#2002 Life Situation vs. Life Experience - Bobby Cappuccio

talk about another topic, which we'll do next time. But you and I were just chatting about the fact that yesterday, as we record this, it's Thursday, the twenty fifth of September, So yesterday, the twenty fourth was our two thousandth episode went live. Thank you everybody for all the feedback and the love and the best wishes. You're fucking great. We dig you even more than you dig us, So thank you.

But I said to you, mate that you know January twenty eighteen, and I said, one of the really interesting but kind of sad things is that since we started the show, six of our guests have passed away and you didn't even know, well, one you didn't know that stat and two you didn't know who they were. But it kind of made you really sad. And I could see in the moment like it's just and then you said,

how fleeting is it? And we just like, I'm sitting here thinking we were going to talk about something else, So I thought, I think maybe we should unpacked this a little bit. But what was that reaction from you.

to grapple with that. But one of the people that you were talking about and how he struggled with mental illness M and how that led up to M this person losing their life. That really hit me because life is life is hard, and and yes, it's hard for everyone. But I feel like sometimes a lot of us underestimate what people with traumatic brain injuries and legitimate mental health issues go through and how hard these people try and work on themselves.

very fortunate, very blessed. Like I think I have pretty good genetics in the sense that I'm not predisposed to depression or anxiety or which doesn't mean I never get a bit flat or never get a bit anxious, but for the most part. But even then, this little kind of this little phase that I was going through. I had this you know, infection in my sinuses which was affecting everything including cognitive function and mood and a whole lot of other stuff and energy and thirst and hunger

and all of these boxes that it ticked. I knew that it was only for a little while, because I kind of went from great to about shit in a week, you know, But I thought, oh my god, this gives me an insight into a tiny insight into what I normally don't have real world experience myself. And yes, I've worked with lots of people with mental health issues and people with addiction issues, and people battling anxiety, depression, all

of these things. But when I started personally to feel a little bit sad, a little bit disconnected, a little bit anxious, I started to think about, what if this

is it? What if this doesn't get better in a week or two, what if this is my you know, I couldn't remember of things, like my brain was foggy, that that sharpness and all of that stuff that's kind of almost my tools of the trade, it was gone, And I got a bit scared, and I'm like, I hope that this is temporary, But it really gave me another dimension of understanding and empathy and awareness around, you know, like a tiny, tiny insight and I don't for one

moment pretend to truly understand the depth of deep, deep depression and anxiety. But yeah, maybe it's just one of those things that you have to have a bit of it to really understand, I mean to truly personally on a cellular level, understand it.

If you know who this person is, a lot of people have admiration for who he appears to be on the outside. And he was just saying there's nothing in my life that's wrong. Yes, like, yeah, I want to grow my business obviously, yeah, you know, I want to be like a really good dad. But there's nothing I really.

because you're going through something. Or I remember at a seminar not too long ago, somebody in the room, one of the one of the facilitators had had made a comment and someone's response was in an evol you know, not everybody can make changes in their life. Some of us are really struggling with mental health issues, and you know, basically I'm not capable of doing anything. So when you say that it's really insensitive, I'm like, oh my goodness,

imagine what that feels like. You know, to be this person, like everybody can do something.

And my not my first boss, but my boss, who really was my first train transformative mentor was kind of like, yeah, you struggle with a lot of things, but if you double down on the things that you're good at, your strengths and you work really, really horrid on that, yeah you could become more and you should. And I didn't think that was insensitive. I thought that was the most liberating and inspiring thing anyone had ever said to me. I was like, this person doesn't think I'm incapable.

the best for you, you know. And that's that unreasonable friend bit. It's like everybody wants feedback until it's feedback that I want, you know, And I think that surrounding yourself with people who tell you perhaps what you want to hear or what they think they should say, is appropriate in this I get that, but it's really more debilitating than it is empowering, because when someone goes, look Bobby, I know you. I love you his By the way, and I've said this to you personally and I've said

it publicly. You're one of the five smartest people that I know. And I know many people, and people would think I'd be enamored by PhDs and all these things. I'm fucking not. I think. By the way, to get a PhD, if you've got one, well done, great achievement.

But knowing you and knowing your journey and your story and where you've come from and what you've dealt with and while you're still flawed and you still have issues, as do I, as does everybody, your capacity to just keep fucking adapting and solving problems and figuring shit out in the middle of all your fucking quirkiness is nothing short of fucking astounding to me, because I know what's behind the curtain, like most people see the front of

the curtain, you know, and it's not that it's a show, but it's you doing you and you being the best you out you know, in that public forum where you're the teacher, the educator, the storyteller, you know, but away from that version of you, where there's been lots of stuff going on. Your capacity to be able to thrive in the middle of what most people would capitulate, I think many people like to me, that's that's very very

for me, very admirable. But I think also your ability to surround yourself with people who have different kinds of skills and knowledge to you. And because you are such a great students, you're a far better student than I have ever been. Because you absorb stuff, you read it, remember it, you apply it. You learn from books, you learn from research, you learn from science, you learn from

watching other humans, you know. So I don't know how I got onto this, but I just think that that capacity to be able.

all the sympathy. What are we going to do, though? Like, what are we going to do? Though? We what action are we going to take? What decision and are we're going to make? Because I don't think you want to spend the next fifteen years just swimming around in these emotions and these fears and these anxieties about past event, you know, And that's that's that line between compassion and practicality.

you don't have the context behind this. You think you do, but you really don't. But like this morning at work, so I had launched. I had launched an initiative in my company with a group of people, and this morning I was in a meeting with one of these people. It was just just me and her, and she laid into me about about this whole thing and a couple of blind spots I had and how that impacted her. I felt so much gratitude for her in the moment.

I feel like it strengthened our relationship because I have had blind spots at work or I have not processed things completely correctly, which happens. But she did something that very few people in my work and personal life would do tell me directly, and it wasn't a general thing like well, I just think you're you know, you don't think things through or you know, I think you're stupid. Great, you might be right about that, But what do I do with that? Like? What do you want to response with?

So here's exactly what happened. Here was the impact, and here's why I'm upset. I'm like, oh, I can change, I can't grow based on that information. I think that in and of itself. Time back to what we're talking about. That's an act of empathy, Like she I think she part of her was not only communicating her experience, but she understood what my experience was. Is she knew what

my intentions were, so it wasn't an accusation. I think sometimes, especially when we're we have all this messaging coming at us and not a lot of us sitting with each other, we really don't have the capacity to go what's it like to be that other person? I think that I think empathetic listening, not condoning, not approving of, not condemning, but just listening with the intent. What did she say today? Yeah, yeah, with the intent not to know, but to understand, Like

knowing is the enemy of understanding. I'm like, ah, wow, that's smart. It was so genius the way she put it to me, just to understand. I think so many of our problems that we create for ourselves would, if not disappear, be greatly diminished. But we really don't do that. So you can you know, you could read ten books on my bookshelf right now about the complexity of human behavior or what goes wrong when someone's struggling with their

mental health. But does that give you the ability to sit with someone and really try to understand rather than arriving at a conclusion about why somebody does things the way they do it, or don't do things that you think they should be doing. I think that's about as useful as trying to become an Olympic downhill skier by reading books on the biomechanics and aerodynamics of skiing. You're going to get on the black double diamond and die

it in no way prepares you. You've got to get on the slopes if you have to sit with people, even when it's uncomfortable.

says that success is about what everyone can see. You know, what you have, what you earn, what you own, what you drive, where you live, what people think you your brand, your money, your business, your career, your stratospheric bloody rise, you know all of that, your academic credibility, all that

stuff right, all the scene stuff. So and you know, you can have your friend, and I've had lots of friends, and there have been moments when I've been moderately successful, I guess, and in the middle of my moderate success, my situation is good, but my experience is shit. Like. So there's this juxtaposition between a person's life situation, which from the outside looking in is a Disney movie, it's a Hollywood episode of something, but the experience for the individual.

So the inner world, you know, thoughts, feelings, emotions, joy, pain, pleasure, sadness, euphoria, disconnection, confusion, like this internal world that we really live in versus the external world that we kind of inhabit. You know that, you know, there's that we base so much of what we think is good or bad or successful or desirable on what we see people doing. Oh look at her, she's in great shape. He's in great shape. Her career

is flourishing. Oh she's all over this and that, or he's making that, or he's built this business, or she's built this brand, or she's in this incredible relationship. And I understand all of that because that's part of the human experience too, But nobody's looking across the room going look at her. She looks really really calm. She doesn't look anxious at all, Like, and I've spoken to her, like she's just really she's not particularly ambitious, but fuck

she's happy. Huh. And she doesn't even have a to do list. She's just calm, you know, she's just like we aren't having those conversations because at least externally, we don't seem to value what's got like let's say, emotional wealth, spiritual wealth, social wealth, intellectual or not intellectual, but perhaps

mental wealth. You know, like all of these things which really determine our human experience to a larger extent than what the fuck we drive or where the fuck we live, or what people think of our latest post on Instagram.

Craig Harper, you know, like I think that that's that we live in a mindset, or a collective mindset and culture that is always looking at the external, if not obsessed with the external while trying to Yeah we should talk about mental health more, and yeah we should, but it's it doesn't seem like that we really value it until something goes wrong.

that really makes your life matter in the end. But but then we go back to doing the It's almost like somebody wrote us a playbook on how to be miserable and struggle through self inflicted wounds, and we're following. We're following that rule book to the t. And and when we catch ourselves like getting off of it and actually doing something that connects us to something we care about as someone we care about, it's like, oh wait,

I got to get back to following this thing. But the way we're told to live, so much of it is making us sick. It's making us sick physically, it's making us sick mentally. If something makes you sick, it's out of harmony with nature. It's not a good philosophy. Something that makes you well is in harmony with nature. It's probably a good ideology that's producing those practices. I mean that for me should be but I guess I'm not smart enough all the time. But it should be

a litmus test. Is this thought I'm having, is this thing I'm about to do? Is this exchange I'm having? Is it making me well or is it making me sick?

And when my head snapped back, I was able to get a look at a different vantage point and go, oh, my goodness, this is not accurate at all.

No judgment, no hate, no self flow, just trying to open the awareness s dooor like, if I continue on my current trajectory with my career, with my habits, my behaviors, my health, my lifestyle, if I kind of stay on the path I'm on in two years, am I going to be better or worse? Like if I'm being real big and brave putting on my big boy pants in two years, if I stay on my current trajectory with

those things, will my life be better or worse? And then if the answer is better, we'll fucking giddy up, keep going, well done, see you next episode. If it's not, that's cool, then try to break that down a little bit. What am I currently doing which is essentially a form of self sabotage? What am I currently doing which is a form of wasting my own talent and potential? What am I doing that is counterproductive to who and how

I want to be? I think these are more global questions, and then we can kind of hone in, you know, and go, well, you know, I guess a very very obvious one is I look at a screen fucking ten hours a day. Now, some of that is unavoidable, but how much how many hours a day do you look at a screen where you probably don't have to? And I know this is probably over talked about, but or it might be, how many hours a day do you spend sitting again, not self loathing, your self awareness? Cool?

Well could you walk? Could you walk and work? Could you stand and work a little bit? Could you? Like? What a Let's try and solve a few problems. Let's not wake up in a minute and go, oh fuck, it's five years. It's five years since I heard Craig and Bobby on that podcast. It's five years and I'm

doing the same dumb shit, but I'm producing worse results. Like, at some stage we need to get fucking proactive and intentional and step out of the theory of the podcast and the idea and the workshop and the book and the fucking research and we need to go, well, I'm doing it now. I'm doing something. It might not be optimal, but I'll figure it out as I go, because this is the For me, the ever present challenge has always been not what do I know? But what do I

do with what? I know, and what am I producing with that activity, with that action, Because I think there comes a point where even you know, you could have the best podcaster in the world, you could have the best corporate speaker, or the best author, all the best you know, but if all the people that are hearing, listening, watching reading are not doing something constructive with that, assuming that everyone who listens to this wants to change something,

then we're just fucking We're just bouncing sounds off the wall and living in a holding pattern.

very different. That's a case by case thing, but the requests are always coming around those three, like eighty percent of the time. So I was at a coaching course and I was sitting down with a friend and colleague of mine, and he's a doctor at Yale University and he leads and develops trains teams of doctors. And he was saying that you know, in the medical field, burnout

is it's catastrophic, and it's increasing steadily. And he said that you would think it's the physicians that have been practicing for decades that are experiencing the most amount of burnout because they've been at it longer, they've been dealing with this stuff longer, but it's not. It's brand new physicians are at much of a risk of this and they're reporting mptoms of burnout as much as anybody else.

They said that two things that he's noticed that isn't a not saying causes it, but exacerbates burnout is the inability, as he put it, to look out into the horizon, so to see something being better off in a future date. And the second thing is lack of agency. It is this sense of learned helplessness that no matter how hard I work, no matter how many difficult conversations I have, no matter what I advocate for who I advocate for,

things are just not going to get better here. And one of the things that we Deliver on burnout is a workshops in training around habit development and behavior change. Now why that's like, how is developing a habit gonna

help me with burnout? I mean, there's a lot of complexity around it, but this particular workshop works because if you were if you were trying to develop a habit, there's something out there in the future that is divorced from everything I'm struggling with today that you're conceptualizing can be better. Otherwise, why would I do the work of developing a habit and I want it to be better? I'm getting clear about why I want it to be better.

And when you're executing on developing a habit, you are exercising agency in the moment around something that is that bridge to where you are and a point in time in the future where things are better. So it's the visualization of something that's important to you and how it shows up in the future. And it's the daily exercise of agency. So that really matters. Like what you're saying, get out and do something, and it doesn't have to be a lot. I got to accomplish this big thing.

Let me just do something different. What is it they can do? An action that they could take that will observably move the needle on my life that is so important to kind of combat learned helplessness.

and it goes through this back and anyway. This lady, when I'm not sure how it works and where do I reach out I want to talk to you about or I want to talk about the possibility of anyway, I said, well, I'm here, you got me, So it normally doesn't work this way, but do you want to have a ten minute phone call or zoom call? And I said, and she went yep, So we jumped on zoom. So it was quite unorganized, quite impromptu. Anyway, lovely lady. I won't mention who or what, but very big company,

like very big company. So it was quite weird that it was such a casual kind of opening of the door. Normally it would be a lot more kind of official and efficient and whatever. Anyway, we're having this chat and she was talking about the issues and obviously no one knows who this lady is or the organization, so it doesn't matter. But just a lot of stuff, a lot

of in house. They've had lots of change and lots of pain and so there's let's just say, the stuff that you've been talking about, but also a fair bit of discontent and the culture has probably taken a bit of a left turn where it's not as great as it was, and there's a fair bit of work to be done, like nothing that's insurmountable, but stuff to be done. Anyway, said to me, like we've got this thing in November.

I was thinking about bringing you in to do you know, one or two hour of this or that, and I said, okay, one and this is after I'd like, there's a lot more to it than what I've shared, but there's a fair bit going on that ain't going to be fixed in an hour or even a day, or probably even a month, right, And I said, okay, so certainly I

can come in. I can do a one hour keynote, or I can do a two hour short workshop, and I can go, Biby Bobby Boo, charge you a whole bunch of money, and it'll be pretty good and they'll probably like it, and I'll get well paid and you'll go. He came, and he did his job. I go. But truly, there is not a speaker in the world that you can bring in that can talk for one or two hours that's going to completely reinvent the culture in your organization.

And we're talking about now, whether it's me or someone else. I said, So what I can do is I can do that, and we can just open the conversation and try to keep people on side and create a good experience and then talk about you know, this this is an ongoing and whether it's with somebody else or whether it's with another team or whether it's with me, I

don't care. I'm not trying to sell you anything, but these are things that you know, if there's a significant problem, we can't wheel someone in and go, look, here's the problem. This is how we fix it. I'm Craig harpas you next time, and some of these things just need to be worked through in an ongoing way where we need to keep coming back and going. You know, what's working here? What's not working? Like, what are the key problems and issues that we're having, what's the origin story of that?

And this is the you know, whether or not it's professional development, personal development, self help, behavior or psychology coming in the form of a podcast with you and me, or it's through a program provided by some providers. In the corporate space, there is no magic fucking pill. And this is the problem is that people love selling and

buying magic pills in inverted commas. But the truth is that real change, like inside out corporate organizational change, individual personal change, it's just something that we've got to just keep chipping away at. I mean, how long have you been in the space and you're still working on you. I'm still working on me. I think I'm better at many things than I was. I still think I have a long way to go on many other things. But this is the thing is that it's like theory is great,

knowledge is great, understanding awareness is great. But until we are consistently doing something with that, we're going to keep inhabiting a space, be that financially, practically, personally, professionally, emotionally, physiologically that we don't want to be in because all we do is fucking listen to stuff and read stuff, but we're not consistently working through it.

is not new, but they were concerned about it. And you know, she was asking me if I would be able to help out.

so they didn't fit me very well. Yeah, there was a lot of material there. And it's not just that I want to help them, which I really do. This is something that I feel serious about, but it helps me as well because when we're talking about getting moving

and using what you're learning and taking action. When it's like, okay, how can I use this, your story goes from oh, all this kind of stuff happened to me to contradict something I said earlier, So get ready that there's a contradiction coming, Yes, but it changes it to this laid the foundations for me being able to do something or somebody that I probably wouldn't have known was a problem or I wouldn't have been able to do to the same degree had it not happen. So this has developed

me into pursuing this purpose. So I'm not a victim. At the other end of it I was shaped as a result of it, which I personally feel is so much more empowering. And when it's like, Okay, what am I reading? What seminars am I going to? Why? Like why am I doing this? Versus going to a culinary workshop to learn how to bake a cake? People love cakes? Why don't I do that? Because obviously there's something that's

resonant here, there's something I value. So using it, even utilizing these tools imperfectly, I think, allows us to change our internal narrative and our story about what has happened versus who we are and who we're becoming. You know, I mean looking back for less is great and trying to extrapolate them. But if we spend more time looking in the rear of your mirror, I know I've been guilty of this than looking what's in front of us,

We're probably going to crash. That's dangerous. So a lot of stuff that you're saying, I think is not only important for our growth and development and whatever quote unquote success how that shows up, I think it's really important for the experience we have being us day to day.

I'm not talking as an excise scientist. I'm talking as an ex fat kid who had a pretty hard fucking time. So yeah, I can talk to you about, you know, kind of the science of whatever, but I can also talk to you as a person who just went through what your kid's going through, or a version of what your kid's going through. And I think that, you know, it's like people with addiction issues tend to gravitate towards people who were clean and sober who had an addiction issue.

They're going to listen to them more than they're going to listen to me, because what the fuck do I know? Because I've never had a beer, and I couldn't understand and I understand that perspective. You know, if I want to train for one hundred mile race, not that I do, but I would rather work with someone that's done one hundred mile race than an excise physiologist who theoretically understands the hundred mile race but has never run more than

five miles. Like, let me go work with that girl or that guy who's done the race, who's been through the psychological, mental, physical bullshit, who's been to the fucking wall and back. I want to talk to them because I want to understand what they understand, or I at least want to benefit from their understanding. Versus Brian, who God blessed Brian. But all Brian does is bench press and fucking you know, squat but he's never but he

doesn't run, but he's technically qualified, you know. So I think there's something to be said for both, you know, the intersection of scientific knowledge and understanding storytelling and also real world experience so that you can you can share from a place that a lot of people cannot share from. I can't. I can't have the insight and do not have the insight into a lot of things that you do because I haven't been where you've been, you know.

So I would defer to you. I would go I could give you my thoughts, but they're just my thoughts. But you can talk to Bobby. You're going to get thoughts, insights, and real world experience. So go there. And I think that's what compels many people who like, how many people do you and I know who were not in good shape then they got in good shape, then they became a trainer, or people who battled psychological stuff and then

went to UNI and studied psychology. You know, it's like it's very, very common that there's an origin story that kind of explains quite clearly why people are doing what they're doing now, and it's not because that just happened to be the course they got into, you know. So I think that real world awareness and emotion and that journey that you've been on, I think in many ways that's more empowering than necessarily the dude or the lady who's a psychologist talking about the theory of something.

or they're struggling because they simply do not care. Because the truth of the matter is the majority of people do not give a toss what you're going through or what happened to you or your trauma. They might say they do, and you'll see this where people are so invested in caring empathetically for people who they will never meet and they don't know their name, but when somebody very close to them is struggling with that, they don't have the same level of empathy.

was one of my mates. His dad was a preacher, pastor, and his dad was so loving, so compassionate, so amazing with everyone in his church, but complete shit with his own children. Like he was like the neglectful, unavailable dad to his own kids, but to everyone else he was this, And I'm like, what is that about? Like, and he was genuinely what seemed to be genuinely kind and compassionate for his flock, but to his own kids like donuts, I'm like, what is that about? What is that about?

The unavailable dad? Who's available to everyone except his own actual family. And yeah, I struggled with that, dude. I still don't really like that. Dude. I probably should, but yeah, that's a thing too, Like I think people like pak, yeah there is Hey, you.

But behind closed doors, he treated his kids like shit. And I know because I was there and one of his kids was one of my mates. And I'm like, fucking hell, you're like two people. If the people at church saw this, you you wouldn't have a church.

just the sweetest, kindest person. But with certain people that they don't require their admiration, well, there's nothing that person can do for them. They are absolutely brutal. Yeah, And and things happen to their relationships that are very unusual and and very tragic, and they have a very different explanation. It's never them, it's always someone else. So I think that's something we need to like. That's something that's curious with people where the people that are closest to you

and you're supposed to love and you abuse them. But to everybody else on the outside superficially you're amazing. Maybe not.

not to be a version of that. I mean, I think because I had that role model with an asterisk next to it, it just gave me a level of awareness around, oh this is so I so don't want to be that dude, because because I saw a side of him that most of his you know, parishioners or you know, congregants never saw, which was like so diametrically opposed to what people thought. So anyway, that's enough. Hey, let's let's do better, shall we? All of us? Bobby?

Where can people find you? Follow you, connect with you other than the You project once a week or thereabouts.