The Uneducated PT Podcast - #59 Hazel Gale - I Can Only Be Loved If I'm A Success

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

In this episode of the uneducated PT Podcast we speak to author, therapist and ex boxer Hazel Gale. Hazel wrote a book called 'the mind monster solution' helping you to identify self sabotaging behaviours. In this episode we touch on conditional validation, overtraining, finding purpose, why achieving your goals won't mkae you happy, relationship dynamics, different types of trauma and much more. Hazel has her own app called Be-Twixt App which you can download on the playstore for free.                           

Hello and welcome to the uneducated PT podcast with me, your host, Carlo Rourke. The goal of this podcast is to bring on interest and knowledgeable people from all walks of life, learn a little something from each conversation and for you, the listener, just learn something from each episode. So don't forget to subscribe to the channel, press the box below, show some support and I'll see you on the next episode. Hazel, in preparation for this podcast, I learned about something called conditional validation. I can only be loved under certain conditions.

And so I just wanted to ask you, how does that show up in people's lives? Where does it stem from? And what are the dangers of the consequences of it? God. I mean, that's a huge question. Okay, so I don't think it's avoidable. We grow up, you know, when we're born, when we're young, we are just sponges for information. And we're, in particular, we're tuning in to things that bring us resources.

and mainly those resources that we're worried about at the beginning there are feeling sort of safe and connected and loved and so anything that allows us to feel protected and cared for by our primary caregivers is likely to get logged on a list of things that we then turn to later in life regardless of whether they still logically make sense to us to our life in order to try and repeat that feeling. So there is a theory from transactional analysis

called drivers. And I'm trying to remember now the name of the person who came up with this has just slipped my mind for a moment. It will come back to me a minute. There are five drivers. And so this, Tali Khyber, that's his name. He

looked at five different patterns. They are, be perfect, please others, be strong, try hard and hurry up. And he reckoned the theory goes that everybody will have at least one of these drivers. And so somebody with a be perfect driver, for example, will likely to have been praised during their formative years

for maybe having a tidy bedroom, getting things right, getting good grades. And as a result, they grow up feeling like they need to be perfect or as close to it as possible in order to be worthy of love. Somebody who has a hurry up driver will like, likely to be praised for getting things done quickly or to be punished for lagging behind by their caregivers. And so they will grow up with this sort of unconscious conditional pattern in their mind that says, I have to get things done quickly. Lots of people will have all five of those drivers. I can absolutely recognise all five of those drivers in my behaviour. Yeah, I was just

thinking to myself, as you were saying, I feel like I'm all of them things, maybe at different times. Well, exactly. That's another thing we'll do. We're likely to sort of link them to different contexts. And you know, you get these combinations of them because I definitely have, I'm very high in try hard, be perfect and hurry up. And you end up with it, I end up finding myself in these situations where I'm definitely thinking, hurry up and be perfect. Hurry up and get ridiculous amounts done. You know, somebody with a try hard driver will overcomplicate things, tasks without realizing they're doing it. Because with a try hard driver, we absolutely feel that if something's easy, it's not worth doing. And the more effort you

put into something the better it's going to be. And the end chart taking cutting corners or slacking off is completely prohibited because that makes me feel worthless. You know, it makes me feel really guilty. And I don't think, I don't think it's feasible to say that we could take these drives and change them. I think that the sensible thing to do with your driver is to build enough awareness of it to be able to recognize it when it's happening and also anticipate it happening. Because you can absolutely do that. If you know, drivers activate most strongly under stress. So we're feeling overloaded, overwhelmed or nervous.

We've got a presentation coming up or something like that. And we know where our drivers are. We know we're likely to turn to them. Someone where the police, others driver is likely to under stress, try and find other people to save and help and be the good guy because that's how they have learned to gain a feeling of self-worth. Perhaps they were the older sibling and they were, required to look after their younger siblings as a child and they got praised when they did that

or they were told off for being mean to people. You know, so this is just a theory. None of these things are necessarily 100% true, but they're brilliant ways to work with our minds because we can start to recognize these patterns playing out and that gives us a sense of control that would otherwise, without it, we would feel completely at the whim of something we can't even grasp. yeah yeah i suppose it's like it doesn't resonate with you if it does then it makes sense to kind to explore it i think the big thing that you touched on there is awareness because if you're not aware

of at these patterns then you're you're you're deemed to continue to fall into them if they're destructive behaviors i know from myself even when you said the thing like be perfect and hurry up it's like i've had to start to to recognize like okay whether i'm you know trying to build a business or you know, get more subscribers on the podcast or do a public speaking thing or whatever it is or, you know,

do the next marathon or run the next race and win it. Like, am I doing this for, for me or am I doing this so I can feel accepted? And that's something that like I have to keep on asking myself now anytime that I go to challenge for a new goal. It's like,

am I actually doing this because I actually want to do it or am I doing this because it will validate me? it's such a great habit to get yourself into. This comes back to the concept of ideal self and real self. So like our real self is who we actually are. It's not necessarily that available to us without work. What we truly value, what we truly believe, what truly serves us, that's our real self.

And it's not, it doesn't try to fit in or keep up appearances in any way. It just is, you know, it just is there. And everybody's real self. is just as worthy as it needs to be. You know, we have this sense that we need to accumulate stuff and add stuff and achieve stuff in order to feel a sense of self-worth or in order to be worthy, which leads us in the wrong direction

because it means that we start feeling like we have to edit ourselves. And the more we edit ourselves towards our ideal self. So the ideal self is based on the super ego. The ideal self is what we receive from the world all the way through our lives about what kind of person we should be. I want other people to see us. And, you know, what would count as worthy or, or respectable?

I see this a lot. And so my profession is, I'm a personal trainer. And obviously, a lot of people who come to work with me, come in the pursuit of weight loss. And I see it a lot in people where it's like, you know, once I get down to 60 kilos, then I'll be, then I'll be worthy, then I'll be accepted, rather than, you know, it being an internal validation of, you know, I respect myself and that therefore I exercise because it makes me feel good and therefore then a byproduct of that might be weight loss. Exactly. And it's all, you know,

I rolled my eyes there. I did not roll my eyes at people who find themselves believing that. I absolutely believe that when I go on weight. You know, I know, I know it's not true, but there's still a part of me that believes it. But that's the world we live in, you know, especially for women. Women are, we are conditioned from the very beginning to believe that the thinner and prettier we are, the better we are. You know, and men have, people socialised as men, have a similar list, not necessarily exactly the same. But the culture, our consumerist world, wants us to believe that the more we have, wealth, power, dominance, money, the more worthy we are. I was reading this incredible study, good. I'm doing, I'm currently doing a video series on The Seven Deadly Sins,

I was looking into greed. And there is a psychologist called Paul Piff. I can't remember which university he works from right now. But he is devoted a lot of his career to studying greed. And they did an experiment with a rigged game of monopoly. So they put two people against each other. But at the beginning, they flipped a coin. And the winner of the coin toss got double the starting money.

They were allowed to roll two dice as opposed to one. while moving around the board. They got double the money whenever they passed go, and they got to use the luxury car playing piece, as opposed to the old boot. So they set up this temporary discrepancy in privilege, basically, and financial wealth. Oh, sorry, Alexa joining in.

And what they found was that when the game started playing, when the players started playing at the beginning, the fake rich players would feel quite awkward about their privilege, and they would apologize. But as the game went on, they started to get louder and to get boastful and gloat about their wealth. They literally took up more space at the table. They ate more of the food that was on offer. And they just seemed to become increasingly less attuned to the plight of the other player.

To really cap this off, at the end, they had to fill out a questionnaire, which asked them how they won. And the rich players, they didn't mention the coin toss. They started talking about how their superior decision making had, you know, had led to their success. So it seems that greed, this sort of pretend ideal self version of worth has a lot to do with our circumstance. They did, one of the main criticisms of that study was that a rigged game of monopoly didn't represent reality. So they did another study after that where they took people of varying levels of real life wealth. And they just paired them up and they gave one person in the pairing of tenor and that person had to decide whether or not they were going to share any of that money. and if so how much of it.

This is terrifying. They found that the more money the person had in the real world, the less they would share of a gifted £10. And you would assume, you would think, oh, if I had loads of money, I'd be able to give loads of charity. But that doesn't seem to be how it works. And again, this is not really demonising anybody who has money. These studies seem to suggest that there is an unconscious thing that goes on here.

And it's to do with what we learn from the world, that if you, that you are better, you are a better person, you are therefore more deserving if you have more. And so... Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. Finish. I was just going to link that back to, you know, the ideal self and coming to a training session wanting to lose weight.

And just taking a bit more of a compassionate view when we find ourselves in that place because it's, it appears to be an unconscious process that goes on in human beings in general to link these things like wealth and thinness and prettiness to work and so it's understandable that would fall into the trap of believing

that we need to accumulate more and more it's just that it doesn't actually seem to work. That study really makes me, like when you were talking about that study, the first top pattern that was coming up was the fact that some people will have less empathy for others. So let's say, you know, you're someone who,

you know, was brought up in a two-parent household and, you know, your mum and dad would make you a home-cooked meal and they would take you to football and, you know, you were quite active and then you've never struggled with your body weight and then you then grow up thinking, oh, I'm in good shape because I just work hard, I'm just motivated, I'm just more ambitious than that person who might be obese, who might have come from a low socioeconomic background, who might have lived in a neighborhood that was actually dangerous to go out walking, who might have different genetics. But, you know, they're overweight because they're lazy and I'm in shape because, you know, I work hard. And that's the story I tell myself. Exactly. And we just constantly come up with

these rationalisations for why everything, why we're okay. Piff argues that that it's possible that the reason our empathy seems to diminish as we gain wealth. And obviously he's talking about money and possessions rather than physical appearance. But I'm all linked. He argues that possibly it's to do with the fact that money buys you space, like physical space. The more money you have, the bigger your house. You travel in cabs as opposed to taking the tube. You fly business class. You're likely to have a managerial position at work with your own office. You're less likely to be working alongside other people in the teams. So the more money you have, the less you are around other people and the less you depend on other people.

and empathy, we can think of it a little bit like a muscle. If you stop using it, it withers a little bit. So perhaps this is what is going on. Perhaps wealth actually buys us a kind of disconnection and loneliness that impedes our ability to connect with other people. And if that's the case, then we have an actionable way of countering it. You know, if we find ourselves in a position. And oh, I was about to say we find ourselves in a position of privilege.

But we're all in a position that nobody doesn't have some kind of, of advantage somewhere, whether it's race, gender, affluence, position in the world, position in your family or friendship group, nobody doesn't have at least one little chip that they can use. And if we don't acknowledge these chips, then we run the risk of falling into this very hubristic, disconnected, disempowering and actually eventually quite uncomfortable way of living where we're trying to accumulate all of our good stuff and take full ownership of it in an attempt to feel better about ourselves.

So it goes back to like the self-made man, isn't it? When there's no such thing really, because everyone has had help at some point to get them to stage to where they want to be. Yes. And if we just acknowledge that people feel like acknowledging the help of others or the assistance they've had along the way

will diminish their feeling of pride. But it doesn't. It expands it because then you get to feel proud not just of yourself, but of the people you're working with and of other people's successes, you know, sharing pride out actually makes it bigger and more fulfilling. But we live in this individualistic society where we've fallen into the trap of feeling like we really need to be the star of the show. And I think the more we try to focus on our individual brilliance, the less brilliant we feel.

Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Could you just explain the concept of mind monsters and how individuals can identify their own? Yeah, so mine monsters was something that came out of my book. So I wrote a book called The Mind Monster Solution, which is a big process of, I haven't spoken about it in quite a while. This was out in 2018, I haven't got all of my elevator pitch sentences. My mind, it's a long process of learning how to love the part of. of yourself that you fundamentally feel

to be unlovable. When I was competing as a fighter, so before, it feels like another life, about 15 years ago, I was, I was competing on the international scene as a kickboxer and then a boxer. I know, I wanted to ask you about it, but I also, like, it was so long ago that I don't, I want to still have like

fresh ideas in your mind that I'm asking versus always going back to probably feel like in their life. Yeah. I appreciate that. I mean, I'm prepared to talk about it does, it does always feel relevant, the boxing stuff, but, you know, I was in, The reason I became a therapist was because I started out, you know, I wasn't in that world at all.

I went to art school. And then I became an athlete and I was working full-time as an athlete and coach. And I was in this exact trap that we're talking about, totally focused on trying to make, on my own individual success, you know, believing that if I could just be the best fighter, I was going to say that I could be. But really, I wanted to be the best fighter of the people around me. And I know that I knew even then that that was unrealistic,

I know that that was what a part of me thought I needed to do in order to feel worthwhile or just in order to feel like a good fighter. It was completely broken. And what it meant was that I put the stress and strain on both my mind and my body were far too much. And I crashed completely physically and mentally. You know, I got to a place where my fatigue was so bone deep that I had to stop for breathers just walking up a flight of stairs. And as somebody who prided myself on my strength and my fitness, this was, you know, heartbreaking in every way possible.

So I avoided my burnout for a long time. I just did what any kind of in denial alcoholic would do, you know, told myself that it was all fine. Maybe I just had a cold. And as soon as I felt a little bit of energy coming back, I'd be straight back into the gym doing all of the same stuff that it caused me to crash in the first place. Ultimately, it got to a point where I couldn't ignore it anymore. Far longer into the process than I'd care to admit. And at that point, after exhausting all of the doctor,

I initially just thought doctors were going to be able to fix me. There's something wrong with my body, someone should be able to fix me. And I even got annoyed when people couldn't, you know. Were you fixated on like, oh, there's something wrong with me physically, not psychologically? Yeah, because I was so completely out of touch. It feels funny to say now because now I'm such, a different person but I was so out of touch I did not know how to feel my emotions I wasn't

aware of my thought processes you know I just thought I was having anxiety attacks on a daily basis um occasionally panic attacks and I thought I thought there was just something up with my body you know I didn't know I didn't know this was emotion it's so strange um eventually I you know it caused me to to train to to have therapy and that got me back onto my feet and he got me back into competition ultimately led me away from boxing because my therapy process really taught me I didn't want to be in this aggressive sport anymore i don't have any judgment for people who do boxing and still you know enjoy it as a training thing for but for me at that point it just didn't seem to make sense anymore so then i trained as a therapist and moved into that world um i can't remember what

what were we saying just before and then that was to translate over to to the mind monsters that's right That's very long intro to that. So I wrote a book for The Mind Monster Solution, which sort of documents that journey at the same time as offering tools as well as theories that I learned along the way that helped me to sort of alchemize my own fear. So when I was fighting,

I remember people continually saying things to me like, you just need to make fear your friend. Like, learn to love your fear. And I was at that time crippled by, fear and I was like, how? That sounds great, but how? How on earth am I supposed to do this? It was so impossibly abstract. And the work that I did with one of my therapists helped me to kind of personify my fear. So that's the monster. And the way that we think about things, especially in the West, we tend to think that these parts of the personality we don't like. So in my

case, this fear of weakness and failure that we just need to get rid of that part. We think, you know, I just need to kill this part of. And as I was working as a therapist, you'd have this all the time, you'd get people to personify their overeating problem and they'd see a sort of a fat, blobby character sitting on their hand. And I'd say, what do you want to do with that part? And they would aggressively smash it or throw it in the bin or kick it or say, I just wanted to disappear, I want to disown it. But the problem is that this desire to try and resist and get rid of these aspects of self, not only doesn't work, but it makes the situation harder because the further we push these psychological aspects away, the louder they have to scream in order to be heard.

And no part of the personality is bad. No part of the personality is fundamentally evil. No part of the personality wants to do us harm. Every part has a positive intention behind its behaviours. But just like a part that has got too wedded to the idea of drivers that we spoke about earlier on, the behaviours exhibited by these parts of the personality aren't necessarily helpful.

If we keep on the behaviour, we want to get rid of the part, but that doesn't work. So I wanted to write a book that helped people gradually get to know they're quote unquote monsters. To start by personifying it or visualising it and then to start to understand what lies beneath it, what its intentions are, how to connect with a part of the personality like that.

You can talk to it. There's nothing wrong with that. You can start to build a connection. And over the course of the book, people get a chance to come back and re-visualise and redraw if they want to, this part of the personality. And I've had these wonderful emails from people

who've sent this really angry scribble at the beginning that has evolved into this sort of beautiful, colourful, smiling, cute little critter at the end because that's the idea. To learn to empathise with ourselves and even with the parts of ourselves that we like the least. Because when we do that, they stop being monsters and they become teachers.

At the end of my book, this was a wonderful story. I wasn't sure. At the end of the book, I've been talking about metaphor and the importance of the symbols we give to things. things. And I, at this point, we're still talking about monsters in the book. And I, although we've reframed the idea of this monster, I was like, we have to give it a different name. But I don't know what to call it. And around this time, I found my old thesis from my degree. And I, it's still here somewhere. I started reading it. And a part of me was, I just wanted to kind of laugh at 22 year old Hazel's

attempt at writing because I was like, oh, I'm going to be so much better at this by now. I read the first page and I was, by the end of it, I was like, oh my God, I don't even know what half these words mean anymore. I've not got clever. I've got stupid. Am I punched drunk? What the hell has happened? It's a really bizarre crisis of confidence. And then I sort of shook my head and thought, okay, I need to give myself a talking to. So I left the office and I went into the kitchen and I boiled the kettle because if you're going to get philosophical about stuff, you absolutely need some tea. And as the kettle was boiling and as the water was bubbling up, I realized that the word monster is an anagram of the word

mentors. And I was like, holy moly, that's it. That's how it finishes, because we don't have one big black monster. If we just look at it differently, if we just rearrange our perception, we have multiple, like a team of mentors inside us. Every single experience, every thought, every feeling can teach us something about who we are, about the actions we need to take, about what matters to us, all of these other things that we really need to know in order to actually live our lives fully. And so that's how the book ends. That makes sense.

So like a fear is a mentor, it's a teach, teaching you something. Anxiety is a, it's a mentor. It's teaching you something. And instead of kind of trying to run away from these, whether that's kind of, over-training so you don't have to think about it or overeating or drinking or taking drugs or gambling or porn addiction or whatever it is. It's like, okay, you're trying to avoid what that's trying to teach you by using whatever coping mechanism you end up using. Yeah, well, you're trying to avoid how it makes you feel because that's the only thing we notice at first. If we just learn

to sit with the feeling and the discomfort of whatever that situation is, whatever the emotion is, and if we can encourage ourselves to get curious about where it's coming from and why it's here. So this idea that every experience we have, every experience produced by the unconscious mind and the body is there to teach you something. And that is totally true. You know, just as physical pain is there to encourage us to look after an ailment or injury or illness, psychological pain is there to direct our attention to a psychological pain or illness. or injury. And most of the time, that will come down to something like an unmet need, an unexpressed thought or opinion, a value that we're not living in line with. And we can

only start to recognize those things if we look underneath the surface level experience of our problems. But so long as we're trying to numb our problems and that surface level experience with things like overtraining or overeating or binge watching TV or whatever, then we never get to the actual information and we just stay in this holding pattern of avoidance. indefinitely. I love the idea of drawing a monster and making it real. Like making your thoughts real. I have a friend who he talks about his inner critic as

someone who constantly tells him that he's too overweight to wear shorts at the beach or to go into the gym and people will talk about him and like calls himself a piece of shit and stuff like that. And his name is Jerbo. He calls, he calls calls that person Frank. He goes, oh, that's just Frank talk. And that's just Frank giving out again,

shut up, Frank. And he kind of, he creates this real person so that he can kind of separate that negative self-talk to who he actually is. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's, that's it. So we don't end up identifying entirely with that part.

And I really encourage him as well to, in a time of, away from a time of conflict, perhaps not when he's feeling stressed and not when Frank is really spitting his most awful vitriol. to have a conversation with Frank and ask Frank what's most important to him and what he's trying to achieve. Because invariably, Frank

will be trying to protect your friend from something or other. Very often the inner critic, ironically, is trying to protect us from the outer critic. So the part of us that jumps up and says, you're too stupid to put that video out online.

You're going to look like an idiot. Or, you know, you can't write a book. Who do you think? you are. It is, it sounds like just pointless self-destruction, but it isn't. That comes out of a fear of exposure and fear of humiliation. And that part is trying everything it can to stop you from risking exposure and humiliation. So can I ask you a question? So let's say that that is, that is your fair. So you, your inner critic is telling you that, you know, you're too stupid to write a book or that video is going to look city or you shouldn't open that business or, you know, you're not

fit enough to apply for this race or whatever it is. But you know that these are things that you want to achieve, but that inner critic or that fear is holding you back from achieving everything that you want to achieve. Like how do we, like what techniques can people do to make sure that they can still pursue these things without kind of fear crippling them? Yeah, I like the way you put that without fear crippling them. So we have to remember that we don't get to pursue things that are different without some level of fear. Yeah. So it's about being able to minimize that experience so it doesn't stop us.

And there are lots of different things you can do. And of course, it's a courses for horses thing. And if I was working with someone in therapy and they were really dealing with a very limiting sort of in a critic part, I would always at some point get them to think back to where that voice originally came from. I really, really liked, I mean, I don't practice other therapists anymore. When I did, I really enjoyed for the people it seemed relevant for to work with early memories. And it's not that you're looking for the root cause of a certain problem. I don't really believe in root cause therapy. I don't really believe that we, I think it's arrogant to think that we can find the one and only initial incident, especially as memory.

We know now that memory changes constantly. Our records of the past are probably complete fiction, you know. Yeah, yeah, you build, like we said before, of the self-made man, like you build up your own story of how great you are, without remember and all the help you got or all the struggles you went through or how difficult it actually was. And equally, we build up stories about how awful things were for us too, you know, everything, if we keep going back to a memory, it becomes more and more of itself and because memory isn't, because memory is plastic and changing all the time. So it's not about trying to find the route. But if we recognise that what the mind does, mind uses categorisation to understand. understand things, right? So we don't have to work out what to do with a chair every time we come across a new one because we know what a chair is and we've got a category for chairs and anything that fits into that category. We know that we can sit down, you know, to the extent. And it generalises

so we understand that we can sit down on a bollard too and on a boulder or on somebody on all fours looking for their pen lid. You know, we we recognise as a chair category, I can do the thing. And most of the time that's not going to cause problems except for maybe my last example of the person on all forth. But in fear situations, it can cause great problems. Because if I had, so I once, I thought I just would have made a video lately about my old fear of public speaking. And I still have a bit of fear of public speaking, but it was really bad before. And I looked into my early memories and I remembered, I just basically, in order to do this, I got in touch with the fear of public speaking, which was easy because I had a talk coming up in about four weeks. I imagined myself

on stage and I started to feel the tension and vibration of anxiety, the way that I, my personal version of anxiety in that moment. And then I just asked my mind, if I, you know, if I would have traced this feeling back as far as I can go, what would be the earliest memories I would link to it? You know, what comes up for me? And my mind was on a wash with associations at that point. But one memory stood out. I was about seven years old performing in a school production of Cinderella. I had one line and I forgot to say it. And at the time when the plate was ground to a halt

and I remember thinking, oh, what's happening? And who's supposed to be speaking? And I was looking around. And then I realized that it was all my fault. And of course, as a seven-year-old, I was making it into this big thing. Everyone's going to hate me. You know, my parents are going to be disappointed.

And I saw I just stayed quiet and I waited for somebody else to pick it up and carry on, which of course happened as a play of seven-year-olds. an adult is like, come on, as if that could really be a problem still. But the fact that my mind immediately went there when I imagined standing on stage talking about my book, this was when my book came out and I had to do public speaking for the first time, really, means that my brain was putting those things into the same category. And one of the reasons we'd use categorization is so we can anticipate a situation. So if this thing is like that thing, then I can expect something similar from it. Yes. And so if my mind was putting that Cinderella experience in the same category

as my book promotion talk, then that must mean that a part of my mind was expecting to stand up on there, forget my lines, to feel totally exposed and like I was letting everybody down and looking stupid and all this other stuff. So, so I, so bearing in mind that memory is plastic and it changes, this means that I can take that early Cinderella memory, which feels relatively safe to work with as well, especially as an adult. And I can rewrite it. So I did that. I just, I imagine going back and talking to my younger self, standing there, and telling her that was okay, and that nobody minded, and it's all right to make mistakes.

And I encouraged her to say her line. And I had to spend quite a while getting my brain to imagine that. It did not like the idea of speaking, which was very telling. I did have this huge habit under pressure of going completely mute, just like that little girl on the stage. I mustn't say anything. If I'm just quiet, it's all going to go. way. But eventually I managed to convince myself to imagine her saying her line. And when she did, I imagined this beautiful gold light flowing out of her and into the audience. And I imagine my

parents in the audience. My dad had died a few years before this as well. So that was a very emotional experience for me. I imagined this gold light sort of flooding out everyone being being proud of me or happy to receive this line eventually. I even remember the line. The line was she's not even wearing any shoes. That was my one line in a school player at seven. I I still remember it. And that really changed the way I felt about this talk coming up. I used the visualization of this gold light repeatedly in between that point and the talk. So I'd imagine it going to sleep and I'd imagine it in the shower,

just to kind of repeatedly get my mind to sort of urging it to save this new and better version of the memory, which it has, by the way, because now I think back to that play, I imagine my little self, automatically imagine my little self with the gold light, whereas before I automatically imagined her standing there, everyone looking at her. So I've just updated this seemingly insignificant memory, but as a result, I've changed something in that category of public speaking fear. And now I can, not only do I find it much less terrifying, not necessarily calm, but less terrifying, but I've also trained myself to realize that any kind of performance is an act of gift giving. That that moment and any moment, and any

moment you're on stage, you're not, it's not all about you. You're not at the center of the audience's attention. The audience needs to be at the center of your attention. You're giving something of value. If you don't think you're giving something of value, you shouldn't be doing a talk. So that's such a really good reframe, isn't it as well, to get yourself to be calm and understand that. It's actually not about you. It's always, it's never about you. That's the thing. No matter what we're doing, there's always somebody else, somebody else's opinion to take and perspective to take into account. And whenever we do, it can be extremely calming because we just remember that not everybody is going to be focusing on our slightly quavering

voice or whether we put on half a kilo as much as we are. Yeah, I had a friend come on my podcast out the other day and I think it might have been his first ever time being on the podcast and he did that exact same frame. It was like, he was like, oh, why would I be on a podcast? What do I have to talk about? And then he had to reframe it and he was like, no, Carl actually asked me to come on this podcast. So he wants to get something. something out of me. So it is for him and I helped him to kind of ease himself into actually recording the episode. Exactly. Yeah. Everyone has something to offer. Everyone's story is worth something. Yeah. It made a big difference. And actually that was a big part of the process of the

sort of alchemy of my monster to eventually the evolution of my monster went from this black amorphous cloud of fear and shame. And in the end, I imagined that scared part of me as, a little girl around age seven. It was also linked to, a lot linked to my dad. My dad was really, he was a sporty guy. He was a very gregarious, funny, charming guy. And he wasn't around that much when I was young because he worked. He was a scientist and he did a lot of traveling for work. He wasn't absent, but he'd be away, you know, maybe a week every month. And that counts a lot when you're little. So when he was around, I was desperate for her, for his connection and love and attention. And one of the ways I recognized I would get it

was when I did sporty stuff. I had this memory of him being at a school sports day and me doing like the 60 yard dash or whatever and winning and him being over the moon. And I also have a memory of, I think it was at his 40th birthday party when he called me downstairs to show his friends my biceps.

So I had these like bolting biceps as a little girl. And I was so proud that he had called me downstairs to show me off to his friends. And so no wonder my mind started to put an over-dramatic emphasis on the need to be physically dominant and successful in a physical, sporty way, because, you know, that was where, that was how I felt connected to my dad. That's so interesting. That's so interesting.

Do you think, like, lots of high performers, like, in sport, they have this kind of inferiority complex where it's like they don't feel good enough, and that's almost what drives them to get to that next level, that most people don't put themselves true. I get in trouble for this question because yes, I do. But I don't think that is limited to sports. Yeah. I think that we're all doing it in our own ways.

And I think one of the big problems we have as a society is that a lot of the people at the top, whether it's in business or sports or Hollywood, a lot of those people, it's less so at Hollywood. It's something you see less with actors than you do with people, you know, sports tycoot, like I'm thinking of Trump, of course. and a sort of angry inferior-feeling athletes,

like Rhonda Rousey was somebody often used to point to for that who said she would rather die in the ring than give up. Yeah. I think he's just a little bit out of... Tiger Woods was the same as well. He would, Tiger Woods is done putting through horrendous things and like people only seeing that, oh, I'd love to be Tiger Woods. He's the greatest of all time,

not knowing anything about kind of his childhood and what he went through. And no wonder that showed up in like, sexual behaviours and stuff like that. Exactly. And we see it so often that it's very easy to believe that you have to use the stick as opposed to the carrot

in order to motivate yourself and people who are used to beating themselves up in order to do stuff or to achieve find it very hard to even contemplate letting go of their shame and self-criticism because they think it's what's got them

to where they are. The reality is, I mean, in theory at least is very, very hard to test this. the carrot can get you just as far as a stick. In fact, I would say it arguably gets you further because if you are motivating yourself based on what you genuinely want and then enjoying that success,

as opposed to motivating yourself based on what you don't want, which is to be a failure or to be pathetic or whatever it is you running from, you may be, maybe objectively you go to the same distance, but the experience of it is entirely different and there's no point in reaching goal if you can't enjoy it, which you never will

if you're running from a monster. I even see it, I even see it in terms of people trying to achieve body composition goals, whether it is weight loss or whatever it is. It's like, you know, am I, am I going towards this goal because I hate how I look and I hate who I am

versus I'm going towards this goal because I love who I am and I respect who I am and I enjoy it. It's like it's the same goal. It might be just reducing your calories or going to the gym or whatever. but just your perspective around it is completely different. One's going to be far more enjoyable.

Yes, and also and much more sustainable because if we focus only on the goal, that's also to do with process and goal orientation. So if we focus on the goal, let's say I want to lose a kilo. If I focus on losing the kilo and I do all the things I want to do in order to lose that kilo, what happens when I've lost it? You know, have I built up a good habit? Probably not.

I probably just feel. I probably would want to go further. Now I want to lose another kilo. Yeah. But if I, if with the same kind, in the same kind of area, instead of focusing on wanting to lose a kilo, what if I focus on, really engaging in sports that I absolutely love to do for the sake of doing them?

Or eating food that is gorgeously healthy, not calorie restricted, but gorgeously healthy. Like if I say, I can start with a kind of a negative point. Now, maybe I feel a little unhealthy and make some lifestyle changes. But instead of I'm going to make those changes in order to get to where I want to be, I'm going to make those changes based on how to live the life I actually want to live. Now I can lose this kilo, but I can probably keep it off much more easily because I have chosen a load of things that I genuinely love doing.

And I really love going out for long walks. And I really enjoy this beautiful Japanese salad that I worked out how to make the other day. These things can get me there, but they also are worthwhile in doing in themselves. And they don't feel like self-punishment. So it's just infinitely better in all respects. Yeah, it's like I have to eat the salad or I get to eat the salad. I get to eat this nutritious salad versus I have to eat this, you know, boring plain salad because I'm trying to lose weight because I hate how I look.

Exactly, exactly. Who wants, which is very easy to choose between those two world views. But we rarely do. Do you think that like to get started though, there has to be some sort of kind of ignition of pain and not being happy in a place where you are to to almost use the stick a little bit and then that kind of transform into the carry because I see it in a lot of people as well it's like okay I started training because I'm not happy with my circumstances I'm not happy how I look but then maybe after a while

why they continue isn't because there's lots of, you know, self-hatred, but because they actually just enjoy how they feel after they do the thing. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that's a very, I think it's a very good point. There has to be, if we want to make a change, there must be a reason we want to make a change. So in any situation where, where we are going to make a change, there will be a pain point as well as all of the,

potential rewards. Sometimes a pain point can be extremely small because if we just want, and that's really where we want it to be. I think there's a particular dialectic

which is a conflicting thought state where we can, the aim really to be our best selves is to be able to recognize that we can accept ourselves fully and we can feel 100% worthy as we are right now

at the same time as knowing that we can be better and that we want to change. You know, and a lot of people really struggle with that. Because they think if I can be better in any way or if I want to change any way, that must mean that who I am right now is bad. And if we fall into that habit, then we get that very fear-based, shame-based,

stick-motivated behavior that just puts us on a treadmill that never gets us anywhere and we just, the monster gets bigger and bigger. But if we can recognize that it's always possible to actually enjoy the process of striving for more and learning new skills and changing, and yeah, sure, things like getting things like getting. fitter or stronger or whatever at the same time as knowing that we at every point along that journey have been worthwhile. If we can train ourselves to believe that conflicting thought pattern, then we can really do amazing things and enjoy the process of doing them. I think a lot of people

fall into the trap of thinking, okay, if I'm if I'm not hard on myself or if I don't punish myself or if I accept myself as I am, then I won't get to the next level or I won't continue to progress. Yeah, they think, oh, they'll just lie back and watch Netflix and be lazy. And I don't think that would be true for many people at all. We might do it for a few days. And it might be the best thing you could deal. Maybe we'd need to, you know, if we've been running and running and running away from something all this time.

But nobody wants to stay in that state forever unless they're pinned there by fear. Yeah, it's another thing we can find ourselves doing indefinitely because we are consumed by fear and shame. But if we actually accept ourselves fully, we will want to do nourishing, wonderful, vibrant things with our life. And that will include learning amazing stuff. embarking on exciting projects. I wanted to ask you about trauma

because obviously I think a lot of people's perception of trauma is that it's this big, you know, arch and big event that happens in someone's life and that then that obviously ripples into other aspects or areas of their life. Could you just kind of like explain what trauma is and, you know, how it can show up in like big and severe things and also or maybe small things that might seem insignificant. Kind of like just the example you spoke about

in terms of on stage at the play as a seven-year-old girl. I mean, in therapy, we often talk about capital T and lower-case T trauma. Because there is a difference, right? If someone can have a really big capital T trauma, like some kind of awful abuse they suffered when they were younger. And that will affect them differently than somebody who has had lowercase T traumas like the one I was, I mean, I wouldn't even sure if I would class.

Maybe I probably would, low case tea trauma, Cinderella thing, because it was just because it was quite young and, and stuck with me. But, and there would be, they, you would, I mean, every, every individual needs different treatment anyway, but also you would be likely to treat those types of experiences differently. And you really, really handle capital T trauma with the greatest care and caution and, patience because it can be difficult to get past. You know, it really absolutely affects the way your brain forms itself, actually, if it happens young enough.

But this, but the fact that that stuff happens and it doesn't happen to all of us, I think the key takeaways, that doesn't mean we should write off the things that we have that have happened to us if they are, you know, more of the lowercase-tie things. Because we can only experience what we can experience, what we can experience, right?

The worst day of my life is always going to be the worst day of my life, even if somebody else has had a much worse day. Yeah, it's ridiculous to compare the two events. Yes, yeah, and I think so much of our, you know, struggles as adults comes down to dismissing our pain, both past pain and present pain, and you can very easily fall into the trap of, you know, how dare I feel dissatisfied with my marriage when, my husband isn't beating me like my friend's husband is.

It doesn't mean that your marriage is now fine just because it's not as objectively bad as another one that you are aware exists. And if we keep dismissing our own pain, then we just get, again, we just get further and further away from who we are. We push the monsters further and further away, and that means the monsters get bigger and bigger and more monstrous,

and we end up consumed by automatic behaviours that are coming from a place that we feel, It's completely invisible because we have just been dismissing every single thing that's been happening to us along the way. So, yes, although you can recognise as a difference between this sort of objective level of trauma, when it comes to the subjective experience of them and our reaction to them, they all need to be treated with the same gravitas. They need to be treated with the same level of importance. Do you think is the, let's say trauma with a low capital T, is that more difficult to, to find?

binding people because it might be kind of subconscious because it feels like it's a small act so it might feel irrelevant to the person but obviously it's showing up in their day to day lives. Yes and no. I mean, first of all, like capital T trauma can absolutely be invisible. We can have been through the most friend of things

and the brain can get very skilled at blocking these things out. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Because it's trying to protect you by getting it to forget. Exactly. Amnesia is a protective device as is dissociation.

We can even not really experience a trauma while it's happening because our body just learns to shut down our senses and go somewhere else to try and avoid the experience. So it's not necessarily the case that capital T traumas are going to be very obvious in the front of somebody's minds whereas the low-case T is going to be harder to find. But at the same time, as I just said, because people write things off, it can be tricky to,

you can take a little time to, give those sorts of things the importance that they deserve. But at the same time as well, remember what I was saying about not necessarily being able to find the root cause of any particular issue. You know, it's tempting when working with memory to feel like we need to delve in and find the one thing that's going to make the difference.

And I just fundamentally don't believe that that's possible. I think that sometimes people could work with the memory and seem to do a great reframe and nothing much changes. And then you carry on working on other things and over time the little changes in different areas, not just stuff you do in the past, but stuff about imagining the future and stuff about your current behaviour.

Because the mind doesn't leave things in separate places. Everything works together. So as you build up little, little shifts in all of these different areas, at some point it reaches a point where it goes over threshold. And then you're like, oh, I feel better actually. And there's no way of saying, okay, that was the thing that made the difference

because it's just been an accumulation of changes that have affected your perspective on the world. There's a really good study that I, that I'm always obsessed with when I'm talking about obesity with people. And it's women who have been sexually assaulted. I can't remember the percentage, but are far more likely to become obese and they use it as a protective mechanism

to, you know, keep predators away. Because, you know, if they feel like that they're not sexually attractive, then that will protect them from predators. And I just think it's really interesting, how like something that you might deem as, you know, something that's impacting you in a negative way, but it has a purpose, even if you don't realize what that purpose is. That's the perfect example of the positive intention beneath a problematic behavior. And that positive intention won't necessarily be obvious to the person who's overeating,

might as well be very unconscious. One of my pet hates is the lack of empathy and compassion that people often display when confronted with something like that, you know, fatness is absolutely in the cultural shadow. As a culture, we look down on it. And I had a partner once who was, he was, he was, you know, he was an athlete. And he was also a thin person naturally. So there's no way he just would never put on weight. He doesn't know what it's like.

And when you would see somebody who was overweight, he'd just be like, just eat less. And I was like, it's never that simple. Do you not think they've thought of that? You not think they've thought of that? And people like that often say that they hate, you know, the sort of the body positivity movement and people using plus size models. And I spoke to something the other day, it was saying they hated the fact that they thought this was glorifying and promoting. They even use the word promoting obesity. I was like, they're not promoting obesity.

What people don't understand is that most people, I mean, sometimes that will be a physiological thing anyway, hormonal or glandular or whatever. Right. So we don't know what's happening there. But if it is to do with overeating, then that usually is born out of the type of situation you're talking about. It doesn't need to have been sexual abuse can be all sorts of difficulty in the background that has caused this behaviour. And the first thing anybody needs in order to change a behaviour that's been born out of shame and fear is to feel accepted and safe and seen and heard and all of this stuff that we all have an absolute fundamental right to. And if we don't allow those people visibility on TV or if we shame them for being fat and tell them to stop eating, we are probably making them more, we are probably contributing to the problem that causes their overeating rather than helping them in any kind of way. You know, this is, this is becoming, I noticed this changing in the popular culture.

People are becoming more empathetic about it as a result of things like the body positivity movement and that's great. We aren't quite there yet. And the reason is because it's so much in the cultural shadow that we would hate ourselves to get to a place of obesity. And so we really find it hard to witness on other people. I just think we need to make a concerted effort to start with empathy because it's really, I just think the only way that we can actually make a change on mass. Yeah.

I don't consider, I don't think I was naturally born as someone who was empathetic to other people in any kind of area. but like I think a reframe that I've that I've used over the years whether it's like I'm looking at someone who's suffering from obesity alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling

or whatever it is someone who's quite aggressive it's like now I always think like that person was a child that was a child and something happened to them and that's whatever their circumstances or environment was that's how they ended up in where they are in terms of their position

and like that could have easily been me but I just grew up in a different environment, different circumstances, and was exposed to different things in the world. Yeah, exactly. If only we all just took that stance more often, it isn't always easy because sometimes we'll be triggered into a strong emotional reaction

and it's hard to access those level-headed thoughts and perspectives while in the grip of those emotions. So I also have empathy for people who struggle to see it, but I do just, I fully believe that if we could all just start moving more towards that stance more often, if we can help other people to take that stance when they're feeling triggered or help them calm down first and then take that stance, we would live in a better world. Yeah.

I wanted to talk to you about relationships, because I presume that's something that you helped a lot of people with when you were practicing as a therapist. I mean, yeah, relationships are kind of connected to everything. I was never a relationship therapist. I didn't work with couples, but, you know, they're all pretty much. the question that I wanted to ask it was like what do you think is the secret to building meaningful, last in relationships? Wow. And the reason I ask that is just because the type of people that listen to my podcast, okay, they might be listening because, you know, they have body composition goals or fat loss goals or they just want to improve their health and stuff like that.

But then what I see a lot of the time is a lot of the relationships around them actually impacts their actually. and behaviours as well. Like if it's someone who I'm working with who, you know, they might have a certain group of friends who isn't really contributing to the person that they're actually trying to become now and it's difficult for them. Or they might have a partner who,

you know, is getting upset because they're spending all this time in the gym where they're trying to get in shape and that other person is not getting in shape. And now they're passing little comments like, oh, don't get too lean or don't, you know, or you look fine as you are, but you don't change too much.

And I've noticed that relationships can be a big aspect to people getting the desired results they want or not, whether that's going in one direction or the other direction. Yeah. And it's one other one of those big topics. It's hard to kind of, it would be different for everybody. But I think that a really important thing with relationships, first of all, we need to realize that we, by and large,

can choose the people we spend time with. It can be difficult when we need to make changes to family, for example. But friends, certainly and definitely partners. We pick these people. So again, we need awareness about why we are choosing people. And whether we do have to stay friends with somebody that doesn't make us feel good because the answer is invariably, no, you don't have to stay friends with anybody. It's hard to unfriend somebody, but sometimes it's necessary.

But before we can start making those kinds of decisions about who we spend our time with, we have to work on self-awareness. If we don't, again, if we can't start to get in touch with our real selves, then we are not present for any of our relationships. We will not feel, it's much harder to feel connected to people if our authentic self is not in a relationship

because we know that we're hiding our authentic selves. And we often think things like, well, if they just knew the real me, they'd leave, or they won't like who I actually am. You know, we create these, facades that we think we have to show to the world. But in doing that, we just get more and more disconnected. So I think that in any conversation about relationships,

the first thing that we need to do is to do the work on ourselves. And I also think that it takes time. But if somebody spends some time working on themselves, if they go to therapy or if they work with meditation or if they do lots of stuff, like how would they choose to do it journaling, the better they get to know themselves, the easier it is for the people around them to feel good,

you know, to feel that you have people around you that feel good to be with. And I think it often happens quite, I think people sometimes go on a big cull, like a friendship cull and they're like, I'm choosing to be a person who's building my self up in a certain way, and therefore I'm getting rid of the people who don't serve me. I don't think that's really, it can be really traumatic, both of the person doing it and the people on the other end.

And I think if you do it in an organic way, if you're just learning who you are and you're getting and you're building genuine, authentic self-connection and self-compassion, over time, the people that aren't right for you, they just, they phase out. Yeah. You don't make a conscious decision for it to happen. You might need to, if you recognize, often people are in really toxic relationships when they begin the work and they start to realize a relationship is toxic. And so you might, yeah, you might need to take steps to, to change that. dynamic or if it's a partner you might want to leave the partner you know there are things that you might need to do but I don't think it's ever a case of this huge kind of big immediate change it's more likely to be it doesn't it doesn't have to be this big washout where you tell

everyone that I can no longer and talk to you now because I'm trying to get in shape or I'm trying to build a business it can be it can be literally just okay now I'm going to set boundaries that I wouldn't have set before where like maybe you're a people please or who just says yes to everything and that's actually preventing you from moving forward with whatever goal you have, whether it's writing a book or, you know, getting in shape or whatever it is, to be able to set them boundaries that you probably weren't setting before. That's a perfect example. If somebody is a people pleaser and they've just been a yes man and they've been looking after everybody and then and then they start to learn to say no, they will very quickly work out who out of

their friends actually values them for who they are and who is just, been using them because of their people pleasing patterns because they will because of people who they genuinely want to stay friends with will be the ones who might might be a little bit off put off put by the initial no and they might it like to get a little bit of time to recalibrate but the ones who really just aren't prepared to be friends with you when you are a boundary self-respecting person will disappear it'll disappear before long it looks after itself then And yeah, exactly. In those smaller situations, this is, this doesn't apply to big abusive relationships where the dynamic is different.

But in those smaller situations, you know, friends that are just sort of hanging around like a bad smell often, using you in different ways because you have been giving all of these resources away, they won't stick around. And it will be good. They'll disappear and you'll be like, oh, I haven't seen such and such in a while. And then you'll think, and that feels good. Yeah, I don't care. You know, that's all you need to know. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's say it is a bigger dynamic, like it's a very intense relationship. And, you know, one person is growing or changing significantly and the other feels left behind. How does someone maneuver that dynamic? I mean, again, it's just difficult because it would be different for every relationship. You know, if there's abuse involved, if there's abuse involved, go and speak to somebody. get a therapist or a counsellor or speak to your doctor or somebody objective and get the advice you need because I couldn't issue a sort of one-size-fits-all

a bit of advice for anything like that. But if it's not abusive and it's just about the kind of growing pains in a relationship because right, that can really be difficult. If one person goes on a big path of change and the other person who doesn't, if it stays that way, it's the relationship is likely to end but it doesn't necessarily have to. But you need to be aware of process all the way through. So if you're the person who's changing and the other person seems to be digging their heels and resisting the change and it's getting difficult, talk to them about it. And it's such an obvious thing, but you have to find out how they're actually feeling

because there's a, it could be that they are projecting their own insecurities onto you. So if you are getting fitter, for example, and they are not, they could be resenting you and making and or feeling like you're now judging them. And if that's the case, they might just need their minds, put at ease in order to feel better about it. But you know, you just can't ever, you can't ever change how another person sees the world or how they act. You shouldn't try to. But you can just try to understand it. And it's amazing how much conflict can dissolve when you've actually had sat down and had a proper open as calm as possible, heartless.

to heart about what's going on because when you see the other person's point of view, suddenly things are different. So I would say that that's the way. And if the relationships just isn't going to work out, you'll know over time. It will, you'll realise and it will have to come to an end. And that's never easy, but it happens. But if the relationship can work out, you'll also know how to work on it and get that to happen as a result of talking to the other person.

Do you think that's where most relationships fall down is that communication aspect that seems so obvious actually doesn't happen? Probably. Probably. We really get, we find it very hard to have vulnerable conversations and we much prefer to just make up our own version of what's happening and then, yeah, because I would have clients who would, you know, be ranting about their husband or ranting about their girlfriend and say, oh, I couldn't go here because of this and he's doing this and I was like, instead of ranting at me, did you actually have that conversation with the partner? Probably not.

Yeah, exactly. He thinks this, she thinks this, but do they? You know, have you, have they said that? And people say, yeah, they have definitely said it. Have they actually said it or have they said something that sounds a bit like it? Now, don't be afraid to talk to people. Amazing things can happen when people talk. And ultimately, any problem in any relationship will resolve itself if and really only if both parties take 100% of the responsibility. Gay Hendrix, who was a psychiatrist, I think, in the States. He's written a lovely few books.

One of them is called Big Leap. And he talks about how there's always 200% responsibility up for. grabs in any one problem. And the problem is that we think there's 100% and that we each need to take our 50. But when we think of it in that way, we end up taking 49 because we're like, I'm taking my 50, but really it's a bit more their fault than ours. And you always, then the other person does exactly the same. They take 49. There's always 2% left that is not getting resolved because we try to do our part at the same time as holding on to this idea, but it was always more their fault than it was ours. And so the only way a relationship issue gets,

as if you both recognize this 200% responsibility upro grabs, meaning that you both have to take 100% responsibility, means that you act as if it is all up to you to change. And if both of you do that, problems basically just go off and smoke. They disappear. But you have to let go of this sort of jostling for the victim position. We all want to be able to say, I'm the victim here, you're doing this to me. Poor me.

If we get rid of that urge to prove our own helplessness, then things really change. Yeah, what can my partner do for me versus what can I do for my partner? And what can I do for the relationship as well? I wanted to get your thoughts on purpose and even if we could go back to like speaking on, let's say the high performer and like the dangers of your purpose being the best in the world, the best athlete,

the best writer, the best content creator, the best podcaster, like what can be the dangers of aligning your purpose with that? best position. If your purpose is all about yourself, then you are locking yourself into a life of self-consciousness. It's as simple as that. If your purpose is all focused on, I want to be this, or especially I want to be the best at something or other, then you will spend your entire life comparing yourself to other people, feeling like you're failing if anybody does anything better than you. And when you get there, let's say you get there. Let's say you want to be the

fastest man in the world, 100 metre sprint. When you get there, you will have like five minutes of feeling amazing. And then immediately you have this dopamine crash and you feel like crap. And then the very next day, you're back in training because there's another race coming up and there's another threat of losing your position as fastest man in the world. It's a very, very frightening, tense situation to live in. Your purpose is instead to do something that helps the rest of the world or animals or people or whatever it is that you choose it to be. It doesn't need to be a big egalitarian charitable mission.

It doesn't need to be that. It just has to involve the rest of the world. Then you are setting yourself up for a life that feels connected. And less be focused. I love that the concept of the gold medal syndrome, like, when athletes go over to the Olympics and they might win gold medal and then instantly after,

after all this train and to become the best, they become the best. And then there's this like a massive just dip and like feeling depressed. I think Michael Phelps after he won gold, he said he was depressed for for weeks or months after. Yeah. Yeah.

And Phelps famously talked about how he was, he was powered by fear. He was so, he raised because he was afraid of losing rather than because he loved the idea of racing. And yeah, he's just another perfect example of what we were saying earlier on where we look at somebody and say, okay, that's how to be the best. And we don't question how they experience the best.

But did Phelps also? I think it was Phelps also how it became an alcoholic and had a string of DUIs or a big crash of something. I think it was Phelps. I'm really sorry if I've just said that when it isn't him. But there was certainly a swimmer in that category. And it just, yeah, it was really difficult because in part of that's because you set yourself up for this idea of when.

I, when I am X, when I am the best in the world, I will feel so, I will feel worthy, but we don't. We get there and we're like, oh, I feel just as, just, in fact, I probably feel more empty than I did before, because now my goal has gone as well. Yeah, it's so fleet and it's literally for one day, whereas you've probably tried for the last 10 years up until that point. Yeah. And it can't, we, we're hoping for something that is literally impossible. No external achievement can change how we feel about ourselves on the inside can change our sense of self-worth because they are in, different places, different types of thought. One is an inside job.

The other is outside external objective achievements. They are totally different categories of things. And so if we hope that one is going to bring us the other, then we're just setting ourselves up for a huge disappointment. And when that is coming at the end of a big 10 year buildup, like you just mentioned, then it's really, I can be in a very unstable position after that. I've gone from someone who might be put into purpose,

into the wrong domain versus someone who, let's say, feels like they lack purpose in their life. They feel quite aimless. Do you have any advice for anyone who feels like that at the moment? I mean, it's the same as the relationship of advising that you've got to start with yourself. It's very hard to, and the purpose question, by the way, is kind of difficult because people, I think we've fallen into a habit of thinking that everybody needs to have a purpose in life. And then we confuse purpose with mission. And so we think that to have a purpose is to be.

working towards one external goal. And then we fall into the trap of everything we've just been talking about. Purpose is not mission. And I think a better way to think about purpose is to is to question what feeling purposeful in the act of doing something is like for us. What gives us a sense of present moment purpose while we're doing a thing. So it's not purpose is not so much about a future projection. That's mission.

That's an outcome. purpose is about how we live while on the journey. And so that changes things. So then we can start to ask us, I'll say, well, if I don't feel like I've got a sense of purpose right now or if I don't feel like anything makes me feel purposeful right now, what can I remember in my life? What did feel good in a way?

What made me feel like I was contributing something to the world or even just to myself in a really wholesome way? And you'll start to notice there'll be little moments of that. And purpose can often feel a lot like flowing that you get, lost in a price because the thing that you're doing is just so right for you to be doing. That's a beautiful way of looking at purpose and it changes the things. You don't need a big goal for purpose actually. You need to know that you're affecting things that matter.

That makes sense. Like I've fallen into the trap of thinking like my identity is, you know, the personal trainer. And then I was like, oh, well, what if I lost my job for whatever reason, people stopped coming to work with me or whatever, whatever happened? And then I'm like, okay, then I have no identity left. I have to have no purpose. So then I had to kind of rearrange what my identity was.

And, you know, what I did was like instead of putting it into one area, one box of my life, like what areas of my life bring me purpose, joy, feel good. It's like, okay, well, you know, I feel purpose when I'm out with my friends having a laugh. So, you know, I could be a good friend every day and that could give me purpose. I could be a good brother. I can, you know, be an adventure. I love going hike and whatever it is. And like I can be them things every day.

day and it's not just fitting into one little narrowing over a box and kind of spread myself too tame. Exactly. And you can sometimes recognise kind of quite abstract links between very seemingly different things that both give you a sense of purpose. I've looked into this fair amount of myself and I've found that most of the time I'm doing something that involves communication of of information that I feel is important or especially information around you know, clearly mental health stuff, anything that I feel is going to help people to achieve self-awareness and therefore improve their ability to empathise and connect with the world. Once I'm doing anything like that, I can feel really, really purposeful about it.

But that's not just, you know, obviously that applies to what we're doing right now. And it applies to being a therapist. And also like... An hour or a speaker, barking to someone. Even when I was right, you know, I was, I spent a little while, I used to sing a lot. And I learned guitar, I didn't get to play guitar particularly well, to be honest. But for a while there, I was writing songs. And even that, you know, that felt in the same category.

And so it doesn't need to purpose, really doesn't need to limit you to a certain area of life at all. And I also don't think it should be connected to your identity. If you associate too much with your purpose, my identity is a person who communicates information that helps people to empathize. Like, that starts to feel limiting too. The identity is even bigger than people. purpose or maybe it's the other way around. I'm not entirely sure, but either way, they're slightly different. And if we get the, if we get the levels of these things mixed up, just

like you were saying, your identity as a personal trainer, being a personal trainer is actually with your job, that means it's your behaviour. It's just the thing you do. It's not who you are as a person. And that's the same purpose. Your purpose is not who you are as a person. Well, we see this all the time when like high performing athletes get injured. Like they lose, they get injured. They can never play their sport again. They get like an ACL injury on their and then they go into this depth of despair because they've lost that one thing that they are. They are the football or they are the basketball

or they are the volleyball player. They are the boxer. They are the kickboxer. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's often going to be hard, but I used to see this a lot when I was fighting and people getting either injured

or just coming to the end of their career and really struggling with the transition. And that didn't happen to me at all because by the time I left boxing, I was already... trained up and working as a therapist. So I feel very, very glad about that. But had I not done,

had I not had the burnout that led to the therapy work that I did for myself, that probably wouldn't have been the case. And people can hold on to things way longer than it's healthy because of, because of that. I only have three more questions for you and then I'll let you go. So the first question I wanted to ask you was, how do you define success and how has that definition

changed over time for you? Well, it's how it's changed is much to do with the purpose stuff we were just talking about. I used to think success was, you know, all about external achievement. I definitely don't think that now. I don't know if I have a ready definition. I suppose I would say that I feel successful when I'm making, when I'm, when I'm living in a way that feels interesting to me and valuable to me and purposeful. So it's kind of vague. But, yeah, I don't really think about success or not success much.

But do you think that it kind of needs to be vague because of the things that we just spoke about? It's like putting yourself into boxes if we don't. Yeah. I actually think we need to stop talking about success so much because it just inherently feels connected to outcomes. You either achieve success or you don't. And I think that's limiting in itself. I don't ever ask myself, do I feel successful? I sometimes have this realization that other people must look at me and think of me as successful.

I had that realization the other day because somebody said it about somebody else. I think she's very successful because she's doing X, Y, and Z and she was doing similar stuff to me. I thought, well, most people must say that about me or think that about me. And I thought, that's weird. I could get successful in comparison to what, you know? It feels like it's such a meaningless term. So I'd like to get rid of it.

So my next question would be, how do you cultivate inner peace and how can people create more inner peace in their lives? I really think you need to start asking some bigger questions because it's just, you know, so detail-focused. how does somebody creating a piece? I'll make it easier for you. How did you create it?

Do you feel like you have inner peace? Sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes. I mean, I think. How did you cultivate that? Because obviously, as we spoke about, you didn't have that before.

I don't think I cultivated it so much as I think it's another one of those things. It's like self-worth. I think it's always there. And, you know, you don't, create a life in order to experience in a piece. It doesn't, if you try to do that, you almost certainly won't. But rather, it's there for you to experience and you just need to stop for a moment. And if you do that, you will. So, or if you do the work that gets in the way

of the stuff that kind of blocks you. So I think that really, it's kind of the same answer to it. I mean, my answer to everything is to do the work and get to know yourself. And the better you do, the more you do of that work, the better you get at at achieving the things. you want in life, experiencing things you want in life, like in a piece. So yeah. Last question, sorry, sorry. Last question that I wanted to ask you was just about is it, I just want to make sure that I'm pronouncing this right, the B-Twix, Twix, Twix app, isn't it?

Yeah, betwixt, like, as in the word, betwixt and between, you know, it's a sort of slightly archaic word that means in the middle of something. Can you tell me a little bit about that and what the inspiration behind it was? Yeah, but Twixst is a fantasy interactive adventure game that allows the players to, to develop skills of self-awareness, self-compassion, and also some emotion regulation tools like self-distance, while immersed in a fantasy world and engaging in this very magical liminal space.

So there's a space called the world is called the Inbetween. You find yourself there speaking to this voice, sort of disembodied voice called the voice. You know it only is a voice. and the voice explains that this world needs just one thing from you and it's for you to be able to see yourself clearly. And when you can do that, things will change. You'll break free of this limitation. And so you go through the game having these experiences with the voice and the world reacts to you. So the weather becomes your emotion. You know, you see things in the world that are based on your experiences. and the idea was to create a different way to engage in in therapeutic tools and personal development

rather than the kind of clinical quite boring apps and books that a lot of us have done a number of we wanted to see if we could make you know the problem with those things is that the learnings don't tend to stick that well sometimes little bits too but in terms of creating enduring behavioral change is quite difficult when you're just learning something from in a logical factual way. It's easier if you actually get to experience it.

And so we wanted to see if we could create a world that you actually step into and where and it's engaging because now the story of it brings you back and it helps you to learn better because you're immersed in the world and therefore you remember it more easily. Yeah, that's great because people learn in different ways. People do visualisation.

Some people listen through listening. and there's loads of different ways in which you can learn. So where can people go to find this app to give it a go? It's on the app stores. So if you're an iOS user, if you've got an iPhone, then it's in the iOS app store and it's on Google Play for Android users. And it's free for anybody who needs it to be free. You know, we obviously it needs to support itself.

It's extremely expensive for an app to run. So we do need some people to pay, but it's optional. You can either request a free slot if you don't have money or you can upgrade. It's always a one-off payment. We don't have a subscription, various different levels, if you want to support us

and get some extra resources. And we've got a Discord community as well. We've got about 5,000 people in our Discord community as well. There's such lovely people. That's constantly growing. So if you download the app, you can also click on the little world icon in the top right-hand corner

and come and join us in Discord for more chats and self-awareness work. Hazel, this has been really, really, really inspirational. I really appreciate your time. Is there anywhere else that people can go to follow your work? Yeah, you can find well all over the place. You can find us.

If you search for betwixt on YouTube, I think we're betwixt underscore app on YouTube and betwixt dot app on both Instagram and and TikTok. I think actually your YouTube might just be betwixt at one word. Either way, but search betwixt and it will come up a purple, a purple logo with a bee on it. And yeah, we post videos weekly, so lots of stuff going out there. Brilliant. Okay, I'll make sure to have everything attached on the show notes.

But listen, thank you very much for today. I've really appreciated your time. I'm so glad we finally managed to both be, you know, available and healthy at the same time. Yeah, yeah, long overdue. Hazel, thanks again. Enjoy the rest of your day. You too. Thanks for watching. If you like that episode and you want to see more content like this, make sure you're subscribed,

and I'll see you on the next one.