Latest / The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell / #36 - Rowing Across Oceans and Redirecting Your Life with Roz Savage

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#36 - Rowing Across Oceans and Redirecting Your Life with Roz Savage · The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: It felt almost like I was saying to my soul, who am I?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: Who's in there trying to get out?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: And like my soul was going, Oh, thank God, I thought you'd never ask.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Seeking Authenticity.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Flint Mitchell, and I get absolutely psyched by having conversations with authentic people that I admire about the things they value.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Their stories and perspectives don't just make me smile, laugh, and think.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: They inspire me to wake up earlier, listen better, focus, and work harder, and help make me a better version of myself.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's my hope that sharing these conversations through this podcast might do the same thing for you.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I talk with Roz Savage.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Roz changed her life in her 30s when, through an environmental epiphany, she completely shifted her direction from her current role in management consulting to become a world-class adventurer.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: As you and I spent our days commuting to class or the office, she was rowing across the oceans for many months at a time completely alone.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: She's completed the big three oceans, the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian, and consequently became a powerful voice both for the environment and personal development.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Appearing on numerous TV channels, talk shows, TED Talks, and with three published books, the most recent of which, The Gifts of Solitude, being relevant to our situation in the pandemic, she has plenty of wonderful insight.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, I wanted to hear about her current adventure, where she has taken on a PhD.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: From this, we talk about her perspective on changing course in life, identifying, even if just through awareness, the areas of our life that we want to redirect.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: She explains these thoughts with examples from her own life and shares what I believe to be a very inspiring message of hope that our futures and the future of our world are inextricably linked to our internal states of being.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: I had a lot of fun listening to Roz and her stories, and I know you will too.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for doing this with me, Raz.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate it.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: My absolute pleasure.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Any friend of Ellen's is a friend of mine.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Ellen is Ellen is wonderful.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I it it's a privilege to meet and to talk with you.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to hear uh what you have to say and your a bit about your perspective.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was reading some of your blog posts from the past several months, and it seems like you've had a lot of important thoughts going on over topics such as well.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, in 2020, I've had a lot of opportunity to think, haven't we all?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, but these these blog posts have included the topics of purpose, dealing with stress and turbulence, which there's been a lot of um hope.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Your recent book of of uh kind of your experiences of rowing and and dealing with solitude, uh creating connections across the aisle, regardless of if you want to, or at least becoming aware of the opportunity to do that.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's there's a lot there that I respect you talking about and trying to share your opinion.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: These are important topics to talk about.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Likewise, I think it's it's always fun for me to talk to people who could have one of one of their life labels could be adventure.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a fantastic term, and everyone knows an adventure when they meet them, regardless of if they know how to define that word.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And those are those are inspiring conversations for me.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I really appreciate having you on.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: With that said, I'd love to talk about your most, or start off talking about your most recent adventure, which it sounds like is been a PhD.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Could you tell me a bit about how you found that opportunity and and what it has been?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, my adventures in academia this year, uh, or the last couple of years.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'd been wanting to do a doctorate for oh, at least um eight years.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: And about once a year, uh the urge would hit me again, and I'd Google around and try and find a program that meshed with what I wanted, and I could never find that.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then actually, this opportunity came about very serendipitously, as most of the best opportunities do, through a friend of a friend who told me about a programme at the University of Middlesex called the Doctorate of Professional Studies with Public Works.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: So it's for people like me who are to put it nicely a bit older and have already uh published a certain amount of work and they interpret publications very broadly.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: So, as well as the three books that I've now published, they also include my ocean rowing voyages as things I've put out there into the public domain, as well as my TED and TEDx talks and the oh getting on for 2,000 blog posts that I've done over the years, and so um it was really an opportunity, uh, it's a very personal kind of doctorate where I could look back over the ocean rowing, which I combined with environmental campaigning, and to assess where I succeeded and where I failed.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then to also uh so to say something about that first.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um clearly I succeeded in crossing three oceans um and survived, or else wouldn't be here, um, and got a few Guinness World records along the way.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: Where I didn't succeed so much was in making a difference to the way that we're treating our beautiful planet.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: And when I looked back at that and also the things that have fascinated me over the uh nine years since I rode my last ocean, um I realized that in my naivety as a sort of because I was quite late having my environmental epiphany.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: I was in my early 30s, it so it was in about 2003, and um because I had when I found out about climate change and deforestation and biodiversity loss and all of these other things, I was on fire with it and was just like, oh well, I must change, and and everybody else must change, and and surely if they're not changing, it's because they just don't know.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: So when I tell them, yeah, everything's gonna change.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, it didn't, because we're all embedded in these systems, social and economic and political, that are kind of designed to maintain the status quo.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, so it's quite difficult for things to change.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, really, that's what a lot of this doctoral program has ended up being about for me is all of the other things that I have explored since, like um economics, feminism, spirituality, neuroscience, complexity theory, and all of these things, you know, I felt like such a generalist.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: I would just get attracted by this new shiny idea and dive down.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really mixing my metaphors here, but dive down that shiny rabbit hole for a while, um, and then sort of surface again, well, that was a lot of fun, but so what?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the issue the issue with that is each one of those topics very well, you could very well spend a life diving into them.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it is a tough uh I I find myself in a similar bucket where I become interested with a lot of different facets of science or nature, and it be it's intimidating to look at those topics and know that you will maybe not be able to go past the term generalist in all of them, right?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: You kind of have to choose.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and in the course of doing this doctoral program, I have found that there is a fancy academic term for generalists.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um we are called uh bricolors, um which um some French dude came up with.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: And um the point of this is um so actually uh some of the French surrealists believed in this idea of the bricolage, that um when something just appeals to us, it's worth paying attention to that sort of intuitive hit that we get.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: So the more artistic ones would uh do stuff like wander through flea markets in Paris, um kind of waiting for an object to call to them.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the idea was that these objects would be clues to what was going on in their subconscious, yeah.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so then they would acquire these objects and put them together and try and use this as a way of exploring their own subconscious desires.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: So um actually, I feel like my uh generalist approach to life has been somewhat um vindicated.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I had a lot of fun with taking all of these disparate ideas, and I felt a bit like I was writing an Agatha Christie murder mystery, you know, where you've got all of these different strands of the story, and you can't quite see how it's all going to fit together until the last moment when you know a cool poirot or whoever explains it all, ties it all up with a big bow on top, and sort of goes, ta-da! That's what it was all about.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it's it's been a really amazing opportunity.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you start, it sounds like the process started off with you reflecting on on your your past experiences.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: It sounded like specifically on things that you felt you had not lived up to, right?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: You you said you looked at your failures.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: That was the beginning process, and then you tried to identify maybe those specific topics that you hadn't uh lived up to your own personal uh idea of success and then dove further into those.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, when I look around, you know, I I like to think that environmentally I've added a few straws to one side of the balance um and toward contributing towards the tipping point, but clearly all of our metrics about CO2 emissions and loss of forest and ocean acidification, all of those metrics are going in the wrong direction still.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, what I was actually trying to do with um my dissertation was you know, I was very taken with uh Yuvon Noah Harari's idea in his book Sapiens, that as human beings we are driven by stories.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I was trying to think, you know, what is our story about what it means to be a human in the 21st century?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because it feels like the old neoliberal um capitalist story about, you know, he with the most toys wins.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like that story is not really working so well for us anymore when we look at the uh statistics on stress and depression and also what we're doing to the environment.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: So this is where it all went a little bit spiritual, and um I've been quite influenced by Buddhism and Taoism over the last 16, 17 years, and I'd never really talked explicitly about it because I felt like my spiritual life was very personal and very private, yeah.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: But actually I realized as I was doing this reflection and evaluation that if I was just gonna talk about the outer manifestations, then that would really only be half of the story.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: And that actually I think okay, the the the absolute sort of crux of my whole argument is that our dysfunctional relationship with the rest of nature is actually because we're not doing the inner work that that as humans we are these very complicated creatures, and we kind of have a lot of inner mess.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think most people would disagree, and and what we're doing externally is really just the outer manifestation of all of our, I don't know, our self-dislike, our um lack of self-forgiveness, um, maybe our lack of self-knowledge.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: And this isn't really meant as a criticism, it's just saying that while environmentalism focuses on fixing problems out there, I just don't think it's really going to work.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: That what we actually need is a shift in consciousness, and that looks like um love, gratitude, and forgiveness and starting with our own selves.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of my um a very long dissertation in a very small nutshell.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fantastic idea.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think that bringing awareness to that perspective is is wonderful.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that, and I completely agree, first off, I think everyone everyone can agree that we've all got a little bit of noise inside our psyche, but the idea of cleaning up your own life before cleaning up the world doesn't actually seem, I think, on surface level, the straightest path, right?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you say, all right, I have this stress in in my head, I'm not dealing with my relationship with my father, I'm not dealing with uh the reasons why I'm not able to focus at work, and you know, maybe my relationship with work or my relationship with if I'm being honest in my in my personal time, those kind of things.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you you could say, all right, well, if I fix that, I'm not fixing the environment, right?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's my passion.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: The issue is that if you don't fix those problems, at least my doubt is, at least for my myself, I can't really speak for others, but my my doubt for myself is if I don't fix those personal problems, I won't be as efficient in my day-to-day life attacking issues outside of myself.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I see what you're saying.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: I I think there's maybe a surprising number of human desires and yearnings that are not best tackled directly, but you sort of have to come at them obliquely, like people who set out directly wanting to be happy.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I think happiness is is often a byproduct of finding a purpose, um, creating healthy relationships with other people.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's not, it's quite difficult to pursue happiness as an end in itself, but maybe I can um give an example of a way in which I think that doing our inner work does have a fairly direct impact on our um environmental impact.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I call this the um the existential death spiral, which is a cheery little name for it.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, we we do live in this society where we're constantly exposed to these advertising messages that tell us that if we're not happy, then if we buy this product, then our lives will be better.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, the adverts set out to first of all make us unhappy, uh, to feel like we suck if we don't have that particular product, that you know, we're not beautiful enough or thin enough or young enough or rich enough or whatever it is.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um but somehow, you know, buying this toothpaste is going to make everything better.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so often we try uh when we're feeling that stress and that inadequacy, that somehow gets um transmuted by the advertising industry into buying stuff.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, stuff always has an environmental impact.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: So for as long as we are looking for happiness and fulfillment in what we own, with all of the resources that go into manufacturing and transporting and marketing and selling stuff, and then dealing with the aftermath when we've realized it doesn't make us happy and change our lives for the better, um, then we would actually, you know, what you and I were talking about just before we came on air, we probably wouldn't consume as as much stuff because we instead of using stuff as a proxy for happiness, we'd just go sort of straight to the things that actually make us happy.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, those things like purpose and relationships and connection and belonging.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think it's a very good example because it doesn't just necessarily speak to a larger house or more toys.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: It could also be, you know, your diet, right?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: You will probably purchase a few less pints if if you're completely satisfied with if of where you're at, right?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, absolutely.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: I actually think we could have healthier, happier people and uh healthier planets.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think those things are connected.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, absolutely.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's I I I like that you give an example of this.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think another one, um it's it I think this is a pretty good example.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: I it's I found it in, I guess it's it's pretty intuitive for people who have felt it, but it I've also I I found it defined, I guess, in the Book of Joy, uh, which was written about a discussion between uh Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fantastic book.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a week-long set of conversations between the two of them, asking questions like what is joy and stuff, stuff like that.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's great.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: But his uh one of the Dalai Lama's points was a fantastic way that is usually successful to find joy is helping other people.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it speaks exactly to what you were saying.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Happiness is a byproduct, right?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because in helping another person, I think it can actually, you can look at yourself and become aware that something isn't right in your life, that you're not feeling too great about something, and use helping other people as a method for helping yourself.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you go out and say, all right, I'm going to spend this day focusing on another person and or another or an organization or on the earth, you know, cleaning up a beach, and really focus my energy on that.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: It tends to be something that really reflects and gives you some semblance of joy or purpose, right?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I actually interviewed a behavioral scientist for the book that I wrote at the start of the COVID lockdown, um, called The Gifts of Solitude.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: And he's done research that shows that making a contribution, helping other people, doesn't just make you feel better, it actually makes you healthier at the epigenetic level.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's really fascinating research.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, it's an absolute win-win.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: And um it's exciting to see some new ideas coming up and complementary currencies like alternative economies that are actually based around contribution and collaboration and regeneration, um, even though 2020 has been um, you know, in many years, in many ways, not quite the year that we'd we'd planned on.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I'm also feeling more optimistic and hopeful than I have done in a long time.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: That I really feel like these seeds of change are being sown right now.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious to see how the history books are going to regard 2020, whether this is the start of a shift towards something more uh positive, peaceful, sustainable, equitable.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, time will tell.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a fantastic mindset to have.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a Somewhat difficult one to attain in a time of stress.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is something I probably would not completely attribute, but attribute partly to your experience as an adventurer and going through some of those extremely strenuous uh rows across ocean is the ability to be in a place of probably pain or stress or of the above and to find a positive outlook, right?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And to be aware of the pain and kind of keep it in your head or keep it in in the environment, not push it away, but also look towards the positive direction you could go.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's not necessarily being an optimist, it's just searching for the positive direction.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'd love to say something about that because um oh, I wish that there was a way to photograph somebody's psyche so that you could sort of see the difference between who I was when I set out on my first ocean and who I am now.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: Because um, towards the end of my corporate career, these 11 years as management consultant, I was in a pretty bad place.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: My self-esteem was really going down the drain, and um, yeah, just not a happy, not happy bunny at all.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: And um and then it got worse.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well no, I I was um I was very called to row across the Atlantic after my environmental epiphany.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: It felt like exactly the thing that I was meant to be doing, and I was going to a very spiritual stage, and I really felt like this was my big call to adventure.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: This was my sort of existential expression of this new self that I was starting to create.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then the Atlantic just sucked to high heaven because it was it was the worst year ever for weather on the Atlantic, and everything started breaking.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: All four of my oars broke before I got halfway across, camping stove broke, so no hot dinner after 12 hours of rowing every day.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, towards the end, my satellite phone broke, um, the stereo broke, so I had literally nothing but my own thoughts to entertain me for three and a half long months.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was so hard.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: And at the time I was really indignant.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, what the hell?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, come on, life.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, my my my great, you know, enlightenment.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and um, and also life, you asked me to do this.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm out here as a champion for Mother Nature.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: Mother Nature seems determined to like beat me up every which way.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it probably, I would say it took me about 10 years to figure this out.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, at the time I did learn a hell of a lot about myself and how to, as you were just alluding to, I learned how to reframe situations so that even though I couldn't change the reality, I could change my attitude to it.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, like going, yay, I'm so uncomfortable, I must be really far outside my comfort zone, and I know this is where all the magic happens, even though I'm not feeling very magical right now.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, about 10 years later, instead of feeling like I'd learned a lot despite everything that went wrong on the Atlantic, I actually realized that I'd learned a lot because of everything that went wrong on the Atlantic.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: That if the weather had been calm and lovely, and if I hadn't have been injured and hadn't have had all of these breakages, I wouldn't have learned anywhere near as much as I did about who I am and what I'm capable of.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I could have sat on my sofa waiting for courage to show up, and it never would have done because you don't need courage to sit on the sofa.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so I had to put myself, and I was very fortunate, and I really want to um say I acknowledge my privilege here that I got to choose my challenge, and I know a lot of people do not get to choose, you know, they get burnished in the flame of something that was not up to them.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um but it now I actually have a really different attitude um when things go sideways.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like at the start of this year, um my main paid work is as a keynote speaker, usually at conferences.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and in the space, yeah, space for a few days at the end of February, all my paid work for the year got cancelled.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: Heavy.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and for about four days I sulked and panicked.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Mostly sulked.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: Occasional panicking.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then I just again decided to do that reframe and adopted the the mindset of, well, I've been in this situation before where I just haven't known where you know the next payment is going to come from and how am I going to pay my rent and all of that.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: And and it's always worked out.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm just going to trust life that um it's going to show up for me, that I'm going to be okay, and even better, there are going to be gifts in this, even though uh clearly this year's not panning out the way that I planned.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: But I just try and see the perfection in it.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that can be, you know, this might sound hollow to some people who really are going through the worst kinds of hell this year.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um but there is this thing called post-traumatic growth.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: That if we, you know, people who've been in accidents, who've had uh, you know, Viktor Frankel is one of my greatest inspirations, this um Auschwitz Holocaust survivor.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: You I mean, I cannot imagine anything worse than that.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a quick shout out for the listeners.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't read Man's Search for Meaning, it is top two books ever written.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, life-changing.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, what's your other what's your other top two book?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I said top two because I was gonna say top one, but I don't know all the books that have been written.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't want to exclude the other one that was probably should be up there.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: It certainly is way up there.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's a short book that really just I mean, you have no rights to complain about anything ever again after you've read it.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: I it's a book, it's the first book I ever read where once I finished it, I bought, I went to Amazon and I bought three or four copies and sent it to all my closest friends.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um I have an interesting question leading off of that.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's this point of taking your uh physical situation, which could be monetary, right, in the case of earlier this year for you, or it could be um you on the ocean dealing with the stresses of oars breaking and injuries?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: How do you kind of kind of go in with this theme of what it seems like your dissertation was of searching kind of for these internal, like aspects of your life that you felt like you needed to improve?
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: How do you go about becoming aware of ways you are acting?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of physical situations failing you, personal actions or thoughts or perceptions failing you, have you had experiences where you looked at your own self and your own actions in life and thought that they didn't really represent who you wanted to be in that moment, maybe with friends or with relationships or with even yourself, and then went about to how do you become aware of things in your own life that you're unsatisfied with in the way you act, and then changing those uh to kind of become more proud of yourself.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great question, yeah.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: A whole flurry of examples are coming to mind.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um so um I'll I'll try and keep it to a couple, um, although I'm I might um I might go to three.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: So the the first one, okay.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: So something I'm really not proud of.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: I used to be a smoker.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, I was I was never a very heavy smoker, sort of max 10 a day, but still, you know, it's not a smart thing to do.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it got to 12 months before I was going to row the Atlantic, and I just thought, you know what, this smoking habit is not compatible with this identity as an adventurer athlete that I'm trying to create.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so um a year before I set out, I was like, enough.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it took me about a week, and I um tried to make it as disgusting to myself as I could.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: So where I was living at the time, I had to um like the the the rubbish that the garbage was collected from the front of my flat on a particular day of the week.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I sort of put a bag of rubbish out the back in a shed.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so I took my last packet of cigarettes that still had about 10 left in it, and I put it in the bag of rubbish.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: So then when I got a craving, I had to go out to the shed and fish out from the trash, uh, the packet of cigarettes.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'd start smoking when I go, oh, this is pathetic.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, just um throw half of it away.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: And and by the end of that week, I'd you know, this sort of aversion therapy.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: I I just like you know, I really don't need this anyway.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I love that that idea of of associating the cigarette with the trash.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that was sort of a fairly like going from a negative behavior to zero, but then um an example from my rowboat was um every day that I was on the ocean, I wrote a blog post, which was often the last thing I felt like doing after 12 hours of rowing, especially because to transmit data through a satellite phone takes forever.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: And at that time, if I lost um the connection part way through the transmission, had to go back to the start.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it could take ages, it was a real labour of love.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, my whole point was to be an advocate for the environment, so I had to stay connected and get my messages out there.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so people would often write really lovely comments on my blog post in response, you know, words of encouragement and whatever.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: And um, my mum would pick up these messages and select a few of them and email them back to me because I could only do email from the boat, I couldn't see websites.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um so she'd like pick a few of the nicest ones and send them to me to cheer me up.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: And people were saying really lovely things, uh, admiring my courage and my resourcefulness.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: And at first I could not own those words because I felt like anything but courageous and resourceful.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, no, not me.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: But then I sort of went, Well, why not me?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I had this whiteboard in front of my rowing seat, so I wrote up these nice words on the whiteboard where I was sitting looking at them for these 12 hours a day while I'm on the rowing seat.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: And as I went about my business on the boat, I made a deliberate effort to embody those words in everything that I did in my behaviors.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like I mean, even the rowing itself, I feel like we have this little observer in our heads that is assessing who we are, what our identity is based on what it how it sees us behaving.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it can get a little bit freaked out when we try and do something new, like rowing across an ocean.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's like, what the hell do you think you're doing?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh, yeah.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: Never done anything like this before.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: You're not a seafarer, you get seasick, you know, what the hell.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but then as time goes on and you manage to persist with the behavior, and in the case of the ocean rowing, manage to persist in not dying, um eventually that little observer starts to calm down.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, oh, okay, well, guess this is the new you.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: All right, so let's go with this new identity.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's really the only sustainable way of changing, because otherwise, if we try and do it through sheer willpower, you know, like I'm not gonna have that cigarette or I am gonna do this rowing shift, you know, it's that sort of white-knuckled, yeah, very tense, shoulders hunched sort of experience.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas when we actually go, you know, like if someone's struggling to lose weight, if they go, you know, I am a healthy person, what would a healthy person eat in this situation?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, or what would a healthy person buy in the supermarket?
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's what's worked for me.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love that.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: I've made some pretty big changes over the years.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: I love that question.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why not me?
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's that it's the it's such a hard thing to do, is change your identity.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it sounds a it sounds a really like a really big thing, you know, go change your identity, but you know, just changing small facets of your of your character, of your identity, is hard because it tends to impact the rest of your life.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: It could impact uh relationships or it could impact the way you see yourself.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just this idea that it causes discomfort.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and people in general try to avoid discomfort.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, although you know, people change their identities all the time.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't have children, but a lot of people do, and I can't imagine a much bigger transformation than going from being not a parent to being a parent.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's huge.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess it's a bit, you know, like setting out across an ocean.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: You don't know what the hell you're doing at first, but you gradually grow into that new identity and to a greater or lesser degree figure it out as you go along.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: So we're actually all changing all the time, it's just a question of how intentional that change is.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: This leads me to a fun place.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: We in our email thread, uh, or at least I brought up the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I liked a comment you wrote about it, which was I think it was in your book summaries.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: I you said something along the lines of, I have a tough time writing a conclusion out, uh, what I got from this, because anybody could pick this book up and and read something different from it or get something different out of it.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: But my question is, the one of the philosophies of that book or commentaries of that book is, I guess I would say the central one is identifying what is valuable, right?
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: The idea of defining quality.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: What is what is valuable in life?
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a person changes, right?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: Some of these changes are uh not their choice, right?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Becoming a parent, or I guess that is partially your decision.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um sometimes not.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: But when you have a child or when you become a parent, the change in identity isn't necessarily something that you choose.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas maybe the when you're on a you're rowing your your boat across the ocean and you have these difficulties, you became aware of the things, right?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: You were the one who asked the question, why not me?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: Why couldn't I be this person that I kind of want to look up to?
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how do you choose what is valuable, right?
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of qualities are valuable to you that you would want to change your identity for them?
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, that um that's deep.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: And where do I want to go with that?
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um to me it's sort of an intuitive thing.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: Again, sort of coming back to that bricolage that I talked about earlier.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think um when I was in a bad place um towards the end of my corporate career, um, and in fact, compared with that, even the bad places I was in on the ocean felt like good bad places, because at least they were sort of on the way to something very intentional and very positive.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I mean, I do think there's such a thing as good hard and bad hard.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and yeah, corporate life to me personally felt bad hard.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um when I got pangs of envy for somebody, whether it was a fictional character or um I suppose I didn't encounter that many um inspiring people in my day-to-day life.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_02: So it was more likely to be fictional or um or maybe uh in a biography or something like that.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: I found that envy was quite um clarifying.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um and okay, I'm afraid I'm gonna there's a story I tell too often about really when my transformation started, which was when um I had turned self-help books in desperation to try and figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, um, just at the age of like 32.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and um, I was reading the seven habits of highly affected people, as many people have done before me, and hopefully will in the future.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: And habit number two is begin with the end in mind, and there's this exercise in which you write two versions of your own funeral.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the version that you want, you know, what will people be saying about you and how you lived your life and how they perceived you and what you contributed.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then what version are you actually heading for if you carry on as you are?
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: And what I really loved about this exercise was that previously, when I tried to figure out, you know, what job do I want to do, what's going to feel purposeful and meaningful to me, I always started from where I was and could just see all of the skills that I didn't have.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um whereas, and also um that tended to take me into quite a material mindset of how can I pay the bills?
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it was a very it became a very mundane, practical kind of a question.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas imagining the end of my life and where I wanted to end up and then reverse engineering from that really freed me up to just dream far more expansively about what kind of a person I wanted to be.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it felt almost like I was saying to my soul, who am I?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: Who who's in there trying to get out?
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: And like my soul was going, Oh, thank God, I thought you'd never ask.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because the words just came pouring out of me as I was doing this journaling exercise.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and that really, really just helped me to decide who I wanted to be.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: Although it wasn't an immediate um life change because I could see that that imaginary person that I just described was so far removed from who I was, and a lot of things were going to have to fall by the wayside, including my marriage, um, for me to get on track for becoming that person.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I just didn't have the courage to make those decisions consciously at the time.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I sort of made them unconsciously, which means that for a few years then my life looked like a train wreck.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: While um well, it's uh those are those are right when you say that, and I think that leads back to the way you started to answer that question, which is it's intuitive, right?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's somewhat difficult to change your life or your direction or your mindset in a way that is like in the zen in the art, not necessarily definable.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: It in in ways it is.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can say, I want to be more honest.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: I can I want to be more, I want to pursue this direction more, but at the same time, it's not necessarily.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: A very succinct definition of this is what I need to do, this is what I need to say, this is who I need to be.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's it would be quite remarkable for a person to go through an exercise and then the next day change everything about their life, right?
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: In that direction.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it certainly takes somebody with more courage than I had at that time.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, even with with I courage is is definitely part of the equation, but awareness of exactly what to do is a pretty tough one.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, even though my life did look like a train wreck for a little while, um, what was so liberating about that was that all of the things that had represented security, you know, the job, the income, the relationship, the home, I found that I didn't need all of those things.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: And it really uh, because when I wrote that version of my funeral that I wanted, it was extremely vague on specifics.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: It certainly didn't mention rowing across oceans, you know, it was it was pretty generic.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it was, I suppose I am a believer in the power of visualization, that once I'd seen that potential life, and it had felt really real to me, even though it was so dramatically different from the life I was actually living, I couldn't unsee it again.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: So it does feel like internally something had shifted.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I know our mutual friend Ellen talks a lot about you know, um, alignment and attention and intention, and just somehow I subconsciously needed to come into alignment with that vision that I'd I'd had.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it did look a little bit messy in my case, um, but it all turned out okay in the end.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I think that that brings up some of the points that we've talked about, which is there is this direction that is intuitive to you, but it's not necessarily easy to attack directly.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: That didn't really make a lot of sense, but the point I'm trying to say is you kind of have this direction in life.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the the definition you put down in this uh exercise uh of identifying you you said you had a lot of it was quite vague, right?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't exactly what you were gonna do at the end of life, and that is I would say leads back to this point of who do I want to be, as opposed to what do I want to have done?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you ask who do I want to be, it doesn't define the actions that you've taken.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't define your life's CV, it more defines the way other people will think of you and the way you will think of yourself.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that the reason that I say it ties back into some of the things we've talked about is because it kind of goes back to that question you asked yourself on that boat, which is why not me?
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right when you when you write down this list of things that you want to be in life, this obituary exercise, you look at them and then you look at your life and you say, Well, I'm not doing those things, but why not?
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why why can't I do those things?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, oh wow.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I could talk forever about self-limiting beliefs because um, yeah, I've um when I was on the boat, I kept asking myself, like, can I do this?
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_02: Do I have what it takes?
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, when you ask the question that way, your brain says, Oh, let me have a check through the memory banks and I'll have a look, see if we've got any evidence that we can do this.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then it comes back going, oh crap, like you've never rode across an ocean before.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: We don't think you can do this.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_02: Abort, abort, you know.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so um, I love what you say about the uh the being and the doing aspects because actually, when I did write that somewhat vague vision for the end of my life, it was maybe less about what people would think of me, it was more about how I would feel about being me.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: I I would actually have some respect for myself and I would feel proud of the contribution that I'd made to the world.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: I would feel proud of the fact that I've been a good friend and been of service to some greater purpose.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it was very much, you know, the person that you are when you wake up at 4 a.m.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if you can be at peace with that person and know that you're doing your best, um, that's really how I how I wanted to feel.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: So even though externally it might look like I'm quite achievement driven, and to some extent I am, but I'm also um very much trying, um, you know, working on enjoying the journey.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's a to come back to Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, there's a phrase where he says, Um, we're making good time, you know, but it usually that means like we're going fast.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: But he he says, No, this is in the sense of we are making a good time.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: It is about um, and I wasn't very good at this on the ocean, but it is about enjoying the journey, not just the destination.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's wonderful.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's I think that's a pretty good place to wrap up.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you bringing that example up of making the experience most like the most making the experience of life most positive is helped by being the person that would bring you the most joy during that, during the experience of life.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um we've talked about a lot of really wonderful things.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think that even touches back on a slight parallel to the way we started the conversation of talking about uh identifying for your PhD the ways you haven't necessarily uh succeeded, that you want to have an impact, such as in the environment.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: Though I would say that your roads have definitely drawn awareness, and I'm sure you uh respect the the successes you have had and just see the ways you would want to uh succeed even further, draw more awareness, create even more of an impact.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: I find that really respectable.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's inspiring.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: Likewise, we touched on uh not just drawing from our failures, but creating happiness as a byproduct.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one method, helping other people, right, is a good way of delineating how uh an approach to life which could bring you joy in a in a nonlinear way or in a uh a different way.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we talked about uh changing aspects of your character, becoming uh aware of aspects of your character and how really it is quite intuitive and not necessarily definable, but uh your intuition definitely does give you a a direction to go.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of up to you to say, well, why not me?
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why, why can't I be that person that I wanna that I want to uh be in this life?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then tying it all all kind of, you know, with a fancy bow is well, if I am that person, maybe I'll enjoy it a little better along the way.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'll make a better time out of it.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um kind of looking back over that conversation, what would you think is one message you want would want listeners to take out of it and really drive home?
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_02: I I think I I think what I'm about to say sort of maybe just encapsulates all of that in a little sort of daily motto.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: I've got this sign on my desk, and I say this phrase to myself every single morning.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, this sign says, be the kind of woman that when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says, Oh, she's up.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_02: I don't always find, especially in the winter, I don't always find it very easy to get out of bed in the mornings.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so just when that phrase comes into my head, it's like, okay, devil, here we go.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's awesome.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_02: Bring it on.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's wonderful.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Roz.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's been an absolute pleasure, Flint.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for your great question.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely, definitely.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: I want to thank Roz for that conversation.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed it as well, I think you would get a lot out of episode two of this podcast with Ellen Leance, another incredible person whose adventure seems to have paralleled the fast-paced growth of technology in the Silicon Valley.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: Likewise, it would be great if you shared this episode with a friend who might also appreciate it.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'll link to Roz's website in the episode notes so you can check out her blog and other works.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: While I have many thoughts coming out of this chat, the one that sticks with me most is the question I think I repeated a couple times after Roz told her story of identifying with the positive traits she believed she wanted to have.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the question, why not me?
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are all these people living incredible and passionate lives.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Whether they simply create strong relationships and bonds with others, are extremely genuine, or are following their passions.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: So if they can do those things, if they can live those lives, why not me?
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: And why not you?
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you liked this episode of Seeking Authenticity, that's freaking awesome.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: All I want to ask of you, the listener, in return for the time and effort I put into making it, is that you take a deep breath.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean really breathe.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe so that it stretches out your shoulders and your back and your chest and pushes out your stomach.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: No more of these shallow, bullshit breaths.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: They're barely keeping you alive, my friend.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: And after you exhale, go out and soak up today.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because in the end, your actions and the way they interact with the world and the people around you right now are all you have in this life.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: So be authentic with them.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.