Latest / The Christian Reeve Podcast / Dr Kevin J. Payne | The Christian Reeve Podcast | #146 |

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Dr Kevin J. Payne | The Christian Reeve Podcast | #146 | · The Christian Reeve Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to another episode of Christian re podcast.
• 0:04
  Today's guest is a social psychologist, entrepreneur,
• 0:07
  author and skydiver all the way from Kansas city in the United
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  States. Is name is dr.
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  Kevin J, Payne. Welcome to the show Kevin
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  Hayden. Well, thank you so much for
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  having me. Christian, I appreciate being
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  here. Oh the pleasure is mine as
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  always. Yeah I mean there's many
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  different suppose directions. I can take this in straight away
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  but let's start from the academic.
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  Perspective. So you have a PhD in sociology
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  and psychology interested to know.
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  How did you get into this field of study and what have been your
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  biggest discoveries to date? Well, in the first place, I
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  always knew I wanted to be a scientist.
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  I was a weird kid from the time I was a kid I was really
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  interested in Science and Mathematics but I was also
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  really interested in the Arts so I grew up both performing and
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  Being a science geek. And so that was kind of a weird
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  combination that you don't see a as often as you know, you might
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  think. But but it is however more
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  common than you would think to because creativity is at the
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  heart of both of those things, if you want to be a scientist,
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  it's about trying to push the edge of knowledge in your
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  particular area. And so So I thought I would be a
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  natural scientist and then long about the time.
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  I went to college, I realized that I was so fascinated by
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  people because people are just the the endless conundrum that
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  keeps on coming. And so I made a switch from
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  physics to initially economics, which is actually a Early
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  Commons, which because both of those fields emphasise,
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  mathematical formulations and that sort of thing.
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  So I did I did my undergraduate at in what the Brits Cole
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  procedures and policies. Yeah.
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  And and and I spent, you know, a couple of years there, I was in
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  Oxford and, you know, had a great time.
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  So that's political science. Economics philosophy.
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  And in my case, a lot of mathematics and econometrics.
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  So I then went from that to the first year of my PhD in
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  economics and I got into that and I don't know if you want the
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  story about this but it was it was kind of funny.
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  I'm we're in a a weed out class, it's a microeconomics class.
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  And the idea is to start the class with a whole bunch of
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  people in it and get rid of as many As you possibly can
• 3:01
  throughout the the course. And and so we were doing this
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  and you know, maybe there were half of us left at the end of it
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  but so it was pretty brutal and and hold on.
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  So, was this like particular measures that the teachers took
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  to actually weed people out, like, particular exercises?
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  Well, this this was really kind of fascinating because it was
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  this class started. Added a month before the actual
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  program started and you had to be there.
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  And they they brought in a professor from outside, so that
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  it could be somebody you could really hate.
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  And they brought this guy in from the sorbonne who I will not
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  name. And although this is 30 years
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  ago, I'm sure he's retired by now but but in any case he
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  would, we were there like every morning at 8 a.m. and then and
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  it went all morning and then every Saturday there was a test
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  and and this was the kind of thing where he would just like
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  fling a piece of chalk at somebody and say you get up that
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  the board approve this and he would give us some mathematical
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  thing to prove. And so we would start on our
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  proof and he would start berating us and And then
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  eventually he would just Rags aspirated and and, and run up
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  and grab the top and throw it at somebody else and say, you
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  continue. And, and so, just wanted it
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  room. I had a teacher at school that
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  was like, this, that you just can't get rid of this shit
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  anymore. This is old-school.
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  My would get like that is. Yeah, this is very old school.
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  I don't know, Old English, teacher called mrs.
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  Jones. That would literally.
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  She was very old school even then she was old school.
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  This is like the early 2000's and she would just pop it
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  someone talking in my class. Just take a board Rubber and
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  just throw it at your head. The best bit about this is that
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  none of the other teachers ever. Like, even though they knew it
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  was wrong that you can't behave like this anymore, none of them
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  had the guts or the go to say anything to her because to be
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  her head, there was a level of respect.
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  She was a fantastic teacher. Like if you were in her lesson,
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  you would 100% do well and learn something.
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  It's just her methods are a bit, but you can't be throwing for
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  drivers at kids heads, man. You just can't.
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  Yeah, exactly. So went through that.
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  And then we got into the the first semester there and and
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  it's as micro econ sequence and and it was one of those classes
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  where there were boards, there were white boards on all four
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  walls of the room and he would start with equations.
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  And the upper left front of the room and he would keep going and
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  he would fill the board's all the way around each session as
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  he was just lecturing constantly and and then he would start
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  again and and just like be erasing as he went through.
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  And so finally, one day he got to the end of the class and and
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  tossed the marker down and said, therefore The consequence of
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  this is that understanding humans is not essential to
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  understanding economic systems. And everybody's just furiously
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  riding away. And I had the temerity to raise
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  my hand and and say, how can you justify that?
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  And he looked at me blankly and everyone else in the class,
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  looked at me blankly and he said, but the and he started
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  pointing around to the and I said, I'm not questioning your
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  mathematics, I'm questioning your first principles and
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  everyone kind of looked at me like I was the third head and
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  and and then the bell rang and class is over and I was never
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  answered. But at that point I realized I
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  was in the wrong field. I've gotten all the way to my
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  doctorate in econ, when I realized, I was wrong field.
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  So I made a lateral shift to sociology and psychology and
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  found a really good fit and had a wonderful doctoral Mentor, who
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  was a very senior, eminent scholar in the field, and I was
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  his last doctoral student and, you know, it was, it was a
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  profoundly wonderful enriching educational experience but You
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  know, so I don't wander around a little bit to get there.
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  It's amazing how teaches in our lives can and this comes in all
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  Fields, not just academic Academia go.
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  Yeah, just in general. Yeah, the different teachers and
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  our lives can just kind of caused us to have these like
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  lightbulb moment sometimes, you know, I'm a definite like I had
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  it with English class and business where you know, I
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  wasn't like I was a smart kid but I wasn't, you know, I
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  doubted myself a lot and I was never Like, you know,
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  particularly great like maths or science or any of that stuff.
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  I liked science didn't like maths.
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  But I understood why it was necessary, but I lived for
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  English and business and I remember, Just like certain
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  things clicking every now. And again, like I remember one
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  time And I always attribute this to the beginning of my
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  education, sort of going in the right direction.
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  And it was a really important life lesson was about 14 at the
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  time. 1314 wasn't particularly doing very well in my studies,
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  and I was failing in business because I just started, I didn't
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  know what was going on, they'd lost all my work for a semester,
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  so I had to redo it, like, I was very unmotivated and my teacher
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  sat me down. Shout out to mr.
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  Nelly. And she just said what you doing
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  now? As I would, you mean She said,
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  what do you want to do? It's not often a teacher asks
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  you that right? That's also what do you mean?
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  She's like what's your I use that a lot with my advisees
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  besides that. What's your goal would you want
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  to achieve in this class? And I just kind of sarcastically
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  when I want to Ace it because I was I knew I was failing at the
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  time so I was like I'm going to ace the class and instead of
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  mocking me or saying like oh you know you can't do that or let's
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  set a more reasonable goal. She was like, okay, we're gonna
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  need to do work. Very, very hard then. and I was
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  like, yeah and I didn't expect to hear that and I was like oh
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  and she's like if you want to do that Then we'll work together
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  and we'll make that happen. And it was like, I don't know.
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  There was, there was always like, stars in my eyes at that
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  moment. I was like, you're saying
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  there's a chance and she was like, yeah.
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  And I hope you get there. And from that point onwards, I
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  worked my absolute ass off and I became like top of the class and
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  I aced the course, and I went to do the next level of it
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  afterwards and everything. And it all started from that
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  moment and I attribute all that to her.
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  And also the other supporting business teachers to, but her in
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  particular because She believed in me and she had kids as well.
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  So I think the mother instinct is well, served her.
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  Well I think most of the time, if you've got children, you'll
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  probably be a good teacher because, you know, How to talk
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  so people younger than you and Inspire them and say the right
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  things because that's the thing, like people think they're
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  teaching, I think a lot of the time is 0 you just need to teach
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  them the right tools and they'll get there and it's like no
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  sometimes you need to just kind of inspire some self belief in
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  people and give them like this Awakening moment.
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  And then then they go and Achieve that goal.
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  But you still need to give them that initial spark of
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  realization that they can achieve it.
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  But you know, I spent 15 years as a professor and I still do
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  education all the time. That's core to to what I do and
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  you bring up a really important distinction and that's this,
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  this goal process distinction, and you can have a goal.
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  Goal is great. But you then have to answer the
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  question, how am I going to get there?
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  And then you have to go one step further.
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  And you have to say, What are the resources and what is the,
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  the help the support that I'm going to need to make those
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  steps and and then once you do that, you've got to take the
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  goal and set it aside. And focus on the process.
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  And then you can you can pause every once in awhile and stand
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  and look up and say oh yeah I'm getting closer to my goal.
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  Okay, I'll keep doing what I'm doing or you can look up and
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  say, oh no, I'm getting further away from my goal.
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  I need to make some changes and and then you tweak, the
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  trajectory you maybe find different help you find other
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  resources and you dive back in because it's always about the
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  work because humans are learning animals.
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  Every single second we are awake, we are always learning.
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  The issue is, are you paying attention to what?
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  You are learning? Hmm.
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  Because often, we're not, we're on autopilot, and so you're
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  still learning something, but you're not aware of what it is,
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  you were learning. So, you pay attention to
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  yourself and you're like, oh, how did I get this bad habit?
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  And you're like, oh well, you know, that's what you, that's
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  what you taught. Caught yourself through your
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  experience when you weren't paying any attention.
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  Yeah, and this is two things that come to my me say this one
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  is understanding the significance of what you've
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  learned and why it matters, which is why when I was at
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  school and I would ask loads and loads of questions and I'd be
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  told off for asking questions, I knew that that was logically
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  stupid of those teachers to say that because you need to
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  understand why you understand what you understand.
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  And secondly, I remember Like growing up, my mom would always
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  make an effort to explain things in detail and she was young.
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  She was a young mom, and she would get mocked for that.
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  People be like, oh, why are you explaining that to him?
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  He's a child. What are you doing?
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  Bubba, bubba. And it's like no, I'm doing that
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  because now he understands why I'm doing this.
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  He understands I'm not being unfair.
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  He understands the significance of why this is important.
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  And if a kid is Old enough to ask a question, the kid deserves
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  an answer that they can use. .. Well, also prevent, I mean, if
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  we took in just specifically about parenting like it helps to
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  eliminate that kind of parrot effective.
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  You keep asking for the thing and you don't get it.
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  If you explain, why you can't get that thing like okay, no,
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  don't put your hand there because you're going to burn it.
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  If you just go do it, don't do it.
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  It does is a snuffin, it's pointless, but if you carefully
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  explained, listen, this is really going to hurt you.
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  I've accidentally hurt myself doing this.
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  You don't want this, you put that person on the same level as
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  you. And you explain with respect and
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  that's yeah, that gets through to someone on the other hand.
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  I tried that with my daughter when she was about three or so
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  she put her hand on the grill. I was grilling and I spine and
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  the next week she did it again. And and then it's done.
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  Is it? This is even better my son when
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  he was 20 or so. So he's toddling along.
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  He grabs a paint a metal paint brush from his mother's Studio.
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  Oh, no. And is toddling down the hall
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  and he sees an outlet. It.
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  And he says, oh and jams it in there and there's like this and
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  shock and it shoots him back across the whole, he bounces on
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  the wall and he like shakes himself little bit grabs it
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  grabs the paintbrush toggles back over and jams it in again
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  before anyone can get over to. So then he has he has like the
• 15:45
  baby sneak hair that's just sticking up in all directions.
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  And like a black ring of carbonized around him.
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  Fortunately his mother happened to be on the phone with a friend
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  of hers who was a nurse at the time and was she was able to so
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  they she was able to check him out and everything and he was
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  okay. But but sometimes you can have
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  it explained to you. Yeah.
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  You just need a little more experience.
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  I remember what I was like not that I ever did anything like
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  that. Of course not.
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  I did when I was two years old my mom's we have.
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  What those? Oh I don't know if they have
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  them in the States, but here in the UK, we we lived in.
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  We were quite poor. And I mean the one and only time
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  we lived in a house when I was really young but it was an old
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  house and the radiators were like if you put like they would
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  get so hot that you couldn't touch them.
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  Like they would not boiling crazy heat.
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  Yeah. I shared a flat like that in
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  Oxford. Yeah, it's talking about you
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  know, the wise like the really thin Ones as well.
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  Yeah. And my mom explicitly told me
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  and we were sitting in the bathroom.
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  She's like, don't put your hand on that.
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  And I was like, why? It's just like if you put your
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  hand on that it will burn. Do not do that.
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  She turns away and I put my hand in it and I'm like, and she's
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  like, what did I tell you? But she what it wasn't like,
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  like, like, angry screaming anything?
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  It was just like, what did I tell you?
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  And then, I just felt better. In fact, shame and like, and
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  then that was where the lessons. But know to your point about
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  like, people will really listening to things and
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  understanding things, I think it brings up another point about
• 17:27
  like relationships as well, in the sense that.
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  And this is this is what how I learned to show empathy to
• 17:34
  people because I didn't used to understand the concept of
• 17:37
  empathy and I've spoken on the show about this before, so I'll
• 17:40
  be brief. But I remember kind of thinking
• 17:45
  the showing empathy is just like a nice hog and a chair.
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  And I give some advice Wrong. No.
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  Empathy is Really sitting and listening and being present and
• 17:56
  trying to explore what the problem actually is.
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  Yeah, you hear words and you can listen and Lala or whatever,
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  right? But that's just context you're
• 18:09
  listening for what the problem really is.
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  So then, you know how to address it.
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  And often it just comes from listening but it's like that's
• 18:17
  what you're looking out for. And that's the kind of what you
• 18:20
  were saying before. About the significance of
• 18:22
  understanding. Why?
• 18:24
  Something is what it is. It's like you're not listening
• 18:27
  to find out why this person's upset, you're listening to get
• 18:31
  to that point where you it clicks, then you're like oh
• 18:33
  they're upset about this thing. That's the real thing, not this
• 18:37
  thing that's just triggered them like that.
• 18:39
  This is the real problem, and this is what we need to work
• 18:42
  through. Well, and people are.
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  They know this at an intuitive level, but we have to be
• 18:51
  reminded that there are surface characteristics of the things
• 18:56
  that were interested in and then their deep characteristics.
• 18:59
  And so, we can hear, but not really listen.
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  And the listening is an active process.
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  It's an Engaged process and, and true empathy.
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  Is, is about trying to put yourself in another person's
• 19:19
  circumstance. Now, here's the asterisks that
• 19:22
  goes on that because while I will first, say we all really,
• 19:29
  really, really need to do that. But we also need to understand
• 19:33
  is if we look at the research on perspective, taking, so how
• 19:39
  successful are you able to put yourself into another person's
• 19:43
  circumstances? Dance and accurately make
• 19:47
  attributions about what's going on.
• 19:52
  It turns out humans suck at making attributions to
• 19:57
  correctly, okay? And the closest people in your
• 20:02
  lives. So say a domestic partner that
• 20:06
  you live with The best case is you will be correct in the
• 20:12
  attributions that you make about half the time.
• 20:18
  And that's it. So we don't just need to
• 20:22
  perspective. Take, it's not just a matter of
• 20:25
  us actively listening and trying to make those attributions.
• 20:30
  We also have to perspective, give and we have to be receptive
• 20:36
  when they give their perspective to us because humans are
• 20:42
  resource misers. In other words, that's a really
• 20:45
  polite way of using academic, speak to say, we're lazy and and
• 20:50
  we try to fill in the blanks all that we can.
• 20:55
  So we fill in the blanks with, you know, about a particular
• 21:01
  person with what we know about people like them, quote unquote,
• 21:06
  about the roles that they have about surface characteristics.
• 21:12
  Things like that. And and it turns out that we're
• 21:16
  all very diverse and we don't necessarily fit neatly into
• 21:22
  those roles. Like we would like people to key
• 21:27
  aspect to this and I only say this because I often give people
• 21:31
  advice friends and stuff like that they come to me and I used
• 21:35
  to think it was weird because I was always like I don't have my
• 21:37
  shit together. I feel like now I do but you
• 21:40
  know, in the past not so much but I was always The one reason
• 21:44
  I was able to give advice is because, you know, it's like I
• 21:49
  had a friend that was talking to and giving advice just before I
• 21:52
  came on today and I said to this person I was like I know you and
• 21:59
  the people that love you know you and you should listen to us
• 22:03
  because we're not trying to give you advice that we think you
• 22:07
  want to hear or that we would do.
• 22:10
  We're telling you the stuff that you need to.
• 22:13
  To hear. That's right for you because we
• 22:16
  know you and that's a key part of this whenever you're given
• 22:19
  advice. Like I make sure to always
• 22:22
  understand that I know the person properly and I'm very
• 22:26
  hesitant to give anyone advice unless I know the whole story, I
• 22:29
  mean, I still will try every now and again, but I never feel like
• 22:32
  it's really. As you say, like a correct
• 22:35
  attribution, I don't think it's really proper.
• 22:37
  Unless, you know, the person because if, you know, them, and
• 22:41
  I don't mean, like, the way they taste.
• 22:43
  You can stuff like that. But like from the core aspect
• 22:46
  like their innermost desires their fears insecurities
• 22:51
  everything in between and you're like okay.
• 22:55
  I know all of these things. This is the thing they're
• 22:57
  telling me about, but this is the deeper thing that's needs to
• 23:03
  be addressed. And then you relay the
• 23:05
  information that, you know, they need to hear based on the fact
• 23:08
  that, you know, them. And that's when you can
• 23:10
  sometimes get through to people, obviously they need to be
• 23:13
  receptive and hear it. But that's kind of the core
• 23:16
  aspect of that was I think one of the things that people forget
• 23:20
  about advice is it's not about you being An expert or a savior
• 23:27
  or anything else. What it really is if you want
• 23:33
  some, if you want your advice to stick, you don't tell them, you
• 23:38
  helped them, ask better questions so that they can come
• 23:43
  to it themselves. and if they come to it themselves, they will
• 23:48
  accept it and they will be much more likely to act on it, but
• 23:53
  you can't be The sage on the stage or the guru or whatever it
• 23:59
  is, you you've got to be humble and giving and questioning and
• 24:07
  curious and and embody those values so that they can practice
• 24:17
  them and get better at them for themselves.
• 24:22
  It's a pleasure talking to you sir.
• 24:23
  Honestly like I mean this like I've been thinking a lot lately
• 24:28
  about the fact that I get to do this, I believe this will be
• 24:33
  episode 146 and I've been doing this close to two years now and
• 24:39
  I've realized I've become a better conversation, there's
• 24:41
  better at listening, which is key especially with what we're
• 24:43
  talking about. But I mean, I'm just so
• 24:47
  grateful. I get to talk to all different
• 24:49
  types of people. At their backgrounds.
• 24:51
  And you know the funny thing is like doesn't matter what
• 24:54
  background someone comes from everyone has something to offer,
• 24:58
  and you find yourself lost in these conversations.
• 25:01
  Like I really lose myself in these conversations and I
• 25:04
  sometimes forget that I have to steer it and actually making a
• 25:09
  proper showed. And because that's the thing
• 25:11
  like I used to approach it like this is an interview and you
• 25:14
  need to make these certain questions and and to a degree,
• 25:17
  you know, you do need to kind of Hit the the Just things that
• 25:21
  people are expecting to hear, but I always think that there's
• 25:24
  more interesting stuff to dig into when you start gauge in
• 25:29
  someone's opinions, on things, you know, and, and kind of
• 25:32
  that's when you find yourself often, like leading into things
• 25:37
  naturally or even just touching on things that you probably
• 25:41
  never expected you would touch on.
• 25:43
  Yes, it's just interesting. You know, I think a good life is
• 25:47
  about collecting experiences and And that's not just experiences
• 25:53
  that I have but experiences that I witness and as a social and
• 25:57
  behavioral scientist, one of the things that really fascinates me
• 26:04
  and and that I find truly a beautiful expression of our
• 26:11
  human experience and that is expertise.
• 26:16
  And expertise is everywhere. And and so I'll give you a for
• 26:20
  instance. So for several years, I lived in
• 26:25
  a small college town, and I had done my doctorate there and I
• 26:29
  stayed on faculty for a few years afterward.
• 26:32
  And so I had this house on this street, and every week, the
• 26:37
  trash collection would come by and I would stand in this big
• 26:42
  picture window up the hill, you know, look, Looking down
• 26:46
  watching the trash come by and collect early in the morning,
• 26:49
  unlike Wednesday morning when it came to our house and I would
• 26:55
  watch and there was this one guy who at the time was was a
• 26:59
  middle-aged guy. And All I can say is he was
• 27:07
  obviously Mindful and graceful in his work and he had this
• 27:16
  beautiful economy of motion as he would grab the the garbage
• 27:23
  and and throw it into the truck and it was and people say well
• 27:28
  how do you find beauty in garbage collection?
• 27:30
  And it was like no joke ever. Week.
• 27:34
  I would make a point to just be there when I would hear the
• 27:38
  truck coming. I would make a point to just
• 27:41
  stand there and watch because this was a guy and evidently his
• 27:45
  his co-workers and his bosses recognize this too.
• 27:49
  Because often there would be a new hire that was with him, we'd
• 27:56
  be training the new person and so I mean for me that that is A
• 28:04
  beautiful flashbulb memory that humans can can find ways to
• 28:13
  express Beauty and connection, and skill, that has been
• 28:19
  developed through years of attention and practice in any
• 28:25
  activity. And end it is up to us to
• 28:31
  recognize those things because that makes us beautiful.
• 28:36
  I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I think the process of
• 28:39
  discovery for that is tough and I know of myself, I've had times
• 28:44
  where I've questioned myself, and I've wondered a, my
• 28:47
  worthless. Do I have nothing to contribute,
• 28:49
  and I've had friends that have said the same thing, and
• 28:54
  Sometimes even the smallest things in our lives, you know,
• 28:58
  to us, you know, we're masterful in and yet we don't even see it.
• 29:03
  And I always think it comes down to confidence, you know, like
• 29:09
  yeah, it really was. Yeah, it does.
• 29:12
  And it also comes down to allowing yourself to see
• 29:16
  yourself as you really are. Because the things that we tend
• 29:23
  to diminish about ourselves are the things that we had become so
• 29:30
  practiced and habituated in that others have not And so it has
• 29:36
  become so commonplace for us that that we no longer see the
• 29:43
  Magic in the way that we do it. It's true although I will say
• 29:49
  sometimes, as in for instance, the example that you gave when
• 29:52
  someone takes pride in what they do and they truly enjoy it.
• 29:57
  Sometimes it is just beautiful experience in witnessing that
• 30:00
  what especially when they know and they're humble about it.
• 30:03
  They're like yeah. Yeah the thing that I enjoy it
• 30:06
  but they just make it look effortless.
• 30:08
  Like they're not even trying and it's just watching a master at
• 30:12
  work. Yeah it truly is it is it is
• 30:16
  what we Nicolas flow experience. Hmm.
• 30:20
  And and, you know, for me the most profound And probably
• 30:30
  Salient personal examples of that.
• 30:33
  For me are on the one hand working through a scientific
• 30:38
  problem but there's not anything really interesting being a
• 30:42
  spectator on that because it's just me sitting there looking,
• 30:47
  you know, concerned and sometimes constipated.
• 30:50
  But but the more profound example to witness this happens
• 30:55
  in skydiver and and that is the thing.
• 30:59
  That I love about it because they're, you know, my book.
• 31:03
  I talk about it, I call it the edge and it's a ratio between
• 31:09
  what a task in front of you, demands of you and the capacity
• 31:17
  you can deliver in that moment. And so if the demand is really
• 31:23
  low in Your Capacity, as I wear your board and if it's a little
• 31:27
  higher, then, well, this is in the area of habit and you're not
• 31:31
  really paying attention and as the demand gets a little higher,
• 31:34
  you know, now it's it's you're engaged but then it approaches
• 31:41
  the limits of what you can successfully do and these are
• 31:45
  called flow experiences. And you know, It's when you are
• 31:51
  are challenged but you are confident and you are not
• 31:55
  overwhelmed and you know that you are performing at the peak
• 32:00
  of your capacity. And this, this is a beautiful
• 32:04
  human expression, but the issue is, and it's stressful because
• 32:09
  people don't, you know, we misunderstand stress.
• 32:11
  Stress can be good. It's called you stress.
• 32:13
  Stress can be bad. It's called distress.
• 32:15
  And the thing is you stress and distress, good stress, and bad
• 32:19
  stress. Are right next to each other at
• 32:21
  the edge. When your capacity is just a
• 32:24
  little bit more than what you need to deliver that you stress
• 32:28
  and it's still triggering your acute stress response.
• 32:32
  It's still triggering your sympathetic nervous system.
• 32:34
  However, it takes up just a little bit more and now the
• 32:39
  demand is a little bit more than what you can deliver and you are
• 32:42
  overwhelmed and you will fail. And and the thing that people
• 32:45
  say is, you know, they say, oh, don't don't get stressed, you
• 32:48
  need to reduce stress in your life.
• 32:50
  Well, that's a load of BS because because because if you
• 32:56
  pull yourself back from the potential of the bad stress, you
• 33:01
  pull yourself back from the potential of the good stress,
• 33:04
  and this is where we find our value and our joy in our lives.
• 33:09
  And and so no, we have to learn how to reframe stress.
• 33:15
  The perfect example of this earlier this week, where,
• 33:20
  Basically, so I work with freelance, right?
• 33:24
  I don't work every day. I work about four days a week
• 33:28
  and I do, although I basically work all the time I'm
• 33:31
  workaholic. But I find time to relax and be
• 33:34
  lazy to, you know, it's balanced.
• 33:35
  Anyway, point is, I've had an influx of demand in the podcast
• 33:42
  lately, as far as guests are concerned.
• 33:44
  So I just decided to run with it.
• 33:46
  I might, you know what? Let's just get it all done now.
• 33:48
  And I'll Put myself ahead, I'll pre-schedule this stuff, you
• 33:51
  know, I'll take advantage of the situation and I'll have a good
• 33:54
  time. But obviously, since time is the
• 33:57
  key aspect of this, what it means is that it's fine.
• 34:01
  If it's a day off or weekend, that's no problem, right?
• 34:04
  But when it's the day of the week, when I've got sort of day
• 34:07
  job, I've got then finish that thing, then go straight to doing
• 34:11
  the podcast and editing the podcast and scheduling the
• 34:14
  podcast and then, on top of that, had additional other work
• 34:19
  that I was doing. And I got to a particular day
• 34:21
  where. Yeah, I had you call it, you
• 34:24
  stress is that right? Yeah, youth je USD ress, use
• 34:28
  dress, you stress. So I experienced that and I've
• 34:31
  experienced that several times where as you say that you get
• 34:34
  into that zone, where got a little bit too much work and you
• 34:37
  have that moment where you think I'm going to get this done.
• 34:40
  But then you just start doing it.
• 34:42
  You start the doing and you get into, as you call it, the Flow
• 34:45
  State and then you just start doing it.
• 34:47
  And before, you know it, you've already done it.
• 34:50
  And then that's when you distress, if you like and just
• 34:52
  relax, right? But it's after having embraced
• 34:56
  the stress and use it as, like, part of Like what you are?
• 35:02
  And I always bring up this example because I think it's
• 35:05
  amazing and people should go out of their way to find this.
• 35:08
  There's a interview with David Bowie sometime in the 90s and I
• 35:14
  can't remember exactly what the question is.
• 35:16
  But someone asks him about his work and he basically says, the
• 35:20
  best state you want to be and it's to be basically imagine
• 35:25
  that you're in the deep end of a pool and your feet are not Quite
• 35:30
  touching the floor, but your head is above the water, so
• 35:33
  you're not drowning, and he said, basically, that's the
• 35:37
  state you want to be in perpetually so you're just a
• 35:40
  little bit out of your comfort zone but you're not so far out
• 35:43
  that you're, you know, completely out of it.
• 35:46
  You're just a little bit out, always reaching a little bit out
• 35:48
  and that's perfect space to be, and that's really crucial
• 35:52
  because like, to continue this, you know, this metaphor.
• 35:55
  So if your demand is a little bit over your Yeah, you're
• 36:01
  overwhelmed and you fail if it's a little bit more than that.
• 36:05
  So now it's noticeably more this, you will get injured.
• 36:10
  Yep, from it. And if it is a lot more than
• 36:14
  what you can deliver at that point, then this is what trauma
• 36:19
  is, if that is actually what drama is and and The crucial
• 36:25
  thing to understand is we've got physical edges, we've got
• 36:29
  cognitive edges, we've Got a motion alleges.
• 36:31
  We've got social edges. We got operational edges, we've
• 36:33
  got all sorts of edges and we met something may not be say a
• 36:39
  cognitive Edge. We met in the abstract know how
• 36:43
  to do it but it may be emotionally really difficult for
• 36:49
  us to do. So in other words, I know the
• 36:52
  right thing to do but doing that, In that experience, I have
• 36:59
  to confront a lot of negative emotions that I'm not prepared
• 37:04
  to handle. I'm still going to fail.
• 37:07
  And on the other end, I may get really angry at myself because I
• 37:10
  think I know what to do. Well, yes you knew what to do.
• 37:15
  You could make that cognitive Edge but you couldn't make the
• 37:19
  emotional Edge and we learn. Remember I said we always learn.
• 37:23
  So we're always learning in one of two ways where Either Edge,
• 37:27
  learning. This is growth.
• 37:29
  This is where growth happens. Always, this is the trigger to
• 37:33
  growth. So, physically that's like, you
• 37:36
  know, pushing yourself to failure, lifting weights, right?
• 37:39
  But it's also cognitively emotionally, and socially, all
• 37:42
  that stuff, or we're doing what's called habituated
• 37:46
  learning. And so that's down in our
• 37:48
  comfort zone, and that's pushing things down into automaticity,
• 37:52
  right? So the thing is, if we Want to
• 37:57
  humans are always either growing or atrophy.
• 38:00
  We're growing you're dying. One of the two.
• 38:02
  That's period. So you have to regularly have
• 38:07
  those growth experiences of all different kinds but you can't
• 38:11
  live there because you're triggering your acute stress
• 38:14
  response. So if you grow, now you've got
• 38:17
  to pull yourself back to what I call your home away from the
• 38:20
  edge. And you've got to rest relax,
• 38:23
  recover nourish, sleep, all that stuff.
• 38:25
  Because Was the trigger for the growth is at the edge but the
• 38:29
  actual growth happens when you back off and allow your system
• 38:33
  to repair. Two years ago when I returned
• 38:37
  from Estonia is living in Estonia for three years.
• 38:42
  And a lot had happened. I basically gone to university
• 38:46
  in England and then for three years and then straight away,
• 38:49
  I'd gone to Estonia. And then I came back is
• 38:51
  basically like freed 5 to 6 years of just constant stuff.
• 38:56
  Going on constant stressful situations, unfamiliarity, all
• 39:00
  sorts of stuff, constantly being out of my comfort zone. on the
• 39:05
  edge and It's interesting, the time and this is why I wanted to
• 39:10
  bring this up. So I returned to the UK in
• 39:13
  February 20, 20 move to a new city.
• 39:17
  So the stress didn't really stop and then one side kind of got my
• 39:21
  place to live and I had settled down.
• 39:25
  I basically destress I basically just sat down and had time to
• 39:28
  think and then I did exactly what you're talking about where
• 39:32
  I then started processing the last six years of my life and it
• 39:38
  was it was a lot. I mean it you know the human
• 39:41
  mind works in mysterious and amazing ways and for me it's
• 39:46
  very intrusive like my brain just never stops thinking and
• 39:50
  that's useful but also a hindrance and you know, And I'm
• 39:55
  imagining many of us are like that sometimes.
• 39:57
  And, you know, I will say if you're able to find a way to
• 40:00
  switch off, Mazel Tov to you. Well done, that's incredible
• 40:04
  because I really struggle for that sometimes and it's taken me
• 40:08
  years of meditative practice to build that.
• 40:11
  And, and I'm still far from perfect, but that's the key
• 40:14
  though, isn't it? It's like that conscious effort
• 40:17
  to actually take the time to do that, for me.
• 40:21
  I needed to just take time to just sit down and just think and
• 40:25
  chill. And then through that, I
• 40:27
  started, Just just thinking about stuff and coming to terms
• 40:32
  with certain things and and and really learning the lessons that
• 40:36
  I hadn't actually learned when I was dealing with them.
• 40:38
  And I put that down to what you were talking about, which is the
• 40:40
  stress factor. It's like you're dealing with
• 40:42
  all this stuff and you don't quite learn the lesson, straight
• 40:46
  away. People say learn the lesson,
• 40:47
  right? Learn from the lesson is that
• 40:49
  you. But you need to sit down and
• 40:50
  actually absorb and think about the lesson.
• 40:54
  That's not a conscious thing ever.
• 40:56
  It's like a, you go for a walk. In the forest, the thought comes
• 41:00
  up in your head and you just walking around and then it
• 41:03
  suddenly just clicks and Dawns on you and then it's like and
• 41:06
  it's so similar in every other field.
• 41:08
  That's why when you said earlier that, you know, you were
• 41:11
  surprised there was a link between creativity and science,
• 41:15
  you know, I found I thought the same thing when I was growing up
• 41:17
  and now I'm just like no makes perfect sense.
• 41:19
  Creativity is in everything but this kind of thought process
• 41:25
  that we have doesn't matter if you're a mathematician scientist
• 41:28
  and artist. Artist rocket scientist,
• 41:30
  whatever that doesn't matter, what your career is, everyone
• 41:33
  can relate to this, where you've got a problem, you can't figure
• 41:37
  it out, you like and you just stop and you just I don't know,
• 41:40
  walk away, you have a cigarette, you go do your business and then
• 41:44
  while you're doing that stuff, it just comes to you.
• 41:47
  Maybe you're on the treadmill and you're just running and it
• 41:49
  clicks or you go out for a drive and it clicks or just sit in
• 41:53
  the, you know, enjoying the the Sunday weather and it clicks,
• 41:57
  you know, it's like Those moments, when you take that time
• 42:00
  or made it through meditation, as you mentioned your method,
• 42:03
  you know, it's whatever your method is, whatever your vices,
• 42:07
  whatever your your thing that makes you wind down is that's
• 42:13
  where the answer will come. Well, you've got to have the,
• 42:16
  you've got to have the preparation.
• 42:18
  So you've got to have the resources and experience that
• 42:21
  you had built and you can't skip a step here.
• 42:24
  You can't suddenly go ten steps forward. 20 steps forward.
• 42:28
  Because you will be traumatized, right guys, we've already
• 42:32
  established that this is this is so you've got to go step by step
• 42:35
  by step and you've got to have the triggering experience.
• 42:40
  So that is that edge experience? Where you where your system is
• 42:46
  motivated to grow? Because if you said, if you just
• 42:51
  sit on the couch, With with you know your Cheetos or Weetabix or
• 42:57
  whatever it is watching, Netflix all the time, try to be
• 43:01
  Multicultural there. And and then your your system is
• 43:08
  learning that it can work down to those expectations all the
• 43:14
  time right now. I'm saying, you know, I'm not
• 43:17
  saying don't do that. I'm just I'm saying, don't do
• 43:19
  that all the time because our system.
• 43:22
  We'll learn up or learn down because we're resource misers.
• 43:27
  Okay? And, and we will try to
• 43:31
  efficiently, Do what our environment.
• 43:36
  What what we expect our environment is going to demand
• 43:40
  of us. And and so we are building we
• 43:46
  are learning in those ways. So you got to go to the edge but
• 43:50
  then you've got to disengage that sympathetic nervous system
• 43:54
  engage your parasympathetic nervous system, right?
• 43:56
  Because the sympathetic nervous system is the acute stress
• 44:01
  response called the fight or flight response.
• 44:03
  It's really actually a lot more than fight or flight.
• 44:05
  It's more like freeze front flight fight on flock, fright,
• 44:09
  faint. I mean, there's a lot of stuff.
• 44:11
  On, I call it the effort response.
• 44:14
  I knew it was never that straightforward.
• 44:15
  When they taught me that in Psychology class.
• 44:18
  I was like, no way. Is it that black await Nothing
• 44:20
  in life. Is that black and white?
• 44:21
  Come on. Yeah, it is not really that
• 44:23
  black and white but that does particular things to our system
• 44:30
  and to the way we think and the way we see ourselves and the
• 44:34
  possibilities we see in the world.
• 44:36
  So we've got to back off because now we triggered.
• 44:39
  We've triggered an edge now. We got to back off.
• 44:41
  And engage that parasympathetic nervous system also called the
• 44:45
  feed and breed system, or the rest and digest system.
• 44:48
  And what that is about is about comfort and Safety and Security,
• 44:55
  so that you can nourish and rest and recover and consolidate and,
• 45:01
  and grow. So, the next time you go out to
• 45:04
  the edge, your Edge is a little bit further.
• 45:08
  You're a little more confident there.
• 45:11
  Amazing stuff in the course of the earlier, you mentioned about
• 45:16
  your books, your book is called your life live will.
• 45:22
  Well life lived. Well, so it may go well, your
• 45:25
  life. Yeah, well, so talk to us a
• 45:28
  little bit about this book, the process of creating this book,
• 45:33
  what led up to that and you know why people should read it.
• 45:38
  So I do, you know, your life load also name of the company's
• 45:43
  name in the book. It's the name of the seminars
• 45:45
  that I do. It's their song on my podcast,
• 45:48
  all of it, that is the brand and for me there were a couple of
• 45:55
  things. So one thing that we haven't
• 45:57
  really talked about here is that I live with Multiple sclerosis
• 46:03
  and I was first symptomatic with Ms in 1989 and I was correctly
• 46:09
  diagnosed in 2006. And Ms is, you know, they're
• 46:16
  about 2.8 million people in the world right now, diagnosed
• 46:20
  living with Ms. So it is a relatively common rare disease
• 46:25
  and it is an autoimmune neurodegenerative condition.
• 46:30
  So my nervous system is Being eaten up, the myelin in my
• 46:35
  central nervous system my brain and spinal cord is being eaten
• 46:38
  up by my confused. Immune system.
• 46:44
  So that means that everything I do think feel say hope, dream,
• 46:50
  whatever passes, through my central nervous system and
• 46:53
  wherever I get damaged is where very good symptoms.
• 46:56
  So, the symptoms of MS. I mean, chronic pain, I have chronic
• 47:00
  fatigue. I'm chronically confused.
• 47:03
  My legs don't work right. Sometimes.
• 47:05
  I've got you know, paresthesias, which are random feelings that
• 47:09
  don't actually exist. I've got over 30 symptoms, that
• 47:12
  come and go. And and so it is, it is a real
• 47:17
  grab bag and one of the things that it, that it did to me, was
• 47:25
  I came to a point in my life, where my condition had gotten
• 47:28
  very bad and I lost everything that I cared about my career.
• 47:35
  It exploded my family to exploded my, you know, my dog
• 47:39
  even died on me. And yeah, Sorry to hand, then
• 47:45
  three days. After my, my dog traumatically
• 47:48
  died in front of me. I was struck by lightning almost
• 47:51
  it. Hit the tree right next to me
• 47:54
  and and knock me off my feet and Blinded Me.
• 47:56
  And Devon me. And and so you know I really
• 47:59
  felt like job at that point. Yeah.
• 48:04
  I was gonna say, did you start to feel like is there a curse on
• 48:06
  me? Little boy.
• 48:08
  Yeah rice and and I literally had come to a point in my life
• 48:13
  where I couldn't see it. Ask from where my life was to
• 48:16
  any kind of life. I was interested in living and
• 48:20
  my right about that time because my son was the last one to leave
• 48:24
  and he said, you know, Dad you really suck at doing things for
• 48:27
  yourself and I realized that, you know, because so I got a PhD
• 48:35
  in people. I got all the knowledge but I
• 48:38
  had become so consumed. Being the dad being the husband,
• 48:44
  his, you know, supporting his mother through a decade of
• 48:47
  cancer. You know, keeping a roof over
• 48:50
  our heads. As a sole income of a family of
• 48:52
  four with two small kids and all that stuff, I had let my own
• 48:57
  self-care go by the wayside because it was always, we'll get
• 49:02
  through this next Crisis and then I'll be able to catch up
• 49:04
  with that and we just never would there was one crisis after
• 49:08
  another, for 10 years. And so I realized that.
• 49:11
  Yeah. He had never seen me do
• 49:15
  something just for myself. And I was like, wow.
• 49:21
  So so I knew that I had spent the last 20 years or so.
• 49:28
  Always being the expert in the room being a professor being
• 49:33
  expensive, consultant being whatever and I had stopped
• 49:39
  taking care of myself. And I given up on myself and I
• 49:44
  had been betrayed by my body by the MS. In so many ways over the
• 49:49
  years. Years that I had become
• 49:51
  terrified of my own body. The thing, I feared most in the
• 49:56
  world was locked in my carcass with me and all of those fight
• 50:01
  or flight. You know, quote-unquote things
• 50:03
  that we talked about earlier that I mentioned all those
• 50:06
  strategies are about getting distance between you and the
• 50:10
  thing that you fear but I can't get distance from my own body.
• 50:16
  And a lot of times, the thing that we fear most in the world
• 50:20
  is something that we can't get away from.
• 50:23
  So we have to learn to reframe it and, and accommodate it and
• 50:27
  we're creatively around it and through it.
• 50:30
  And so, I said I'm going to give myself one more chance and
• 50:36
  literally this was my last chance I was giving myself.
• 50:41
  That's not an overstatement. I said, I'm going to use my
• 50:43
  science and skydiving to save myself.
• 50:47
  Because I'd wanted to be a skydiver from the time.
• 50:49
  I was a little kid, I started doing the training in the 90s
• 50:52
  for the first time, got a handful of jumps in and then
• 50:57
  what a life got in the way and eventually my my condition got
• 51:02
  so bad that I gave up on it. So I said okay I need to do
• 51:06
  something just for myself but there's no practical reason for
• 51:11
  like jumping out of a quote unquote perfectly good airplane.
• 51:15
  A lot. And and and I need to do
• 51:19
  something that takes me to my Edge and allows me to build
• 51:26
  confidence in my wonky body. That I had lost.
• 51:32
  And so a lot of people come to skydiving because they're afraid
• 51:35
  of heights. That's not my issue.
• 51:38
  I mean I had enough jumps, you know, in the 90s that I knew
• 51:42
  what I was going to be into when I came back to skydiving in
• 51:46
  2019, it was, you know, I didn't know whether I could pass the
• 51:51
  training. Because my body is weird and,
• 51:56
  you know, I can't feel my legs below my knees, and you've got
• 51:59
  to be able to control your legs in free fall, or you start
• 52:02
  spending in tumbling out of control.
• 52:05
  It's difficult to stand up a landing on a parachute.
• 52:07
  When you can't feel your feet, So, you know, I had, I had some
• 52:12
  exceptional challenges that I had to get through and normally
• 52:15
  it takes 25 jumps to get your A license in skydiving.
• 52:18
  That's the first of four licenses.
• 52:22
  It took me 47. Because I had to do a lot of
• 52:27
  extra training on the ground. I had to spend a lot of time in
• 52:30
  a wind tunnel with an instructor holding my legs in exactly the
• 52:35
  right position. So that I could say, okay, I
• 52:37
  can't feel what's going on with my legs but I can't get
• 52:41
  consistent feelings at the tendons behind my knees and so I
• 52:45
  could learn to interpret those signals and say, okay, when my
• 52:49
  when my tendency like this this is what my leg is doing.
• 52:55
  So I had to get creative and work within my limitations and
• 52:58
  work around it and it managed to do that.
• 53:00
  So in 2019, I logged about 140 jumps, I got my a my B license
• 53:05
  in 2020. I sent myself a bigger goal and
• 53:07
  I said I'm going to become a legit skydiver and what that
• 53:11
  means is passing 500 jumps in the sport because that's where
• 53:15
  you are eligible for all the licensing, that's where you're
• 53:18
  eligible for professional ratings and so in I was going to
• 53:22
  do that in 2020 that It means that I was going to have to jump
• 53:26
  on average once a day for the entire year.
• 53:30
  And so so I set myself a goal and I logged 370 jumps in 2020
• 53:38
  and God through the license has earned a coach rating and and
• 53:44
  became a legit skydiver. Now, am I an expert far from it?
• 53:49
  I've got 600 some jumps now, you know?
• 53:52
  And and Later today I'll probably be out of the Drop Zone
• 53:57
  and get a jumping because the weather's nice butt.
• 54:01
  It was an edge for me physically, mentally emotionally
• 54:06
  because and here's the thing. So you see the cover of my book
• 54:10
  and if people can't see it, you know, it's me at 5,000 feet and
• 54:18
  and there's this. It the sun is on the horizon or
• 54:20
  these beautiful clouds below me and this was the exact image.
• 54:26
  I wanted on the cover of my book and it took us eight jumps over
• 54:30
  six weeks. To capture this image and it
• 54:34
  tells the story of everything that I do, and here's what it
• 54:37
  is. So I'm in street clothes, so, no
• 54:40
  helmet, no jumpsuit, nothing like that.
• 54:43
  I'm in jeans and a sweater. And I look like a guy.
• 54:47
  A quote-unquote, normal guy off the street, who is thrust into
• 54:50
  this extraordinary circumstance and that's what it feels like.
• 54:54
  When you get a chronic diagnosis that you're never going to get
• 54:57
  better from feels like your life is in free fall like The bottom
• 55:02
  has been taken away from you. So at that, instant on 5,000
• 55:07
  feet above the Earth and I'm headed to the Earth at 120 miles
• 55:10
  an hour. Now what that means in Practical
• 55:13
  real terms, not exaggerating my life.
• 55:17
  Expectancy is now, 27 seconds, if I do nothing at that point
• 55:24
  you can be absolutely certain that if I do nothing.
• 55:29
  When that photo is taken, I would have been dead, 27 seconds
• 55:35
  later. So what am I doing?
• 55:37
  I've got my hands up to my forehead and I'm about and I'm
• 55:40
  doing something that every skydiver in the world.
• 55:42
  Recognizes, it's called The Wave off.
• 55:44
  You bring your hands up to your forehead.
• 55:46
  Me sweep them out broad low. And what I'm doing is, I'm
• 55:49
  warning, everyone in my airspace that I am about to take action
• 55:54
  to save myself. And so I wave off and I deploy
• 56:00
  my parachute. What I am doing in the face of
• 56:05
  certain death is choosing actively for life.
• 56:12
  And that's what I want people to understand.
• 56:15
  If you're going to make your life better, it's going to
• 56:18
  start. Even if it's out of control,
• 56:22
  even if you're overwhelmed, you are going to have to actively
• 56:26
  choose life. What moment did you realize free
• 56:33
  or skydiving? That it was actually a wider
• 56:37
  metaphor for your life and all of your struggles that you would
• 56:41
  do in and with, you know, II had a sense of that going back to
• 56:48
  it. I mean it was, it was, it truly
• 56:51
  is, you know, if you're a fan of the stoics, it truly is a
• 56:55
  Memento Mori. It is, it is an active.
• 57:00
  And that we are going to die but not today because I am going to
• 57:07
  choose living and and to do that repeatedly to be a middle-aged
• 57:14
  guy with a wonky central nervous system who can day after day
• 57:18
  after day, fling his body happily from a perfectly good.
• 57:23
  Aircraft have a lot of fun, you know, for 60 or 70 seconds in
• 57:28
  the meantime, and then save myself every time and landed on
• 57:33
  targets. That is a massive amount of
• 57:35
  confidence that I can then carry into the rest of my life.
• 57:42
  So how did you actually start doing that?
• 57:45
  Because obviously it's one thing to do what, you know, you needed
• 57:48
  to do which is something for yourself and to, you know, and
• 57:53
  now, you know, you've kind of already partially answered.
• 57:55
  The question, is much as you recognize that this diagnosis
• 58:00
  that you It is not a hindrance, it's just basically saying to
• 58:06
  you, okay? This is what you're this is the
• 58:11
  the hand you've been dealt and instead of resisting it, you've
• 58:15
  got to find a way to adapt to it and and rather Adapt to that
• 58:22
  situation and then make life work for you within the confines
• 58:25
  of that. So in essence, I guess my
• 58:29
  question is how did you begin to do that elsewhere?
• 58:34
  It's an invitation to be creative and and it goes back to
• 58:38
  this Edge idea and that's the chapter for the book and and,
• 58:45
  and it goes back to something. I briefly touched on earlier.
• 58:51
  And that is being humble. And and so one of the things
• 58:57
  that happens is with the chronic illness, there are probably
• 59:01
  going to be some of your capacities that are going to be
• 59:05
  greatly curtailed. Now that doesn't mean that
• 59:09
  they're always going to have to be there, but that means that
• 59:12
  you've got to honestly acknowledge where they are right
• 59:15
  now so that you can systematically work on trying to
• 59:20
  grow them or work on trying to be creative and work around them
• 59:24
  or through them or whatever it is.
• 59:27
  And so I had to First Take, take a brutally honest stock.
• 59:37
  Of where my capacities currently work. and, That wasn't a very
• 59:46
  flattering view of myself because I, you know, I was
• 59:51
  living with chronic pain and chronic fatigue and chronic
• 59:54
  confusion. And those are all still will
• 59:58
  with me, but I've managed to again, through meditation and
• 1:00:03
  exercise. And in cognitive reframing, I
• 1:00:06
  used to, you know, there are several years there where my
• 1:00:09
  pain on a, on a standard 11-point Pain, Scale was a six
• 1:00:13
  to eight every day. That's bad.
• 1:00:16
  That's getting in the way of your life and it did.
• 1:00:19
  Now I still feel pain but it's a 1-2-3.
• 1:00:23
  Do you fit all the time or just a particular moments.
• 1:00:27
  So it's not like him to entice, continuous pain all the time all
• 1:00:31
  the time. But even but it's very yeah,
• 1:00:33
  even right now. Yeah, but it, but it varies in
• 1:00:37
  so it can feel like stinging, it can feel like, electric shocks.
• 1:00:43
  It can feel like Like a something thudding, do lie in
• 1:00:48
  the background, it's always variable in my experience
• 1:00:53
  because it's not about physical damage.
• 1:00:58
  That's nociceptive pain, where you've got nerves in your skin
• 1:01:03
  that are detecting a noxious stimuli.
• 1:01:06
  This is neurogenic pain. It's because of damage in my
• 1:01:10
  brain so it's not a signal, it's noise.
• 1:01:15
  And, and I've had to learn to operate through.
• 1:01:18
  I know you gave some examples of things, like, you know, if
• 1:01:21
  working out and doing things like, yoga meditation, that kind
• 1:01:26
  of thing. But, I mean, how do you kind of
• 1:01:31
  try to put it in such a blunt way?
• 1:01:32
  But how do you stop yourself from going crazy, like feeling
• 1:01:35
  constant pain? Because I mean, when I think
• 1:01:38
  about, I don't know, a particular pain that I've got or
• 1:01:41
  sickness or something like that. That's lasted a bit too low.
• 1:01:44
  Long it does start to get to you and and it's irrational because
• 1:01:49
  you know that it will go away but this is something that that
• 1:01:51
  never goes away. So like how do you reconcile
• 1:01:55
  that like Is it just like you build up a resiliency to it?
• 1:01:59
  Or is there like steps you have to take two kind of Deal.
• 1:02:03
  The deal about how do you decide this?
• 1:02:05
  I mentioned this issue of cognitive reframing, right?
• 1:02:07
  So if we look at the last 20 years of pain science research,
• 1:02:14
  okay? We have a very different
• 1:02:17
  understanding of pain now than we did a generation ago and of
• 1:02:23
  course, the problem is most Medical Health Wellness
• 1:02:26
  professional. So like, like a physician
• 1:02:30
  through their course of training.
• 1:02:33
  On average, unless they are specialists in pain on average
• 1:02:37
  will get somewhere between two and four hours of education on
• 1:02:42
  pain. And why?
• 1:02:45
  That's because there's a there's you know as my son would say a
• 1:02:48
  metric crap ton of stuff that they have to learn and and
• 1:02:53
  there's all kinds of other stuff so yeah to 24 hours of pain.
• 1:02:58
  So if if for example somebody were to go to my podcast and
• 1:03:05
  look at and listen to my episode on pain management, okay they
• 1:03:10
  would walk away from that episode with some Between half
• 1:03:15
  and his face and a fourth, as much education as their position
• 1:03:19
  has about pain. And it would probably be more
• 1:03:25
  up-to-date with the latest research than what their
• 1:03:29
  education was whenever they got it.
• 1:03:32
  Okay. And so I use that word
• 1:03:36
  nociception earlier, which is the name for physical pain,
• 1:03:41
  crushing burning, rending tearing physical damage.
• 1:03:46
  That's a signal, okay? And it's not irrational.
• 1:03:50
  It's not non-rational, its pre rational.
• 1:03:54
  And, and this is a really important distinction in how you
• 1:03:59
  frame it, okay? So, our pain system is older
• 1:04:04
  than our rationality. And it happens faster than our
• 1:04:09
  rationality. So your pain signals are going
• 1:04:14
  to get processed. And and your basil.
• 1:04:18
  Brain has already made a decision about it before.
• 1:04:22
  You are even consciously aware of it.
• 1:04:26
  That's how fast it happens because our frontal lobes are
• 1:04:31
  quote unquote higher cognition are.
• 1:04:33
  Which, which I like to think of as a recent brain not are, you
• 1:04:38
  know, Primal brain is slower because it's more nuanced.
• 1:04:43
  It's more abstract, it's doing a lot more, it seemed more.
• 1:04:48
  So what you have to understand is that when you get that signal
• 1:04:54
  of pain, It is not only a neurological signal.
• 1:05:01
  It has been layer upon layer of somatic systems and emotional
• 1:05:07
  systems and your experience and and all of that stuff, right?
• 1:05:14
  That's, that's already been layered on it and it's either
• 1:05:18
  ramped up your experience of the pain or it's brought it back
• 1:05:22
  down before you ever experienced it.
• 1:05:27
  So pain and especially chronic pain.
• 1:05:31
  Is a complex layered phenomenon. Is this why when people talk
• 1:05:38
  about like the pain threshold and the ability to experience
• 1:05:41
  more or less pain it? I mean in a way what your kind
• 1:05:46
  of implying as if someone has kind of reconciled and come to
• 1:05:49
  terms with the idea of pain and taking on, that's how they are
• 1:05:54
  then able to take on more, or it's get your because like yeah,
• 1:06:00
  I'll take like a professional wrestler as an example.
• 1:06:02
  There's a guy called Mick Foley, People might know him as Cactus
• 1:06:07
  Jack mankind. Dude.
• 1:06:09
  Love in the state's. It's besides the point, the
• 1:06:12
  thing and anyone who's not familiar with wrestling just
• 1:06:16
  Google Mick Foley Undertaker. I don't know.
• 1:06:22
  Pain. Whatever.
• 1:06:23
  Your hit your see a lot of documentaries where he talks
• 1:06:25
  about pain and his threshold and kind of not Like he sometimes he
• 1:06:32
  says he kind of likes the pain but I think that it's a
• 1:06:35
  combination of maybe adrenaline doing what he does and stuff
• 1:06:38
  like that. But I think it's also genuinely
• 1:06:40
  he just doesn't feel pain in the same way that other people do.
• 1:06:45
  And I always wondered if that came down to just, you know,
• 1:06:48
  being born able to do that. Or if it's just something that
• 1:06:52
  as you say, you can like work on and then Be able to then take on
• 1:06:58
  more pain because you recognize that it's not.
• 1:07:02
  I'm really worried in this family but as painful, let me
• 1:07:06
  jump in here. So so two things, one, we all
• 1:07:10
  have baselines for every kind of thing that human does including
• 1:07:17
  our pain tolerance. And so some people with regard
• 1:07:22
  to a particular goal, may be more or less blessed naturally
• 1:07:26
  to begin with, but Then from those bass lines we either grow
• 1:07:34
  or we atrophy right depending on what we use or not.
• 1:07:39
  So for example, The thing that is and I know people are going
• 1:07:46
  to think that sounds weird. But what I had to learn was that
• 1:07:54
  I just don't care about pain. And that's, that's really what
• 1:08:00
  it was. Now let me tell you the downside
• 1:08:03
  of this, okay? So so I spent six years ago or
• 1:08:09
  so I had gotten. My pain threshold drop down by
• 1:08:16
  this point and and it was still pretty new to me.
• 1:08:20
  So I had literally gone from there were several years there
• 1:08:24
  where I was taking 24 ibuprofen a day I am, which is really bad
• 1:08:30
  for you. But but I refuse to take opioids
• 1:08:34
  because I wasn't going to go there.
• 1:08:35
  Yep. And none of the other, you know,
• 1:08:38
  like Gabapentin is often prescribed for this and they
• 1:08:41
  prescribe it to me and did nothing for the bank.
• 1:08:43
  And and so I tried some other stuff.
• 1:08:45
  It didn't but ibuprofen, a lot of ibuprofen took a little bit
• 1:08:49
  of the edge off, but I was still, it was difficult for me
• 1:08:53
  to function. And and so I'd finally ratchet
• 1:08:56
  it down to something. Normal.
• 1:08:58
  So I go in for an annual checkup with my my GP with my physician
• 1:09:03
  and I have my shirt off and he's doing an exam, they kind of
• 1:09:07
  looks strangely at my torso and he walks up to me and he pokes
• 1:09:13
  me kind of like the Pillsbury Doughboy and a couple times he
• 1:09:16
  looks and then he asked me to drop trou and he does some more
• 1:09:21
  examining and then he steps back and he looks at me and he says,
• 1:09:25
  how are you still walking? All right.
• 1:09:28
  Okay, and I said, huh? he said, you have a massive
• 1:09:35
  triple hernia I had both Angela Knowles and the epigastric and
• 1:09:43
  and he slotted me for an immediate surgery and they went
• 1:09:45
  and did all three at once and he said he's a most people are just
• 1:09:50
  doubled over in pain because of this.
• 1:09:53
  And as I didn't notice of calling notice.
• 1:09:57
  Yeah, yeah because I had not yet learned to discriminate the
• 1:10:03
  kinds of pain. I had managed to successfully
• 1:10:08
  not care and and dialed down the kind of Fame but I had you can't
• 1:10:16
  presume that all the pain that I'm going to be living with is
• 1:10:18
  multiple sclerosis pain. There are other kinds of pain.
• 1:10:21
  I'm not immune from everything else that happens in life and so
• 1:10:24
  I had to to learn to regain my discrimination.
• 1:10:31
  That's incredible. I mean, I've heard stories of
• 1:10:34
  this before but like that's just amazing.
• 1:10:36
  I mean, I think the biggest thing working, I think it's
• 1:10:41
  something to be applauded. This disability to find strength
• 1:10:44
  within yourself to, you know, a not take the hard drugs like
• 1:10:48
  opioids and stuff because that would be if you're in a lot of
• 1:10:50
  pain, that's certainly a place you can go.
• 1:10:54
  And I mean, I mentioned professional wrestlers earlier,
• 1:10:57
  like lot of them, especially in the 90s 80s, Etc, 2, Like
• 1:11:01
  painkillers to get through the pain and then they obviously
• 1:11:04
  became addicted to painkillers. You didn't go down that route.
• 1:11:08
  So then you chose well, what is the other option building your
• 1:11:11
  mental fortitude, being able to reconcile that pain and work
• 1:11:15
  through it, and come to terms with it.
• 1:11:17
  And that takes, I think a tremendous amount of strength
• 1:11:22
  from within, so yeah. So incredible.
• 1:11:25
  And, you know, I don't want to frame it like that because I'm
• 1:11:27
  just, you know, I'm just a guy, right?
• 1:11:29
  And, and this is not at an unattainable thing.
• 1:11:32
  What it does mean is you've got to start really, really small
• 1:11:39
  with like humiliatingly small baby steps.
• 1:11:42
  Yep. And you've got to cultivate a
• 1:11:45
  lot of patience and you've got to become willing to let
• 1:11:50
  yourself fail and to try it again, right?
• 1:11:57
  Because You've got your slowly slowly slowly building that
• 1:12:01
  edge. And and and I want to make sure
• 1:12:05
  that people understand this is not like a superhuman thing that
• 1:12:09
  this guy who spends his time flying to the sky all the time
• 1:12:11
  does, although I do track through the sky like Iron Man.
• 1:12:14
  So that's kind of cool. But but it is a very you have a
• 1:12:18
  human. Did you?
• 1:12:20
  Because you have a cosplay just for the fun of it?
• 1:12:24
  Are you that I have not? You should just think about it.
• 1:12:32
  When were on our belly, in the belly to Earth position, you
• 1:12:35
  know? Like I am in the front of the
• 1:12:38
  book. We're going in about 120 miles
• 1:12:40
  an hour. If you then sweep, your arms
• 1:12:45
  back and extend your legs like Iron Man.
• 1:12:48
  Yes, so that you are now in what's called a tracking
• 1:12:51
  position. You can accelerate from about
• 1:12:54
  120 miles an hour to 200 miles an hour faster in a second.
• 1:13:00
  Wow, doc quick. Geez.
• 1:13:02
  So you suddenly it's like and you are streaking through the
• 1:13:06
  sky and I can tell you you really do feel like a superhero
• 1:13:10
  because the yeah I'm not a religious person, but the only
• 1:13:14
  way I can explain it is when you hit that track position and you
• 1:13:18
  get into the groove it suddenly feels like the hand of God just
• 1:13:26
  picks you up and pushes you to the sky.
• 1:13:30
  And, and it is just this mind-blowing Transcendent
• 1:13:35
  experience. You know, when I was doing my
• 1:13:40
  research notes on everything into you that, okay?
• 1:13:44
  I found the hole. Concept.
• 1:13:46
  Just just interested in general and obviously an inspiring
• 1:13:49
  story, but I had no idea that like skydiving was so
• 1:13:53
  intrinsically. Linked to your Cover every
• 1:13:58
  process in every sense. And I think it's just an amazing
• 1:14:03
  powerful story and I know that everyone listen well really
• 1:14:06
  takeaways from this because it is it is it is truly intrinsic
• 1:14:13
  to me and and I'm not suggesting that other people jump out of a
• 1:14:16
  perfectly good airplane. What I am suggesting is that I'm
• 1:14:21
  using this as a very visceral. Evocative, Salient example, 44
• 1:14:28
  For people to look at and say, wow, but what's important is
• 1:14:33
  that it was an edge experience and I was doing it for me.
• 1:14:39
  Hmm, it was about self-care. So what I'm encouraging is that
• 1:14:45
  everybody has something, that is an edge for them that they want
• 1:14:51
  to grow and explore and, and become better at in some what
• 1:14:57
  And everybody has something that they can do just for themselves
• 1:15:05
  just because this is something that makes you feel happy,
• 1:15:10
  satisfied, functional gauge meaningful, you know, secure
• 1:15:14
  whatever it is. It's, you know, it fulfills one
• 1:15:18
  of those deep human values that we need.
• 1:15:22
  And, and that you should Find that and do it and make a place
• 1:15:30
  for it and honor it and be humble about it and let yourself
• 1:15:38
  be open to not a pre-programmed experience, but the growth and
• 1:15:45
  and the beauty that can be found and discovered there.
• 1:15:50
  And and you know for me that screaming to the sky at terminal
• 1:15:53
  velocity but Yeah, we have edges everywhere.
• 1:15:59
  And, and you find yours. Brilliant message.
• 1:16:05
  Thank you. You've had over 50 guest
• 1:16:09
  appearances and counting on other podcasts.
• 1:16:11
  I just wondered how effective has this been for sort of
• 1:16:16
  creating awareness about your projects and what you do and
• 1:16:20
  sharing your message in general. Because I mean I've appeared on
• 1:16:23
  a few shows now maybe 5 to 10 over the course of the last year
• 1:16:30
  and a half of doing this show. And yeah I think the I think
• 1:16:33
  I've gained for me is just making connections and you know,
• 1:16:37
  reach a new people but I wondered how effective it's been
• 1:16:42
  for you and and if you'd recommend it as well,
• 1:16:48
  Fascinating question. And, and My, my short answer is
• 1:16:57
  I'm not doing it for short-term returns, right?
• 1:17:01
  I mean, I'm doing it for ya, making the connections and, and
• 1:17:08
  it's planting seeds. And so, yeah.
• 1:17:12
  Are people starting to connect with me and and do that?
• 1:17:17
  Yeah, they are. And, and the cool thing about
• 1:17:21
  these Appearances. You know, and now it's it's
• 1:17:26
  podcast TV radio and you know, I'm getting and I'm starting to
• 1:17:33
  get Inquiries from people with larger and larger markets.
• 1:17:40
  Yeah. So so that's part of it as well.
• 1:17:43
  But, but fundamentally, it's about, I get to have really cool
• 1:17:48
  conversations with with somebody else and you're going to ask me
• 1:17:52
  different questions and see different things out of it than
• 1:17:56
  I do. And that anybody else I've
• 1:17:59
  talked to has. And I can truly say I've done.
• 1:18:03
  I've done actually almost 100 degrees in the past few months
• 1:18:06
  And you know there's a bunch of them that aren't out yet.
• 1:18:10
  And and and you know what I found one is really encouraging
• 1:18:15
  because people have said, yeah, we'd love to have you on your
• 1:18:19
  show and, and, you know, this is really interesting and they find
• 1:18:22
  it valuable and I'm humbled because I have spent my entire
• 1:18:28
  life, studying people trying to make something useful out of it
• 1:18:34
  and I will, I will degrade. Dress with a really quick story.
• 1:18:38
  So, when I, you know, I said earlier that I was really
• 1:18:43
  fortunate to have a very senior scholar and be his last doctoral
• 1:18:47
  student. And Bruce was, he was in his 70s
• 1:18:53
  when when I defended and he was born 28.
• 1:18:59
  He was actually a third-generation PhD.
• 1:19:02
  And he was born in 28 and and and You know, he got his
• 1:19:07
  Doctorate in the 50s. and and so he was really amanat and we were
• 1:19:15
  really close and when he passed away a few years ago, his kids
• 1:19:19
  asked me to deliver one of his eulogies at his at his service
• 1:19:23
  and I was really honored for that but I will never forget
• 1:19:27
  when when you earn a PhD, the graduation ceremonies called a
• 1:19:31
  hooding and you know that that higher education is one of these
• 1:19:37
  last bastions of They delightfully medieval
• 1:19:41
  sensibility and we have the more education you get, the more
• 1:19:46
  decorative, your robes get. And and the hood is that
• 1:19:49
  decorative sash that goes around you with your doctoral ropes.
• 1:19:55
  So you go up on stage and your advisor who has shepherded you
• 1:19:59
  through years of mentorship. Is the one who puts the sash
• 1:20:04
  over you in the hood you. So Bruce was a bear of a man.
• 1:20:08
  Who's just Giant man, and I'm average size.
• 1:20:12
  And and so he put his, his put, the sash around me and took me
• 1:20:19
  in this bear hug, and he leaned into me.
• 1:20:23
  And, and he said and, you know, out there, my parents are out
• 1:20:26
  there and my wife is out there and she's very, very pregnant
• 1:20:29
  with our son at the time and he things into me and he whispers
• 1:20:35
  now, go do something meaningful with this privilege.
• 1:20:39
  You've earned. And for me, I have had the
• 1:20:45
  privilege to spend my life, studying humanity and, and I
• 1:20:51
  love that. And, and I understand that What
• 1:20:56
  an amazing thing that we live in a society, where somebody can
• 1:20:59
  actually devote their life, to doing something like that.
• 1:21:03
  And not, you know, some things so practical, like, like
• 1:21:09
  defending us from bears, right? And, and, and it's my
• 1:21:13
  responsibility, because I've been able to do that too.
• 1:21:18
  Bring something back for other people and for me, your life
• 1:21:22
  lived. Well, is that thing?
• 1:21:23
  Because a lot of people have devoted themselves to the
• 1:21:26
  question, how do you build a good life?
• 1:21:30
  Because all the way back to the ancient Greeks and the study of
• 1:21:33
  eudaimonia Wiki you, you know, demony a eudaimonia a good life,
• 1:21:37
  like good stress, right? Same Greek, root.
• 1:21:40
  And for me, I had a little bit different question that I have
• 1:21:44
  been fascinated with four years and That is how can you build a
• 1:21:49
  good life when you are stuck with something bad that you
• 1:21:54
  can't get away from and if I Can Shed light on that question for
• 1:22:02
  other people and contribute to that conversation, then I
• 1:22:06
  consider that something meaningful that I can share.
• 1:22:10
  I think this point you make about contributing to life is a
• 1:22:17
  really fascinating concept, because I remember when I was
• 1:22:21
  growing up I was a very negative minded person that wasn't in a
• 1:22:25
  great place. And you know, throughout the
• 1:22:28
  course of my 20s, I've gotten to a positive place and it's always
• 1:22:31
  getting better. But I think the key thing I've
• 1:22:35
  learned which I see patterns of everywhere.
• 1:22:40
  I look, it's everywhere. In short, it's reverse
• 1:22:45
  psychology with everything. You know, the thing you want,
• 1:22:49
  you have to do the reverse of. So you know you want a wife.
• 1:22:52
  You want a woman? You need to not be desperate and
• 1:22:55
  play it. Cool.
• 1:22:56
  No matter what your heart is telling you, right?
• 1:22:59
  That's just a small example but with the bigger things that
• 1:23:02
  we're talking about like making something of your life, it
• 1:23:06
  sounds like such a big ask and the reality is it doesn't have
• 1:23:09
  to be. I think a lot of the time when
• 1:23:14
  You dedicate your life and you work hard to creating something
• 1:23:19
  that can benefit other people in a big way.
• 1:23:23
  That's when you start getting what you want and becoming
• 1:23:26
  successful because it's no longer just about you.
• 1:23:29
  It's about this bigger thing that you're trying to achieve,
• 1:23:34
  you know. Yeah and it's not.
• 1:23:36
  It is no longer about other people's judgment.
• 1:23:39
  I mean for me it is fundamentally about Me.
• 1:23:46
  Slogging through day after day, year after year and and trying
• 1:23:51
  to build the best thing that I can from all this research.
• 1:23:57
  Because I've literally I've you know, I've interviewed hundreds
• 1:24:00
  if they're surveyed thousands. I collected millions of data
• 1:24:04
  points. I did meta-analyses across the
• 1:24:06
  thousands of studies and and have I made mistakes.
• 1:24:12
  Sure. Is somebody going to do
• 1:24:14
  something better. Sure.
• 1:24:16
  Do I do, I personally feel as if I have done, the best thing that
• 1:24:23
  I can to add something of value to this human conversation that
• 1:24:29
  has been going on for thousands of years and will continue
• 1:24:32
  thousands of years. After me, I hope so.
• 1:24:37
  Yeah, and that's it. And then other people, some
• 1:24:39
  people like it and some people won't.
• 1:24:41
  And I don't care, I really don't.
• 1:24:45
  It's like, yeah, I don't care. I care that, I've done the best
• 1:24:50
  that I could in this moment. And and it's something that I
• 1:24:56
  want to share, and that I hope somebody can get some value out
• 1:25:01
  of. And the people are telling me,
• 1:25:02
  they are getting value out of. That's the thing.
• 1:25:06
  Because I mean, With your life. There's kind of like a
• 1:25:08
  transition which is interesting. Because for me, it was the
• 1:25:12
  transition from being less selfish and being more selfless.
• 1:25:18
  And don't get me wrong, I still spend a lot of time working on
• 1:25:21
  myself and I still put myself forward in so much as the things
• 1:25:25
  I do. But the key in that and that's
• 1:25:28
  the point. I really want to hammer home is
• 1:25:29
  that the things that you're doing, do they benefit others in
• 1:25:33
  some shape or form and sometimes you have to spend a A lot of
• 1:25:37
  time working on yourself in order to do that.
• 1:25:41
  So a really good example, what I mean?
• 1:25:42
  Yeah. Because it sounds really cryptic
• 1:25:44
  and silly at this point is to make others happy.
• 1:25:48
  You must first be happy yourself.
• 1:25:51
  And it sounds like I said, obvious point, right?
• 1:25:53
  But it's so important. You know, let's see time and
• 1:25:56
  time again. I see, like in relationships,
• 1:25:58
  people just miserable and I always say the same thing to
• 1:26:01
  them, which is you need to be happy yourself.
• 1:26:05
  First and foremost, Because how can you expect to make the other
• 1:26:08
  person? Happy So also I don't have the
• 1:26:12
  yeah, if you don't have the energy and resources to give to
• 1:26:15
  others, well you've got to keep going yourself to begin with and
• 1:26:20
  you've got to do the things in you that build those resources
• 1:26:25
  so that you can then be giving. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:26:28
  Yeah, that's my point exactly. Like this, this idea of
• 1:26:30
  self-care and self-development and being the best version of
• 1:26:34
  yourself will benefit others because throughout the course of
• 1:26:38
  doing that you will Help others, you will, and you'll be able to
• 1:26:42
  do that more and more as you keep going, because in the same
• 1:26:46
  way, like a flower when it, when it Roots up and it becomes, you
• 1:26:51
  know, the best version of itself others benefit from that.
• 1:26:56
  But only once it's gotten to that point, I just I just find
• 1:27:01
  that really interesting how that works this, you know?
• 1:27:04
  Because you can get used to being being selfish and only
• 1:27:07
  focusing on yourself and sometimes that might be true if
• 1:27:10
  you know, you're reaping the rewards of what you do but then
• 1:27:13
  you're not sharing that with anyone else and then either way
• 1:27:15
  but I think a lot of the time The lesson that has to be
• 1:27:20
  learned, there is this idea of, you know, sharing is the key to
• 1:27:26
  being happy in life, you want to share, happiness, and success
• 1:27:29
  with others. And to get to the bigger point I
• 1:27:31
  wanted to make with this. It's like you worked so hard on
• 1:27:35
  yourself for such a long time and it was this personal battle
• 1:27:37
  and you overcame so many obstacles and you got to this
• 1:27:40
  point where you overcame it but then it was like, what do I do
• 1:27:44
  now? And it's like, will you share
• 1:27:46
  that story because that's an inspiring Story.
• 1:27:49
  That's a story that people need to hear that metaphor that
• 1:27:52
  you're making with skydiving and multiple sclerosis and
• 1:27:57
  everything you had to go through.
• 1:27:58
  That's a message that people can relate to and understand it's a
• 1:28:03
  powerful message. You know, I think about that.
• 1:28:06
  The reason I do this show when I first started the reason I did,
• 1:28:10
  it was just purely selfish, I wanted to do it because I liked
• 1:28:13
  it and because I'll maybe one day or become successful and
• 1:28:17
  famous and Baba. Blah, blah blah.
• 1:28:19
  I don't do it for that reason anymore.
• 1:28:21
  I do it because I love having good conversations with people
• 1:28:26
  and sharing their stories and learning from them and sharing
• 1:28:29
  them with people around the world that will be listening to
• 1:28:32
  this or watching this. And that to me is an inspiring
• 1:28:35
  thing because I think about this concept, you don't know who's
• 1:28:39
  listening and watching it. And you don't know how that
• 1:28:43
  might instead Inspire them to have the confidence within
• 1:28:46
  themselves to do great things themselves and that kind of goes
• 1:28:50
  back to what your professor said.
• 1:28:52
  Yeah, it's the same exact thing it is.
• 1:28:56
  And here's the most difficult thing for me about all of this
• 1:29:00
  and that was I had, you know, I wrote this book twice, I have
• 1:29:06
  gone through a rebranding, I did a lot of stuff and that is
• 1:29:10
  because For me, the most important thing is the science.
• 1:29:15
  Okay? Because the science is and the
• 1:29:19
  science is not about having one way to solve yourself because
• 1:29:24
  Short answer here is there are 150 different ways to change a
• 1:29:29
  behavior. And ultimately, if you are not
• 1:29:31
  happy with your life, if you have something bad that you have
• 1:29:35
  to face in your life, fundamentally that devolves to
• 1:29:38
  behavior and mindset change, you're going to have to do
• 1:29:41
  something different to get a different result, and you're
• 1:29:44
  going to have to change your way.
• 1:29:46
  You see the world, change the world, what you're doing in the
• 1:29:48
  world, change your relationships, change your
• 1:29:50
  environment, something, well there, huh?
• 1:29:53
  And 50 different ways to do that.
• 1:29:54
  And if you look at the research and and I have and all of those
• 1:30:00
  will work for someone, but only some of them will work for you
• 1:30:03
  and the ones that work for you. Right now will not work for you
• 1:30:09
  in six months or six years because you will change in the
• 1:30:13
  problems will change and so forth.
• 1:30:14
  So I'm not interested in pushing a method.
• 1:30:18
  I'm interested in giving people the tools so that they Can
• 1:30:24
  continually make better choices for themselves and again to go
• 1:30:28
  back. What we were talking about
• 1:30:29
  choose Life In This Moment with the tools that work for you
• 1:30:34
  right now. So the science is the important
• 1:30:38
  thing to me but and here's the big, but For a long, long time.
• 1:30:46
  For two reasons, I was unwilling to share my own story.
• 1:30:52
  One. Because It's not about me.
• 1:30:57
  It's about the science. And I truly fundamentally
• 1:31:01
  believe that however, if people don't know me then and I just
• 1:31:08
  get the science then what it sounds like is dr.
• 1:31:12
  Payne Science Guy talking down to everybody else.
• 1:31:18
  And and what I have to have people understand is that Yeah
• 1:31:23
  I'm dr. Payne Science Guy but I have
• 1:31:26
  lived through all of this and my life has been ripped up
• 1:31:30
  completely because of all this and I have all of the compassion
• 1:31:37
  in the world. Fort for everyone who is going
• 1:31:41
  through this and so I had to be willing to to put my story out
• 1:31:48
  there so that, yeah, maybe it's inspiring and people find that
• 1:31:53
  inspiring cool. I, you know, again, that's that.
• 1:31:57
  I just want people to take the science and use the science and
• 1:32:02
  understand the science and put that because because inspiration
• 1:32:06
  lasts for about this long, you can listen to this podcast and
• 1:32:10
  think, wow, that's a really inspiring story and then, You
• 1:32:16
  know, it's like a bath, you've got to do it every day or you're
• 1:32:19
  going to stink and if you're not continually inspired, you're
• 1:32:26
  going to be depressed about the whole thing.
• 1:32:28
  So it lasts about this long What lasts after that?
• 1:32:33
  I'm concerned with what we do after the inspiration phase.
• 1:32:39
  Because I want I want people to be yeah I want people Sure Be
• 1:32:45
  Inspired cool, but inspiration affects our Primal brain.
• 1:32:51
  And it's, and it's only about this long. so now, use that
• 1:32:57
  little bit of inspiration, that little bit of motivation to take
• 1:33:01
  the first step in Humbly carefully, consistently, even
• 1:33:09
  with all the failures start, Bill interrogating, your edges
• 1:33:14
  and building your new habits because those will last you
• 1:33:18
  forever. What's the best advice you've
• 1:33:22
  ever received? That I've ever received.
• 1:33:29
  No means next. I like that.
• 1:33:34
  That's good. Life chose, you know, it's not
• 1:33:38
  an end next. Next.
• 1:33:44
  Sometimes short but sweet really is the best thing, isn't it?
• 1:33:49
  Yeah, I like that one. What's the biggest life lesson
• 1:33:54
  you've learned so far? It all starts with kindness.
• 1:34:01
  No joke. It all starts with kindness and
• 1:34:05
  that begins with you being kinder to yourself.
• 1:34:10
  And what I mean by that is all of us treat ourselves like crap.
• 1:34:19
  All of us treat ourselves in ways that we would not tolerate
• 1:34:25
  from anybody else. If somebody else treated you
• 1:34:29
  that way you would not be in a relationship with them and yet
• 1:34:36
  You are stuffed in that carcass with yourself and you can't get
• 1:34:40
  away. So, you have a choice.
• 1:34:45
  And that choice is, do you continue this dysfunctional
• 1:34:50
  co-dependent, abusive relationship that you have with
• 1:34:55
  yourself. And those voices that are
• 1:35:00
  speaking. In that way, this is chapter 2
• 1:35:03
  of the book. The they those our Primal voices
• 1:35:08
  and they're really loud and they're really black and white
• 1:35:12
  and they're not nuanced and they only see a short time frame and
• 1:35:16
  really honest to goodness that critical voice in your head is
• 1:35:21
  trying to help you in the only limited dysfunctional way.
• 1:35:27
  That it knows how Okay? Because each one of those
• 1:35:32
  characters in your head can only see a limited sense.
• 1:35:39
  Because your identity is the story, you tell yourself about
• 1:35:42
  yourself and and you, our identity, our Rises, as you are
• 1:35:48
  trying to impose Sense on this Society of Mind that's going on
• 1:35:53
  in your head. And a lot of those voices are
• 1:35:56
  really Primal and, and what that means is they're really old.
• 1:36:00
  They're really concrete. They have a short time span, and
• 1:36:03
  they only see the world in one particular way.
• 1:36:07
  And so that's the only contribution they have to make
• 1:36:10
  to you and they want to make sure they make that.
• 1:36:15
  So now once you understand that all of your really awful
• 1:36:18
  negative voices, are just doing a really bad job of trying to
• 1:36:24
  help you in the ways that it understands to do it.
• 1:36:30
  Now, you can give yourself a little Grace and you can be a
• 1:36:34
  little kinder to yourself. And you can teach those voices
• 1:36:40
  in your head carefully, practically, you know, time
• 1:36:44
  after time you're going to fail and say, look, I understand that
• 1:36:48
  you are really dogged on me about this particular thing.
• 1:36:54
  I hear you, I understand you. I'm not clamping you down
• 1:36:58
  because that works just as well. Like with little kids and dogs,
• 1:37:01
  right? You can't do it that way.
• 1:37:04
  You can't force it, you have to acknowledge it.
• 1:37:07
  And then you have to say, now I'm going to go ahead and do
• 1:37:10
  this thing that you are fearful or angry or frustrated or
• 1:37:14
  whatever it is about. And just please hang on with me
• 1:37:19
  and we'll get through to the other side and you'll find that
• 1:37:22
  we can succeed. So that next time, when we're
• 1:37:25
  faced with that, see that circumstance, you're going to be
• 1:37:28
  less negative. Yeah, kinder to yourself.
• 1:37:33
  Yeah, I just want to reiterate this point as well, because this
• 1:37:36
  is a recent lesson that I've learned in the last couple of
• 1:37:38
  years. To I remember, I learned this
• 1:37:42
  lesson from my ex-girlfriend. Actually, she had this
• 1:37:46
  remarkable sort of positive means next comes from my
• 1:37:49
  ex-wife, by the way. Yeah, it's amazing.
• 1:37:51
  How exes can teach us these things, isn't it?
• 1:37:54
  Yeah, my ex was really positive when it came to this concept of
• 1:38:02
  being in like a difficult situation, where you feel like,
• 1:38:06
  oh what we're going to do, what we're going to do and you hit
• 1:38:08
  that kind of fight or flight thing in your life.
• 1:38:10
  We could do what we're gonna do. And she was like Bait.
• 1:38:14
  And this was based on experience, but she would always
• 1:38:16
  say something will come along, something will happen.
• 1:38:19
  These are my experiences that I had and this is what happened
• 1:38:23
  and I trust in the process. She wasn't saying that she
• 1:38:26
  didn't get scared, still worried, but she reconciled that
• 1:38:30
  it would be okay. And I, it took me a few years to
• 1:38:35
  really learn that lesson properly and that was down to
• 1:38:37
  emotional maturity and stuff like that.
• 1:38:39
  But once I got to that point, I rely on that now, every time,
• 1:38:42
  something bad happens. Happens.
• 1:38:43
  I'm like it's going to be fine. We've been here many times.
• 1:38:48
  I'm sure we'll be here many times again in the future.
• 1:38:52
  Calm down. Take it easy. cool head prevails
• 1:38:59
  Let's go. But you have to, as you say,
• 1:39:02
  reconcile with that voice, it's number one priority.
• 1:39:06
  It's about disengaging those Primal voices from control.
• 1:39:10
  Yes, you're not. You're not ignoring them, but
• 1:39:15
  you're saying we have a more expansive world.
• 1:39:21
  We have a longer timeline than you can sense.
• 1:39:27
  Because those voices were developed.
• 1:39:30
  Long before we had developed the capacities to see a bigger
• 1:39:34
  picture so they fundamentally can't see beyond that.
• 1:39:38
  And if they are engaging, what happens is your Primal, brain is
• 1:39:45
  then making the decisions and they are engaging our frontal
• 1:39:49
  brains as rationalize errs. So we're not making rational
• 1:39:54
  decisions, we've already made a pre rational decision and we've
• 1:39:58
  engaged our Brains to pretty it up and make it seem palatable.
• 1:40:08
  So, you've got to disengage them from control.
• 1:40:12
  So that you can say okay I acknowledge your concerns, I can
• 1:40:16
  see where there's some validity in it but now my central
• 1:40:23
  executive is going to be making that decision.
• 1:40:25
  And not my basil, bring great way to put it.
• 1:40:30
  Do you have any upcoming projects or some final thoughts
• 1:40:33
  that you'd like to share with our listeners?
• 1:40:37
  Josh I think I've probably shared more stuff than anybody
• 1:40:41
  cares about, but but I will not true money is.
• 1:40:45
  If somebody is interested. We have just launched.
• 1:40:48
  We've got a regular series of 16 different webinars that people
• 1:40:57
  can add that are that are all about the managing the
• 1:41:03
  non-medical. Circumstances that follow from
• 1:41:07
  living with the condition. That's never going to get
• 1:41:11
  better. So behavioral change pain
• 1:41:14
  management, you know, medical adherence, a lot of those other
• 1:41:18
  your relationships, those kinds of things.
• 1:41:20
  So, there's 16 of them, we do three of them each week and we
• 1:41:23
  rotate through them that schedule has been announced and,
• 1:41:28
  and there's a massive discount for those things.
• 1:41:30
  Right now, we've also just launched the third season of the
• 1:41:35
  Life will do a podcast in the first episode that came out was
• 1:41:39
  about EMS because it came out in March, which is Ms Awareness
• 1:41:43
  Month. The next episode that's coming
• 1:41:45
  out, it will already be out by the time this errors but that
• 1:41:50
  will be coming out the next next week from relative to when we
• 1:41:53
  were recording, this is on masculinity and chronic illness
• 1:41:59
  and and how do you live being a quote unquote sick, man?
• 1:42:04
  So, lots of stuff going on, you know, go to your life load while
• 1:42:08
  doc go, and check it all out. It's been absolute pleasure,
• 1:42:13
  chatting with you and learning about your story and just, I
• 1:42:17
  found it inspiring. I know my listeners will find it
• 1:42:20
  inspiring, but I just want to say a massive half heart.
• 1:42:22
  Thank you for for appearing on the show and sharing it with us.
• 1:42:26
  Well, thank you so much Christian.
• 1:42:28
  I have had a wonderful conversation and you you're just
• 1:42:34
  you do a great job with the interviews and I you're doing
• 1:42:37
  well, thank you. So I really appreciate that.
• 1:42:40
  It's honestly, I love doing this.
• 1:42:43
  I really do and it shows they're in it.
• 1:42:46
  Never stops being a joy for me. I think, because When you want
• 1:42:50
  to just sit and listen to people's stories and engage and
• 1:42:53
  listen, he gets so much you really do.
• 1:42:56
  And for all those of you listening, like Try try to
• 1:43:02
  listen more. And I know how that sounds.
• 1:43:04
  I don't, it sound like condescending.
• 1:43:05
  But what I really mean is to, really listen.
• 1:43:08
  Next time you have a conversation with parents,
• 1:43:10
  family, friends, whoever it is just sit and listen to their
• 1:43:14
  stories, and ask them about the things.
• 1:43:17
  They're passionate about, what they believe in, and just sit
• 1:43:20
  and listen. And you'll be amazed how much
• 1:43:22
  you can really gain from that. And, you know, that's why I
• 1:43:25
  continue to do this show. But yeah, thank you very much
• 1:43:28
  sir, and to all the listeners. As of the Christian roof
• 1:43:31
  podcast, as always be safe, be well, and I'll see you in the
• 1:43:36
  next.