Bruce Feiler on Life Transitions

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. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Bruce Filer, the author of seven New York Times bestsellers. He's also the presenter of two primetime series on PBS and the inspiration for the drama series Council of Dad's on NBC. Bruce's two Ted talks have been viewed millions of times. Today, Eric and Bruce discussed his book Life Is in the Transitions, Mastering Change at Any Age. Hi, Bruce, welcome to the show. Thank you very much to Life. We'll be with you.

I'm excited to have you on. Your book is called Life Is in the Transitions, Mastering Change at Any Age. And we'll get more into the book in a moment. But let's start, like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather. He's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and

hatred and fear and the grounds that stops. 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 ask you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. So what I love about this parable, and what I love about this question, is that the work that I do now and that I've been doing for half a decade is talking to people about the stories they tell,

that the stories of who they are. Right, we all have this kind of voice that's going on in the back of our head and who we are and where we came from and who we want to be and what I've come to realize that that story is not part of us, like it is us in a fundamental way. And in the course of this process of thinking about stories, it turns out that wolves are a huge part of these stories. Right, because we all want our stories to

be fairy tales. Okay, the kind of the the ore stories, like the original story is like the fantasy stories that we all carry around. What's the essence of the fairy tale? Yes, most people they're gonna say there's a hero and there's a happy ending, but that's not what makes it a fairy tale. What makes it a fairy tale is that the hero has to go through the woods, and that the hero, when the hero goes through the woods, is going to encounter a wolf. And so I've come to

think that wolves are central to our story. And the Italians I discovered accidentally have this phrase lupus and fabulou like the wolf in the fairy tale. And they use this to mean, just when our story is going well and it's going along swimmingly, along comes a wolf. And it may be a wolf or an ogre or a dragon, or a downsizing or a diagnosis or a death or a pandemic. That wolf is what makes it a fairy tale. So my response to this story that you've just told

is that we should feed the bad wolf. In some ways, what I want to say, what I feel like is the right answer, Like the part of me that like that wants to do good on this test says we should feed the healthy one that's like the one that's self confidence and self the steam and allow us to

push forward. But what I really believe, as a person who's faced a lot of wolves and talked to hundreds and hundreds of people about their wolves, is that we should feed the bad wolf, and we should feed the difficult wolf, because when we get over, around, or through that wolf, that's the moment that we've become the hero of our own story, and that's the moment when our story becomes a fairy tale. There are so many great things, and what you just said there that I could take

a part. I could go down the spiritual alley of are we really are stories? Yeah, I could go down that route. I love that part in your book. I was hoping you talk about wolves in the fairy tale and I think we're all go is just to say, I agree with you very much that we all want to be part of a fairy tale, and yet when the part of the fairy tale that's hard shows up, we all go no. We all want to be in a good drama until it gets dramatic, you know, and

then we want to turn away. And then my final thought was, I think the nature of life for better or worse. And your book really makes this point is we don't have to feed the bad wolf because it shows up with alarming regularity, right, And that's really a big part of what you talk about in this book is that we tend to think of life as it just kind of goes along and it has a path

and and there's the occasional deviation from that. But what your research really showed was that these transitions such that we have them, you call them disruptors life events. These things happen a lot more frequently than we tend to think I want to begin and that question is this idea that the wolf has a way of showing up. There's the thing I say around my house. It's not in my book. My wife is a warrior, right, and

so she'll walk in. We have to worry about this, or we have to plan for that, and and and my responses. We don't have to go looking for problems. Problems have a way of showing up. And so I think that that sort of captures my philosophy. And just to sort of take a half a step back, and how did I get into this line of work, so to speak? Right? How did I become a life story? And as I sometimes like to call it, like someone who goes after these stories? And the answer, I think

gets to what you've been saying. Like I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. I left fair, I went to Yale, I left there. I went to Japan and I started writing letters home on crinkly airmail paper, like you're not gonna believe what happened to me. And when I got back to Georgia six months later, everyone said I love your letters. I was like, great, have we met? And it turned out that my grandmother had zero to them and passed them around and they went sort of viral

and an old fashioned sense of the word. And I thought, well, if this is that interesting to me and to all these people, like I should write a book about this. I didn't know anyone to written a book, but one thing led to another, and in my twenties I write books about Japan, spent a year as a circus clown,

and write a book about England. As you know, I then started traveling back and forth to the Middle East, like exploring like the original stories, like the stories of the Hebrew Bible, the stories that have formed the backbone of Western civilization. And I wrote a book of walking the Bible. It becomes a thing. It's spent a year and a half of the best Settle List. I make a TV show, And so I'm going back and forth

to the Middle East doing these things, exploring stories. Right, So stories have always been a part because I'm like this Jew from Georgia, and that's like two storytelling traditions and they like collide in me and a never ending fountain of stories. But what I did think of, and what I didn't realize is the time, is that this was the fairy tale version of life. This is the linear fantasy that we all have. Like I stumble early on into what I want to do with my life.

I do it for no money for a long time, I have some success, and then I get married, I have children, Like it's working, like I'm living that fantasy linear life. Then what happens is in my forties, I just get this back to back to back set of disruptive events, almost in a way like the first non linear things that happened to me. First at forty three, I'm a I'm a new dad of identical daughters. I get cancer and in fact so nonlinear, actually have adult

onset pediatric cancer. Right then I have financial troubles, almost go bankrupted the recession, and then my dad, who's struggling with Parkinson's, gets very depressed and tries to take his own life six times in twelve weeks. And I think what I've since learned many people think in such situations, just like this is only happening to me, Like I'm the only one who's lost control of the fairy tale, you know, And there's this sense of shame and isolation.

You don't want to tell anybody, you know, what's the biggest epidemic we have now, It's like loneliness, right, because everybody feels that their thing is can't be discussed, that everybody else is out their own social media posting, you know how they're skipping through the woods on the way to grandmother's house. Because that's sort of one of the kind of scourges of our time, is this perception of fantasy. But when I tell you everybody's got a similar story,

I'm just getting to know you. I mean, I could start asking you questions and when the thirty seconds you're going to tell me you have a similar story of medical problem or financial problem, or anxiety or drinking or addiction, or you know, your boss is a criminal, you're being sued, right, you went through a divorce, your child has an anxiety disorder,

whatever it is. And this all comes to the head to me at a cullege reunion of mine when I'm hearing all these stories, and I called my wife and I was like, you know, no one knows how to tell their story anymore. So to your question of like, is our life really a story? I think yes, because what I realized was to no one knew how to tell it, and So the point I want to make before we get into some of what up in this I didn't go looking for linearity or nonminearity, or disruptors

or life quakes or transition, none of this. I just went into this whole thing with a simple question of how can I help people figure out how to tell their story? Which is why I went collecting stories. It became hundreds and all fifty states, and you know, people lost limbs and homes and change careers and genders and all of this kind of stuff. And then I spent a year coding these stories, and that's where I discovered

in the stories themselves this pattern. And the pattern was hastening, quickening, alarming, lee fast pace of change that we're all dealing with. Yep, thank you for putting that all in context. You know, what happened to you in your forties is amazing, and I agree that I think we don't talk about these

things that much. I often say that it's one of the things I like about Buddhism so much as I think it points us to the fact of, like, this is the way life is, you know, not the modern version that says, oh, everything should go along smoothly Buddhism sort of starts from a position of you know what, things don't go well a lot of the time, Like, you know, that's reality. And I think that's a useful starting point. And I think that's a lot of what you're trying to say in the book is, Hey, this

happens a lot more than you think it will. I think that what's interesting, and you're bringing up Buddhism is that Buddhism offers a different shape of life, a shape of cycles and circles and repeating certain patterns over and over again. And what's interesting about that is that that's not all religions. So Western religions right starting with Judaism and Christianity and Islam, are offering essentially a linear construct.

And to me, the most electrifying moment in this whole process is one that I actually don't often talk about, but I feel like what happened to me was that one day I pull off a book off a chef relatively common act around my life and my house, and the whole shelf moved and there was suddenly a room behind that shelf, like that fantasy that we have, like you know, in a kid's novel, like the library has a different room that no one ever invited me into. And in that room it turns out that Dan Brown

like has one of these in his castle France. His castle in France, by the way, that he just lost to his wife, if I'm correct, in his divorce. What I discover in this room is this idea that for me was new and like electrifying, and that was this that the way we look at our lives is shaped by how we look at the world, and how we look at the world has changed over time. So in the ancient world, they don't have linear time. There's mc

clock's right, there's even sunned out. So they think that life is a cycle because it's agricultural and that's the calendar. So you don't have your own life. You try to kind of recreate this sort of cyclical pattern of the gods. In the West, it's the Hebrew Bible that introduces the idea. Right, you have Adam and Eve, and then you have the patriarchs, and then you have the kings and the prophets. This is a linear path and so this is where the

idea of linear life course gets introduced. But in the Middle Ages, and as you know, in the book. I have this because I was just so fascinated by it. They're looking at life as a staircase up to middle age and then down. That is different from how we grew up in the twentieth century. In the nineteen hundreds, which is that life bottoms out in midlife. They think it peaks. So that's no new life at forty, no new love at fifty, no retiring to Florida and opening up you know, a B and B or an Airbnb.

Now straight up and straight down. And it's when the introduction of science in the nineteenth century that the idea of a linear path gets solidified. Right, So you have pH with development for children, and Freud with the sexual stages, and ericson with the moral stages, and the five stages

of grief and heroes. These are all linear paths. But here's the thing, and that reaches to speak with the idea of a midlife crisis and you know passages and the seventies which want to get into But that's what everybody believes, and anybody over fifty is still haunted by this ghost of linearity. But here's the thing. We've now changed how we look at the world, and we understand that there's chaos and complexity and the network theory that life goes in all sorts of different directions, and yet

we haven't updated our view of our lives. So we have linear expectations and non linear lives, and that gap, that delta between those two causes a lot of the loneliness, causes a lot of the anxiety, and causes a lot of distress because we think that we're not doing what we should be doing, like the tyranny of the shoulds, I call it right, but the truth is everybody else has live in the same life, and by being willing to talk about this and go out with it, I

think this can address a lot of the kind of the core dissatisfaction and unhappiness that plagues so many of us today. I agree completely. I think that delta between what we expect and what's happening is a constant source of pain. And so any time we can get more accurate, you know that we can have a view of what's happening that is more accurate, more in tune with what's real,

we're going to suffer less. And that's the essence of the challenge here and the reason I would defend the idea that this is a narrative exercise is because the fundamentally we have to tell a story both to others but even more important to ourselves that says we're going to have these changes. They're gonna come when we least

expect them. And I actually think in an odd way, for all of its pain and death and destruction and loss of economic life and loss of social connection and all of the lifestyle events that were lost the pandemic, if there is a silver lining, so to speak, it is that it is a blunt force reminder that we cannot control our lives and that these events happen whenever

they happen. If you're between thirty and nine and forty four and a half, which is the original, you know, window of the midlife crisis, congrat reletions, the pandemic is giving you a bit life crisis. But if you're twenty seven to thirty one and a half, you're also having a crisis. And if you're sixty seven to seventy one, you're also having a crisis. And frankly, if you're a teenager like my daughters are now, you're also in a crisis. And this is a great reminder, and I actually think

the pandemic in a certain way is a corrective. You deal these stories, and I coded all these things. And one of the surprising things is that most of the lifequakes that people go through we're personal. It was a

very small number of them that were collective. And there's this line, you know, as a writer, I would say, it's a throwaway line in my book where I say, oh, if I had done these conversations a century ago, when we had two world wars and depression and civil rights and women's rights, right, that many more people would have had collective involuntary life quakes. But we don't do that anymore. Well, guess what, We're all on a collective involuntary life quake.

And in an odd way, I actually think that that's going to not only connect us, but give us a certain amount of empathy. Because I can just look into your eyes as I'm meeting you on a zoom called as I passed you on the street, even if I can't see your mouth with a zoom, and I'm looking into your eyes and I know that you're suffering from something.

Everybody that's listening to us right now stayed up late last night, or sat with a cup of coffee and stay out at window this morning, and is dealing with some life quake. That's the reality. The difference is yours is different from mine, is different from hers, is different from his, and then that leads to somebodys. So what is the big revelation of this project, which is it turns out that the toolkit is much more similar than I would have expected when I set out early in

the book. You have three sort of statements. The linear life is dead, the nonlinear life involves more life transitions, and then life transitions are a skill we can and must master. So I want to spend some time there before we run out, because this show is a lot about skills for how we live through things in our lives. So I don't think we can get too far here

without at least moving through a couple of stages. And the first is to kind of talk about what you call the a b cs of meaning, because these are important as we talk about mastering transitions, and maybe it would be helpful to talk about how you define a transition versus a disruptor. You know, the COVID is a disruptor. What kind of transitions occur as a result of that delineate that for us. Okay, So let me just tick through a number of these ideas really quickly to set

the stage for where you want us to go. Number one, the linear life is dead. Okay, The idea of one home, one job, one relationship, one sexuality, one source of happiness from adolescence to assist a living that's gone and incoming back. It's been replaced by what I call a nonlinear life,

which has many more changes. So my data, when I analyze these hundreds of stories, a thousand hours of interviews, six thousand pages of transcripts, finds that we have basically one disruptor every twelve to eighteen months, say three dozen in the course of our adult lives. And these could be as small as a car wreck or twisting an ankle, or as big as getting married or you know, losing your legs, and most of these we get through relatively quickly.

It turns out that we're pretty good change management machines. But one in ten of those, that's three to five in the lifetime, becomes so big, and so a lifequake is kind of a massive kind of outburst of change. It could be one of the events is very large, like there's a pandemic and you run a restaurant and it's closed down so you have no income or what. It's fast and frankly, in all the literature of social change that I have read, no one's really talked about this.

They tend to clump. Right. So just when you break your leg, you know, you wreck your car, right, or just when your wife is diagnosed with breast cancer, your mother in law needs cataract surgery, like for whatever reason. And I actually come to think that it's almost like our immune system gets weakened by one disruptor and along comes another one, and you know what, it just sends us into a lifequate. But here's the thing. The lifequate

can be voluntary or involuntary. Right. So an involuntary one is your spouse cheets on you, or our tornado destroys your house. A voluntary one is you leave one enterprise to start another, or you cheat on your spouse, right, So they're different, the voluntary involuntary. But here I think is kind of if there's one moment that we can pause on that would be helpful to anybody listening to us, is that the lifequke can be voluntary or involuntary, but

the life transition must be voluntary. You have to choose to lean in and go through the process. So the first one, if you will, kind of puts you back on your heels, and the next one like puts you forward on your toes. And by the way, that process could happen in a weekend or it could take a year and a half, like, depending on how people process it.

So you know, in some ways, I'd say the most comforting thing to say, you know, this book had landed in the middle of a giant life quake in the pandemic, and you know, became a bestseller and all that, and I think a lot of it was the number one reaction was like sort of shute, like I'm not alone and feeling this way, and like it gives me a sense of comfort that I can get through it. And I think the main comfort is the other thing that you kind of tetup that you want to talk about,

which is these transitions turn out to have phases. Okay, the three phases are what I call the law goodbye, where you kind of say goodbye to the life that's not coming back. There's this messy middle right where you shed certain habits and experiment with new ones. And then there's the new beginning where you unveil your new self.

And you know, transitions. There hasn't been a major book on them in forty years, but for a hundred years they've really been talked about, and everybody said, you kind of must do this in or her. That turns out to be total bunk, like you must first say goodbye to the old view and then then you have to go through the wilderness and then you get to the promise. Now that's not true. It turns out people have a superpower,

like they're good at one of these phases. So let me just ask you, like, which of those three phases are you good at? Probably the new beginning piece, I would guess the new beginning pace. Okay, So someone who's go to the new beginning would be I just lost my job, but I'm going to start a new podcast, right, and you get that and you get that going right, or I'm going to start a new company. That's great. Like, you know what, if you're going to the new beginning,

let's start at the new beginning. You just got out of a bad relationship, you know, you're the one who in three months is dating somebody else. That's great, that's your superpower. Let's start there. But what that suggests to me, having talked to people for years, is that you're probably not good. Everyone has a superpower but also a kryptonite um that you're not good at one of the others. Okay,

maybe you're not good at the long goodbye. Maybe you're not good at exploring why you got divorced right and asking no difficult questions, or why did the last job not work out because you feel shame about how you conducted yourself, or maybe the last marriage failed and famine listening. I don't know your story, so I don't know, but maybe you were, you know, suffering from an addiction and you did a behavior that you're ashamed of. But this is what happens. And I'm like, why start with the

artist part? And I'm not just I'm not saying this, this is what people do. Go start with a new one. But if you wanted to be successful, you're gonna have to go at Everybody knows that the next relationship is not going to be successful until you deal with the issues of what happened in the last relationship. And that's true of anything a new job. But it's also true like I mean, a good example of this is the pandemic.

When the pandemic hits, I think we all thought, you know what, I'll sit inside for six weeks, I'll make some sour dough, I'll zoom with my friends, and then we'll go back to normal. It was about six months in before everyone relse you know what, We're not going back to normal. And that's the problem with resilience as a metaphor, because resilience is about a spring, like you bounce forward and you bounce back. No, some people bound.

Usually you bounce sideways or forwards or a new direction entirely. So I think that the long goodbye is hard, and it's emotional and it's difficult. That's why it's called the

long goodbye because it takes a long time. But that doesn't mean you can't be making progress on your transition, because you can be experimenting with new you, or you can be getting in a new relationship where you can start a new company, or you can begin to imagine what your life is after you've lost your legs that you just had to get amputated because you had an accident, so it can work. But it's like life is nonlinear, and the transitions themselves are nonlinear. So let's describe them

real quick. You know, the new beginning is kind of obvious, but what's happening during the long goodbye? So this gets to the tools, and yeah, we don't have time to go into all of them, but to say, there are three stages, and there are these kind of seven tools, and they are kind of vaguely associated with the stages, all but one of them. So the long goodbye involves number one, excepting that this is an emotional experience and

that you are emotional about it. I mean, pick any transition that you went through, professional or personal in your life or medical, Like, what's the biggest emotion that you struggled with in that transition? Failure, failure, feeling of failure, and that's a fear of failure, or that's disappointment that you failed, disappointment, disappointment. Okay, so that's interesting to me.

So the number one people say is fear. Okay, I won't be able to get through it, I won't be able to live without that person, I won't be able to pay my bills, Okay, my new enterprise will not succeed. So fear is the number one emotion. The second is what you said, it's kind of sadness, like I'm sad that my marriage didn't work out, or I'm sad that the job didn't work out, or I'm just sad that I have cancer and I have to go through this treatment,

or that I lost a loved one. Number three, I sort of alluded to this earlier, which is a bit of a surprise to me. With shame, I'm ashamed that I lost my job. I'm ashamed I have to ask for help. I'm ashamed that my child has an anxiety disorder or a drinking problem and I don't want to tell. Just to s poll question, I'm at the supermarket and I run into my old high school teacher or whatever, you know, and she says, oh my god, how is

little Julie. I always loved her in class, And you're thinking, you know, she's drunk, you know, and I had to shut the door in her face and say until you get sober. You're ashamed of that. Back to them not wanting to talk to you and not normalizing. So that's the first emotion. But the second, then people you have to get beyond it, so you have to accept that it's emotional. And then and people do lots of things.

They write their feelings down, they do what I do, which maybe what you do, which is kind of buckle down, you know, like and just go back to work and like sort of compartmentalize it, if you will. But a lot of people and this was so almost inspiring to me, and especially someone who cares about religion and knowing that religion is sort of under attack in a lot of ways in this culture right now. Is people use rituals.

They like candles or sing songs, or have farewell parties, or put flags out, or go to sweat lodges or jump out of airplanes. They do kind of ritualistic gestures

to say goodbye. This is what I kind of feel like the country needs on the pandemic, is we need some sort of ritualistic way of saying we're not going back, kind of mourning it, processing it in some way, not making it go away, but just having some sort of ritual way of bringing the pain or fear or disappointment or shame out into the opening, kind of blanching it in some way. MM hmm. That's an interesting idea because it seems so hard to imagine us as a country

doing any one thing altogether. Seems like a challenge at this point. But think of why is a Memorial Day there? Right? Or why is Labor Day there? And why is Thanksgiving Day there? And Thanksgiving? Was that kind of a history of people having national days of gratitude that began right during the revolution. I mean it wasn't It wasn't a shopping day and a parade day and every all day,

but it was this idea. And I actually personally think this is something that we've lost by sort of saying that religion doesn't belong in public life, and I don't believe proselytizing belongs in public life. But there's a lot there. There's a reason that these institute should survive for thousands of years, and the rituals are powerful because life cycle events and death and loneliness and anxiety are among them

need to be expunged. And this is a national one that we're going differently, it's a global one that we're going through, right. So I think we've lost something by saying everybody go, you know, under your own covers and deal with it yourself. That I totally agree with this doing it all on our own. I mean, you've been talking about this. I was thinking a little bit about you know. I've had a number of big transitions, and

probably the biggest was twenty four. I was a homeless heroin addict and I got sober, and I was thinking about how how useful that was to have as a first big transition because so many of the things I learned in recovery I feel like equipped me for better handling other transitions. This idea of not being ashamed about sharing what's going on, about talking to other people about you know, I mean, just so many of the tools of recovery I think have been so helpful as I've

navigated other transitions down the road. Well, first of all, thank you for sharing that. I'll say that a quarter of my stories had addiction in some way, which I was shocked by, moved by, and kind of made aware. Bye. But I really want to like put a spotlight on what you just said, because I think that's powerful. Right. Well, in your life is dead, the nonlinear life involves more life transitions. Transitions are a skill that we can and

must master. So what it came to realize if we're going to go through three to five of these lifequakes in a lifetime, and I haven't even mentioned in this conversation maybe with a signature piece of that, that the average length of the transition that comes out of the lifequake is five years, So three to five and on lifetime four or five six years, that's twenty five years. That's half of our adult lives. We're in transition. That's

what this book is called. Life is into transitions. To realize if you just look in the ads as periods that you have to grit and grind and kind of grovel your way through your waist in half your life. But the point is this is a lifelong sport that no one is teaching us how to play. When I speak to college kids, a lot of what I say is what is going to college? It's the long goodbye where you're saying goodbye to this life where your parents made your decisions and everything was taken care of and

you were comforted. Then what's the messy middle? It's shedding certain habits and expectations. Do I want to be a believer? Do not want to be a believer? Right? Do I want to be up someone who's my homework or not. And then you shed habits and then you create new ones. And that's what we're talking. Should I try to do this? Should I try this columb Should I try this activity? Do I want to, as I said, sleep around, save myself? Do I want to you know, drink a lot, you

know in my home room into my homework. These are all experimentations with new selves. And then the last is the new beginning, which is you said it's simple. I could poke at that and say it is simple, but part of it is unveiling it, which is maybe rewarding. It turns out, by the way, almost temper. Some of

the people are not good at this phase. But then ultimately it's updating my life story to acknowledge that I was an addict, I got divorced, I lost my job, I lost my limbs, my child as an anxiety dis or whatever it is, and being able. That's the part that we both agreed that people don't do a lot. So I actually would argue that that's harder than it sounds. It's making that shame or fear or sadness or difficulty part of your narrative that you take ownership over as

opposed to trying to lock in the safe. You know, in the inside of your being, in the darkness of your closet. That's not gonna work. So back to college for a second. Then you get out of college. How long is college? Four or five years? Like it's a classic transition to kind of one of them, kind of I don't know, like Windmills, I want to tilt. It is kind of redefining college as a transition forge where

you learn these skills. So that's what you said when you were twenty four, you know, I mean, like, if if you have a kid that's going to take a test or being a sporting event or go on stage and sing something, or maybe a spouse or maybe yourself, the best thing you can do for that kid, putting on my Secrets of Happy Family hat here is to say, remember last time you did it, not you can do it. I believe in you. You've already done it. That's what

the research shows. So you at twenty four, having gone through this hellish experience, no doubt because you didn't lock it away in the safe and say that was something that's no longer part of me. No small thing you did you said, it is part of me, and therefore, next time I go through it, I'm going to tell myself I already did it. That's what I think. If we can teach young people that you've already done it. And here's the pandemic again, guess what. You got through it.

Some people didn't. Half a million of us are gonna lose our lives in the best case scenario. But you got through it. You made adjustments, You have the skill of rewriting your story. You know how to get around the wolf. You didn't just feed the good wolf. You face down the bad wolf, and damn it. That means

you could do it again. I could not agree more that that is one of the most fundamental and helpful things to be able to do for ourselves or to do for other people, is to be able to say, you know how to do this, You've done it before. I think of all the things you've gone through and overcome. Such a powerful way to remind us of our ability to handle this stuff. And I think a key of

it is to normalize the nominearity of it. I know it sounds abstract, but to say I had an addiction problem at twenty four, I had a cancer at Attree, I almost went bankrupt as a multiple times New York Times best selling author. My dad tried to kill himself six times after an incredibly successful career building Owls is in Georgia. And you can't say that. No, we must say that, Yes, we must say that. We must say we've all got wolves. I could attack on your story

my mom tried to kill herself. Listeners of the show are probably tired of hearing about my partner Jenny's mom who has Alzheimer's. It's a thing we're going through, you know, we we certainly share about. I was talking with somebody today and I've got this program called Spiritual Habits, and we talked about combining behavioral science with spiritual principles, and

one of them around generosity. And I was saying that one of the ways we can be generous is with our story to say things like I went through this, I went through that. You know, that's a generosity because we're putting it out into the world that is making it okay for other people to go through those things. It's also a healing exercise, but it's also a generous exercise. And to me, the best phrase that I've heard to capture.

This is a kind of forgotten phrase from sociology and then teen eighties, this scholar came up with this phrase and autobiographical occasion. Okay, so an autobiographical occasion. What he meant by that was that these are occasions when we are forced, in effect, to tell our life story. Okay. And I love this idea because when I asked people, was your life quake? Was your transition an autobiographical occasion?

Of the people said yes, eight zero. And the reason is because life is the story you tell yourself, Because our lives are fundamentally stories that we tell ourselves. And what a lifequake is is a breach in the normal, and a breach in the normal is what makes any story good. Right. I live in a house. True story, where I live. It's it's snowed fourteen inches last night. Okay, I'm going to tell you story. What happened to me today. I walked downstairs. I put my jacket on, and my

mittens and my gloves and my hat. I guess I didn't do mittens and gloves, but my snow boots. I opened the door, and what did I see? Right in front of me? The most beautiful vista of So what we know about storytelling now is that as I tell that story, you are finishing that story. So what you see in front of me, you know I'm going to say, I'm now going to tell the story again. It's snowed. I went downstairs, I put on my jacket, my mittens, my hat. I walked out in my boots. I walked

out story and they're in front of me. Right in front was this beautiful mountain of donuts. So you don't know that I'm going to say mountain of donuts. You think I'm gonna say blanket of snow or whatever. I'm going to say. A mountain of donuts makes you sit up and listen. That's the breach and the normal, and I now have a story. Those donuts are gonna do. What am I gonna do? I gotta go back in that. How do I get to Bruce's house? If there's a mollont of donuts? We gotta get over? Do I eat them?

Do I give them around? Like? What is the donuts? Okay? The donut in this story is the wolf? Okay? The donut is the downsizing or the death, or the addiction or the tornado or the pandemic that the donut in the story. So it is a breach in the normal, and the only way to repair that is with a story. That's why. Yeah, I believe that these lifequakes are autobiographical occasions. They are occasions when we are asked and in some ways forced to rethink and retell the story of our

lives and add a new chapter. I was addicted, and then I got to clean um. My mother had Alzheimer's and the family had to rally together and figure out a way through it. I had a cancer and I was on crutches for two years, and I was in the hospital for a year, and I asked a group of male friends to form a council of dads to

take care of my daughters, whatever it might be. I tried to kill myself six times in twelve weeks, and my children started sending me a question about my life every Monday morning, and over the next six years, I wrote a fifty two thousand word autobiography has applies to my Dad? So this is a storytelling solution. What is

fundamentally a narrative problem. Because lifequakes are autobiographical occasions, I totally agree if we look at the seven tools, and I'm just gonna read them real quick, just so people get a framework for what they are, because you know these things are in there. We talked a little bit about accept it, identify your emotions. We talked a little bit about market ritualize the change. Third is shed it.

Give up old mindsets, uh, create it, try new things, share it, seek wisdom from others, launch it, unveil your new self, and tell it. Compose a fresh story. And that last one you were just hitting on being the composing a fresh story. The autobiographical part of this. The other thing I think is really interesting, and I'm going to circle all the way back to one of the first things I said, which could take this a spiritual direction about whether the stories are really what we are.

Certainly from a Buddhist perspective, of Buddhist would say, your story is what is created, but you are actually something different. But we all know that for all intents and purposes, it is the stories that we tell about our lives that shape kind of who we are. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is that you talk about people going through transitions. That a big transition that I think is interesting to discuss is identity transitions,

because that's where the story really gets different. Right, So let's talk a little bit about the malleability of identity. I like that, and that allows me to also double back to something that you raised and I didn't address earlier. So while I could push back on this idea that our life is still a story, actually if I were even to go one level deep, but what I really believe is that our our life is a sort of

braiding of multiple stories. Okay, so if you think of the uh, the Walt Whitman who lived not far from my home here in Brooklyn Heights talking about I contain multitudes, so that we have three stories, and I call them your me story, the story that kind of where you're at the heart of it, what you do or make

or create. Then there's your wee story, your relationships, your family, your loved ones, your colleagues, your co religionists, members of your basketball team or your political party or whatever it might be. And then there's your the story. Right, so you have your me story, your we story, your these stories some sort of higher calling or spiritual identity or or higher purpose. And so what I came to realize that this was really, really, really hard thing for me

to kind of piece together from all these conversations. And what I came to call the Life Story project was that our identity is built braided, if you will, from these multiple sources of identity. And I came to call this the a b CS of meaning. You know, if you go back a hundred years ago, which, by the way, for someone who spends as much time in the ancient

world as I do, not that long ago. If you look back a hundred years ago, we had to live where our parents wanted to live, believe what our parents wanted to believe, do what our parents wanted us to do, love who our parents wanted us to love on and

our identity was essentially given to us. And this great opportunity of kind of contemporary modern postmoder or whatever, but the great opportunity of the life we lead now is that we can love who we want to love, and be who we want to be, believe what we want to believe, and live where we want to live. You know, we can even change our bodies, you know, and our sexual identity or our gender, things that seemed not even possible,

you know, barely a generation that come. So this is an incredible opportunity that we all have, but it's also a burden because in effect, there's so many choices, right, we get writer's block trying to write the story of our lives, you know, it's kind of the way I think about it. So, but what we have is these

building blocks of meetings. So the A b cs of meeting the A that's agency, right, that is what we do make for many of us, our jobs, or for creators, or the things that we do, our personal way of impacting the world. That b is our relationships, our loved ones, our family, all these things we talked about in the sea as a cause. So we have agency, belonging and cause.

And so to your core question, in some ways, maybe you know, a kind of essence of what we're talking about is that in these life quakes and in the transitions that grew out of them, we shift the balance that we give to each one. So think of the A b cs of meaning as being like um, lady justice, but without two dishes three and each one has a few pebbles. And what happens in our lives is that we get a little unbalanced, right, and then we want to rebalance. So maybe we've been working too hard and

we want to spend more time with our family. Maybe we are your partner who has been caring for her mother and then you know, ultimately her mother passes and she says, you know what, I want to do something for myself, Like I'm I'm just spent. I've been raising my children and I need to do something for myself. Or maybe we've been giving back. Right my wife starts an organization that supports entrepreneurs in fifty countries around the world.

Like she gives and gives and gives. Maybe she one day she burns out and says, you know what, I want to spend more time with my family, or I want to do something for myself. So what happens is that I call this shape shifting, is like in these transitions, we we think why because we have a pause. That's what a rupture in the normal means. Okay, guess what. I've just been buried under a mound of donuts. It's gonna take me a while to dig out. And while

digging out, I'm going to rethink. Am I really doing what I want to do? Am I being how I want to be? Am I spending my time nobody I want to spend my time, or is now the occasion I didn't seek it out, or maybe even I did seek it out, or I want to rethink which part of my identity do I want to emphasize now? And here's the main thing I want to say. It's not

a forever choice. That myth that if you're working and you take time off to raise your children you can get back in the workplace that died in the seventies. It really really did, the idea that this startup failed and you're never going to find another job. You can't go. That's just not how we live. And that's the gift of the nonminear life. Get on and off the treadmill whenever you want, because there ain't no treadmill, and and no one's keeping score because everybody else has got a

wolf or stack of donuts that they're struggling with. Two. Yeah, I love that, And I think it's interesting because if you search deeply into the literature on deep spiritual transformation, right often the most clear cause is, like we've said, some sort of life quake seen over and over and over again as a very likely route to deep transformation.

Is when everything blows up, you know. And so that's both the good news and the bad news of what you're saying, Hey, there's a lot more blowing up going on than we thought, you know. So that's the bad news if we don't like that. But the good news is it offers this multiple opportunities to really reassess who we are, what matters, what do we want to do, and move forward from a new place. And look at the oldest stories that have survived the longest. Look at

the Abra Bible. Where are the moments of breakthrough. Abraham leaving his father's house and going down to the Promised Land. The Israelites leaving Egypt, going into the desert, the Jerusalem leaving Jerusalem by the rivers of Bamblane. That's the moment

of the greatest breakthroughs in the story. Jesus going into the desert, Paul on the road to Damascus, Mohammed, you know, going out into the desert, the Buddha going to sit under the tree, okay, the you know, the Hindies going into the forest dwelling, Okay, Orpheus, Jason Hercules, I mean, you can go down and down and down all of the great stories, the ones that have survived thousands of years, are full of wolves, and specifically they're full of people

who go out on into the wilderness, into the messy middle and my framework, have some sort of transform experience and then come back and share it with others. And how do they share it with others with a story? Right? And I think that again, I'm kind of going back to the good news in lots of transitions is because a lot of us think, well, Okay, that's great, but I don't have an opportunity to go out into the

desert or I go out into the wilderness. But as we sort of said earlier, you don't have to take you know, as they say you have to take Mohammed to the mountain. The mountain will come to mommed. You don't have to go looking for problems. They'll have it. Don't don't worry. The desert will show up at your door. Exact back to that idea of like, well, you could feed the bad wolf of you are, but he's still gonna show up. That's why this book is called Life

is in the Transitions. Okay, it's a William James phrase from the Birth of Psychology and the essence of it is that these are horrible. They're miserable, they're difficult, they're overwhelming, but they are also essential, they are opportunities. But if I could say one thing, that would be to everybody listening to us, that's in the spirit of what you just said, it's don't shield your eyes when the scary

part start, because that's when the heroes are made. And if there's one thing I learned from listening to a thousand hours of interviews like people who had problems as you know, that made even your worst problems seem tame and made me grateful in the long category of miseries i'd already gotten through that there was still a lot that I hadn't gone through. Is that we all want to be and need to be and can be the hero of our own story. Well, I think that is

a perfect and beautiful place to wrap this up. Bruce. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation. You and I will spend a little bit of time in a post show conversation talking a little bit more about these ideas. Listeners, if you'd like access to that, and things like weekly many episodes and all sorts of other good stuff. You can go to one you Feed, dot net slash Join. Thanks again, Bruce, I really enjoyed this. Thank you my provoch, Thank you for having me, and

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