Thomas Sterner

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 Thomas M. Sterner, Founder and CEO of the Practicing Mind Institute. Thomas is considering an expert in present

moment functioning. He's a popular in demand speaker who works with high performance individuals, including athletes, industry groups, and individuals, helping them to operate effectively within the high stress situations so that they can break through to new levels of mastery. He has been featured in top media outlets such as NPR, Fox News, and he is the author of the best seller The Practicing Mind. His latest book is called Fully

Engaged Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses. In time commitment, go to one you feed dot net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to five percent of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help

to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you Feed dot net slash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Thomas M. Sterner. Hi, Tom, Welcome to the show. Thank you, it's great to be here. I'm excited to have you on. Your latest book is called Fully Engaged, Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life, and there are several things in it that are very much right at the heart of things that we talk about on this show over and over, so I'm really

looking forward to getting into those. But before we do, let's start, like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his

grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think that what talks to me the most about that is the need for awareness. What I mean by awareness is because this goes into everything in life, everything that we're going to talk about today. You can't

change anything that you're not aware of. So if we look at this parable and we say, okay, it's the one that you feed, well, you can't feed the one that you want to feed if you're not aware of the one you don't want to feed. And I think that that's a really important point to make. Most of us spend our day, um, what all hall in our thoughts instead of from the perspective of someone having a thought. And people ask me sometimes we know, how do I

become more patient? And my responses while you have to know when you're being impatient And that sounds like a silly response, but in reality, most of the time when people are impatient, they're just feeling impatient. They're not aware that they're having an impatient thought. And they're very different places to come from. The one offers the opportunity to make a conscious choice to go in a different direction.

The other is more of a reaction to a situation and also being a puppet to the emotional content of the situation. So looking at this parable, I would say that we we first need to be we recognize this as the truth. So we now need to know, um, we need to be aware of when we're feeding whichever wolf, and then what are the mechanics of changing how we react to that situation? How do we become more aware?

How do we get ourselves to a place where we enjoy the process of becoming more centered towards the wolf that is the good wolf. Yeah, I agree completely. I think awareness is such a critical baseline for everything that

we have to do. And I know that I can be aware that I am being impatient or that I'm irritable, and I can't always change it sometimes, but at least if I am conscious of like I am in this place, and I can observe it and learn more about it versus like you said, I used the term autopilot all the time on the show, like I'm just kind of going on autopilot, and and that awareness is such a key piece of that. So what are things that people

can do to build awareness? Well, the only way that I have found, and it seems to be backed up by empirical research, is with some form of meditation, thought awareness training. Because what happens to us is that, particularly in this culture that we live in today, you know,

they're finding that our attention span, uh is. I read one study where it's less than that of a goldfish for most people, uh, which is I don't know how they know that, but I don't either, And of course they don't mention that all of the goldfish and the study had PhDs. But but the point is, I think that what we do know is that we are constantly connected to digital devices. Our faces are always in them,

so we're being overstimulated all the time. Our brains are being overstimulated, and our brains are being asked to think at a higher rate of speed, and in order to answer this, the brain is evolving to do that. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but by the same token, we're losing The part of our brain that works to focus on something for any length of time is atrophying, and that's why you see people are having more and more trouble paying attention for any length of time. And

you know, it's in all different ages. It's a real problem with the young people because they're growing up in this error where you know, very young kids. My older daughter is a kindergarten teacher, and she said, you know, the attention span of these kids is just not existent, and it's a real issue, and they're trying to do all these things to change that. But I think that we need to realize that this is the side effect of, you know, the culture that we live in and what

is happening all around us. So we have to do something that is counter to that. And the one thing that all the studies show is to learn to sit quietly for a few minutes, which is very difficult to do because we feel like if we're not doing anything, we're not doing anything, which really isn't true. You know, when we're doing nothing, we're actually doing something. And you know by sitting quietly for even if it's just ten minutes a day and observing your body breathe are saying

hearing a short phrase in your mind. What happens is that you begin to separate yourself from your thoughts, and this awareness that I am not my thoughts, I'm the one that has thoughts starts to grow. And when you do that, that's when this awareness starts to happen. And the other thing that happens is that you begin to develop a stamina and a strength in pulling your mind

back to task. Because anybody that has ever tried any sort of thought awareness white called thought awareness training is just a label or meditation, knows that it only takes a matter of ten fifteen seconds into it when your mind takes off. It just doesn't like being still. It's a problem solving machine. It wants to find a problem, and if you don't give it one, it will go

into search mood. So it takes off, and because you have always followed it in your life, you go with it and you're not even aware that you've done that. And then there's a brief moment where you wake up and you realize that you know you're thinking about something else other than following your breath or saying a short phrase in your mind. And when you do that, that's

when everything happens. In that microsecond. Number one, you've become aware of what your mind is doing without your permission, and then by pulling it back, your ability to do that on demand becomes stronger. So those two things are really everything. As you said earlier, you know, we can be aware that you're being impatient. That doesn't mean it's

going to be easy to pull your mind back. But the more you do it, the more repetitions you go through in a meditative state, the stronger you get and the better you become of that, and then you begin to become more observer oriented and less of a reacting entity in the situation, and that's where all the strength comes.

So really, i'd like to answer your question directly you have to practice something like that, and the benefits besides the fact that you know all the lower and blood pressure and equalizing blood pressure and all these sort of things that it does. That's probably one of the most significant things that it does. And I just really haven't seen anything else that accomplishes that. You've got a line

in the book where you're talking about meditation. It was in my notes here that I wanted to talk about, and since you just brought it up, I thought i'd hit it. I'll just go ahead and read what you said. You say. I am always amused when people interp at the fact that they are chasing their mind all the time as an indicator that they are not good at meditation.

What they are missing, and this is very significant, is they wouldn't be chasing their mind and bringing it back to task if they weren't noticing that their mind was running off. I've commented many times that what many people interpret is a bad meditation is really a good one. That's right. I think it's amusing, you know when when people say that they talk to me and they say, I try meditation, I'm not very good at it. And

when I say, why do you say that. I said, there is no thing is not being good at meditation, And they say, well, because I I All I do is chase my mind. And I said, well, that means that you're you're noticing what your mind is doing. And also in many ways that could be interpreted as a very good meditation, because it would be similar to saying, you know, when I go to the gym, I'm not

very good because all I do is a bunch of repetitions. Now, I mean, every time you you repeat that pulling noticing the mind and pulling it back, you're getting stronger and your awareness is growing, which is what you're after. I think everybody, even the you know, the monks and Saffron robes that meditate all day, will tell you that. You know, some days your mind is extremely active and you're going to be in chase mode the whole time you're in

this meditative state. Other days you're going to just be, for whatever reason, more relaxed, laid back, and your thoughts are gonna be thin. You're gonna have so much thinking going on in your mind and it won't be as arduous of a tack. They're both normal, they're both a part of it. And they're both good, right, And I think some people settle into a quiet state easier than others. But I don't think that that really has much to do with whether meditation is providing the benefit that we

wanted to provide. I'm one of those people. My brain is not very prone to being quiet. And you know, I've meditated it for for a long time and I still find like that for me, that is a that is a consistent challenge. But I still feel like I really get the benefits of it because I'm just doing it and I am, like you said, I'm just recognizing there goes my brain. I bring it back, no judgment, and and You're right, it strengthens that muscle over and

over it does. And I think people enter this thinking when I achieve a quiet mind, that's why I've succeeded at this, and that really the quiet mind is just a target, you know, you have to have, you know, an archery, you need a target to aim at. What are you doing? You need something to aim your energy at, so, uh, something to execute towards. And so the reason we say a quiet mind is it's it's totally opposite of what

our mind normally is. So when we say the target is a quiet mind, that's to give you something to aim at, and choosing a breath based meditation or a phrase meditation, all you're really doing there is giving your mind a single task so that you can really measure whether it's doing that. If you said to your mind, well, I'm going to sit here quietly and just let my mind do whatever it wants, well, then you would have no idea whether you're wouldn't be controlling anything, you wouldn't

be going through repetitions. But when you give your mind a single simple task, and that's why if you choose a phrase, it needs to be two or three words. You don't want to like a long, long sentence that you have to repeat over and over again. You want something that's very simple. It just gives you a baseline. You're telling your mind, this is all I want you to do right now. I don't want you to be working on the report for later on I think of what I needed the grocery store, or when I'm going

to pick the kids over. You don't want any of that. You just want a very simple task. And that's so contrary to everything else that we do during the day, where we're over taxed and trying to do so many things. I also think that one of the things that people struggle with with the concept of meditation is that it's never done. And what I mean by that is we're not comfortable with open ended tasks. You know, we have

so many things, too many things on our plate. So we want this feeling of closure, you know, we want the report them, we want the kids picked up, we want the house claim. We want we want to be able to say this is done and now I can take it off my plate. We're not real comfortable with things where you say you're gonna do this every day for the rest of your life, or least you're gonna

try to. That seems, you know, overwhelming when you approach it like that, And I think that's one of the reasons why people feel frustrated and overwhelmed when they start a meditation practice, and it's because they feel like I never get to someplace where I can say I'm done with this. And I tell people you need to look at it like exercise. I mean, there really is no point in physical exercising that you get to where you can say I've done exercising. I've mastered it. I don't

need exercise for the rest of my life. I mean it's a part of maintaining healthy body, and meditation is a part of maintaining self power and increasing self power and the ability to be the conscious choicemaker. Hey, everybody, before we get back to the interview, we just want to ask you to go to when You Feed Slash Support and make a monthly donation so we can keep

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interview with Thomas S. Turner. One of the other major themes from the book that I want to bring up, and it's one that I have wrestled with my whole life, and and listeners of the show will know about it because I bring it up often because it's been such a challenge for me. And that is this sense that I'll be happy when, um, I'm going to read something again that you wrote, because I think you say it

very eloquently. In the old paradigm, happiness, a sense of real contentment is always outside us, a place we have to get to before we can experience it. Whenever we are in this moment, we are incomplete, and the nectar that will quench our thirst lies outside ourselves. And in some time frame other than the present moment, this feeling can burn within us our whole life, pushing us on in a state of exhaustion, like some poor soul stumbling through the desert trying to get to the water, which

turns out to be maurage. We have an innate sense in us that is misinterpreted. And I will say that the marketing media nurtures this sense as a feeling of being incomplete. And if you look at marketing, which is all the marketing people the media have a connection to us twenty four hours a day, seven days a week

because of all these digital devices. Uh, you know, no matter where you are, you've got a screen in your face that we're one that's very accessible and that's why you see this disease that is overtaking us where people, you know, they're walking down the street, they're always always have their their face and the phone. There's advertisements on there or there's whether they're audio or video. So this feeling of being incomplete is marketed in a way that

your life is passing you by. You can't be happy with where you're at. You have to have this that, this, you have to achieve this, you have to get to this state. All these things are outside of where you are right now. And personally, I think that that feeling is something that we're supposed to have because it's what drives us to expand uh spiritually as human beings. It's the reason that we have the Sistine Chapel, it's the

reason that we have the classical composers. You know that all these accomplishments that we have come from this feeling of there's more, I can do, more, I can be more. That's what makes people push the envelope and whatever they're trying to do, whether it's some small thing that means only something to them personally, or whether it's on a global scale, it's that feeling is there to drive us

to work at executing that into manifesting it. What happens is is it gets misused and misinterpreted, and so something that there's really this tremendous blessing turns into this uncomfortable feeling which makes us feel incomplete and makes us run on this treadmill constantly trying to get someplace other than where we are right now. And even though we repeat that cycle over and over again in our life, we can all look back to the time we were kids

and there was this particular toy we wanted. There was this bike, and then there was the prom dress, and then the first car, and it just goes on and on, and we get all those things, you know, through our lives, and as soon as we get them, we immediately it might last a day or so, and then we replace it with the next thing that we need to feel happy because we're always trying to quench that thirst inside which is not meant to be quenched. It's there for

a reason other than making us feel incomplete. That's one of the fundamental questions I think that I have tried to put right at the heart of this show because it's right at the heart of my own journey. I guess you would say, is that idea of you know, what's the right balance between the striving in the ambition that you talk about. You say that we have it build into our d NA, the desire to expand, And I believe that totally. And then so I believe that

to be completely true. And then I also believe to be very true that the spiritual ideas that say it's this constant craving for things that is the source of a lot of suffering. And how you reconcile those two opposing desires and truths is a very big part of what I'm looking for and what I strive to try and do in my life. Well, and I'll go back to what we spoke about earlier. You can't do that

if you're not aware of what you're doing. You know, when you can notice this feeling of incompleteness, and you notice that you're interpreting it in a way of feeling like I'm not happy here, I have to get someplace else. Then you can have the opportunity to analyze that and to come up with the strategy you know that some sort of a procedure or trigger all these sort of things that you know I've talked about in the book that then you have the opportunity to say, you know what,

this is not serving my happiness. The way I'm feeling right now is an interpretation that I know is not going to serve me, and I can interpret it in a different way and I can shift over into that interpretation. So this stuff is always it's all woven in everything just you know, weaves itself in between and through each other.

So you know, you need this awareness so that you can be aware of when you're interpreting things incorrectly, and then you give yourself the opportunity once again, that doesn't mean that it's going to be effortless to do that, but there are things that we can come up with to make that not only effortless but more more joyful.

And you have a practice in the book for working with this that I think is really wonderful, and I've kind of stumbled into something similar, but I think you say it so well, and you basically say, when you notice that you're not enjoying this moment because you are craving the moment when you reach your goal, ask yourself and then what I mean. It's something that I learned myself where I would notice I was having that feeling

and then I would stop. That feeling would be the trigger when I had that feeling I noticed, you know, I would say, I would that would trigger me to say and them what and I would review when I would say, Okay, let's put myself in the future, so now I own that car, or now I'm making another ten thousand dollars or whatever it is that I seem to be so attached to in that moment. Am I going to feel fully realized for the rest of my life after that? You know? How am I going to

feel two days after that? A week after that? Am I going to feel satisfied for the rest of my life? Or am I just going to start another cycle? And then I try to remember, how how many times have I done this before? What are some of the other situations where I've done this same type of thought process, the same cycle life, repeated it in the past. I know where this leads. I know it's not the answer.

I know that this is it helps me to change my perspective and look at what it is that I'm feeling so attached to, and to use it more as um target, a rudder to steer my efforts, and not something that is there to remind me of what I have yet to do. I mean, that's really where you know I talk about in the practicing mind. I mean, what we do is we misuse our goals. We set these goals and then we feel like, you know, when I have this goal, that I'm going to be happy,

and then we become so attached to the goal. The minute we do that, we put ourselves at war with this moment. Be in this moment, we don't have the goal, and we've already decided that we can't be happy until we do have the goal. So now the whole process of achieving the goal becomes something that we have to

endure rather than something that we can enjoy. You use these words, and multiple guests we've had on the show of you similar words, which is moving away from the result and focusing on the process, the processes where all of the joy exists. I mean, when you run a race, it only takes a second across the finish line. Why does it feel so good. It feels so good because of every the process of running the race, all of the you know, all the preparation work that went in,

the mental stamina of the discipline. The reason it feels like such an accomplishment is because of the process that it took to go through to step over the finish line. If we're standing on a sender's track and I draw I take a stick and draw a line and say there's the finish line, got and step over it, it means nothing. And that's one of the things I think that we really miss is that everything that we have

is effortless, doesn't mean anything to us. Or the things that mean the most to us are the things that we had to put our our our energy, and our focused into and our discipline, and that's why they feel so good. You can look at this in a very simple way. If I put somebody on the stage and I hand them a tennis ball and I say throw it out there in the audience and they go where just throw it out there? And well, that means nothing.

But if I take a small like an eighteen inch diameter trash can and put it out in the floor in the middle, and I said, I give you a hundred bucks if you put the ball in that trash can, all of a sudden everything changes because now it's a challenge. We like a challenge, We need a challenge. I've lectured to kids and I asked him what do you do with a video game that you've mastered? They say, I get rid of it? And I said, that's right, you do.

Why do you do that? Why don't you go back and play one it's easier, I said, you always want something that is beyond your threshold. And this is across the board with arts. You know, as a musician, when you work on a very difficult piece and master the piece, you don't go back and play the first piece you ever learned. You go to a more difficult piece. Why

is that we're driven to do that? Because that's part of this drive to make us expand so I think that when we learn that, that's it's an infinite process that you know, we're always looking for this perfect state. And I have said that, you know, perfection it's not a number, it's not a place that you get to, because all of those things have a limit to them. When you know, when you say, uh, you know, when I can do this this good, I'm going to be

perfect at it now, that doesn't exist. Real perfection is the ability to expand infinitely. So when we accept that and we really grasp that, we realize that the process is where we live our life. If we're not experiencing this moment and the process of achieving our goals, we're losing all the joy that makes the whole effort worthwhile. And that is one of those things that is fairly easy to intellectually understand and very difficult, sometimes too emotionally implement.

How do you get there? Because I can imagine a bunch of people thinking that sounds exhausting. Well, it's interesting, you know, you use the word difficult because's difficult where it's like difficult and struggle. There are labels that we apply to a feeling inside. So I always feel like what we're really describing is the process of learning. I mean, when I say to someone you know, would you uh, they say, well, there's this I've got to go through

this interview, and I hate interviews. I don't do well and I dread them. And I said, well, if you could be anything you wanted to be, how would that be in terms of interviews? They say, Oh, I would like it to be effortless. I'd like to enjoy it. I'd say, okay, well how do you think you get there? And well, I don't know. I said, what you have to do interviews, don't you. I mean you have to. You want to sing in front of people and be comfortable,

you gotta get out and sing in front of people. Now, the feelings that you experience when you do that are normal in the process of learning to do interviews. It's normal when you're in a state of gathering information and gathering and experience to feel off your game because you have these uncertainties. And I think where the problem comes in with what you're describing there is it goes right back to that feeling of I, you know what, am I going to be good at this? You know this

is not fun? You know what? Am I going to be good? Those are interpretations of the moment of the actual experience, But the experience is just the experience. We attach all of these interpretations to it that make us experience that moment in a certain way. So, for example, the living room needs painting, one person says, I absolutely hate painting the living I hate everything about it. I don't want to do it. The next person says, I love it. I can't wait till the weekend when I

get to paint the living room. Painting the living room is just painting the living room. It's neither of those two things. It's the interpretation of the experience that makes it feel the way it does. So I find that in terms of getting better at this, there's a couple of things that you need to do. Number one, you need the awareness that you're interpreting it that way that gives you the opportunity to interpret it a different way.

And then you need, you know, some procedures. You need some um some things that you can fall back on that you so you're not making decisions about difficult moments. So, in other words, when you feel because you said it sounds easy to do this but it sounds exhausting, well that's a feeling and that's an interpretation of it. So when you get in that situation where you say, okay, I'm going to work at being more present moment or whatever.

The next day, there's gonna be a moment in that day that you're going to feel like not doing that, and you need if you come up with a decision as to how you're going to handle that before that feeling, before you get into it, when you're out in this space here, this safe space where you've decided this is the direction I want to go in. But I know when I go in this direction, I'm going to come

up against this roadblock. Will make your decision as to how you're going to deal with that roadblock before and then the roadblock becomes a trigger and you just fall back into this procedure. It's you know, this is what they teach like E. M T. S. You know, like so that when they come up on a dangerous situation or a situation that's that's very upsetting, they have something to drop back into. And I can tell you as a pilot, this stuff is drilled into your head over

and over again. It's procedures. You have a procedure for everything, so that whatever, hopefully whatever happens in the air is something that you have anticipated at some point and you've made a decision as to how you're going to react in that situation, and then it just becomes this routine that you drop back into to help you move through that. And it really is that simple. Uh. The emotional part is all an interpretation, and you have a choice, if you're aware, you have a choice as to how you

interpret it. Now, some people would say, yeah, but it's a moment. I was taught you know your emotions, you can't. You can't control your emotions. When I was growing up, that was what I was always taught. But that's not true at all. I have found in situations that at one point in my life I would have reacted way over this way, getting very upset and full of anxiety and may be angry, and I don't react that way anymore because I've learned that I can control my emotion.

It is a choice that I have. I'm aware of it. It's just a thought. It's a thought or a situation, and I'm interpreting it in a certain way that's making me have a pull towards a certain reaction, and I can change what my habitual response is two different circumstances by being more conscious, more of an observer of how I want to be and how I am currently acting in that particular situation. That's a long answer. I hope it makes sense. It does, and you know, I mostly

agree with that. You know, are you in control of your emotions? Because I think, you know, there are things people suffer from mental illnesses of different types of What I do believe is it's very difficult sometimes in a moment to control my emotion. But over a period of time of systematically trying to reinterpret things and look at things a different way and take different perspectives, I agree with you you can make huge changes in the way

we react to certain situations. Well, I think what you know, what you just said, it's difficult in the moment to control your emotions. But again, that's a skill. You know. What we're talking about here is a skill. It is a skill. Some people are better at handling their emotions than other, So for me, it is a skill. Now I'm talking about I'm not talking about someone who has a clinical situation which could be impeding that, but I'm

talking about you know, the average person. It is a skill. Uh, difficult, It's difficult to do. That is to me that that's an interpretation of the feeling that happens when you do that when you don't know you're not good at it. You know what, you're determined, I'm not good at this. This is difficult. That's your interpretation of the feeling that you're having. And when you begin to recognize that as a feeling and not the truth, something that you do

have control over. Where we get bogged down is when we start to set these standards. Not one of the chapters and fully engage is set your goals with accurate data. Well, what happens is, Okay, we sit back and we say, well, you know, I'm not very good at handling this situation.

I want to change the way I handle it. Well, the problem that we come into is we almost immediately say I want to take about a week, you know, I mean, you know, we we we set these goals without any information and then we begin judging our progress based on this timeline that we've set up. But if I said, you, look, do you want to be better at handling interviews? Yeah, well that should take you about

two years. Well, if I tell you that, and I tell you that in two years you're doing this, you're gonna be really good at Well, if you don't do well in an interview two weeks later or two months later, you're not going to feel bad because you're gonna feel your interpretation is going to be different than it is if you think it's only going to take you three weeks. You know. So I think that these are these are all. There are some mechanical issues here that we can look

at that change our interpretation of that moment that you're describing. Yep, I agree. I mean I think that's such a big piece is that understanding how long something should take, and everything takes far longer then we think it should. I mean that has been proven to me over and over and over again that we almost consistently are almost constantly underestimate the amount of time things will take. Whether it's a software project, or learning to play an instrument, or

a learning to you know, handle our anger better. It's it's almost always longer than we think it would be in certainly longer than we would like it to be. That's right. And the example that I use because it's absurd and everybody can relate to it. As someone says, I want to lose thirty pounds that should take ten days, Well, we can all sit now that's that's never gonna happen.

But if that's what we do with these other things, and what happens to that person that says I want to learn lose thirty pounds in ten days, well, five days into their diet and exercise program, they could be doing extremely well, working at an accelerated pace, but they step on the scale and they've lost seven pounds and they what's their interpretation of that? Their interpretation is, I'm not very good at this. Their confidence goes down, they

feel miserable, when in reality they're doing really well. But because they have said they've chosen this timeframe that's completely unrealistic and inaccurate, they're judging their their progress in relationship to that, and it sets up all these feelings and experiences that happen from that that are completely false. Well that they're not false, but they're based on false information. Yeah, exactly.

And those things are all variable. So it's hard to know whether you know how long something should take for you versus different people, and it's uh. I agree, having having accurate data about how long something's going to take can be very very helpful. Um, we're near the end of time here, but I want to hit one last phrase that you use that I'd like to talk about briefly before we wrap up, and you say, there's a

paradox here. Difficult changes require inner strength, but at the same time they create inner strength as we experience them. There's a story in the book about a young girl golfer that I work with, because I've worked with golfers, young athletes and and older athletes and um. When she came to me, she said, what I want to work on is the way that I handle difficult situations and tournaments.

She said, If I'm playing well, and she was very very highly regarded as a physically as a golfer, she said, when I'm playing well, she said, I do very well. She said, But if I start to play poorly, she said, I really begin to struggle, and then my game starts

to implode. So it came to the biggest tournament of the year that she had, she asked me if I would carry the bag for which wasn't normally allowed, but it wasn't this particular situation, and I could see she was when I pulled up to the course that she was. She was on the range and I could see from a distance that she was so attached to winning this tournament and doing good. She had been planning for a year and actually all the work she had done with me was for this event so that she could move

on to a higher qualifying round. And I knew it was going to be a problem, but I didn't want to say anything to her because I didn't want to start this internal dialogue and put doubt in her mind. So I thought, let's just see how this unfolds. Well, it was a disaster. She went way right off the tea. She just compounded one air after another, and by the time we were on I don't know the fifth or sixth hole, she had shot herself completely out of the tournament.

There was absolutely no chance she was going to even place in the tournament, and I had at that point. She was so dejected and heartbroken, and I thought, well, I have to say something here because that's what she's paying me for. So and I wasn't really sure how do I approach it, So I just asked her, I said, you know, why did you ask me to work with you? And she said I wanted to learn how to deal

with this situation better. And I said, well, I said, so, how do you think you do that now And she said, I honestly don't know. I've tried everything I know and nothing is working. And I said, well, I think the thing that you're missing is you have to be in this situation. She said, what do you mean. I said, well, if you want to learn how to play in the rain, and it has to be raining, If you want to learn how to play in the wind, it has to

be when when. If you want to learn how to extract the most from a situation that you interpret a struggling, you have to be in this situation in order to execute everything that you have practiced for that situation. And I said, you're here, this is where you wanted to be. I said, so forget about the tournament. Just see what you can do with everything that you've worked on and see if you can turn it around. If you can turn it around and start playing your game, then you've won,

which what she did. So my point is is that we have to go through struggle in order to learn to deal with struggle. And that's that that is the paradox. You know, we can't sit in a comfortable situation all the time and learn how to deal with struggling. I that's one of the reasons why, you know, I think where what we're taught and what's on television and everything is, you know, if you're not happy all the time, you need this drug. You know, it's like we're supposed to

be happy all the time. And and I don't believe that. I said to a bunch of golfers one time, what makes a good shot feel so good? And they gave me all these ridiculous answers. I said, no, it's because you've hit so many bad ones. It's a real simple question, um. And I think that one of the things that we gain from in reinterpreting, being able to change our interpretation and struggle is the feeling of accomplishment and control, you know, a self power. So but in order to get there,

you have to be in it. So when you are in it, if you have this awareness again, it gives you this opportunity to go, hey, this is I'm feeling this feeling that I usually call struggling. That means I'm in the process of learning how to do this better, because that's the only way I can do it is if I'm in it. The stuff that I'm good at, I never think about because it's it's easy for me. This is my opportunity here. It's not a bad thing.

It's an opportunity for me to expand myself. And the people that want to grow personally are always going to be up against that threshold because as soon as they master something, they move on. So it's very important to learn to interpret that feeling. What it feels like to be up against your threshold is not a bad thing. It's you're there because you're you're growing. And I think that, um, it's a very important point to make because your interpretation

of it determines how you experience it. And you can't experience that as um as an opportunity and a chance to grow, and then your performance goes up because you're not looking at it as just a horrible experience. That's a sure way to get slugged, though, is if you tell somebody who's in a great deal of pain that this is a wonderful learning opportunity. Yeah, you have to do it, but no, I agree with I agree with

what you're saying. I mean it's like I will think that, like I figured out like how to behave in relationships, well until I get into one, right when I'm outside of one. I got it all figured out, you know, I know exactly what to do, and then you put you in it. It reminds me of that old ram Das saying, right, if you think you're enlightened, go visit

your parents. Well, you make a really good point. I think it's important, you know, with this girl here, that was the reason why I didn't start the tournament out that way. She had to have exhausted everything and realized that what she was doing wasn't working. And I think you have to be in that state of mind. You know, when you get into the state of mind, um, then you become it's like the zen thing. You know, then your cup is empty and you're you're open to receive information.

If I had talked to her about that before, I don't know that she would have had that reaction. But when I said that to her during the tournament, she was very receptive to the idea. Yep, exactly. Well, Tom, thanks so much. I really enjoyed the book and I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think there's been lots of really useful practical things in it, and I love episodes that are like that, So thank you. So thank you. It was a pleasure being here. It was a pleasure

meeting you. I really appreciate the opportunity. All right, take care, okay. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One you Feed podcast Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support