Overwhelmed? Over-Scheduled? Burnt Out? Here's the Antidote. | Diana Hill

27:00Is an intervention in itself. Sometimes you don't even need to answer that question. Just ask yourself, am I stuck in a story here? That little opening of curiosity about what's keeping you stuck can help you get unstuck. Right? Curiosity. And the nature of curiosity is that it doesn't have judgment associated with it. There's that interest curiosity that Jud Brewer talks about, which is one question leads to the next question, which leads to the next question, which is very different from how we often approach our problems and ourselves when we're stuck, which is more of a space of judgmental criticism, like we're trying to get to some answer.

27:34So curiosity has an openness to it. I was just talking with Jonathan Schooler. He's at UCSB, and he's one of our incredible researchers in the area of mind-wandering and curiosity. and he studies openness. We all know that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, that Killingsworth classic study. But he's studying how a wandering mind is a creative, curious mind. And then we actually need a little bit more mind wandering and openness of the mind and awareness of when our mind is wandering and open in order to solve some of our problems. I mean, most of our problems are solved on our hikes and our runs and our walking of dogs and when we have a little bit more space.

28:15So we get curious about the places we're stuck. We get curious about what our strengths are. And we get curious about our values. And the curiosity about our values is that part where we drop from our head down into our heart. I am actually curious about what you really want. What is important to you? Asking ourselves that on a regular basis with a curious open mind. And you'll see what shows up and what comes to you. And that can help direct you to the next step, which is opening up, and the final step, which is focusing your energy. We will dwell upon opening up and focusing your energy in hearty ways eventually, but let's just stay with this getting curious because you mentioned a few things, more than a few things that are worth following up there.

29:02I believe you just now said something about getting curious about what your strengths are. The term you use in the book is your genius energy. So maybe describe that and why it's so important to tune into it. I'm treading lightly into the concept of genius energy because people have a strong reaction when you use the word genius. When I talk about genius energy, I'm talking about what makes you, you. The unique strengths to like Dan. I mean, all of your listeners could think about what is Dan's genius? What is it about him? It's like this interesting combination of humility and curiosity, average guy feel, but not average guy feel.

29:45There's this unique aspect to you. And when I look at it from the psychology of that, I see our genius energy as a combination of our personality patterns, both our temperament that we're born with, but that's also shaped by our life experience. Our genius is our interests, What gets us into flow? Like when you were in flow in the past week, what were you doing? What were you interested in? Our genius also has to do with our emotional intelligence. This isn't Stanford-Binet IQ genius. There's a tremendous amount of research around emotional intelligence, the importance of that. Our character strengths, that comes from Martin Seligman's work in positive psychology.

30:29Humility is a character strength. You would probably score high on humility, Dan. And our genius is our abilities. things that just come easy to us that do not come easy to others. There's certain things that you do that are just like, yeah, I just can do that. For me, it's public speaking is pretty easy for whatever reason. Maybe it's because my dad was an attorney and he did a lot of his like a prep in our living room. And so I was just, I was always comfortable with, you know, that sort of like acting out. But for other people, public speaking is like their worst nightmare. But there's something from that other person that public speaking is their worst nightmare that's really, really hard for me.

31:05So our abilities and our strengths. And when you put those together, you get sort of the je ne sais quoi, that what makes you you. And what can happen is that genius energy. We want to get curious about that. And then we want to use that. We want to apply that with our values. And when you do that, when you get the combination of your genius and your values, and you have a little wisdom in there, then all of a sudden the world opens up and your plate gets too full because you're doing all these great things that are just a flow of energy. There can be some other things that happen, like your genius can become your problem as well.

31:43People have a negative reaction, you said, to genius energy, I imagine, because most people at least are humble enough that they don't want to call themselves geniuses. But I suspect the way I heard it, I know I'm not a genius, and yet I did not have a negative response to genius energy, largely because I heard it as like everybody has their own special genius. And that I think is what you're talking about here. Yeah. Everyone has many geniuses. The field of psychology has shifted quite a lot more recently. There's even a new word in psychology called ideonomics, the study of the individual, the study of the individual in context, right?

32:22Because so much of psychology has been about categorizing people. You know, the whole diagnostic system is about putting people in boxes. But when you start to look at those boxes, you'll find that there's way more variation and diversity within a box of depression or a box of anxiety, right? Then there is, you know, similarities amongst those people. So we need to start looking at people at the individual level. And part of that is looking at their geniuses, their strengths, what makes them uniquely them and how we can honor that in people. When I used to run a treatment center for eating disorders, and what's fascinating about an individual with anorexia is that they are often doing everything society has told them to do to be successful.

33:12They're just doing it like at the nth degree. They're the Olympians of striving. I'd like sit across from them and I'd get really deeply curious, what if they took that energy that they were using to run 10 miles up a hill a day or perfect their tiny little bar that they eat? What if they were to take that energy, that persistence, and they were to take that persistence and they were to use it towards their own recovery or maybe even towards something else that they care about? You could turn that genius around instead of it being something that's problematic for them. So in every human, there are strengths, there's abilities, there's interests, there's emotional intelligence that is unique to them that they can utilize.

33:58And that's the study of ideonomics, the study of the individual in context. How do we prevent our special genius from becoming a problem? has your do you mind if i i put genius qualities on you dan do you would you agree that humility and curiosity are some of your geniuses would you add to the list well my wife might quibble with the humility part yeah yeah but sure i honestly haven't really thought it through which i think is a problem but yeah if off the top of my head those sound pretty good okay let's think it through a tiny bit more and then we'll talk about how it becomes a problem When people asked you for help, like friends call you and they need help from you, what do they ask for?

34:41This just happened to me two nights ago. I was on the phone with an old colleague who was asking me for help. And two things became clear to me quickly. One, he didn't have a clear sense of what he was asking for and that he actually knew the answer already. What he really wanted, although was probably not able to articulate it, was somebody to listen with patience and warm curiosity and help him arrive at the thing he already knew. So would you say that's one of your geniuses? To be able to listen to somebody with patience and curiosity and help them arrive to what they already know? Yeah, I think that's a recent skill.

35:19It was in me, but it was papered over with a lot of Anchorman energy. Yeah, right, right, right. And these develop over time. Here's a question for you. Does that patience and curiosity, can you ever think of a time when your curiosity and patience backfired on you? Maybe you didn't use it where you needed to use it, you didn't offer it to yourself, or you were just being so patient and curious and that problem kept on waking. Like it needed a little more action, needed you to step in. It's funny, this may be annoying because it might derail where you're trying to go. I cannot actually think of an example of what you're saying, but I can think of an example where some of my character deficits impede my patience and warmth, mainly anxiety, self-centered anxiety, often centered around career status, finances, bullshit like that gets in the way of what I think I'm most happy doing.

36:24Yeah. You described those as character deficits, your anxiety. Yeah, probably. That was too harsh. Here's my guess, is that your anxiety could use a little bit of your patience. Yes, yes. And your anxiety could use a little bit of you trusting that you can come to an answer and come to a conclusion you're going to be okay. and the way that you offered that to another person. So sometimes what our genius qualities, we are really good at offering them to other people, but we're not as great as offering them to ourselves. And I picked up on the character deficit thing because that's just loaded with judgment and that is not a curious way of talking about anxiety.

37:06If I ever had a client come into my office and they said that they were anxious and I said, that is a character deficit, they would not come back. I'd be a pretty crappy therapist. So I don't see anxiety as a character deficit. I actually see anxiety, the things that we are anxious about are the things that we care about. You're not anxious about things that you don't care about. And so if you can identify, oh, this is something that I care about, and this is how my body and mind tends to react to that care. It makes up scary stories about it. It has a physiological reaction to it. Then we don't see it as a deficit, but we see it as like, oh, okay, then how can I help out my body and my mind so that I can take care of this thing that I care about, which is a different way of relating to it.

37:54And that would be a curious question to ask of yourself. No, that's very helpful. Did I derail your ability, however, to talk about how our genius can become our problem? No, our genius becomes our problem when it's either overused, underused. So in your case, I would say it's being underused towards yourself. Or it's misdirected. Some of the geniuses that I've discovered in myself are things like emotional sensitivity. I was a kid at Thanksgiving that knew who was drinking, who was arguing. I knew the whole scene, right? I was super sensitive to everything that was happening at the dinner table.

38:32And that would end up becoming my problem because I was so overwhelmed. I was so sensitive to everything. I was like a, like I didn't have emotional skin, right? I mean, I didn't have skin protecting me from everything. I was so porous that that genus became my problem. I was able to redirect it. You know, it's really good if you're in a group therapy setting to be able to feel what everyone's feeling in that setting, but not at a dinner table. And I also had to turn some of that emotional sensitivity towards my inner world, not just to the outer world. so learning how to work with your genius through your values through wisdom and sort of like if you can think about your genius energy is like a like a flow of river and you can be the wise guide right you can have to be the banks that help that flow in directions that matter to you how do values which is a word you've used a lot in this conversation how do values fit into this discussion?

39:34So I think of values as the how we use our genius and the compass in which we direct it. Values is really the cornerstone of ACT, going back to ACT again. It's what sets ACT apart from a lot of therapies and that we spend a lot of time clarifying values. And this is different from, you know, I'll work with organizations and they'll have their values and their mission statement on their website or they'll have it on the bulletin board. But what I see values as is they're more like verbs and adverbs of how you are showing up in your day. If someone were videotaping you, Dan, throughout this, not just this interview, yeah, this all gets videotaped.

40:17What happens in the 10 minutes before and the 10 minutes after? And in that 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after, is that how you want to be? If that were, we would put some descriptors there on the 10 minutes before this interview when I was just in, I have a kid home from school right now, how I interacted with him. Does that align with how I want to be? Was I present? I want to be a present parent. I want to be a kind parent. I want to be a fun parent. Was I present, kind, and fun? so I see values if you think about remember the Stephen Covey book of the seven habits of highly successful people I never read it but I know it yeah yeah so I picked it up like a garage sale like 10 years ago this is how old it is he talks about putting your ladder against a wall if you're climbing ladders in life and be careful what wall you put it against I would add to that is like when you're climbing that ladder how are you climbing are you stepping on people Are you harming yourself?

41:21If someone were watching you climb, would they say, wow, this person really values adventure, or this person really values humor, or this person values creativity, or this person really values focus, or this person really values humility? And sometimes our values match onto our genius energy, but sometimes they don't. There's things that I value that I am not a genius at and I have to work at. I really value risk-taking and I really value courage, but that has not come easily to me at all. And so I use the values to help guide my genius and values end up being at the end of your life. I mean, they are what bring you vitality, but they're also can be huge motivators to do hard things in life.

42:10this word values has come up in several podcasts this fall. So I'm going to ask you the question I've asked others, which is the word can sound a little anodyne or boring. It's also been weaponized in particular by folks on the right, you know, family values. I'm thinking back to my early days as a reporter. How do we figure out what our values are and then put them to work in our lives? There's a couple of different ways that I'd work with a client on this. Here's a fun one. What do you regret? Daniel Pink has that book, Power of Regret. In his American Regret Project, he identified these four primary forms of regret.

42:51We have foundational regrets. I regret not wearing sunscreen and all those tanning beds I did in college. the things that accumulate all over time right we have connection regrets the moments where we didn't look up from our phone or somebody was sharing something painful about their life and we just turned it back on ourselves right we didn't connect we have boldness regrets the times that we didn't step up and say something we didn't protect somebody we didn't put ourselves out there in some way. And then we have moral regrets, the ways in which we've harmed ourselves or others. If you were to go down those four types of regrets and spend a little time on them, you'd have to open up to some uncomfortable feelings and it's not get consumed by your regrets, but actually ask yourself, why do I regret this?

43:43Then you will have a to-do list for the next year of ways in which you could act in this world, right? I could start taking care of my skin. I could start being present when I'm engaging with somebody because I regret whatever, somebody, a client that I work with, their past marriage, that they had all those connection moments that they regret that they didn't connect around. So your regrets can tell you about what you value, and they can actually then give you some action steps that you can live out. Because I said before, I see values as verbs and adverbs. They're how we live our life. their action we can take in the here and now.

44:18They're not some kind of moral thing out there. They're not a should. They are unique to you. They're chosen by you. So when I work with clients, it's not about my values. It's about their chosen values. What are you here to work on? Not what I want you. I want you to work on your drinking. What are you here to work on? Because that is unique to them. And that will be, if you can identify your own personal intrinsic values, then you will have, and there's a good amount of research on this, you will have something that you can turn to that will always be there. I've done a lot of work in the area of exercise and health behavior change.

45:00if you bank your exercise on some extrinsic goal like weight loss or how your body looks in a mirror or whether or not you can walk faster or run faster than you could last week or last year or 10 years ago that will come and go but if you have an inner deeper reason that you care about then that will be an intrinsic motivator that is always there that you can always draw upon It's like a deep, deep, deep well. Okay, that's very helpful. Resetting a bit, we talked about how in your book, Wise Effort, there are three tasks you recommend so we can move from unwise striving to wise effort. The first was getting curious specifically around your strengths, aka genius energy, how the genius energy can become perversely a source of your problems, and then the role of values in terms of how you want to move through the world.

45:57The second task, which is going to be built upon the first, is opening up. What do you mean by opening up in this context? Well, I talk about a number of different ways that we can open up. We can open up our minds, we can open up to feeling, we can open up our sense of self, and then we can open up to change. And I see all of those as necessary to engage in wiser efforts. Right? So opening up our mind, if we go back to being stuck in a story. I go to Plum Village in the summers, and we take our kids. And when we were there a couple of years ago, I think it was the 40th anniversary of Plum Village.

46:44And there was these big banners that were... Plum Village is Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery that he developed over 40 years ago. And it's in Southern France. And there was these big banners along our walking meditation. And one of them that was as we were walking along in our walking meditation was just the simple gata, are you sure? It was so helpful to me because we were doing this silent walking meditation. It's like 700 people and my kids are there. And they were two adolescent boys. And you try and bring two adolescent boys in a silent walking meditation and they're like punching each other and causing all this disruption.

47:22And I'm in my head about like, oh I have to control my kids and then you look up at this sign and it just says are you sure you sure so we open our minds like open our minds are you sure and that can help direct us towards wiser efforts opening our minds but then opening up to feeling is really linked to the values that I've talked about before I said we have to look at our regrets to be able to figure out what we care about and that requires opening up to and being able to be with uncomfortable feelings or Or maybe you want to change something that's going to be uncomfortable. And that's going to require feeling something.

48:00And the avoidance of the feeling is what's keeping you stuck in the thing that you don't like. So we have to open up to feeling and then opening up our sense of self to that wiser self so that we can change. What do you mean by opening up to your wiser self? And how would we even do that? Last time you made, you needed to make an important decision. how did you contact your wiser self, a wiser self? Like not just your head, not the pros and cons. We all want to do the pros and cons list. That's useless. Pros and cons list, you know, because you could just list pros and cons all day long. How did you get to something bigger, something deeper than a pros and cons list?

48:40Honestly, often I, if I have a big decision, I talk to smarter people than me. So like Joseph Goldstein, who's a great meditation teacher, helps me make many decisions. I don't always listen to him. talk about regrets my wife my brother my ceo etc etc so that's one way in which i open up to my wiser self because if you think of the self as unbound by this particular meat sack that we're walking around in uh that the self is dialogic in dialogue with the surround and part of that is like who are you engaged with so that's one way for me yeah dick not han talked about our our second bodies. When he used to take the monastics through the airport, he'd assign everyone a second body.

49:28So the monks would go around and be like, okay, is your second body in the bathroom? How are they doing? Do they leave their suitcase somewhere? So our wise self, our self with a capital S is more than just our small little self that's right in the pros and cons list, right? And sometimes our wise self, we can access it through leaning on and having conversations with wise people and even just being in their presence. There's that whole like neuroception that happens where you're in the presence of a calm, wise, stable human, and you are just receiving that energy. Our wise self, a lot of times people, when I ask that question, when I ask this question of clients, they'll say like, oh, I go up to the top of this mountain or I go to the ocean or I go sit under a tree.

50:14Anne Lamott has this great line. She said, if you want to start any kind of creative writing project, start with, there was a tree. And sometimes I'll assign that, like I'll work with groups and I'll have just one person sit in front of the other person and just give them this prompt, there was a tree. And talk about it. And what shows up when you start talking about this tree? Dan, there was a tree. What would you say? I literally went right to a tree that was in my childhood backyard that we hung a tire swing from. Yeah, that's what I went to. Yeah. And how does that tree represent wisdom to you?

50:50What did it offer you? I don't know. What did it offer you when you went to that tree with that tire swing? Was it like a literal tire? We had like the tire, like my dad brought home from like the shop. An actual tire. I know. There's like spiders in the whole part, you know? Yeah. Disgusting. Yeah. It's disgusting. Yeah. But why did you go to that tree? I mean, I don't know that I can give you any poetic answer. It was like, it was a good tree to hang a tire from and you should avoid it if you're sledding. You should avoid it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there was a tree. Maybe it was a stable. It was like a source of stability there.

51:22It was like, it's like a tree. Yes. Yeah. So some people have memory and people have all sorts of memories of nature as grounding forces. That's a source of wisdom. Some people find wisdom in their ancestors, people who have past. They find wisdom in just greater belief in something bigger that's here. Wisdom of the body. You know, we've all had the experience of our body saying no, or our body saying yes, and we override our whole body no, and we say yes, and we override our whole body yes, and we say no. Your body has a tremendous amount of wisdom. So how do we get to this wiser self? It's through all of that.

52:01It's through all of that. Or maybe through meditation, right opening through the back of the heart and expanding into open awake awareness right just the love the field of love that is here that's a wiser self when we practice with that and we start to welcome that more into our life that can help guide us in our decision making in what we say yes to and what rocks we put in our jar or what rocks we don't put in our jar or maybe how we can allow ourself to be in the space between the rocks and how we are going to choose to use our energy our most precious resource, like this chi within us, our prana, whatever you want to call it, that genius energy.

52:41Coming up, Diana talks about how to open yourself up to change, the role of radical acceptance, how and where to focus your energy, how to spot what she calls energy depleters, and a walking meditation practice that she calls, yes, yes, thank you, thank you.

53:03So just to reset again, we're talking about these three tasks that you recommend in order to, you know, move from unwise striving to wise effort. And the second task is to open up. And we've been talking about how to open your mind, open up to your feelings, open up to your wise self. And then the final thing you recommend within opening up is opening up to change. Can you just say a little bit more about what you mean by that specifically and how it's done? Yeah, my brother-in-law is a roboticist. So he designs self-driving planes and Segways and the robots that go into mines like in Afghanistan.

53:41I was having a conversation with him once and he said the most important thing that he ever programmed into a robot was the get unstuck button. And the get unstuck button, when it's deployed, what it does is everything possible in its repertoire. So it'll do like a backflip. It'll jump up and down. It'll crawl down real low. It will spin around in circles. It'll go backwards as fast as it can. And guess what it does? It gets the robot unstuck. And so open up to change. What we know about human behavior is that we have a tendency to do the same thing, just harder until the point that we're so sick of doing the same thing harder that then we give up.

54:23And you can think about this in terms of your exercise program or stuck spot that you're in with your teenager or your partner or your parent, any kind of health behavior. So getting unstuck and opening up to change, the first part of that is variability. This is at the foundation of evolution. We need variation in order to evolve. So we practice getting unstuck. We practice opening up. We practice wise effort by doing things that are different than the way that we always do them. And then we start to identify what works, what is helpful, what is reinforcing of your values, what uses your genius well.

55:06And then we work towards retaining that, reinforcing it, doing it again. And that is how we open up to change. It's the principles of behavioral psychology. But it's also just sort of like being effective in the world is that most of the time when clients are coming in to work with me. It's because they are either doing the same thing, just harder, or they've given up altogether. And we need to open up to change, trying something different, a different dance move, a different outfit. I have the same hairstyle that I had when I was like 17. Right? Why? Because it's uncomfortable to change. I'm like, I know this one works for me.

55:43But if I were to go brunette and short, what would happen? What would happen? Hair grows. It wouldn't be on the end of the world. One of the things you talk about in this section of the book is radical acceptance. And so I'd be curious to hear you say more about that and with an eye toward dealing with what I imagine you hear all the time, dealing with the resistance that some people have to acceptance because they hear it as resignation or passivity. Yeah. I mean, sometimes I won't even use that word with a client because they associate acceptance with like, you just need to accept your mother-in-law or you just need to accept that you have a health condition.

56:26And radical acceptance does not start with the words you just, right? What we're talking about here with radical acceptance is, can you open to? Can you allow for? Can you welcome? Many of us associate the words radical acceptance with Tara Brock. I first heard them from Marsha Linehan, who's the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. And I was working in DBT, I was working in a mental health center for folks that were chronically suicidal and were doing a lot of cutting behavior. And one of the early skills that we would teach people is radical acceptance. Can you open to and be with this intense experience that you are having right now without trying to make it go away?

57:17Can you ride it like a wave? Can you notice that whatever it is, your craving, your desire to cut, your desire to escape this conversation, your desire for this to end, you don't want it to be in here anymore. And can you get on the wave and watch it rise, rise, rise? It gets to a point where you're like, I can't handle this anymore. I'm going to die of this craving, or I'm going to die of embarrassment, or I'm going to die of anxiety. It's like peaking. It gets to this point where I can't do it anymore, right? No one's ever died of embarrassment. No one's ever died of accreting. No one's ever died of anxiety.

57:53But they've died of some of the things that they've tried to do to get rid of that. So we practice riding it. We practice, we practice, we practice, and then we notice it most of the time comes back down again. And that is riding the wave of acceptance. So when we're talking about acceptance or when I'm talking about acceptance, I'm talking about acceptance of the sensations and inner experiences that you are having. which is different from saying I'm approving of someone else's behavior or I'm approving of the situation outside of me. I don't approve of a whole lot of things, but in order to make the changes that I need to make, I need to accept my inner experience to be able to move towards even making a change around something that I don't approve of in the outer world.

58:41Yes. It's like radical acceptance as I understand it. Well, it's many things, But in particular, when you're talking about pushing back against the concern that it leads to resignation, it's like, no, no, you just need to, as they say in AA, the first step is admitting it. The first step is to see things clearly so that you can, from an embrace of reality, from a sane acknowledgement of how things are, take the right steps. Climate change is a perfect example. So I'm part of this. You had Alyssa Apple on, talked about, she's a really good friend of mine. She has this whole expertise in telomeres and stress.

59:18And she also is a complete badass researcher. And she has initiated this 10 UC campus-wide research project to train undergraduates across all 10 UC campuses in resilient skills. because our college students are facing the reality of a whole slew of problems that they did not create, but that they are going to have to face. And in order to move out into the world, they need to both radically accept the reality of what's happening, have climate grief, have anger, have anxiety, all the things that are difficult to have. How do you accept the reality of what's happened to our climate and then take action?

1:00:11This project that I'm part of with Alyssa, I'm part of the UC campus part of it. We do a lot of work around radical acceptance, being with discomfort, taking care of ourselves. And then we also do a lot of work around climate action. And they do all sorts of fascinating, interesting projects that are unique to them. Talk about genius energy, college students, they create all sorts of really unique and impactful things that channel their energy of climate grief into positive action as a result of this course. And then they, you know, Alyssa is doing all sorts of research, outcome studies on it and its impact.

1:00:54and we're trying to scale it bigger and bigger so it can reach lots of students. Because if there's one consensus amongst climate people is that we might have already passed that little tipping point that they've been warning us about. And now the best thing we can do is radically accept so that we can deal with it. Okay, let's turn to the third task in your book, which is focusing your energy. I'll put it the same way I have every time. What do you mean by that term, focusing your energy and how do we do it? Well, focusing your energy is identifying what matters to you in this moment and putting the right amount of effort and energy into that.

1:01:38Sometimes that's dialing back. Sometimes that's adding more. If you think about a camera that focuses, sometimes focusing means we need to expand our aperture. We need a broader view. Sometimes we need to narrow in our view. And it's the wisdom that helps us decide that, like a camera operator has experience and wisdom that decides that. So for me, last night, I couldn't sleep. There could be a lot of different ways in which I could focus my energy when I'm not sleeping. I could focus on, oh, I'm having an interview with Dan Harris tomorrow, and I should go through my notes because I can't sleep.

1:02:17Or I could worry about something that's related to my kids, or I could worry about not sleeping, right? Those would all be unwise use of my energy. And actually what I ended up doing is like, this is the classic thing that I always, it's like my go-to now. Cause I had variation and it worked. I tried to get unstuck button and this worked for me. If it doesn't work for me at some other point, I'll do something different. Is I went outside. We have a really big full moon right now. And I went outside and I looked at the full moon and I was barefoot and I could feel the hard concrete under my feet and it was kind of cold.

1:02:52And I looked at the moon, I felt the bare concrete under my feet and I just like did a little moon bath. And then I went back inside. It's great use of my energy. It took a little bit of activation energy to get me out of bed, you know, but it was taking up a lot of energy for me to be in my head. So I see that as that's a wise effort move. I mean, kind of wild, but that to me is wisdom combined with genius energy, which is my emotional sensitivity, knowing what I need. I love it. I say that as a fellow insomniac. In this section of the book, you talk about focusing your energy as it relates to at least four different areas, relationships, your body, your work, and creativity.

1:03:35Let's just work through these if you're cool with it. One of the things when you're talking about relationships specifically is you use this phrase and you used part of this phrase earlier so it will sound familiar to close listeners, but use this phrase, diffuse from depletors. So can you hold forth on that concept, please? I think everyone can think about positive energizers, people that when you are around them, you feel their positive energy, you are energized by them. It could even be like your barista. And energy depletors. I know you have some, man. People that suck the energy out of you.

1:04:15and oftentimes we think that the solution to that is just cut them out but sometimes they're like connected to you know like but wait I'm married to this person and you're related to them so I can't really cut you out you keep on having to show up and if I were to do that it might you know be problematic right so how do I defuse from them how do I notice the thoughts in my mind that are unhelpful. We use that example of your hands in front of your face. Well, when you're around that depleter, you may be around them with a whole lot of story that you are putting in front of your face that are preventing you from actually being present for yourself.

1:04:54So that is one way we can diffuse from depleters is actually look at our own minds and our own thoughts and how we are adding on. And usually when you add on a story, you can think about a depleter right now. I won't make you name any names. Do you have one? No, my cat Toby is coming to mind. He's a total depleter. All he does is beg for food and he's 25 pounds and he wants to sit on me and it's uncomfortable. So let's go with Toby. Okay. Okay. Toby's a safe one. So Toby is a depleter in your life. When Toby is begging for food, what is a story that's an unhelpful story that goes on in your head about Toby that makes it worse.

1:05:34This fucking cat is monomaniacal and a total pain in the ass. Can I give him to a neighbor? Okay. So you have that story in your head about this fucking cat is mononical, whatever, horrible. Can I give him to a neighbor? And when you are stuck in that story, where does your attention go? Away from what I'm trying to do in the moment, which is usually work, which is what he has interrupted. Right. So it's depleting you even more from your work. What do you do behaviorally? If I saw you, would you be like, oh, you're a fucking cat. Would you be like giving him an elbow? Would you be? Usually I'm ushering him out of my office and closing the door.

1:06:10Sometimes he will jump up and dig his claws into me when I'm ignoring him and hang. And as I mentioned, 25 pounds, that's incredibly painful. It's a big cat. So at that point I might yell. Yeah. Okay. So your attention goes to things other than your work, your behavior goes to trying to usher him out the door. And what do you prioritize? I am prioritizing in those moments my own comfort and focus over his comfort and happiness. So those three questions come from the work of Elise Lonen and Courtney Smith, who wrote Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. And they have a lot to do with how your energy gets pulled off track by de-energizers, especially when you are stuck in a story.

1:06:56And so I'd like to follow it up with three more questions that have to do with where you actually want to put your energy. What would be wise effort in the situation? And the first question is, where do you want to be placing your attention? If I was watching that moment from the perspective of my 85-year-old self, if I lived that long, I think I would hope that I could just take 90 seconds and give the cat what he needs, which is food and maybe some hugs, and then go back to my work rather than being so monomaniacal myself and thinking that my work should take precedence over every other living being in the house.

1:07:36Okay. So you want to pay attention to 90 seconds worth of your cat and then the rest of the time back to your work. Or whatever it is I'm doing. Yes. or whatever you're doing. The behavior you want to do is like, I'll give you some of this, but not all of me. And what do you want to prioritize? Well, this is a values question, right? It's hard to come up with a non-annoying or cheesy word here, but I want to prioritize. I use this word in a very broad sense, love, just giving a shit, being kind. And this kind of goes back to the view being better when you pull your head out of your ass being stuck on my own to-do list and priorities which are important of course but you can't get so focused on that and can't lard that list up so much that you have no bandwidth left for the other beating hearts in the neighborhood right you want to prioritize love and you loaded that word love with all these other words like this is cheesy and this is we got to just own the love and get over ourselves that it's cheesy.

1:08:42There's a reason why love is central to so many songs. Even though it's cheesy and it's trite, it's the truth. So prioritizing love in that situation. And when you get really clear, okay, I've got this depleting cat. I got a depleting in-law. I got a depleting workmate. I got a depleting kid. I got whatever it is, a depleting person in front of me in line at the grocery store. When you are in unwise effort, you are prioritizing things, you are behaving in ways, and you are focusing your attention on things that are unhelpful to you and them. And when you're engaging in wiser efforts, you're connecting with your deeper values, how you want to show up.

1:09:27And all of a sudden, you can reclaim a little bit of your energy back. You're diffusing from some of the thoughts that are pulling you off track, and you get to reclaim that energy. And love, if you want something that's energizing, invest in love. That's better than any workout plan you can find on the planet. Love will energize you instantly. Instantly. It's like if you're a parent or a partner of somebody, you know how love can motivate you to do all sorts of things, and you can feel alive. And love for your cat, you know, Your 80-year-old self, sure, will have had many cats, but Toby will be the memorable one.

1:10:03So you got to give a little love. Well said. There's so much in this book. I did not get nearly through my list of questions, but in our remaining time, let me just kind of at random pick one. We have been in this section of our conversation talking about the third task in your book, which is focus your energy. We just talked a little bit about how to do that within the context of relationships. You also talk about how to do it within the context of your body. And you have a little mantra that you recommend that I don't actually know what it means, but I'm curious. Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you.

1:10:39Oh, it's a little walking meditation. I think I learned it at Plum Village, but it's a very simple walking meditation where you take one step. Yes. Another step. Yes. Another step. Thank you. And another step. Thank you. with that you can also take a breath and it's beneficial for lots of different reasons when we think about wise effort in the body oftentimes we're relating to our body not from a yes stance or a thank you stance we're relating it relating to it from like a control stance or disconnected so it gets you back into your body having gratitude for your body savoring this one body that we have, pretty much every function that you have right now, your ability to write, your ability to look at me and see me, your ability to hear me, if you can hear, you will not have at some point.

1:11:34And if you are walking, maybe you're not walking, maybe you're wheeling a chair, and maybe you could say, yes, yes, thank you, thank you, if you're lying in a bed and you don't have that capacity and you have the capacity to breathe. but everything that we have with our body we will lose part of this book i wrote in um jack cornfield's little hut so he has a little hut at spirit rock and i was um pulling my hair out writing this book with two kids at home in a schedule of too much stuff and a trudi goodman who's my second body we would write together we'd pull up our zoom i have like strong self-criticism when i'm writing and and at one point i was like i'm just really struggling Trudy, and she said, go up to Jack's cootie.

1:12:17It's called the cootie. Go up to his hut. I went up there, did a lot of walking meditation, a lot of quiet, and wrote some of this book and discovered again the place that I often have to come back to over and over again with wise effort, which is gratitude, being present. Yes, yes, thank you, thank you. And in his little hut, he had the little piece of paper, besides all the cool books that he had, this little tiny piece of paper that had the five remembrance on him of everything we love, we will lose. I think that's a good reminder with why I suffer in the body that everything we love, we will lose.

1:12:57And maybe we treat our body a little bit differently. Let me just add some detail on a few things Diana just said. Jack Kornfield, for people who don't know him, is his legendary meditation teacher. He's married to Trudy Goodman, herself a legendary meditation teacher. And Jack was the prime mover behind the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County in California. All of those were mentioned by Diana. You also mentioned the five remembrances. These are these five things that the Buddha recommended we call to mind every day. Thanks to somebody I suspect you know, Vinnie Ferraro, a great meditation teacher who I interviewed earlier this year.

1:13:34I started doing those five remembrances twice a day. And they are, as you nodded toward this body is of the nature to die. This body is of the nature to get sick. This body is of the nature to get older. We will ultimately lose everything and everyone we hold dear. And fifth, this is where, as Vinny says, the Buddha pulls out the knife. We do have one true possession and that's our actions. Those are our actions. And so to me, all of those point right toward wise effort, giving us the wisdom to make the right decisions based on the non-negotiable truth of change. Am I hunting in the right direction here, according to you?

1:14:16Yes, I think the Buddha was also a behaviorist. At his heart, engaged Buddhism and behavior, that actions are our only belongings. Wise effort is about how we act, how we choose to act, where we choose to put our energy, knowing that everything, including our cat, is impermanent in our bodies, in our relationships, in our planet, then how are we going to act on it? Yeah. And this is kind of another radical acceptance thing. You want to see clearly the often painful truth of the matter, which is we're all going to die. Everybody we know is going to die. Not as a source of hypervigilance or the type of clinging that, as you said earlier, can give you rope burn, but as a wise acknowledgement of the truth that can then help us make wise decisions in that light.

1:15:07Right. It'll help you choose knowing that how you spend your time today, what you choose to add to your list today or choose to say no to on your list today. If you repeat that to yourself twice a day. One caveat, I don't recommend it for folks that are severely depressed or suicidal. I'm giving that assignment. They are highly aware of that. I give actually another assignment around focusing on savoring what is good that is here, savoring your accomplishments, savoring good people in your life, savoring the kind person at the grocery store, the positive energizers, the warm sun on your skin, the tree outside your window, you know, so it's a little bit of a different attentional focus and attentional flexibility if you're feeling particularly down.

1:16:00That seems smart. Two final questions, which I ask habitually. I'm a little worried about this first one, which is, is there something that you were hoping we would get to that we didn't? There are a lot of things we didn't get to, but is there something burning in you right now that we really should cover and have failed to cover. Is there something that you hope to get to that we didn't, Dan? There's a lot of stuff in here about how to do wise effort in community. That's something I'm interested in. There's a lot of stuff in here about wise effort as it pertains to creativity. So I feel badly that we didn't get to it, but again, people can read the book.

1:16:37Yeah. Thank you. Which leads me to the final question, which is, can you remind everybody of the name of the book and anything else you've put out into the universe that we should know about. The book is called Wise Effort, How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most. You can learn more about me at wiseeffort.com. I have a lot of resources there. I have a lot in the arena of ACT if you want to take deeper dives into ACT, a lot in the arena of training therapists and coaches. I have many different efforts that I put out into the world, but they all sort of under this bigger umbrella of wise effort.

1:17:11It's been a huge pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

1:17:19Thank you to Diana Hill. Great to talk to her. Don't forget there's a guided meditation that comes with this episode. It's all about how to cultivate wise effort in your meditation practice and in your life. Our next live guided meditation session is coming up on the 12th, which is a Wednesday. We usually do these on Tuesdays, but the next one is on Wednesday. The 11th is a holiday in the U.S. Christiana Wolfe, our Teacher of the Month, will be featured on the next live session. And if you want to meditate with me in person, don't forget the two events I've got coming up, one on the 18th in New York City with Pete Holmes, the great comedian, and then a solo event I'll be doing up at the Hotel Troutbeck later in the month.

1:18:02Links to both in the show notes. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.