being someone who likes to control things when possible, I started a spreadsheet based around my kind of energy levels.

And I started tracking various areas of my life and what gave me energy and what didn't. So I tracked, you know, whether I went to the gym or not, whether I meditated, whether I would take a magnesium supplement, for example, and all sorts of different things. And some quite interesting results came up. And I was amazed to find that one thing, when I didn't do it on a particular day, reduced my energy levels by about 30%. And I was really surprised by this, you know, because I tracked all sorts of different stuff. Can you guess what it was? When I didn't do it on a particular day, my energy levels reduced by 30%. I'm guessing it's not the obvious one. I'm going to choose meditation. It wasn't meditation, although meditation does make a massive difference to me.

It was actually when I didn't schedule any fun in for a particular day. You know what? I heard you say that on a podcast, which is why I felt like I should know the answer. And I didn't. That's great. So yeah, yeah, yeah. I did hear you say that. I've listened to a couple of a couple of your things and I and I did hear you say that. I've listened to a couple of your things, and I did hear you say that somewhere.

Yeah, oh, that's nice, yeah. Yeah, and so that's great. And so, like, for you, what are fun things that you schedule in, and were you able to get to a point of, like, how much fun you had to have and certain types of fun versus others? Like, does watching Netflix count as fun? I suppose watching TV is a form of relaxation. I mean, I've got a bit of a confession to make now, and you should judge me here because I'm judging myself. But we at the moment, we have a new baby. This is my excuse.

I'm very tired when it gets to nine o'clock in the evening. And normally me and my partner, we watch, you know, lovely documentaries or maybe a kind of a really good well-crafted netflix series but recently we've been watching a reality tv show called love island and i i just shouldn't be watching it it's dreadful tv it's we always feel slightly soiled at the end of watching an hour of love island um but yeah what happened was when i made when i organized lots of fun activities in my day i made a note of it. And this is going to sound a bit weird, but I basically measured it by giving myself a fun score out of 10. And when there was very little fun on a particular day, my daily energy levels went down so much that I realized that it's important for me to organize lots of fun.

So today I was doing voiceovers today and finished work at three o'clock. And we met up with the family after that. We just went for a three-hour walk and a pizza. That counts as fun. So I give myself a pretty good fun score for today, I think. That's really interesting. And it's an interesting thing to track. I have, listeners of the show have heard me say, you know, sometimes over the last, you know, couple years, but really the last year in particular, I was like, I have got to find a way to have more fun. Like, I've got to find a way to do things that I just plain enjoy doing that have no purpose, and they can't be things that I turn into something that has a purpose. If I'm not careful, I will turn a fun activity into a competitive activity that I need to be getting better at. Or it's not, you know, back to the sort of achieving idea.

Yeah, yeah. And what I found is, boy, it's harder for me to find fun than I thought it would be. Like I, I, it's, it doesn't come as naturally to me. I've taken up, um, playing ping pong with a friend, which I, is unabashedly fun. Although it's also very competitive, but it is unabashedly fun. Like I look forward to it. I enjoy it. I have such a good time when I'm doing it, you know, so I'm continuing to look for other areas like that in my life. Well, you see, I know from following you that you are a type A personality. You're an entrepreneur. You've got so many things going on at once. You've worked very hard to make this podcast a success as well. It doesn't surprise me that you're a bit of a workaholic. And even when you're playing, I bet you enjoy the ping pong more

when you're warming up and just hitting than when you're actually having a game. Kind of, although I've really, as I've gotten older, I've gotten better. Like I used to play guitar. No, let me rephrase that. I still play guitar. I used to play guitar and be in bands and write music.

And, you know, I had a dream when I was young that that's what I would do for a career which was not really a dream that was ever likely to come true because I didn't work on it all that hard and and so what I found though later in life was that I would I would turn music into that I'd pick up the guitar and I'd start playing and I'd play something that was kind of cool and I'd be like oh I got to record that what am I going to do with it am I going to write a song and I'd be like, oh, I got to record that. What am I going to do with it? Am I going to write a song? And I've learned over time now, like, I just don't do that anymore. Like I just pick up the guitar and I just enjoy playing it. I enjoy learning something and I've managed to be able to drop that piece of it. And, and with ping pong, although it is very, very competitive

for me and I do prefer winning, I've also been able, my girlfriend asked me this yesterday after I came back from a defeat and she said, well, was it still fun? I said it was still a blast. Like I had a great time. But no, I hear you. Like that is the thing I have to watch out for is that sort of stuff. So what are other fun things for you? I think when I heard you talking about it, I might have heard something about Frisbee golf one day. Did I make that up? Well, when you heard me talking about it, I might've been talking about, uh, there's an author called Charlie Hone and he wrote this

brilliant book called play it away. Um, and Charlie Hone was, I think originally he was an assistant to Tim Ferriss and a a high achiever in his own right and author and everything else. And then he went through complete burnout and he realized the only way he could deal with his own life was just by having loads of fun each day. And the book is all about living stress-free and living a much calmer, happier existence. And he says when he dialed down his ambition, he had a much happier life. And his big thing was Frisbee. So it might have been that. But I really like that book, Play It Away by Charlie Hone. And in terms of my idea of fun, well, you Americans, you know, I love American culture. But one of the things that really disappoints me is you don't really get the

sport of cricket. You know, if only you liked cricket a little bit more, it'd be just so much better. It's, it's funny. I worked for, you know, most of my adult career was in the software development side of the world. Um, and I had a job for several years at a large organization. I was a consultant there. But, you know, probably 85% of the workforce there were people from India. Oh, right. So what what started happening was we started organizing charity events. And so I got to go out and play cricket several times with people. And I found it absolutely a fun game. Totally very interesting. And the part of it that still sticks with me to this day was all these people I worked with, they were very mild mannered, very quiet, very low key, very deferring. But out on the cricket court, they transformed. I was like, who are these guys?

Like, they were so intense. Fantastic. I mean, if you came over to this country and you called the cricket pitch a cricket court, you'd be you'd be laughed out of town but no is that what i just called it the cricket yeah the cricket court yeah but um it is a great game it's what i like about it is you know because the biggest sport here and the sport that i talk about most in my in my job is football right or as you'd call it soccer yeah and that's that's huge and it is a brilliant sport for its simplicity but what i like about cricket is it's so complicated i mean even i would struggle to explain all the rules and it is possible that sometimes you can play for five days and there will be a draw at the end of it and that's brilliant i love that Love that. I'm Jason Alexander.

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That is a very non-American way of looking at things. I think it's the reason why, you know, soccer hasn't taken off to the same degree here. There's just not as much going on. Although for a long time, baseball was really big here and baseball is a slower sport. But it's really become NBA, NFL, you know, these really fast, high scoring sports. I've been to a few baseball games and I love it for the same reason. I suppose what I like about it is, you know, we've been talking about fun and relaxation. And I like the aimlessness of cricket and baseball as well. You know, the thought that you've got nothing better to do to sit at a game and just relax and enjoy. And sometimes there's a lot going on and sometimes there isn't. That flow of a kind of slow paced sport, I think is harder for us to get into than ever, really, because we've got so many distractions. And maybe that is why sports

like baseball and cricket are becoming a bit less popular, sadly. Yeah, yep. So what other things do you do for fun in your own life? Let's let's throw out a couple other ideas for listeners. And then we'll we'll move on to another topic. I mean, I'm an absolute book nerd and one of the questions i always ask everybody at the end of my podcast and i'll be asking you when you come on my podcast very shortly is what is one book that you would recommend and that's a really kind of popular part of the podcast because i think everybody likes reading but we don't make enough time to do it don't we and then the other thing is i mean your listeners are going to

think i'm so square because not only am i into cricket i'm also into chess uh i really like chess and i've got kind of really quite into playing that and um even play the odd little game of online chess because it's just so relaxing and you know talk about being in the moment if you're distracted when you're playing chess you're not going to play very well. So so I like that as well. And those would all count as the kind of things that Charlie Hone would describe as kind of play. And therefore, I would describe on my spreadsheet. So you tracked, you said, whether you went to the gym, whether you meditated, took certain supplements, how you slept, whether you had fun. What else did you track to try and understand how different things affected your energy? Well, the other big secret was switching off, which is something that is not always easy for us to do. But we live such connected lives, don't we? And I'm a bit obsessed by the fact that when i switch off i always live a kind of happier slightly freer life and the big secret appeared to be on my

spreadsheet switching off you know the more i escape technology during the day the more energy i have which is really weird but when i escaped screens for a big chunk of time and that is for like more than about six or eight hours my energy level is about 20 percent higher that's a huge increase right now it's getting away from screens it's not always practical and even that is harder than ever before because of course when i started tracking this stuff years ago i didn't have sat nav in my car but now i do and that's a screen you, so it is harder to get away from the screens, but if you can get away from them from a certain period of time, you might find like me that your energy levels go up a lot. And I think it was for me, again,

it was about living in the moment and having less distractions. So we listed those main things. Are those the main ways that you focus on managing your energy is kind of tweaking each of those areas of your life? Yeah, I mean, in terms of the main things that worked for me on the spreadsheet were switching off, focusing on relaxing. So kind of on the days that I had lived a very relaxing day, and maybe that would include meditation. My daily energy level was about I think about nine about 9.9 percent higher and then exercise really works well i mean like a i mean just so plain to see going to the gym raised my average daily energy by over five percent um one of the things that didn't raise my energy levels as much as i thought it might do is i I like a supplement every once

in a while, Eric, I've, I've tried lots, lots of different supplements. I don't know whether you're that into supplements or not really. Yeah. Do you take, do you take many supplements? Um, I kind of on and off again. Yeah. Yeah. You know, mainly vitamins and things. Um, so yes, sometimes I take more of them than others. And the jury is completely out in my case as to how much they do of anything. I don't know. Because I don't track things in the way that you are. I mean, I track things like, you know, I track basic activities, but I don't track them in correspondence to how I feel. In some ways, I think that's a good thing.

Because, you know, going back to the parable, it's good for me to look after my energy levels but if i start to if i fill out the spreadsheet for like an hour in the evening that's bad because it's just taking me away from relaxing so there's a balance involved isn't there as far as the right supplements were involved i was quite surprised that the supplement that helped most was magnesium but it only increased my daily energy levels by about 2%. So not really as big an increase as I'd hoped for. Definitely something. But I thought at least one of these supplements that I take would be a real magic pill effect, you know, a much higher success rate. But no. Yeah, no, I believe that. I actually do believe it's not, you know, necessarily like big noticeable changes with a lot of that stuff.

So let's talk about some of your other work. You've written a few books, one's called Confidence in One Minute, Persuade in One Minute, and Relax in One Minute. Let's talk about a couple of the techniques from the Relax in One Minute book. You know, things that we can do in a minute or so that can help us de-stress a little bit. Okay. Well, um, relax in a minute was one of my three books. So I started studying in, uh, NLP. Have you heard of NLP before? I have. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it's a, it's a very awkward name to explain. It stands for neuro-linguistic programming. And it was invented in the 70s by a couple of guys in California. Just when computers were starting to come in and they thought, well, give it a computery name and it will sound legit.

And now millions of people do it all over the world. But nobody knows what NLP is. But it stands for neuro-linguistic programming anyway. And really it's a study of how people do things well um and i i found it very helpful kind of studying in it from my own perspective and actually i was a presenter when i started studying this stuff and i started using the techniques on my radio show and i i mean i didn't tell my boss about it because i thought well you know i mean i've only started learning this stuff a few weeks ago, but it'd be quite fun to practice the techniques. And after a couple of months, he called me into his office and he said, I don't know what you've done. And I thought I'm

in trouble here because I've really been layering the techniques on thick. And he said, I don't know what you've done, but your listening figures have gone through the roof. So, um, so I've been using these techniques to kind of get people to feel better about listening, but also to listen longer and maybe to attract some new listeners to my show. And that's when I start to think there's something in this NLP stuff, if you like. So then there's plenty of persuasion stuff in there, but there's plenty of instant relaxation stuff in as well. So there's quite a lot of stuff based around anchoring for example um anchoring would be have you ever heard the story of pavlov's dogs yep just to remind people who might not have heard it um pavlov very famous uh researcher had his dogs and every time he fed his

dogs he would ring a little bell and the dogs would be very excited because they'd know they were about to get fed because the bell equaled feeding time they'd start to salivate and after a while he could ring the bell and the dogs would salivate even if there was no food which seems very unfair on the dogs but that was the the experiment so i kind of i um i adapted that with a technique called the spot and i got people to put stickers around their house or maybe a sticker on your mirror. So you might wake up tomorrow morning, look in the mirror and there'd be a sticker on there, a spot sticker. And the reason that would work is because at some point in your past, you felt relaxed. And we would have used that memory to help you start feel more relaxed every time you look at that sticker, which is quite nice.

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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 can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk a little bit more about that one, because I read that in one of your books. And so the idea is I go through a process of recalling a time that I'm relaxed or a memory that makes me relaxed. I associate it with that spot. When I see the spot, I become more relaxed. But you also talk

about switching them out fairly often. Is that just because after you see the same spot on the mirror for four days in a row, you start to ignore it? Well, yeah, you get used to everything. You get used to everything in life. It's like, it's's like eric i've just moved to a new house and we moved here last week and we're so excited about it it was a real doer-upper and we bought it and it was in a real state and we you know we got it cheaper because it was in a real state we changed all the carpets and we've you put nice wallpaper in and that kind of thing and um every time i walk around the house i notice different things that we've done that made it look really nice. Now, give it six months and I won't notice any of that.

I'll just be acclimatized to it. But I'm noticing it all of the moment. So that's the idea behind switching up. By the way, before I go any further, thank you so much for doing so much research on me. I really appreciate it. You've properly delved into my work and it's very kind of you. I try to always do that. I try and always... No, it's really impressive. Thank you.

If you're going to take the time to come on, I should have taken the time to know more about you and have a good conversation. So I'm glad you appreciate it. It's nice to hear. I really do. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And the spot was inspired by a friend of mine, actually, Carl Morris, who is a sports psychologist. He's a kind of mind game coach. And there was a golfer called Louis Eustazen, who's still one of the top golfers in the world. And he won the British Open Golf Championship. And throughout the four days of competition, the TV cameras kept zoning in on his bag. And he had this small red spot on his clothing. He'd on his golf glove and the TV cameras picked up on it. And after he won, everyone was asking about this kind of strange red spot and saying, well, what's that all to do to do with? And he'd been

working with Karl Morris, who's a friend of mine. And to help his concentration levels, Carl, just like Pavlov with his dogs, had anchored the feeling of concentration to that red spot. And I can do it with your listeners right now if you want to. Sure, let's do it. If you want to kind of do a similar technique. I mean, let's think of, as people listen, just look at something in the room that you're in. So I don't know. It might be a picture on the wall, for example. And if you're driving, don't take your eyes off the road. If not, then find something and focus on that. And now think about a time when you felt very relaxed.

You might have been on holiday or you might have been sitting in your favorite armchair. you've been on holiday or you might have been sitting in your favorite armchair and remember exactly what you could see and exactly what you could hear and how it felt to feel really relaxed as you look at this item that you've picked and kind of turn the feelings of relaxation up make the colors brighter in your mind of how relaxed you felt and make the sounds loud and vivid and clear in your mind remember exactly what you could hear at the time as you look at this picture, as you look at whatever you've picked. And you are now using this process known as anchoring. And the theory is that the next time that you walk into the room that you're in and you look at this item that you've picked to anchor these feelings of relaxation, you'll feel that same sense of relaxation again. relaxation, you'll feel that same sense of relaxation again. And if you're a bit skeptical about whether that works or not, just go into an old photo album of maybe a holiday, for example,

and look through some of those pictures and see how you feel. Notice how you feel. That's anchoring in action. Very interesting. That is a great, great technique to try. And the thing I liked about your books was just how quick some of these things, well, they're one minute, right, which is, which is important for a lot of us, a lot of us, you know, I know that, you know, I work with a lot of people who the biggest struggle is finding time to do this, what appears to be a nearly endless list of things to do to improve our mental, emotional, physical health, right? And so I think anything that can help us do them quicker, I tend to believe that like, along with little quick things that, I mean, it's in the tagline of the show, and I, that Chris reads at the beginning, you know, it takes constant, consistent and creative effort to make a life that's worth living. So it is effort, but I do think the more of these little things that we can do as we're on the go and moving

about our lives, that's great. So what's another one for anxiety that you really like? This neuro-linguistic programming can seem like quite a complicated discipline, which is why I was quite keen to kind of break it down into these very simple steps. And it's very interesting the way it's been greeted, the books, actually, because here in the UK they didn't sell that well, which is a little bit disappointing, but there you go. But then they got translated into loads of different languages and much more popular around the world than England.

So it obviously resonates with some people, but perhaps not brits in quite the same way um but yeah i wanted to break down the techniques to make them kind of very simple and one of the things that um we look at uh in nlp is something another great technical term sub modalities um but when when that um involves uh your internal, it can be very helpful. You know, Buddhists call your internal voice the chattering monkey, which sits on your shoulder all day and talks. And it's not very helpful and says you can't do that and you shouldn't do this. And, you know, that won't work and comes up with the worst possible outcomes to events. So I work with people to turn down their internal voice.

If your internal voice is positive and happy and comes up with loads of great suggestions, then you can turn it up. But if the internal voice is not helpful, you can change the way that you experience it. Because after all, it's only in your mind. You know, if it's in your imagination, you can use your imagination to turn it down. So if you've got an internal voice that causes you anxiety that's causing you problems that isn't very helpful at times and to be honest most of us have um you can listen to it and you can become aware of its tone and volume and perhaps where it is spatially is it behind you or in front of you and then imagine you have a large volume knob in your mind and grab it and

turn it down and start to turn your internal voice all the way down until it gets quieter and quieter until it gets to one and then switch it off and enjoy the silence so it's just a fun technique and obviously all the metaphors as is the you know the parable around which your podcast is created but these metaphors often work very very effectively another thing you can do with your internal voice is move it away. Put it in a different, if it's in front of you, put it behind you. And if it's a very serious voice, give it a cartoon character's voice. Make it sound like Homer Simpson and see if it has the same amount of power. Right. I love all those approaches to the inner voice.

They're talked about often in acceptance and commitment therapy, which I'm guessing they borrowed a lot from NLP because NLP has been around a lot longer. But in acceptance and commitment therapy, often known as ACT or ACT, they give the same sort of thing. Like, make that internal voice into something that is other than you. We tend to hear that internal voice and we think, that's me. And all the techniques that you just described are ways of making it other. They're ways of breaking, the term is inact, the term is cognitive fusion, right? We are completely fused with that internal voice. We believe it to be us. We believe it to be true. And all those techniques you just talked about are ways of creating a little distance between us and that

voice. If you imagine moving it or turning it down, you know, you don't turn yourself down, right? You don't move your internal self, right? But you can move the voice, which helps at least, you know, in my perspective of helps to, to sort of give me some space from that voice. Yeah. Well, acceptance and commitment therapy sounds fantastic. What else do I need to know from this? Oh, it's a, it's a really fascinating therapy. I had a, I had a listener who wrote to me several years ago. He said, do you know about acceptance and commitment therapy? I said, no. He's like, well, you ought to look into it because it basically sounds like your life philosophy. And I went, oh, that's interesting. So I did look into it and I, you know, I agreed. It's very much at its most basic premise is we can't necessarily change how we feel or what we

think. But what we can do is we can act in a way that's accordance with our values. So what they're really after is, you know, ultimately a very much an action focused, you act in according to your values. And as you do that, lots of things in life improve, because for a lot of people who have issues psychologically, you know, things like avoidance are a big part of it, right? Like, I don't like how I feel when I do that or when this happens, so I avoid it. And then that just makes everything worse. The avoidance, you know, compiles on itself. And so acceptance and commitment therapy is really about like, of course, we should do everything we can to try and, you know, minimize our mental and emotional suffering. But the other thing to do

is to accept it, allow it to be there, but still act according to our values. And so that's the heart of it. But they've got so many great techniques. There's two guys, you might want to look into them for your show, Russ Harris and Stephen C. Hayes. Stephen C. Hayes has a book called Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life or something like that, which is just, it is such a good book. I've interviewed both those guys and we recently re-released the Stephen C. Hayes episode because it is so good. So I love those guys and I think it's such a fascinating view on life. They're very focused on mindfulness, right? It's a therapy that has mindfulness kind of baked right into the center of it. So for me, it does align with so much of what I believe, which is about it's our actions that we take that ultimately determine the quality of our lives. And again, you know, my most used phrase on this show, and maybe we'll talk about it on your show, is that sometimes you can't think your way into right action, you have to act

your way into right thinking. And so acceptance and commitment therapy is, that would be a good summary of it. Okay, yeah. And I certainly think, you know, authenticity is more prized than it has ever been isn't it and and these days because we all live our lives so in such a public manner you can't get away with being inauthentic because people will sniff you out in a moment and i think these days our kind of public heroes and especially kind of social media heroes they're the ones who are living in a very authentic way now might not be their values might not be something

you agree with but there's there's an authenticity about them that is hard to deny and and dare i say it eric and i'm probably wading into murky territory here, but the way that Trump lives his life online, whether you agree with him or hate him, he doesn't hold back, does he? He says what he thinks. That's right. And that does seem to be a big part of his appeal to certain people is, you know, he's really who he is, which is actually, I think, is absolutely true. Although the thing about it, well, I'm not going to get into it.

Oh, go on. Get into it. Go on. Well, I was just going to say that, you know, I think the thing about Trump that's so amazing to me is that usually when you hear somebody's being authentic, you're like, well, they're true to who they really are. They're true to, you know, but, but, you know, to me, Trump just seems to be like, he's true to whatever mood comes up or whatever emotion comes up. There's no deeper orienting authenticity there.

Right. Yeah. No, that sounds like it makes perfect sense. Yeah. Or maybe the, the authenticity is just simply the inauthenticity or like, you know, I mean, he's authentic in his ego. There's no, yeah, I think that's a pretty, pretty safe statement. But yeah, I do agree. Authenticity is something that people seem to really hunger for these days. Definitely. I started in broadcasting, you know, 20 years ago. And then the, I was a radio presenter for 10 years before I started working as a TV

presenter. And the radio presenters, you know, they all talked like this. And they all had these kind of public personalities. And that's just not the way people really talk or the way people really are. And now you can't really get away with that style, you know. That's a pretty good impression, though. That was good. I know.

I know. I was almost that kind of radio presenter to myself but i managed to escape just in just in time yeah well i think we are nearing the end of our time here tony you and i are going to talk briefly in the post-show conversation i want to talk about your persuade in one minute book in the post-show conversation i kind of want to talk about the difference between persuasion and manipulation. You and I will get into that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you're interested in becoming a member, you can go to oneyoufeed.net slash support. And we have post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, and a mini episode for me every week. So oneyoufeed.net slash support. Tony, thanks so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I have to, Eric, and I really look forward to you coming on Zestology as well.

And, um, any of your listeners who want to kind of hop over there and have a listen to that chat with you, that'd be great. And, um, yeah, it's just been really good. Thanks for all the preparation you've done for this interview. It's just terrific. You're welcome. All right. Thanks so much.

Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net. 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 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.