In case you're just recently joining us, or however long you've been a listener of the show. You may not realize we have years of incredible episodes on our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Greg McEwan.
If you focus on what you lack, you will lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you will gain what you lack.
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Greg McEwan, an author, public speaker, and leadership and business strategist. Greg often speaks on how to live and lead as an essentialist.
His books include twenty Tens, Multipliers and twenty fourteen's Essentialism, and today Greg and Eric discuss his new book Effortless Make It Easier to Do what matters Most.
Hi, Greg, welcome to the show.
It's great to be with you. Thank you, Eric.
I am really happy to have you on. We are going to be discussing your book, Effortless Make it Easier to Do what matters Most. But before we do that, we'll start, like we always do, with a parable. And in the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops. She thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather, and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Well, this is the great choice of life. I had an experience a few years ago where we moved to quite an idyllic area just north of Malibu. It's this area that was built in the nineteen fifties. The whole world moved on and no one told anyone here. So it's got white picket fences, it's more horseways than roads.
And our four children really seemed to thrive, especially one of my daughters, who was always climbing trees and naming our chickens, yes we had chickens, and just always writing journals, reading, constantly interested in animals, voluminous in her talking, and all of this is how it was until she turned fourteen, and then she started being slower in doing her chores.
She'd answer as in more sort of one word answers, and we just thought pretty age appropriate behavior until in a routine physical therapy appointment, the therapist pulled my wife and her aside and said, look, I don't want to alarm you, but she just failed a reflex test, and so I just think you should go see a neurologists
just to be sure, to be worn twice. What began that day was a let's call it an agonizing experience, because she had a free fall in her capability, Like just every single day, we were watching it differently now, so we were seeing it differently, but also there was more to see. So eventually, you know, within a couple of months, she was maybe it would take her forty five seconds to write the last three letters of her name, two minutes to write out her whole name, hours to
eat a meal. Her personality, once so vibrant, just full of light, just became monotone, a loss of emotional complexity. And to make it even more challenging, neurologists, some of them, thirty five year experts in their field, just shrug her shoulders. All tests coming in in the normal range. They didn't even offer as even the beginning of a diagnosis. So in the midst of that, what I experienced was the opening of two paths. It became clear that there were
two parts. I think it's probably pretty analogous to the two wolves one wolf is saying worry, panic, blame, doctors get subsessed about these things that we can't control about. It just puts you in a state of anxiety and fear, a scared state. Let's call it. If you feed that wolf, that just makes everything harder. Yeah, the problem itself isn't served by that. So you've taken a problem which is
already immensely challenging, and you just make it worse. Or on the other side, we found that there was this other path, this other wolf to use the mesophor that you introduced, which says, can we be grateful in the mimiest of this? Can we still focus on what we can control? Can we still have a lighter spirit? Can we adopt a lighter way of living life where we'll still laugh together, We'll still get around the piano and sing, We'll still play together, and pray together and go on walks.
And although it seems obvious which wolf you ought to feed, the temptation was to feed the first. For sure, that was the path of least resistance. But quite fortunately, early on I felt inspired to read a chapter of a compilation book by Gordon B. Hinckley, and there was a chapter in that about cultivating an attitude of happiness and a spirit of optimism something like that, and I felt quite inspired to listen to that every day, and for
the next four months I did. I think I listened to it almost every single day for four months, and I felt that that was in a sense, feeding the right wolf and rewiring my brain in the midst of this extremity. And what I saw happen almost immediately was almost magical. There was a positive force, a sense of hope, of faith. It was tangible in myself and in our family. There were plenty of tears along the way. We're not talking about positivity here where you just pretend everything's okay. No,
we're facing the facts. But we weren't taking a hard situation and making it harder. And that really is what sent me down the path of researching and writing effortless. Is just this idea that you know, just because something's essential doesn't mean you have to then do it the hard way. Something can be essential and then you still have a choice to make you know what really matters. We knew what really mattered in this case was helping
our daughter to become fully well again. So the goal isn't ambiguous for us, but there was still two paths, broadly speaking of how to handle it. And if we'd taken the harder path, the heavier path, if we'd fed the wrong wolf, then we would have been burned out in half a minute. We'd have been in such a state of anxiety that we would have burned out our
own mental state. Well, then what happens to your marriage? Well, okay, then that gets harder, and that life isn't even almost worth living if your marriage is this hard enough and gets tough enough, and the culture in the family that we'd invested so much in could easily have been demolished too,
And then what does that do for our daughter? I mean, if you're in that state of exhaustion mentally, emotionally, in that kind of traumatic state, well then you can't help her either, because you can't make good decisions, your discernment is gone, and so your chance of actually being successful is lower. All of that goes with the first path. The second path. We just saw so much good come out of being and what I now would call the
effortless state. So much good came of it, and we were able to In the end, it was a long journey, and that's an important part of the story. It took two and a half years ups and down along the way, but we had the energy and the light. We fed the right wolf, so we were able to be there and we saw her come back to full health and now to be thriving and to be moving forward in her life. You know, superbly. That story is what comes to mind when you ask me a question about the one you feed.
I'm glad you.
Went there right away, because it's kind of at the end of your book, and I was going to bring it around to the front of our conversation, so I'm glad that you did that. I'm curious, as you were early on in that process and you talk about that eventually that led you to sort of seeing this easier path versus the harder path. I'm curious would you been able to define it that way early on, or would there have been a different way you looked at it or phrased what you guys were choosing to do.
I think we could have find it as something close to the lighter path than the darker path. I'm not sure I would have said easier versus harder in the moment, but it reminds me a little bit of that movie. I can't remember the name of it, but it's the story of a spy from Russia who's here in the United States, and it's his story and that he has this extraordinary ability to maintain equanimity in the midst of
all of these crazy ups and downs. And the phrase he uses all the time when he's asked, why are you so calm right now? And he said, well, would it help, you know, to get all emotional, to get angry? Would it help? And I think that that's the right beginning place, is you say, well, would it help to overreact? Does it help to get all negative? Or does it just take a hard situation to make it harder? Life is hard, Yeah, I got no questions about that. Life
is full of challenge. And every person listening to this is dealing with something pretty hard right now, or maybe many things that are hard right now. And even if they don't share it with other people, even if it's quite secret, people are suffering. And I think that that is true for most people most of the time. In a hundred ways. You don't write a book on effortless
of life is effortless. You write a book on effortless because it's full of challenge, and so to me, the key decision in every moment is whether to make it harder than it needs to be, or whether you can at least open yourself up to the idea, what is there a better way? Is there an easier way? Is
there a lighter path? And as soon as you start to open up, you find that there are all sorts of simple strategies that are all sorts of better approaches, and so you still achieve results that you want in life. You still get to focus on the things that matter most, but you find yourself better able to do them best, are able to cope. You can achieve even breakthrough results. I mean imagine, if you can start training yourself to
look for effortless solutions. Then let's say someone who is already on the edge of exhaustion, somebody who has burned out with the challenges of life, and maybe they're overachievers, but they've just run out of space. They're already working effectively as hard as they can. So what if they want to achieve as many overachievers do, ten x results, much better results? Can any of the people listening to this who want that level of results, work ten times harder.
Nobody listening to this can work ten times harder. They wouldn't even put in the effort to be here. So for those people, my brother Justin calls the hit squad a hard working, intelligent, talented group of people. For those people, they can't work ten times harder. So suddenly you say, well, if you can't work tens harder, let's find ten x easier way to achieve the results. Then you can achieve extraordinary things and still without burning out. That sort of
becomes the value proposition of effortless. Is that impossible things start to seem within reach because we don't have to do them the old paradigm way of just through grinding effort. I'm fully in favor of effort, but it will only take you so far past a certain point. You just have to find better, smarter, simpler, in fact, yes, easier strategies.
And so, what would you say are some of the things that were most important as you applied this idea to you and your family's life, Because I think a lot of people listening to this, Certainly, people who are listeners of this show on any kind of regular basis are going to be people who at least go, Yeah, I don't want to make life any harder. We talk on this show all the time about all the ways
we make things worse. Sometimes I feel like everything I teach people is about how to not make things worse, which sounds kind of pessimistic, except we are incredibly good at making lots of things in life worse, and sometimes simply not adding to the burden is a really big deal. So what sort of things helped you, guys, to either not add to the burden or actively lighten it sort
of in your family life? And I think then we'll I'll turn our attention to some of the strategies in the book that I wanted to hit on, But I'm kind of curious which of them were closest to sort of you and your family's experience that were useful.
Well, let me offer too. Well. We've all heard, surely that thankfulness and gratitude is important. But it's a principle that is unique among principles because there's no way to overdo it. Most principles have point of breaking where if you do it too little, that's not good. If you do it too much, now it's a problem. Most principles most characteristics are like that, most truths are like that. I have not found a place that gratitude breaks. I
haven't come anywhere close to that point. It's enormously powerful. It can be applied far more broadly and deeply than's obvious. For example, so I've done for years a gratitude journal, and past ten years now, I think we're probably at eleven years. And I don't think I've missed a day in eleven years, right, And in that journal, I'm writing, you know, all the things I'm thankful for, So I'm way past ten thousand items. Now that's great. I mean it is so centering, and all the way through this
situation with our daughter, I was doing that. That's level one. Let's say what's level two? It's what do you do in between? You know, what I describe is a ritual that means something to me. Right, That's more than a habit. A habit is a thing you do consistently. Ritual is something you do that you enjoy the doing of it. The way you do it matters. A ritual is a habit with a soul. And so writing, you know, my journal in the way that I do is a ritual. I enjoy the process of it, not just the fact
that I've done it. Later, Oh good, I've written today. That's a good feeling. Doing it is good. But in between that ritual, you've got the real life. Right, most of life is not in the journal writing process. It's in between. So how does gratitude play in that? And one of the habit recipes that we began that is still a part of our family culture, woven into the fabric of it now, is that after I complain, I
will say something I am thankful for. And what I noticed when I started doing that myself is that I complain much more often than I realized. So I think of myself as quite positive, quite grateful person. In some ways, it was just the easiest thing to walk into the other room and you see a child doing the wrong thing, and you focus on that the meeting goes too long, or the temperature is too hot or too cold, I mean,
endlesslygin with the complaint. Well, this recipe accepts that as a sort of natural tendency in humans and builds on it. You just take advantage of that. You turn let's call it a negative tendency into a positive tendency. So every time you complain, you say something you're thankful for. I mean, even if you change the ratio to fifty to fifty, the impact is instant and what begins as just a nice new technique quickly changes the culture and dynamic around you.
Barbara Frederickson called this the broaden and build theory, and it basically means that if you can get into what I call now an effortless state, but into a state of gratitude in this moment to positive emotions, that it creates a natural upward momentum. So it doesn't just say, oh, I feel better, which gratitude will instantly do. You will instantly feel happier. You will instantly feel better about your life and about yourself and circumstances. Well, that means that
you show up differently. It means the next interaction you have with somebody is more positive. So that increases your optionality with them, it improves your relationship with them, and that materially improves the resources you have at your disposal in life. And so this is why she calls it broaden and build. There's an upward momentum, and it all begins by just catching yourself when there's something you know you can plain, you catch yourself and you say something
you're thankful for. I've done it now with our children. I remember one time doing it. The ante was that if you can plain, that's fine. I know you have to say three things you're thankful for. And I remember my son at the time. I said, okay, now, I'd give you three things you're thankful. Okay, number one, I am so thankful that my dad wants to play this game. But we have to say three things with thankful every time we can plain. And he said it just like that,
you know. And here's what's powerful is that it didn't matter. We all laughed and it worked. And seriously, a principle or a characteristic that is so powerful that you can do it with a degree of cynicism and it still works is powerful stuff. And that's exactly what I found. It almost doesn't matter your attitude. It just has this disproportionate effect. I'll summarize the effect this way. If you focus on what you lack, you will lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you will gain
what you lack. Benjamin Hardy, who I had on the wat's Essential podcast not very long ago, he said are you living in the gain or in the gap. If you're in the gap, you're looking at all the things you haven't achieved, or you don't have what everybody else has, the gap between what you are now and what you would like to be. Well, that gap always exists, that's never going away. So if you live in the gap, you could be making great progress actually in your life,
but you'd still be miserable. Alternatively, if you get in the gain, you're looking at all the progress that's having made, all the good that's happened, the successes that you've had, and in this moment, I think you'll achieve more, but you'll certainly be happier in the journey. This, I would say, is one of the great lessons that we learned and are still applying and still building into the culture in our family.
Makes me think of slightly different context, but same sort of principle, which is Stephen Covey's circle of concern versus circle of influence. You know, the idea is we've got this big circle which is everything we're concerned with. The small circle is our circle of influence. The more time we spend in our circle of concern outside our circle of influence, the more our circle of influence actually shrinks.
We wear ourselves out by worrying about stuff and what we can actually affect and change shrinks, Whereas if we flip it and we spend our time in our circle of influence, spend more time there, it actually starts to grow and we begin to be able to affect more things. It's a very similar idea to that, when you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.
Yeah, I really agree with that. Gratitude is always within usphere of influence, so I think it would fit within Stephen Covey's be proactive within the seven habits. It's a concrete, immediate thing, and you saying that just makes me want as you say one more thing about it, which is this principle so ubiquitous you don't just use it for the things that are good. This pushes people past where I think they would generally see the edges of gratitude.
It's not just that you are grateful for the things that are going right. This is deeper. Be thankful in everything when something goes wrong. I'm thankful this thing went wrong. And you don't know why. When you begin that sentence, you don't know why. Really you're not thankful, but you're pushing yourself to go through a pattern of thinking that suddenly opens you to the idea that the thing that
you're calling bad could be good. That life, let's say it this way, isn't just happening to you but for you. That the bad thing so called is also happening for you, That in each challenge there is an opportunity and you just haven't seen it that way yet. It becomes a way of living whatever's going on. And so immediately something doesn't happen the way you want it. The flight is delayed, the flight is canceled. Somebody's not helping you be grateful in it. And suddenly, as soon as you are, I'm
thankful for this situation. It's sort of almost positive irony or something. But I'm so glad that that person isn't helping me right now. Why Oh, because I can develop in this moment greater compassion and understanding of how the world works and what they might be dealing with. I'm
thankful because it's an opportunity to develop by character. And maybe this just seems a step too far for people, But to me, a person who can receive all things with thankfulness will achieve not ten X results, but literally one hundred X, and it will start to flow to them. The power of what we're talking about, I think, is difficult to overstate.
Makes me think of the old Taoist story of the farmer who has a horse and his horse runs away, you know, and his neighbor comes over and says, well, I'm so sorry about you losing your horse. You know, it's the most valuable thing you had, and he goes, well, it could be good, could be bad, you know, and
then the horse comes back with five horses. I won't go through the whole thing, but I think sometimes, you know, if we can even get to where that farmer was, which was where he was was, could be good, could be bad. I don't know, right, but I'm not going to rush to judge this thing as good or bad because I don't know how it's going to play out in my life. I don't know how it's going to play out in making me be the person that I'm
going to become. Let me at least move from this is awful to a place that holds open the door of possibility that says, Okay, this seems bad to me right now, but let me at least move to a neutral place where I say, okay, I'm going to be open, and then if you can even where you are, which is that extra step beyond which says I'm going to be thankful because in some way this can be worked for me. It's that phrase. I think. I've often heard
that things happen for the best. You know, I don't believe that, but I do believe we can make the best out of everything that happens. And I do believe that in everything that happens there is a seed of our future growth. It's in there if we look for it.
I certainly think that's true. And at some point, I mean C. S. Lewis puts it this way, that we have to decide. And of course he was an atheist for a long time, became a Christian, and in the journey started to write some of the most eloquent modern writings on what it really means to be a Christian and what it doesn't mean and how it would apply in a modern context. And one of the things he observes, and somebody can take this whether they have an active
faith in God or not. But he says, we have to decide at some point point whether God is a vivisectionist or whether all things are there to work for our good. You know that every test is really with
purpose and might even be analogous to that New Testament idea. Well, I mean, it's it's a story, but there's an idea in it too, where Jesus is brought to the most agonizing part of his entire ministry, this atonement, this moment of total suffering, and he asks, if there's any way for this to pass from me, let it pass from me. And I've often wondered why that's even in the account.
Are we really saying that now, the manifestation of God in the flesh, this superman embodiment of all that is good, is actually saying, hey, listen, I'd rather not do this if you don't mind, you know, I'd rather not do the big challenge. And one thing I think it illustrates is it puts in the record that there was no
other way. It gives opportunity for the writers to be explicit their no other path, there was one way to being able to achieve this mission and I do think that that is a helpful idea to all of us when we're dealing with things that would otherwise or are causing as suffering or otherwise would keep us in total misery, is to just go, well, what if there was no
other way? But if the only way to have learned what we need to learn in this life to progress and the way that we do in this life is to go through this path where you start to do that, you can get out of so much of the self recrimination and also blaming and actively grudge keeping about other people and well that I'm a victim of their thing and this awful thing, and so on it, and just
go what if this is the path? But if this is the only way for us to become what we need to become, it's the only way for us to gain the good things that are just around the corner, there was no other path? Is There's something about that that I think can be very liberating and again builds on this idea of like, yeah, let's just get back to the effortless state. There's a whole chapter on grudges in effortless and the importance of being able to let go of them and talk about a way that we
make life harder than it needs to be. There's no number of opportunities for us to pick up a grudge, to hire a grudge. We might say, even I like that. Language echoes Clayton Christiansen's question of like, what do we hire this product or service to do for us? And if you do that with grudges, it opens the whole subject up because you say, we have grudges for a reason, what did we hire them to do for us? We
hire a grudge. Maybe we hire a grudge to make us feel one up with the relationship with the person that hurt us. We go, well, yeah, well I see, look at that, and I'll hold them to it and that terrible thing they did. See, there's a concrete thing, and I can point to it, and I can point to it one hundred times they did this wrong to me, And we do it to kind of make ourselves feel superior. But does it the grudges actually make us feel superior?
Do they make us more powerful? You can evaluate a grudge like a job evaluation, where you say, okay, well I hired you to do this, how you're doing your performance evaluation? Are you making me more powerful? Or do you make me endlessly feel like a victim, endlessly feel weaker. Grudges make us feel weaker. They don't make us feel more powerful. Maybe we do it to get people to feel sorry for us, you know, provide a sympathy. They might give us things, opportunities, benefits might come to us.
And that's true too, but it's a short lived benefit because in general, people get quite fatigued with that kind of victimhood story, which is one of the reasons we have to keep finding new people to tell our grudge story too, because people only have so much time for it. And so if you go through and evaluate it, you find that grudges don't perform their duties well, and so it's time to fire grudges. And when you do, when you fire a grudge, you just find your life comes
back to you can move forward in your life. I asked Tim Ferriss on his podcas asked, what percentage of your mental and emotional energy have you given to grudges and anger in your life? And he laughed and he said, for about a fifteen year period of his life, he probably gave between sixty and seventy percent of his mental and emotional capacity to grudges and anger. Think of that. You'd never think of firing grudges as being the ultimate
productivity hack. No one's ever said that. I mean, maybe I have now, but like you don't find that in the average productivity book. And yet, what else can you call a return of sixty percent of your capacity or seventy percent of your abilities come back to you. That's all being siphoned off, that's all making as putting us in a state of suffering instead of an effortless state.
And the moment we get it back, we can take all those resources and we can actually put them to use on things that really are essential, things that really matter to us. Get back to our mission, get back to the purpose of our lives, and that to me is a worthy change.
As women, as humans. Really, the world can trick us into believing we're doing life wrong, which keeps us small and separated. But we don't have to play along. Let's make a plan together, shall we. I'm Jenny Gay.
And I'm Brandy Lust, and we host a podcast called Something to Normalize. As best friends and experts in mindfulness and adult learning, We've done the hard work of courageously engaging and self exploration, healing, and self expression.
In our podcast, You'll be a fly on the wall for intimate, safe conversations where we share our life experiences, collective wisdom, and research from experts to help you breathe that big sigh of relief that comes from feeling seen and understood.
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People have often asked, you know, well, how do I forgive? How do I let go? I often think the very first and most important step is to do exactly what you just described, which is to see what it's costing me, you know, to really see what's happening by me holding on to this. You know it's attributed to the Buddha, but I don't think the Buddha said it that resentments are like drinking poison and waiting for the other person
to die. You know, once you really sort of see the nature of a grudge, As you've said, I love your framework of it. What did I hire this grudge to do? And is it really doing it? When we get clear on that, these things are a lot easier to let go.
I think absolutely right, And I mean forgiveness is a foundational principle across every religious tradition. It's part of the wisdom of every generation of every societal culture that survives over a long period of time. Why because if you burden yourself with the kind of costs you're just describing, then you can't progress well. And if you make the error, as societies can definitely do of, then teaching those grudges to their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and sharing
it around, the cost is absolutely enormous. It can lead to war, to civil wars. We've seen these things, we do still see them sometimes even now. And I do agree with you too that a key breakthrough is to realize it's not a selfish thing. So I can't say it that way, that there is a self interested reason to do this. The forgiveness is not saying, well, I'm just going to do something good for this other person it may do good for the other person, but it
isn't the point at all. I just interviewed Chris Williams. I think he'd be a great person for you to talk to him. Chris Williams had a catastrophic situation in his life where he's driving his car and his car is hit broadside by a drunk teenage driver, kills his wife and their unborn child, kills a couple other members of his family that were with him that day, injures another, and then one of his children wasn't in the car on that day, but of course has all the massive
emotional trauma of the experience. So he's in there. He says, he hears a sound right there. It's in the middle of like this, in the middle of the winter, freezing colds, in this car, broken bended metal, everything, and he just hears this sound, this screaming. It takes him a moment to notice it's him. It is in this absolute true agony. You know, you can look across its wife, you can see that she's not breathing. And in the moment he discovers the two paths. He has two choices, two wolves.
Pick your metaphor, and that's what's so profound to me is that it happens so fast for him, and he realizes, past one, I will add to this trauma, bitterness, revenge, anger, hate, all of that, and then that will then destroy what's left of us all. It will then take the rest of my life. It will cost me everything that remains. Plus it will cost me all of the possible upside and opportunities and blessings that still exist in life. So
it won't just cost me what I already have. It will cost me all the things I could still have or this other path. It's not like suddenly this is an easy path, but it is. He recognizes even this moment, an easier path is to forgive that person, whoever they are in that car right now. And if he does that, it doesn't mean that all the problems that he now has in his life will disappear, but it does mean
he won't add to them these unbearable burdens of resentment. Well, he does make that choice, and within a very short while word spreads about that, and he's interviewed somehow by the media. I suppose it's quite a major story. In the moment he gets asked about it, so he makes
this comment. He said, like, yeah, please, just somewhat everybody here, just forgive someone who are coming up to February fourteenth, Fountain's day, do something for someone as an act of kindness in the name of my broken family is just do something to forgive or to do good. He got thousands of responses all over the world where people did that. And so you see already that his choice is turning
a negative into a positive. And a person who can turn a negative into a positive can never be defeated. I mean, so many good things have already come or he went on to write a book about it, to teach about it, to talk about it, to share it. He continues to do it. Well, he got remarried, they have more children, They've built good and good has come from it, and here we are talking about it. Now that's the power he let go. He made another, though
important distinction. I think this matters. He did the forgiving right there. And now that doesn't mean he never felt bad again, of course that's not right. But he still made an important choice. But he said, if you make forgiveness conditional, then you're trapped. Because even in his case where he forgave the person and has had a relationship with them, a positive relationship with them, since like the person still went to jail, they still had their cost.
He says, if you make it at orc conditional, you are trapped by that decision, because he said, like, what's enough? At what point has that individual in his case actually paid the full price to society? What's enough goes to jail? What if the person actually says sorry, well he did say that, is that sorry enough? Was there enough remorse in him on that day? Has he really been truly
remorseful enough? Does he understand the intergenerational impact that that moment had, Like, you can go on forever even if the person is trying to make amends, So you can be trapped forever if you make it conditional, You make your forgiveness unconditional, so that you can be unconditionally free from the burden. That doesn't mean that someone else isn't responsible. Doesn't violate the responsibility that somebody else faces for what they have done to you or wrongs that they have done.
You just don't self harm over it.
I think that's such a great way you just ended that, which is to think about what we are doing, which is the self harm we're doing to ourselves. I think it's really important. We've had several interviews focusing on forgiveness, and this is not an easy thing to do. I think it comes from where we set our intention. Our intention is to unconditionally forgive. That's what I want. That's where I want to be, knowing that we don't always feel that, but that that's what we're aiming at all the time.
I think it's similar to the idea of after I complain, I will say something I'm thankful for. In this case, it's I will say after I feel frustrated with someone, I will say the words I forgive you. Like treat it like a checkbox, not a Once I feel a certain way, I will forgive you. It's exactly the opposite order. You say I forgive you even when you don't feel it at all. You just say it. You start to try to make that check box moment, and the feeling will eventually catch up with the decision.
That sort of is the phrase that I think might be the most common one on this show, which is sometimes you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking. And so that's exactly what you're saying, I decide. The action I'm going to take is every time this comes up, what I'm going to do is say I forgive you and do my best to forgive you. And I hope that by taking that action, by checking that box, that then the feelings come along.
Words are so much more powerful than is obvious. The words we choose are not descriptors. I think that's how they would typically be thought about by people. That we use words to describe the world we live in, to describe what's happened to us. But I think of words as creators. When we speak, we're creating, We're breathing. Our words create the future. Yes, will say it that way.
There's another biblical reference. And again you can read that as literal as somebody wants, or a symbolic as somebody wants. But if you think about the creation story, even if somebody thinks about this as a myth, as stories that frame the Western world, there are all sorts of symbolic benefits, and one of them is the idea that God says, let there be light, and there was light. There's something really important about the order that you use language to create.
That language is a creative force in our lives. As a writer, I feel, perhaps especially conscious of this, that I'm writing the future into existence. When I'm writing. It is quite a profound process. I mean sometimes it can
be just a messy process. It often is, but it also is profound as you try to weigh up words, aware that it could be that a million people or millions of people will end up reading what you're writing right now, that this is not just describing something in the past, that you are breathing something into existence in your words. Well, similarly, in our own lives, I think we use the power of words quite unthinkingly, sometimes a
little thoughtlessly. I mean that can include something as obvious as saying something rude to someone in your own family, you know, saying something a bit too bluntly, saying something a bit worn out, You're a bit exhausted, and you say it. What are you going to get back? What is so predictable? Mimetic creatures? People tend to return exactly what they're given, And so you do that you have now created in your future an argument. You have created
an unpleasant conversation in the future. So words, I mean, wordsmithing is one thing for writing, but I think it's a similar process in our lives to be so careful to use words that help create the kind of life you want. There's a great book, classic book, as a man Thinketh, and it's all about this, right, does a man thinketh? Whether the verse it's from also biblical, is a man thinketh in his heart? So is he? That's
the rest of that phrase. Well, that's interesting too, because it suggests that thinking isn't something that you just do in your head. Thinking is something you do in your heart, which I think is quite a profound change. Their thoughts are derived from your heart. Well, I think words are similar to that that they derive from your heart and
they come up and they create. And so trying to work out how can I use words intentionally to try and create the kind of future relationships and results that I want is a non trivial change once people start to discover power in those words.
As you were quoting that, I was thinking of more my spiritual tradition of Buddhism and the Damapata or some of the first sayings of the Buddha, and it's basically, you know something to the effect of, you know, mind is the forerunner of all states. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind. It can be translated a lot of different things. Suffering will follow, just like the wheel of an ox cart when the ox pulls, you know,
it's the same basic idea. It starts there. And as you were saying that, I was thinking of another guest. We had on, a guy by the name of Christian Conte, and he had a phrase that I've reflected on a lot lately, and I used it in the Spiritual Habits of course I teached recently, which was basically inflammatory words lead to inflammatory emotions. And you can say that externally, but for me, where I've noticed that the most is internally,
you know. And one of the things that I've noticed that I've gotten way better at is my brain is an exist aggerator of internal state. My brain will say something like my back is killing me. When I finally tune into the thoughts, I'm like, that's what it's saying. And then I'll check in with my back and I'll be like, well, I mean, I've got a little twinge back there, I suppose, you know. But I'm bringing that
into life with these words. I'm creating a state of mind by the description that I'm giving something and that description isn't even accurate.
This is so true, and I think somebody with any Buddhist training will read well both essentialism and now Effortless with different eyes. It's really rich whenever somebody is reading it who has had some Buddhist exposure, because the whole idea of effortless state, I mean, I think it's represented in all the major religions and of course cross positive psychology and beyond, but it's like not emphasized in certain cultures.
And this is one of the great benefits the Eastern philosophies and Eastern cultures is that it helps us to rediscover things that actually are in Western philosophy, but just somehow we just don't emphasize it, and so we don't see that it's right there, hidden in plain sight. Effortless state leading to effortless action. I mean that's tourism, right, I mean that fear of effortless effort or you know, to act without action. These are all not just consistent
with what I'm writing about, Like they're right there. They're what I want people to get to, but I'm trying to do it in a way that would be palatable let's say to people that are working in corporate environments and so on, so that you know that they can still absorb them, so you don't have organ rejection. But we're definitely looking for this deeper wisdom, and we need Eastern as well as Western. Oh, we absolutely do. There's so much to learn. There's a group that used to
meet at Harvard. I think it was the Dean of Divinity harm that started the group, and they would have these people meet to discuss basically into religious dialogue. And one of the rules they had was you can't compare the best of your own faith to the worst of someone else's. So that seems like a good rule.
It's a good rule.
But a second is that we should allow ourselves. The phrase he came up with was wholly envy.
Yeah, so that you.
Can say, even if at first or even ever, we say, well, I'm not going to actually absorb that that's not what I believe, but I can see why that would be so good to believe. I can see why that would be so advantageous. And I think out of holy envy grows an even deeper thing, where you say, all truth, wherever it is, can be circumscribed into one great haule. All truth is interrelated, and this idea that all truth is in one tradition or in one group or one philosophy.
Maybe this is too blunt of a way of saying it, but to me, that's an appalling idea. What we need is to pursue truth wherever it is, to discover it, to try it. Takes a lot of a certain kind of mindset and heart set to even approach this. I'm working on a new book now about deep listening, and I'm so excited about this work. I've spent twenty years thinking about this and working on it, and it's finally
time to do it. But one of the very first things you have to conclude to even want to get into deep listening is to just discover how little you know, how truly you know. Use that word again, appalling. It is how little we know compared to what there is
to be known. And so suddenly you stop being in a mindset of well, I think the way I see the world is probably about how it is, and instead say, every person you talk to you in the uber car, you're asking questions and learning, and there's a lot to learn from the person who's driving you in the uber car because well, just speaking literally, the chances are not always, of course, but the chances are that this is going to be an immigrant, and that person has made really
powerful choices to be able to be where they are with you, and they've made trade offs that are serious trade offs, and they've come from a culture very different to your own. And if you listen and ask questions, you might be the only person that day, that month that's doing it. So you have a lot of opportunity and richness to have somebody describe under what circumstances they left and why, and what they're achieving and what family
is where. And that's just one tiny illustration of I think what starts to happen once you discover do you don't even know what you don't know in life?
Yeah? I think that's a profound place to operate from. Is grasping just how little we actually know makes me think of a couple of things. As you were talking for a minute there, I was thinking about my spiritual director as a Christian priest. That's not my faith tradition. I'm primarily zen. But Hey has a saying that I love. He says every time I find something I love in another tradition because he's been a big interfaith guy for years. He's like, I run back to my own tradition and
I look for it, and I always find it. It's always there, and I just think that's such a beautiful mentality. And then I was also thinking, as you were talking about deep listening. I don't know when I completed it. It's been a little while now, but I did a interfaith spiritual direction training for eighteen months, and that was the heart of the entire thing. You know, if I was going to boil the entire thing down to what did they teach for eighteen months primarily deep listening.
And give me an example of how they tolt that.
Well, it was really a lot of it, I would say. In some ways, you can sum it up so quickly, and yet it's a constant practice. And the practice was constantly recognizing when as you're trying to listen, you're being pulled into your habitual reactions, thoughts, comments, responses, all the different ways that you move from listening in to reacting internally and learning to notice that movement as it happens
and just shift back into listening. You know, it's one of those things that again you sort of describe it and you're like, this is very easy, like okay, great, just you know, just listen. You're doing podcasting now, so you know a little bit about what it's like when you're trying to interview somebody. You're trying to really listen to what's going on with what they're saying. You want to respond. You've also got an idea of where the
conversation might go, You've got your notes. You're sort of juggling a couple different things, right, And I think deep listening for me was learning to juggle this like listening
to the person and giving them my full attention. But the other thing I'm juggling is what's going on inside me at the same time, and learning to sort of not get stuck or lost in that, because that's where typically we stop listening is when we start wanting to either respond now we're formulating what we're going to say, or there's an emotional reaction happening inside me, like they're talking about this thing and I'm thinking do I agree, do I not agree? What do I think about that?
Or there's some feeling coming up, But it's all sort of pulling me away. So I've got to be listening really deeply to the person, but I also have to be listening to what's happening inside me, not to give it a lot of attention, but to notice that it's happening, so I can shift back. M.
Yeah, it sounds, as you describe it, like a meditative.
Practice one hundred percent. That's often the way it was phrased. So it was interface spiritual direction, and deep listening was framed as a the heart of what spiritual direction is, but b as a contemplative practice.
I relate to so much of what you're describing there. I think deep listening is the closest experience I have on a regular basis to meditation. I do meditate, but I find deep listening when you to use the Gatlin's phrase for this, that you shelve your agenda. You have an agenda, but you shelve it so that you can even be here, so you can even give attention to something.
And then when you get into not just surface listening, which I think surface listening can be quite hard, but deep listening, I think once you develop the skill, you know what you're doing with it is easier than surface listening. Because it's so much more interesting. Surface listening is painful. If you're just listening to somebody, they're just rambling on and rambling on, and you're not really paying attention and
you're not really there. It's just a tax. You're not getting much from it, but you're still having to give something. So it's kind of like a pound of flesh. But deep listening everybody so interesting once you get beyond the surface. So much going on in them. There's so much to relate to, there's so much to absorb. It's the richest journey of life. And my observation currently is that it is missing. In fact, I just put on Twitter going to pull it up. I thought this was really interesting.
I just did this yesterday. I asked a question, do you ever feel we have lost the ability to deeply listen? And there's just tons of responses. I wasn't expecting to people to really write responses to it. It was more of a rhetorical question or something, but I just had so
many people talk about this lost art. I mean, certainly, I put out a poll on a different on LinkedIn, where I am quite active, and I don't know it's non scientific, Paul, but sixteen hundred people are so responded immediately, and ninety percent of people believe that we either have lost it or we never had it to begin with. It wasn't a very robust Paul, but that means that just only eleven percent of people think that we haven't lost it, and that speaks to something. Somebody was just
talking to me just a couple of days ago. I was doing a TV appearance and I was talking with the director afterwards for about forty five minutes, and he said, when you told me you were writing this new book and you sort of said the approximate title of it, he said, I just realized there was something missing in my life. It named something missing in my soul. The deep listening just isn't there. It's not a part of life.
Everything's interrupted. Is that at home, everything's interrupted. There's always something someone some input digital input, of course, is if you have children, it's definitely going to be inputs there. Somebody knocks on the doors, something's on the radio, something's on you know, there's always something. And that's even not even to mention the phone. This this, you know, makes a useful servant but a poor master. And I sense it's just mastering so much of our lives, and still
too much of my life. It just makes deep listening rarer. And yet this is what we yearn for. Maybe that is the deepest human need is to be known, to be heard, to be seen. I mean, what happens, Eric, what happens psychologically to a person who has never been deeply listened to. I haven't done the research yet, but I'm doing it, beginning it to try to answer this and many other related questions. But I'm so curious to actually identify what research we have about what happens when
people are never deeply listen to. I mean, we can hypothesize that they feel no value, that they feel not fully human.
You know, there's a lot of childhood attachment theory around attunement, right, we could say that the process of attunement between parent and child is a process of deep listening. I think, sir, and we know all the ways that when that doesn't happen, that things can go wrong for children.
Well, the disorder attachments can be some of the most catastrophic psychological issues that people then live with for the rest of their lives. They don't trust, they don't trust humans. Yep, Yeah, I had Josh Ship on the show's he wrote a book called The grown Ups Guide to Teenage Humans.
But yeah, we've had him but a long time. But yeah, amazing man.
Joship was left by his mother, abandoned, That's how certainly he felt about it, and what he learned from that experience for years was that you couldn't trust adults, and so he never did, And of course that causes incredible dysfunction. Yeah, because every time anyone does something, even if they're trying
to do something good, will be distrusted by him. Even if they are sincere, even if they're genuine, even if they're reliable, they are trustworthy, he won't trust them, And so it does create a detachment that it took somebody coming along and being so consistent with him for years for him to just question the paradigm that he'd gained.
And so I think maybe there's a miniature version of that going on for all of us now because of this what we would call it disconnected, wouldn't we We'd say, you know, technology has made us disconnected rather than connecting us. But isn't that not much of a stretch linguistically from disconnected to detached? I wonder if it isn't true that for many people they're suffering with a sort of lightweight virgin of detachment disorder. They just feel disconnected from people.
You know, they've been isolated for the last eighteen months because of COVID, but then even in normal life when they're in a big group of people, it's almost worse. If you're in a big group of people and you feel detached and disconnected, that's like, that's a greater form of loneliness. Yeah, if you feel that, that separation. And so I mean, I think we could probably tie up all these threads into a single idea which was shared
with me by a friend. He said, he said, in life, we have to shift between being in the scared state, the scared state, and the sacred state. Yeah, and I love that because again, linguistically just one letter difference, scared
and sacred. And to really get into that mode where you're listening deeply past the surface scared state, which I think is sort of at the periphery, and get deeper so you can start to feel that, you know, whatever the language we choose, that wisdom, that conscience, that guidance, and that I think produces somehow a certain ability, confidence, ability, not sure the right word, to be able to even listen to other people, to even be able to gauge
appropriately with the world around us, to orient ourselves well and surely that path of deep listening within deep listening without is key to being able to live our lives more effortlessly. To even know what is essential to us, to know what's essential to other people, and then to do it to be more aligned, is so much better
than this state of suffering. Makes everything harder, makes it harder to even know what is essential to and what is not, makes it harder for us to engage with other people because we distrust them and we're out of alignment with them, and we're all of this I think adds up to a life that it makes everything much harder for ourselves than the people around us.
I think that is a wonderful way to bring it all around and sum it up. There's about seventy five ideas in the book that I wanted us to talk about, and we've run out of time. The book is called Effortless, Make it Easier to do what matters most. There's so much great stuff in it. Courage listeners to check out your What's Essential podcast? Yes, check that podcast out and Greg, thank you so much for your time. I've really enjoyed this conversation and it's been really rich for me.
It's been a pleasure. Eric, it's great to be on the One You Feed podcast.
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