Tony Wrighton on Managing Your Energy

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 Sky Sports presenter Tony Wrighton, who is also the author of three books and the creator and host

of the Zestology podcast. Hi Tony, welcome to the show. Hey, how are you doing. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I am really happy to have you on. You are the host of a podcast called Zestology, which I'll also be appearing on and we'll talk a lot more about that here soon. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and 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. Well. First of all, I really like the way that you've kind of based your podcast around this. I think it's I always like it when a podcast has a title that it doesn't make it immediately apparent what the nature of the podcast is all about, you know, I thought, oh, is this like a charity podcast? Do they feed lots of people in third world countries? What's going on here? You know? Is it a cooking show. Yeah, exactly. It's it's a nice idea.

It works really well. And I think in terms of the multiple personalities that I've got inside myself, the one I feeds very relevant. I'll be looking into this parable before coming on your show. And there's lots of different interpretations of it, aren't there. And it's appeared in lots of films, and it's been told retold in different ways. And sometimes it's not not necessarily a good and evil wolf, but there's just two wolves. And but but there's the

parable still applies, you know. I mean, which one you feed kind of grows inside you. And I think one of the things that I've been very interested and very much looking forward to talking to you about is in terms of habit, habit forming and habit building and building good habits and staying on the straight and narrow. It's

very hard sometimes to remind yourself, you know. Just before we started recording I I was telling you that I'm a new dad and I've got a four month old and one of the things that I know works really well for me is meditation. I know, I've got quite a distractive mind. I'm easily distracted and just ten minutes of kind of calm every morning does work really well.

But when you've got a four month old, you can't control anything, and if they're up at five o'clock in the morning, you're looking after them and there's no time for meditation. So I've desperately been trying to feed the

meditation wolf inside me. But but to me, there isn't necessarily a good and evil wolf, but there's there's lots of different wolves inside me, all kind of pursuing slightly different agendas, and I have to work hard to be disciplined to kind of follow the path that I know makes me feel a little bit more calm and balanced.

It's definitely true that there's two wolves inside of us is a definite oversimplification, but I get your point around the parable for me just is basically about choice, right,

It's just about what choices are we making. And so we were just talking a minute ago about how having a newborn suddenly makes you have a lot less control, and so you know, that is one of the sort of challenges in life, or one of the things that I always think is at the center of my questions in life, which is about accepting things the way they are and trying to make things better. And I think that, you know, life is a skillful dance between those two poles,

so to speak. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, I mean I would certainly veer towards the control side. I think something I've I've worked on, you know. I mean my day job is I'm a TV presenter here in the UK, and I worked really hard for that job, and I trained in NLP for I started training that about fifteen years ago. And a lot of neuro linguistic programming skills are based around goal setting or outcome setting as you might say.

And you know, with the with the job at Sky Sports, I really wanted it, and I wrote it down and I did self hypnosis around it, and I settle these anchors and goals and outcomes and I did everything I could. I modeled the presenters that were already on there, and in the end I got the job. But then when it comes to many things in life like relationships and children, um, I wasn't so good at that part of it because I couldn't control it, and therefore and therefore I wasn't

very successful in that area. So yeah, controllers served me quite well in a work capacity in some ways, but it's work in progress. When it comes to relationships and kids, hopefully I've got a bit better anyway, I hope my girlfriend would tell you that. Anyway. Yeah, well, no relationships and uh childer and all that stuff. You're right as an area that control doesn't really work. And and I think as I've gotten older, you know, I was sharing with you my son is in college, so i'm you know,

I'm obviously a little bit older than you are. And and I think for me it's really been in the in the later years for me that I think I've gotten a deeper sense of the value of letting go of control. Um. I think that I have a tendency to to very much be about control, right and and very much be about well, if you just do this, and you do this, and you do this and you do that, then you'll be happy, Then you'll be mentally healthy,

then you'll be this, then you'll be that. And there is no doubt that there are lots and lots of things that we can and probably should do in life to give us the greatest chance of happiness and fulfillment and meaning in all that. And life just does its own things sometimes no matter how hard we try, it just throws stuff at that a lot of times is just beyond what we can control. Yeah, the apple of your eye, your child is college age. You really have to let go because they're going to go and do

their own thing anyway, right. I think that's stuff. I was talking with a coaching client earlier today and one of his sons, I think is like ten now, and I was talking about how, you know, I feel like when my son turned about twelve or thirteen, I started really asking myself like how much control do I have?

I mean, obviously can be like come home at this time, do that, but it seemed like more and more at that age, it was like what as peers were saying to him was so much more important than what I was saying. And you know, as he as he got older through his teenage years, I think I made a very conscious effort to try and sort of let the leash out a little bit more and more and more, knowing that, like you said, once he turns eighteen, the leash is kind of gone. I know you've had gabble

Matte on your podcast, haven't you, and we have? Yeah, yeah, and um, I wonder if he spoke with all about parenting because he's got some fastening. He's actually written a book called I Think It's Time to Parent or something all that. Anyway, he has some really fascinating thoughts about parents. And I read his book whilst my partner, Faith was pregnant, and I find it quite daunting actually, because because there's

so much to learn. But again, you know, I mean, okay, you learned so much and then try not to control it and provide a loving home and then send them off into the world and hope for the best. I suppose that's right. Yeah, No, it's not something Gabborer and I talked about, or Dr Marte or however we should refer to him. You know, we mostly focused on addiction. But funny enough, and and that's earlier conversation with one

of my coaching clients. We were talking about that very idea, and I was saying that, you know, to me, parenting is one of those things that you just never quite feel like you do good enough, Like it doesn't matter what you try, you can only do so much right. We just inevitably come across our own limitations. Um, at least I did kind of over and over and over again. And yet and you know, thankfully knock on wood. In my son's case, he's you know, so far, he's doing really,

really well. And I think you kind of said what to me is the most important part, which is sort of this idea of providing a loving and supporting environment, you know, not a lenient cuddling environment, but definitely a loving and supporting environment. Well, Eric, I have to tell you right now, I have provided a very loving and supportive environment for my four month old son, and in a distant corner of the house, he's screaming his head off, not wanting to go to bed. So you can only

do so much. You can only do so much. For the good news is I can't I can't really hear him, and I hope the little guy gets to sleep here soon. Good, thank you. Yeah, he'll be all right. So your podcast is called Zestology, and you know, as I understand it, it's primarily around energy. But but tell me why you named it that and what it means to you. Well, I um, as I said, I was a kind of TV presenter, and I've been doing that for quite a long time, and I've written these books around n LP.

You know, how people do things well nero linguistic programming UM. And then it turned out I wasn't very doing things very well, particularly when I got ill. I went to the jungle. I went on holiday to the Philippines, and we staid in this beardiful place in the middle of nowhere. It was a retreat called the Farm, kind of an hour or so outside Manila, and we had nothing more to worry about than what smoothie we were going to have for breakfast, and the kind of squawk of the

parrots in the trees. And then I got quite ill, quite seriously, and I picked up this virus that was so rare that the doctors that I saw when I got back, they were specialists, and they said, you know, we know you've had a virus, but we can't tell you what the virus was. We just know that there

are some viruses that haven't been discovered yet. And I end up spending a few months in bed, and I wasn't working in TV, and I didn't really ever know if i'd get out of bed, And then the kind of deepest, darkest recesses of those few months, I thought, if I start to get back to full health, it would be great to do a podcast on energy, and I thought the names astrology then, so that's kind of

how it was born. I thought, without energy, you can't do anything, and when you've got loads of energy, you feel you can take on the world. So that was the basic premise behind the podcast, and now it's become quite a fun adventure. I've traveled around the place. I've been to your country loads of times, and been to various health conferences and retreats, and thankfully got back to full health as well, and tried some fun, unusual, kind of wacky experiments but for more energy along the way.

Some of them work and some of them don't. What would you say for you are some of the key principles from me? Energy and energy not necessarily like the exact thing you do, but like, how do you think about or how do you advise people to think about if they want to have more energy in life? What's what's the process? The first thing to say is that all the really fun stuff is what people want to talk about. They want to hear about the cryotherapy. Have you done cry a therapy? I have? I have. Yeah,

It's it's good fun, isn't it. Well, it's called that's that's that's the answer of a man who didn't love his cryotherapy session. I didn't have a strong feeling about it one way or the other. I didn't really notice. I found it invigorating and refreshing, but I can't really say that. Like I left there in like three hours later, I was still like, yes, this has changed my life. I just didn't have a ton of an impact on me that I could tell. I mean, you know, I

think it's probably like a double espresso or something. It gives you a little boost, but it's kind of not the end of the world. But I'll tell you what. It does make a very good Instagram picture for anyone considering doing it, because you kind of pop your head out the top of this tank and it freezes your body down to minus two something degrees um, so you

can you can do all the fun stuff. And in fact, just before we did this podcast, I took five minutes or so to meditate in front of an infrared light device, which is really lovely. Helps in the morning with kind of bright light with energy, and it helps in the evening to kind of calm you down a bit um. But the truth is that a lot of the things that help with energy, the most actually slightly boring, which always comes as a massive disappointment when I kind of

do presentations and talk to people about it. That you know, the stuff like meditating, sleep, good food, not know, lower carb and higher fat diet just seems to work really well. Intermittent fasting is not necessarily the kind of the jazzy cryotherapy and the infrared lights or that people do like caring about that as well, Right, And those are kind of the basic fundamentals, right, that you're describing here is

basic fundamentals to well being. And I think they help with energy, they help with health, they help with mental health. I mean, that's the thing I love about the things like exercise, meditating, good diet, and good sleep is that they're they're positively indicated in so many different areas that that I can feel pretty good about doing them because I know it's it's helping me in multiple areas of my life, and plus the main area that I pay

attention to us, I just feel better if it. Actually when you spoke about control earlier on being someone who likes to control things when possible, I started a spreadsheet based around my kind of energy levels, and I started tracking various areas of my life and what gave me

energy and what didn't. So I tracked, you know, whether I went to the gym or not, whether I meditated, whether I would take a magnesium supplement, for example, and all sorts of different things, and some quite interesting results came up. And I was amazed to find that one thing, um, when I didn't do it on a particular day, reduced my energy levels by about thirty And I was really surprised by this, you know, because I tracked all sorts

of different stuff. Can you guess what it was when I didn't do it on a particular day and my energy levels reduced by I'm guessing it's not the obvious one. I'm going to choose meditation. It wasn't meditation, although meditation does make a massive difference to me. Um, it was actually when I didn't schedule any fun in for a particular day. You know what. I heard you say that on a podcast, which is why I felt like I should know the answer and I didn't. That's great, So yeah, yeah, yeah,

I did hear you say that. I've listened to a couple of a couple of your things, and I did hear you say that yeah, yeah, and so that's great and and so like for you, what are fun things that you schedule in and were you able to get to a point of like how much fun you had to have? And certain types of fun versus others, like just watching Netflix count as fun. I suppose watching TV is a form of relaxation. I mean, I've got a bit of a confession to make now, and you should

judge me here, um, because I'm judging myself. But we at the moment, we have a new baby. This is my excuse. I'm very tired when it gets to nine o'clock in the evening. And normally me and my partner we watched you know, lovely documentaries or maybe a kind of a really good, well crafted Netflix series. But recently we've been watching a reality TV so called Love Island, and I I just shouldn't be watching it. It's dreadful TV. It's we always feel slightly soiled at the end of

watching in an hour of Love Island. Um. But yeah, what happened was when I when I organized lots of fun activities in my day, I made a note of it. And and this is going to sound a bit weird, but I basically measured it by giving myself a fun score out of ten, and when there was very little fun on a particular day, my daily energy levels went down so much that I realized that it's important for

me to organize lots of fun. So today I was doing I was doing voiceovers today and I finished work at three o'clock and we met up with the family. After that, we just went for a three hour walk on a pizza. That counts as fun. So I give myself a pretty good fund score for today. I think that's really interesting and it's an interesting thing to track.

I have listeners a show I've heard me say, you know sometimes over the last you know, a couple of years, but really the last year in particular, I was like, I have got to find a way to have more fun. Like I've got to find a way to do things that I just plain enjoy doing that have no purpose, and they can't be things that I turn into something

that has a purpose. Like if I'm not careful, I will turn a fun activity into a competitive activity that I need to be getting better at or it's not you know, back to back to the sort of achieving idea. And what I found is boy it's harder for me to find fun than I thought it would be. Like I I, it's it doesn't come as naturally to me. I've taken up um playing ping pong with a friend, which is unabashed fun, although it's also very competitive, but it is unabashedly fun. Like I look forward to it.

I enjoy it. I have such a good time when I'm doing it, you know, so I'm continuing to look for other areas like that in my life. Well, you said, I know from following you that you are a type paid personality or an entrepreneur. You've got so many things going on at once. You've worked very hard to make this podcast to success as well. It doesn't surprise me

that you're a bit of a workaholic. And even when you're playing, I bet you enjoy the ping pong more when you're warming up and just hitting and when you're actually having a game kind of. Although I've really as I've gotten older, I've gotten better. Like I used to play guitar or no, let me rephrase that, I still play guitar. I used to play guitar and be in

bands and write music. And you know, I had a I had a dream when I was young that that's what I would do for a career, um, which was not really a dream that was ever likely to come true because I didn't work on it all that hard and um. And so what I found though, layer in life was that I would I would turn music into that. I'd pick up the guitar and I start playing, and I play something that was kind of cool and be like, oh, I got to record that. What am I going to

do with it? Am I going to write a song? And I've learned over time now like I just don't do that anymore. Like I just pick up the guitar and I just enjoy playing it. I enjoy learning something, and I've managed to be able to drop that piece of it. And and with ping pong, although it is very very competitive for me and I do prefer winning, I've also been able to my My girlfriend asked me this yesterday after I came back from a defeat, and

she said, well, was it still fun? I said, it was still a blast, Like I had a great time. But no, I hear you, like that is the thing I have to watch out for. Is is that sort of stuff? So what are other fun things for you? I think when I heard you talking about it, I might have heard something about frisbee golf one day. Did I make that up? Well, when you heard me talking about it, I might have been talking about There's an author called Charlie Hone and he wrote this brilliant book

called Play It Away, Um. And Charlie Hone was I think Originally he was an assistant to Tim Ferris and quite high achieving his own writing all through anything else, and then he went through complete burnout and he realized the only way he could deal with his own life was just by having loads of fun each day. And the book is all about living stress free and living a much calmer, happier existence. And he says when he dialed down his ambition, he had a much happier life,

and his big thing was frisbee. So it might have been that, But I really liked that book, um, Play It Away by by Charlie Hone. And in terms of my idea of fun, well, you Americans, you know, I I love American culture, but one of the things that really disappoints me is you don't really get the sportive cricket. You know, if only you like to cricket a little bit more it would be just so much better. It's

it's funny. I worked for you know, most of my adult career was in the software development side of the world. UM and I had a job for several years at a large organization. I was a consultant there, but you know, probably of the workforce there were people from India, right, So what what started happening was we started organizing charity events and so I got to go out and play cricket several times with people, and I found it absolutely

a fun game, totally very interesting. And the part of it that still sticks with me to this day was all these people I worked with. They were very mild mannered, very quiet, very low key, very deferring, but out on the cricket court they transformed. I was like, who are these guys like? They were so intense, fantastic. I mean, if you came over to this country and you called the cricket picture cricket court, you'd be you'd be laughed out of town. That's what I just called it. The

cricket the cricket court. Yeah, but it is a great game, is what I like about it is, you know, because the biggest sport here and the sport that I talked about most in my in my job is football, or as you'd call it, soccer, and that's that's huge, and it is a brilliant sport for its simplicity. But what

I like about cricket is it's so complicated. I mean, even I would struggle to explain all the rules, and it is possible that sometimes you can play for five days and there will be a draw at the end of it, and that's brilliant. I love that. That is a very non American way of looking at things, and I think it's the reason why, you know, uh, soccer hasn't taken off to the same degree here. There's just

not as much going on. Although for a long time baseball was really big here in Baseball is a slower sport, but but it's really become NBA, NFL, you know, these really fast, high scoring sports. I've been to a few baseball games and I love it for the same reason. I suppose what I like about it is, you know, we've been talking about fun and relaxation, and I like the aimlessness of cricket and baseball as well. You know, the thought that you've got nothing better to do to

sit at a game and just relax and enjoying. Sometimes there's a lot going on, and sometimes there isn't that flow of a kind of slow paced sport. I think it's harder for us to get into than ever, really, because we've got so many distractions. And maybe that is why sports like baseball and cricket are becoming a bit less popular sadly. Yeah, yep, So what other things do you do for fun in your own life? Let's let's throw out a couple other ideas for listeners, and then

we'll move on to another topic. I mean, look, I'm an absolute book nerd, and one of the questions I always ask everybody at the end of my podcast, and I'll be asking you when you come on my podcast very shortly, is what is one book that you would recommend? And that's a really kind of popular part of the podcast because I think everybody likes reading, but we don't

make enough time to do it, don't we. And then the other thing is, I mean, your listeners are going to think I'm so square because not only on my into cricket, I'm also into chess. I really like chess, and I've got kind of really quite into playing that and even play the odd little game of online chess because it's just so relaxing, and you know, talk about being in the moment. If you're distracted when you're playing chess,

you're not going to play very well. So so I like that as well, and that those would all count as the kind of things that Charlie Hone would describe as kind of play, and therefore I would describe on my spreadsheet as fun. So I'm definitely gonna check out that book. So what else was on your spreadsheets? So you tracked? You said, whether you went to the gym, whether you meditated to certain supplements, how you slept, whether you had fun. What else did you track to try

and understand how different things affected your energy? Well, the other big secret was switching off, which is something that is not always easy for us to do. But we live such connected lives, don't we. And I'm a bit obsessed by the fact that when I switched off, I always live a kind of happier, slightly freer life. And the big secrets appeared to be on my spreadsheets switching off. You know, the more I escape technology during the day,

the more energy I have, which is really weird. But when I escaped screens for a big chunk of time, and that is for more than about six or eight hours. My energy level was about higher. That's a huge increase. Now it is getting away from screens. It's not always practical, and even that is harder than ever before, because of course, when I started tracking this stuff years ago, I didn't have sat NAV in my car, but now I do, and that's a screen, you know, So it is harder

to get away from the screens. But if you can get away from them from a certain period of time, you might find, like me, that your energy levels go up a lot. And I think it was for me again it was living in the moment and having less distractions. So we listed those main things. Are those the main ways that you focus on managing your energy is kind

of tweaking each of those areas of your life. Yeah, I mean, in terms of the main things that worked for me on the spreadsheet were switching off, focusing on relaxing, so kind of on the days that had lived a very relaxing day, and maybe that would include meditation. My daily energy level was about I think it's about nine point nine percent higher. And then exercise really works well. I mean, like I mean, just so plain to see. Going to the gym raised my average daily energy by

over five um. One of the things that didn't raise my energy levels as much as I thought it might do is I like a supplement every once in a while. Eric, I've I've tried lots of lots of different supplements. I don't know whether you're that into supplements or not. Really do you take Do you take many supplements? Um? I kind of on and our again. Yeah, yeah, you know, mainly vitamins and things. Um, so yes, sometimes I take

more of them than others. And I the jury is completely out in my case as how much do they do of anything? I don't know because I don't track things in the way that you are. I mean, I track things like you know, I track basic activities, but I don't track them in correspondence to how I feel. In some ways, I think that's a good thing, because you know, going back to the parable, it's good for

me to look after my energy levels. But if I start to if I fill out the spreadsheet for like an hour in the evening, that's bad because it's just taking me away from relaxing. So there's a balance involved. Isn't there as far as the right supplements were involved. I was quite surprised that the supplement they helped most was magnesium. But it only increased my daily energy levels by about two so not really as big an increase

as I had hoped for. Definitely something, but I thought at least one of these supplements that I take would be a real magic pill effect, you know, much success rate. But no, yeah, no, I believe that. I actually do believe it's not you know, necessarily like big noticeable changes with a lot of that stuff. So let's talk about some of your other work. You you've written a few books. One's called Confidence in one Minute, Persuade in one Minute,

and Relax in one Minute. Let's talk about a couple of the techniques from the Relax in one Minute book. You know, things that we can do in a minute or so that can help us distress a little bit. Okay, well, Relax in a Minute was one of my three books. I started studying in MLP. Have you heard of MLP before? I have? Yep. Yeah, Yeah, it's UM. It's a it's

a very awkward name to explain. It stands for neuro linguistic programming and It was invented in the seventies by a couple of guys in California, just when computers were starting to come in. And I thought, we'll give it a computer in NIM and it will sound legit. And now many of the people do it all over the world, but nobody knows what n LP is, but it stands for neuro linguistic programming anyway, and and really it's a

study of how people do things well. Um, and I I found it very helpful kind of studying in it from my own perspective. And actually I was resented when I started studying this stuff and I started using the techniques on my radio show, and I mean I didn't tell my boss about it because I thought, but you know, I mean, I've only started learning this stuff a few weeks ago, but it'd be quite fun to practice the techniques.

And after a couple of months he called me into his office and he said, I don't know what you've done. And I thought, I'm in trouble here because I've really been layering the techniques on thick and he said, I don't know what you've done, but you're listening. Figures have gone through the roof so so I've been using these techniques to kind of get people to feel better about listening, but also to listen longer and maybe to attract some new listeners to my show. And that's when I started

to think there's something in this NLP stuff. If you like UM so, then there's plenty of persuasion stuff in there. But there's plenty of instant relaxation stuff in as well. So there's quite a lot of stuff based around anchoring. For example, UM anchoring would be have you ever heard of the story of Pavlov's dogs? Just to remind people

who might not have heard it. Um Pavlov, very famous researcher, had his dogs and every time he fed his dogs, he would ring a little bell and the dogs would be very excited because they know they were about to get fed because the bell equaled feeding time, and they'd start to salivate, and after a while he could ring the bell on the dogs would salivate even if there was no food, which seems very unfair on the dogs, But that was the experiment, so I kind of um

I adapted that with a technique called the spot, and I got people to put stickers around their house, maybe a sticker on your mirrors. You might wake up tomorrow morning, look in the mirror and they'd be a sticker on there, a spot sticker. And the reason that would work is because at some point in your past you felt relaxed, and we would have used that memory to help you start feel more relaxed every time you look at that sticker,

which is quite nice. Let's talk a little bit more about that one, because I read that in one of your books, and so the idea is I go through a process of recalling a time that I'm relaxed, or a memory that makes me relaxed, I associate it with that spot. When I see the spot, I become more relaxed. But you also talk about switching them out fairly often. Is that just because after you see the same spot on the mirror for four days in a row, you start to ignore it. Well, yeah, you get to everything,

You get used to everything in life. It's like it's like, Eric, I've just moved to a new house and we moved here last week, and we're so excited about it. It was a real doer upper and we bought it and it was in a real state and we you know, we got it cheaper because it was in a real state, and we changed all the carpets and you put nice wallpaper into that kind of thing. And um, every time I walk around the house, I noticed different things that

we've done that made it look really nice. Now give it six months and I won't notice any of that. I'll just be acclimatized to it. But I'm noticing it all at the moment um. So that's the idea behind switching up. By the way, before I go any further, thank you so much for doing so much research on me. I really I really appreciate it. You've properly delved into my work, and it's it's very kind of you. I tried to always do that always. It's really it's really

really impressive. Thank you. If you're going to take the time to come on, I should have taken the time to to know more about you and have a good conversation. So appreciate it. I really do. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And the spot was inspired by a friend of mine, actually, Carl Morris, who was a sports psychologist. He's a kind of mind game coach. And there was a golfer called Louis Ustazn who he's still one of the top golfers in the world, and he won the British Open Golf Championship.

And throughout the four days of competition, the TV cameras kept zoning in on his bag and he had this small red spot on his clothing. He'd on his golf glove and the TV cameras picked up on it. And after he won, everyone was asking about this kind of strange red spot and saying, well, what's that all to do to do with? And he'd been working with Carl Morris, He's a friend of mine and to help his concentration levels. Carl, just like paffle Off with his dogs, had anchored the

feeling of concentration to that red spot. And I can do it with your listeners right now if you want to, if you want to kind of do a similar technique. I mean, let's think of as people listen, just look at something in the room that you're in so I don't know, it might be a picture on the wall for example. Um, and if you're driving, don't take your eyes off the rope. If not, then find find something and focus on that. And now think about a time

when you felt very relaxed. You might have been on holiday, or you might have been sitting in your favorite arm chair, and remember exactly what you could see and exactly what you could hear, and how it felt to feel really relaxed as you look at this item that you've picked and kind of turn the feelings of relaxation up, make the colors brighter in your mind of how relaxed you felt, and make the sounds loud and vivid and clear in

your mind. Remember exactly what you could hear at the time as you look at this picture, as you look at whatever you've picked, and you are now using this process known as anchoring. And the theory is that the next time that you walk into the room that you're in and you look at this item that you've picked to anchor these feelings of relaxation, you'll feel that same

sense of relaxation again. And if you're a bit skeptical about whether that works or not, just go into an old photo album of maybe a holiday, for example, and look through some of those pictures and see how you feel. Notice how you feel. That's anchoring in action. Very interesting.

That is a great great technique to try. And the thing I liked about your books was just how quick some of these things, well there one minute, right, which is which is um important for a lot of us, a lot of us, you know, I know that, you know, I work with a lot of people who the biggest struggle is finding time to do this what appears to be a nearly endless list of things to do to improve our mental, emotional, physical health, right, And so I

think anything that can help us do them quicker. I tend to believe that like along with little quick things that it's in the tagline of the show, and I Chris reads at the beginning, takes a constant, consistent and creative effort to make a life that's worth living. So it is effort. But I do think that more of these little things that we can do is we're on the go and moving about our lives. That's great. So

what's another one for anxiety that you really like? This neuro linguistic programming can seem like a quite a complicated discipline, which is why I was quite keen to kind of break it down into these very simple steps. And it's it's very interesting the way it's been greeted. The books actually because here in the UK they didn't sell that well, which is a little bit disappointing, but there you go.

But then they did, They got translated into loads of different languages and much more popular around the world than England. So um, so obviously resonates with some people, perhaps not Brits in quite the same way. Um. But yeah, I wanted to break down the techniques to make them kind of very simple. And one of the things that we look at in n LP is something another great technical term, sub modalities. Um. But when when that involves your internal voice,

it can be very helpful. You know. Buddhists call your internal voice the chattering monkey, which sits on your shoulder all day and talks and it's not very helpful and says you can't do that, and you shouldn't do this, and you know that won't work, and comes up with the worst possible outcomes to events. So I work with people to turn down their internal voice. If your internal voice is positive and happy and comes up with loads

of great suggestions, then you can turn it out. But if the internal voice is not helpful, you can change the way that you experience it, because after all, it's only in your mind, you know, if it's in your imagination,

you can use your imagination to turn it down. So if you've got an internal voice that causes your anxiety, that's causing your problems, that isn't very helpful at times, and to be honest, most of us have um you can listen to it, and you can become aware of its tone and volume and perhaps where it is spatially,

is it behind you or in front of you? And then imagine you have a large volume knob in your mind and grab it and turn it down and start to turn your internal voice all the way down until it gets quieter and quieter until it gets to one, and then switch it off and enjoy the silence. So it's just a fun technique. And obviously all the metaphors, as is the you know, the parable around which your podcast is created. But these metaphors often work very, very effectively.

Another thing you can do with your internal voices, move it away, put it in a different If it's in front of you, put it behind you. And if it's a very serious voice, give it a cartoon character's voice. Make it sound like Homer Simpson and see if it has the same amount of power. I love all those approaches to the inner voice. They're talked about often in acceptance and commitment therapy, which I'm guessing they borrowed a lot from NLP because NLP has been around a lot longer.

But an acceptance and commitment therapy, often known as ACT or a c T, they give the same sort of thing, like make that internal voice in to something that is other than you. We we tend to hear that internal voice and we think that's me. And all the techniques that you just described are ways of making it other, their ways of breaking. The term is in ACT. The term is cognitive fusion. Right, we are completely fused with that internal voice. We believe it to be us, We

believe it to be true. And all those techniques you just talked about our ways of creating a little distance between us and that voice. If you imagine moving it or turning it down. You know, you don't turn yourself down, right, You don't move your internal self, right, but you can move the voice, which helps at least, you know, in my my perspective of it helps to to sort of give me some space from that voice. Yeah. One, Acceptance and commitment therapy sounds fantastic. What else do I need

to know from that? Oh, it's a it's a really fascinating therapy I had. I had a listener wrote to me several years ago he said, do you know about acceptance and commitment therapy? I said no. He's like, well, you ought to look into it because it basically sounds like your life philosophy, and I want, oh, that's interesting. So I did look into it, and um, I I you know, I agreed. It's very much at its most basic premise is we can't necessarily change how we feel

or what we think. But what we can do is we can act in a way that's accordance with our values. So what they're really after is, you know, ultimately a very much an action focused you act in according to your values, and as you do that, lots of things

in life improved. Because for a lot of people who have issues psychologically, you know, things like avoidance are a big part of it, right, Like I don't like how I feel when I do that or when this happens, so I avoid it, and then that just makes everything worse. The avoidance, you know, compiles on itself, and so acceptance and commitment therapy is really about like, of course, we should do everything we can to try and you know,

minimize our mental and emotional suffering. But the other thing to do is to accept it, allow it to be there, but still act according to our values. And so that's the heart of it. But they've got so many great techniques. There's two guys you might want to look into them for your show through Russ Harris and Steven C. Hayes. Um Stephen ce Hayes has a book called Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life or something like that,

which is just it is such a good book. We've I've interviewed both those guys and we recently re release re release the Steven C. Hayes episode because it is so good. So I love those guys and I think it's such a fascinating view on life. They're very focused on mindfulness, right, it's a it's a it's a therapy that has mindfulness kind of baked right into the center

of it. So for me, you know, it does align with so much of what I believe, which is about you know, it's our actions that we take that ultimately determine the quality of our lives. And again, you know, my my most used phrase on this show, and maybe we'll talk about it on your show. Is that, Um, sometimes you can't think your way in the right action, you have to act your way in the right thinking. And so acceptance of commitment therapy is that would be

a good summary of it. Okay, Yeah, And I certainly think you know, authenticity is more prized than it has ever been, isn't it? And and that these days, because we all live our lives so in such a public manner, you can't get away with being inauthentic because people will sniff you out in a moment. And I think these days our kind of public heroes, and especially kind of social media heroes, they're the ones who are living in

a very authentic way. Now might not be their values, might not be something you agree with, but there's there's an authenticity about them that it's hard to deny. And and dare I say it, Eric, And I'm probably wading into murky territory here, But the way that that Trump lives his life online, whether you agree with him or hate him, he doesn't hold back, does he He says

what he thinks that's right. And and that does seem to be a big part of his appeal to certain people is you know, he's really who he is which is actually I think is absolutely true. Although the thing about it, well, I'm not gonna I'm not going to get into it. Oh, go on, get into it. Well, I was just gonna say that, you know, I think the thing about Trump that's so amazing to me is that usually when you hear somebody's being authentic, you're like, well,

they're true to who they really are. They're true too, you know. But but you know, to me, Trump just seems to be like he's true to whatever mood comes up or whatever emotion comes up. There's no deeper orienting authenticity there, right, Yeah, No, that sounds like it makes perfect sense. Yeah, Or maybe the the authenticity is just simply the inth inauthentici deal or like, you know, I mean, he's authentic in his ego. There's no Yeah, I think

that's a pretty pretty safe statement. But yeah, I do agree authenticity is something that people seem to really hunger for these days. Definitely. I started in broadcasting, you know, twenty years ago, and and then the I was a radio presenter preten years before I started working as a TV presenter, and the radio presenters, you know, they all talked like this, and they all had these kind of public personalities and that is just not the way people

really talk or the way people really are. And now you can't really get away with that style. You know. That's a pretty good impression, though, I mean that was that was good, and I know I was almost that kind of radio present to myself, but I managed to escape just into just in time. Yeah, well, I think we are nearing the end of our time here, Tony. You and I are going to talk briefly in the post show conversation. I want to talk about your persuade

in one minute book. In the post show conversation, I kind of want to talk about the difference between persuasion and manipulation. You and I'll get into that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you're interested in becoming a member, you can go to one you feed dot net slash support and we have post show conversation ad free episodes and a mini episode for me every week. So when you feed dot net slash support, Tony, thanks so much.

I've really enjoyed this conversation. I have too, Larry, and I really look forward to you coming on Zestology as well, and any of your listeners who want to kind of hop over there and have a listen to that chat with you. That'd be great. And yeah, it's just been really good. Thanks for all the preparation you've done for this interview. That terrific. You're welcome, all right, thanks so much.

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