SUMMER REPLAY: IAN CRON: The Path to Flourishing—and Freedom

24:33And unmanageable may not mean losing your house, your car, your wife, your kids, and all that stuff. That's severe unmanageability. It could be just emotional, spiritual, mental unmanageability, right? If you're out over your skis, this thing has got a hold of you and you just don't know what to do next, right? I would strongly recommend that that person find a therapist with a background in addictions. If they have a severe addiction, I would encourage them to either get to a 12-step meeting immediately, or if it's pretty far down the road, seek treatment because we need help, right? Like I always say the three most courageous words in the world are, I need help.

25:12And by the way, that's the beginning of true healing. That's when the relief actually comes, I need help. Because the snare of addiction is so powerful and the forces of denial are so great, self-deception, that to get out, to extricate yourself from this problem, you need other people to be involved. For the person listening to this that's contemplating what you just said and reaching out to someone, they feel so much shame that they maybe don't feel like that there's a safe space where they can be? I mean, is there a way to normalize that feeling and just say, look, you're not alone. That's very typical.

25:55I mean, what would you say to the person that's feeling the shame and they just are stuck? Yeah, first of all, it is very normal. Second of all, if they want to find a place where they're not going to feel shame for it, right? Certainly 12-step communities are that. I mean, holy smokes. And there's about, I don't know, There are hundreds of 12-step types for treating different types of addictions and mental health problems. There's just hundreds of them based on the 12 steps. A therapist certainly isn't going to shame you for coming in and saying, I have this problem. But shame should also be a red flag that something really is wrong.

26:34And just going back to that Johan Hari quote, because it's so good, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, although that's part of it. It is connection. It's community, right? You have to come out of hiding and begin to name the truth. You know, you said something to me once, Mike, that is actually quoted in the book. You said to me once something to the effect that the greatest obstacle or the one thing that stands between you and you becoming the highest expression of yourself is the truth. Something like that. Am I right on that? I think what I say is, and it's probably not original with me, but the shortest distance between you and the life you want is the truth.

27:15I think Tony Rogers says all progress begins with the truth. Oh my gosh. This is the 12 steps, Mike. This is step one. We're just going to get honest. We admit that we're powerless over blank. It could be the kind of kooky and meshed relationship I have, codependent relationship I have with my wife or my kids or my partner, and it's making my life unmanageable. That's the truth. We begin with the truth. We get honest, right? We do that in the context of community. We do it with another person and we seek out help, right? The first three steps could be summarized like this. Step one, I can't. Step two, God can.

27:54Step three, I think I'll let him. For those of us that are not familiar with the 12 steps, could you elaborate or expand upon that? Sure. The first step, as I mentioned earlier, we admitted we were powerless over blank, that our lives have become unmanageable. There's I can't. Step two, came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. And let's think of that word sanity as the word for wholeness. Step three, made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understood him. Right? So I can't. God can. I'm going to let him. Right? Right. So people think that powerlessness is actually a shameful thing.

28:37We're constantly told, take control, take back control of your life, et cetera, et cetera. Right. When in reality, powerlessness is a superpower. When you finally admit I am powerless or I do not have control over nearly as much of life as I think that I do, suddenly a great, great burden is lifted from your shoulders. I have had the personal palpable felt somatic experience in my own life many times when I have said, I'm out of ammo. I'm out of ammo. And when I've said that, and I've turned my gaze toward my higher power, toward God, and said, I'm out of ammo. And suddenly, it's almost as if I hear God say, oh, good.

29:20Now we can get somewhere, right? Because my ego always wants to take charge. It wants to believe that it is the star of the show, man. It's the producer, the director, the screenwriter of this little soap opera we call My Life. And what we want to do, and what the 12 steps helps us to do, is move from an egocentric life to a theocentric life, where you're no longer in charge. And that's a great relief. You know, there's a passage in the New Testament, if it's okay, and I don't presume that everybody listening on this show is a person of faith, but I think this is just true. And you can replace the word Christ with whatever word you choose.

29:57For I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And then this is the message translation. My ego is no longer central. Yeah, because the word I in that sentence is ego in the original language. For ego, for crisis crucified my ego and my ego no longer lives. The life I live now, and then he goes on to say, my ego is no longer central. Golly whiz, when your ego gets out of the way, it's a great relief to go from creator to creation.

30:30Ian Cron:Ian, one of the interesting things, of course, you know our family story really well, and our younger three children are adopted. And what we did not to understand because like so many people who have stepped in that journey was that we were entering a healing journey with our kids. You know, that any child that is available for adoption has endured an imaginable loss, trauma and tragedy. And that what you're walking into is not merely giving a child a family or becoming a family of people who are not blood relatives to one another, but you're walking in this healing journey. And as we have done a bunch of therapy, which I've talked about in our book, Mind Your Mindset, one of the things that I've learned from our therapist, she does a narrative-based therapy that helps really set the story straight.

31:20Ian Cron:Because one of the things that happens with trauma is that your understanding of what happened to you and how the world works just gets all disordered and wonky. You know, it's like she, as she would say, you get the wrong feelings on the wrong people in the wrong events, which then totally just torched your life, you know? And so what's interesting is the way that she does therapy, she will do intensives with families like ours, where you come and you do six to eight hours of therapy a day for three, four, five, eight days. It was the first time we did that. And let me just tell you, that is like going to bootcamp for your soul.

31:51Ian Cron:You know, it's intense and kids are not able to attend therapy voluntarily as, you know, young kids, especially. And what she does is she kind of sits there and as they're working through the narrative, as they're, you know, in air quotes, forgetting part of their story that they've kind of gotten back in order, you know, they're falling back into the disordered way of thinking, is that she kind of won't accept the lies. She confronts them, she'll wait them out, she'll smoke them out, all kinds of things. And what I love about that, having watched it, while it can feel a little aggressive sometimes, what you realize she's doing is she's setting these kids free from their coping strategies that stand between them and healing.

32:36Ian Cron:Because as long as they hold on to really the addiction to these stories that are untrue about themselves and other people in the world, they can never be healed. You know, it's only in truth that they can be healed. And, you know, I think about that as we're talking about, it's like, ultimately what we want for ourselves and the people we love most is freedom. The only human flourishing that can happen has to be planted in a bed of freedom. You can't be in bondage and flourish. Those are antithetical to one another. And I think the truth is the pathway there. Thank you for sharing that. When you break down the 12 steps, it's all about freedom.

33:18The pathway to it could be broken out like this. And I know we haven't articulated all the different steps. That would take a minute. But one to three is about making peace with God, You've heard those three steps. That's what that's about. Four through seven is about healing your relationship with yourself, making peace with yourself. Eight and nine is about making peace with others. And then 10 through 12 is really about how do I cultivate a lifestyle that promotes growth and healing in each of those domains of my life moving forward? It's so simple. People want to make this hard. It's like the ultimate, I don't mean to trivialize this or diminish it.

33:56It's like the ultimate personal growth program. It's like everything that you read about personal growth and personal development and human flourishing, it's all kind of captured in this proven system that's been around for quite a while now. I mean, it was kind of invented in the 30s. Is that right? Yeah. So it began with a man named Bill Wilson. Bill Wilson was a stockbroker and a hopeless alcoholic. You have to remember in those days, there was no solution to this problem. You were just deemed hopeless and people anticipated that you would either die from drinking in a sanitarium or on your own somewhere.

34:33Bill Wilson has this profound spiritual experience in a hospital room. And he later went on to found Alcoholics Anonymous and he took six steps from a Christian organization called the Oxford Group and then expanded it into 12. And for him, all addictions, though they have other complicating factors, are principally spiritual. The problem is principally spiritual, right? He just put together these steps that would help people mend these broken, ruptured relationships in their life and place them in a place where they are now no longer the center of their own universe, but where now God is at the center.

35:19which was who and what they were looking for all along. You know, it's interesting, Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, who is sort of known as the kind of secret founder of AA, co-founder of AA, he used to correspond with Bill Wilson all the time. He used to say that all addicts are frustrated mystics.

35:37Ian Cron:Oh. That's powerful. Yeah, and Jean-Paul Sartre, you know, he once said that when you see a man knocking on the door of a brothel, he's looking for God. and the problem is these are counterfeits of what we're really looking for they're bad hacks these are bad hacks and we have to you know plug into the real source of healing in life so that these things are unnecessary for us we just can look at them and be indifferent now I love how you're talking about this because you know I think that my understanding of addiction years ago. And, you know, we have someone in our family who has dealt with addiction, actually multiple people, but one in particular who has not only recognized addiction, but then entered a pretty intense process of recovery.

36:30Ian Cron:And it's been an unbelievable gift to that person, but also to all the people that love them. And I used to think that recovery was about learning how to not give in to temptation. And I think maybe a lot of us think that, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but you know, I think, I think a lot of us think it's something about being able to be presented with something that you want and say no to it. And I love that the answer isn't willpower. The answer is meeting the real desire that's, that is underneath the counterfeit one. That just feels so much more human to me and more restorative. I don't know, that's a big aha, I think.

37:13Ian Cron:Yeah. So one of the things I talk about in the book, right, is the difference between reformation and transformation. Okay. Most people on their spiritual journeys, not most, but many, many, many, okay, are engaged in well-intentioned, but grace opposed projects of reformation. I'm going to, with my unaided willpower, make myself a better person. And I'm always like, how's that going? How's that working out for you? Yeah, just tell me, how's that going? We can move the furniture around a little bit, a couple inches here, a couple inches there, right? But I refer to that as taping fruit to trees.

37:54Ian Cron:It's kind of like the difference between working out and wearing Spanx. Yeah, exactly. Right. So that's reformation. Right. But transformation is something entirely different. That's when, and here's how it happens. It's so simple and so counterintuitive that people just can't get it until they hit a bottom and say, okay, I'm not a good idea. So I'll try yours. Right. Right. Transformation is when you give God consent. It's one of the biggest words I use. When you give God consent to do for you what you cannot do for yourself, namely change. This is a huge idea in the spiritual life. Right. And all of your practices are not going to earn you transformation.

38:44It's just not. What all you can do is place yourself in a place where God can have at you. That's transformation. In the book, I tell a story about Aiden, and both of you know Aiden, so this makes it fun. This is my son. Yes.

39:02Ian Cron:How old is he now? He's 27 now. Oh, my gosh. That makes me feel old, by the way. I know. I know. So when he was about two years old, maybe a little younger, I was giving him a bath and I realized I didn't have a towel. So I ran to the linen closet to get one. And in the minute that it took me to do that, when I came back, Aiden had taken an epic poo in the tub. Now I'm talking about Exxon Valdez level problems here. I'm worried about harp seals and penguins. It's like, this is bad. And in the time that I've been gone, he has been picking up these little buoys and then realizing, oh, my hands are dirty now.

39:39He's trying to get rid of it, right? He realizes I got a disaster on my hands. And he's like, oh, what do I do with this? And now he's wiping. His hands are dirty. So he puts those down. He's wiping his hands off with his hair. And then he's wiping his hands on the tiled walls and on his chest. And by the time I get there, he's just covered in poo, right? Now, Aiden has been trying to fix himself. He's been trying to fix himself. and it's only making things worse, all right? What he needs is a power greater than himself to enter the equation and do for him what he cannot do for himself. Ah, here's dad.

40:16Dad's going to come in, wash him off, take care of him, pull him out of the tub, transform child. That is a really good illustration, I think, of what happens in the spiritual life, right? We're constantly thrashing around the water, trying to get our hands clean, coming up with all kinds of kooky strategies for changing ourselves, fixing ourselves, becoming better people, blah, blah, blah. And what we really need to do is to say, I'm powerless. God, come and do for me what I cannot do for myself.

40:53I have a friend and we together have another friend. And this other friend desperately needs some coaching. And so my friend knows that I'm a coach. And he says, you have just got to persuade him to do this. And the guy doesn't want to do it. Like I've literally had the conversation with him. And to me, it's always in the form of an invitation and not even with me. I was inviting him to get into a working relationship with another coach that I know. And he just said, I just don't want to do that. I mean, he's just very resistant. So then a friend is saying, you need to take another pass at him.

41:27And I said, that's not going to happen. And I said, that never goes well. You can't coerce participation. And he said, but don't you realize he could crash and burn? And I said, he may have to. Yes. And I think that's the difference. My friend basically wanted me to enter into a reformation process, even if I had to hold him a gunpoint to coerce the behavior. And I think what I recognize, and you gave me language for this, is that that's not going to lead to transformation. And in fact, what I found is when somebody wants you to do something, there's almost always a resistance to it. Absolutely.

42:07Yes. And I'm thinking the people that are listening right now who maybe they don't feel like they have an addiction problem, but their husband or their wife or their son. And we do want you to buy Ian's book, but don't go buy it and then demand that somebody read it. That will basically, I think, push them back into the hole and make them even more resistant to change. And this has been difficult for me, as you know, because we've talked many times about this. I grew up in a home with an alcoholic father. And so it's very easy for me to be the fixer and to think I got to fix everybody around me.

42:45Yes. And what I've had to learn with as I've kind of unraveled the codependency addiction that I had was that I have to just be okay with people not changing. I want them to change. I pray for them to change, but they have to want it. Yes. And Mike, thank you for your vulnerability and for sharing that because you just so beautifully articulated so many truths. I wouldn't even know where to start. So if you have someone in your life who falls into this category, right? And chances are, it's everybody, right? We all have an alcoholic brother, sister, parent, child, drugs, porn, whatever it is, right?

43:22But we all have, we're surrounded by people with the big ache, right? And with bad solutions to the problem. And you really can't change other people. And that's when you go to Al-Anon, which is the group that people go to when you have a spouse or a child or a friend who has a problem with addiction and you have become codependent, right? And you're having to work on yourself. That's really the place to start. If you're in a relationship with someone with a significant problem, the best thing you can do is start by working on you and establishing getting unenmeshed from them and trying to fix them, change them, enable them, pay their rent.

44:01So we have, as I mentioned earlier, and I have permission to say this, I have a child who's in recovery, actually my son, Aiden. And we had to get to a point with Aiden, and by the way, he says this was the turning point where he was in our home. He was drinking and using, and we discovered that he'd been lying to us, secretive, all the stuff, right? And we just lovingly, without any judgment, without any blame, just said, Aiden, we love you, and you have an hour to pack your stuff and leave the house.

44:32Ian Cron:Now, he had no car. He had no money. He had no place to live. He had nothing. And of course, now we're into a titanic struggle, right? And it's like, no, son, we love you. And you have to leave now. Now, a couple of days on the street, and Aiden figured out, this is a kid who went to boarding school and grew up in a fairly privileged home. So this was not his natural environs, okay? He discovered, oh, I'm now paying the price for my own choices. And what it did is it precipitated enough of a crisis that he realized I'm out of control and I need help. So people do have to reach a point in their life where they go, the pain that I'm experiencing from this is greater than the pain that it was trying to solve, that my behavior was trying to solve.

45:17And I have to get at the underlying causes and conditions. To your point, Megan, I have to get down beneath the surface. And that's what the 12 steps does, right? Like the 12 steps helps you get underneath the addiction itself. Because you see, here's the deal. Drinking isn't your problem. It's your solution.

45:36Ian Cron:Yes. Workaholism is not your problem. It's your solution to a problem. And you have to focus your energies on the problem, not the perceived problem, which is actually what you've been using all along to deal with it. Right. And again, that's what I love about the 12 steps. It's like, okay, we're going to have an experience of God that now expels the need for this. But we now also have to get at the underlying causes and conditions that created the problem in the first place. It's so profound. And I love the framing of that, that the addiction is just a bad solution to a very real problem that needs attention and care and understanding and all the things that any healing modality would bring to it.

46:22Ian Cron:A lot of the people in our audience would describe themselves as high achievers. Many of them are leaders or business owners, or they hope to be someday. And they may naturally kind of bristle at this idea of, you know, well, I'm not like those people. I do all this work on myself and I'm setting goals and I'm productive and all this kind of stuff. I would just love for you to talk for a minute. I know we've talked kind of around it, but how does addiction show up most commonly and most insidiously for people like us? And what's on the other side if we're willing to look at those things and really realize that they're a bad solution to a real problem?

47:05Let's just talk about the number one addiction, playing God. Playing God. That's an addiction, right? And your ego is always telling you, I have so much control of my life. I'm really in charge here. I am so powerful. I have built this big company. I have lots of wealth. I have perfect children. I'm really in control here. And that is a great lie. I mean, you are walking around on a planet moving at 67 ,000 miles an hour through the universe, right? Spinning. You are a little vulnerable biped that really does not have nearly as much control over your life as you think you do, right? So a life that is built on self-will and self - propulsion is a life being teed up for disaster of some kind, right?

47:58And so the addiction to wanting to be in charge, and we want people to organize their lives around our priorities and our desires and our wants. We are manipulative. We are people that are doing all kinds of stuff to get the world to do what we want it to. It's so interesting. I was with a leader that I coached the other day, and I had been on site with him. And he actually runs a number of companies. And I watched him work and I was with him. And I said, if you ever noticed that you like Steve Jobs are trying to bend reality all the time and to get people to control the narrative all the time, to get people to do in situations to be like, I see you wrestling so hard trying to make it all work.

48:42And the response was tears. He's an anxious, anxious mess. And his addiction is to his own self-will, right? To controlling the world. And when you work on the 12 steps, you move from this posture of I'm the creator to being, oh yeah, I'm the creation. And there's a way of moving through this world where I can still be as effective, still be as productive, but be a person who is centered and grounded in this knowledge that I am no longer in charge. And we begin to see the fruit, which is an organic thing, I would remind you. So it's something that grows on its own, right? If you're planted in the right soil.

49:28And what begins to happen is this intentional program of doing inward work, doing repair work with other people that we've experienced rupture with in our relationships, and then just tending the garden, right? By working the steps every single day, it's just tending the garden, right? And I just love that image of a trellis, you know, like in your garden, like the 12 steps are like a trellis. It's just a structure on which you can begin to grow really beautiful plants, right? It's not magic. It's actually quite simple, honestly, so simple, it's deceptively simple. Not easy, but simple. But now you have a plan, right?

50:08Most people don't have a plan of transformation for their lives. They have hacks, they have ideas, they have things they try, but they don't have a plan, right? 12 steps are a plan. And everybody from heroin addicts to soccer moms sitting at the table who have an addiction to people-pleasing, and their life is unmanageable emotionally, whatever it is, you know, everyone on the spectrum on the continuum of addiction or of the big ache, whatever it is, can derive the same benefits that people like me do. So the whole goal is to democratize the steps, to make them available to everybody. And I just know that if people come in with an open mind and an open heart or a broken heart, that they will actually come away saying, oh, now I got a plan.

50:57Buddy, this is really important work that you're doing. And I really want to encourage you guys to buy the book and to dive in. This would make a great first step in your own transformation or just to carry you along in the journey. We always have three questions that we ask at the end that are kind of the lightning round, but it's all about the double win. So, you know, The show's about winning at work and succeeding life, trying to restore that holistic approach to life where it's not all about work, but it's all these other things too. What's your biggest obstacle in you getting the double win?

51:39Fear. I would say that fear is a – everyone knows that fear and anxiety is a problem, right? But usually fear is what activates our character defects and character defenses, right? If you're afraid that you're not going to get a raise and a promotion, you might find yourself subtly bringing down someone else on the team to make yourself look better. So what's happened is fear has activated a character defect, right? And so for me, fear, I realized in my recovery journey, like one of the things you do on the recovery journey is you do a fear inventory because to know what your fears are and to face them squarely is super important on the spiritual and the journey of emotional health, because it's those very fears that activate the obstacles to you becoming the highest expression of yourself.

52:36So I would say I'm working right now on fear and anxiety. I think I've always been a low level, fearful and anxious person. And I'm just facing up to that now. It's hard for me to ask for help sometimes. It's really hard. And I feel like that's a big obstacle for me to having a double win. I just need to become more practice. I need to normalize saying to other people, Hey, you know what? I need help. Can you help me? I'm trying to figure something out.

53:03Ian Cron:Yeah. Yeah, that's been the journey. I won't speak for you, Megan, but that's been the journey, my journey this year, just confronting anxiety and fear. And I didn't actually have language around it until this year and got into therapy again. And it's been one of the best things I've ever done. And I still got a long ways to go, but man, I am, I've seen vast relief from just kind of confronting that and acknowledging it. Yeah. That fear is another part of the big age. And I'm just glad that you didn't turn to other behaviors or substances to deal with that dimension of the big ache. But if you had, I'd have understood.

53:45This is why I'm like, no shame, man. This is what humans do. No shame, but let's get to the root of it and find a way home.

53:55Ian Cron:I love it. Okay. Next question. How do you know when you've personally gotten the double win? There are moments in my life when I have a feeling of ultimate well-being, where I feel integrated, where I feel like I'm firing on all cylinders. And that's probably the only way I could describe it. It's interesting, biblically, we'd say I have an experience of some taste of shalom, right? This feeling of all is well, right? That I'm flourishing. And where what's happening in my personal life is illuminating and funding what's happening in my professional life and where what's happening in my professional life is feeding.

54:41And so I'm in a healthy, virtuous loop where everything is going right. Beautifully said. The last question is, what's one ritual or routine that helps you do what you do that kind of keeps you on the right path? I have a daily practice of meditation. It's so simple. Well, I have two. One is a morning practice of meditation because what is so desperately needed in our age is a practice that can clear away the mental clutter that prevents us from seeing that we are already in connection and in relationship with God. so we have to clear away the mental rubbish that's there and for me and i do it you know based on the teaching of a wonderful man named father martin laherty is a catholic professor at villanova so for me that practice of meditation is about grounding myself it's about centering it's about increasing awareness and realization of union with god and and to me that's the big kahuna of the spiritual journey, right, is the awakening and the realization that I am in union with God.

55:58Is there a particular book that you could point us to? Oh, yes, I can, several. One would be Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird. Another one is called Ocean of Light by Martin Laird, Father Thomas Keating's Open Heart, Open Mind. We call it Centering Prayer Meditation, right? For me, that's how I start my day every single day. And it's a practice. Sometimes it's boring, dull, but that's why we call it a practice, you know, like, you know, whatever. The other thing, Mike, I do is I meet with a trainer five days a week for strength training, in addition to my cardio stuff. And that's something that's come online the last two years.

56:36And that has had a profound effect on me discovering at 64 years old, hey, guess what? You're not a brain on a stick. You have a body. And this body is really interesting. and it's a really good idea to have a good relationship with that body.

56:53Ian Cron:So that's been big too. I started doing that with a trainer 19 weeks ago. Yeah. So Gail and I work out with him three days a week. Yep. Monday, Wednesday, usually Thursday, if we go to the lake on the weekend, today we worked out this morning, we're recording this on a Friday, but it's been transformative. Yes. And he shows up in our house. So I don't have any excuse. And that was the reason I did it. I I said, I am not being consistent. And I kind of gin up the energy to do it. And then I fall off the wagon. So I said, I'm just going to get somebody to show up at my house. And I know not everybody can do that.

57:27But having an accountability partner is awesome. Yeah. In fact, I'm meeting mine in 33 minutes. I have to get my head on because he is this wonderful Mexican man named Juan Carlos. And he yells at me all the time, sin dolor, no hay gloria, which means without pain, there is no glory. And I have to get my head into that zone in 33 minutes.

57:50Ian Cron:Yeah, that's a zone for sure. Yeah. Well, buddy, thank you so much for coming on. I really, I'm shocked at how fast this time has gone, but I feel like we're just getting started. So we're going to have to get together soon and carry this conversation on over coffee or something. Love you. Can't wait to see you, Nan. So fun. Love you guys too. Thanks so much. Appreciate you.

58:20Well, Meg, as per usual, that was an amazing interview. Not because of us, but because of the guests. And one of the things we try to do every week is bring you people that we find interesting. And Ian is one of those treasures that we've known for many years. I've known him for probably 15 years now. He's one of my closest friends. And he's got so much wisdom. The way he's poured into my life has been life-changing. One of the things that I appreciate about people who are in recovery is that they are often some of the deepest, most reflective people that you'll ever meet.

58:56Ian Cron:And I think that's because they've hit rock bottom. They've been through a lot of suffering. They're very self-aware. They're very honest. All those things together, I think, are kind of Ian's secret sauce, plus all the unique things in his history and his experience that are just really special. Like I said, when we were talking, you know, I just started this book this morning. Regrettably, I wish I had finished it before the interview and even 21 pages in or whatever I'm at, you know, 21 pages. I was just blown away. I mean, it just resonated so deeply. I feel like we are living in a time where we are, we're addicted to our screens.

59:31Ian Cron:We're addicted to social media. We've never been lonelier or felt more empty than we are now. We're reduced basically to consumers. You know, so much of our life, especially if we're affluent in any way, is spent making purchasing decisions and thinking about purchases and basically not living in the life that we have, but living in the life we wish we had or we think is somehow better than the one that we have. And we miss so much. You know, it's a counterfeit solution to that idea that he calls the big egg. And I think that is such a resonant idea. It feels so true to me. Absolutely is. Well, as a writer, he has all these pithy things that he says that I just love.

1:00:15And so I wrote down a couple. But one of them, he says, is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.

1:00:24Ian Cron:Yep. And I thought, that's really true. And what did he say about something about we do one thing in secret, but we heal in community? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like addiction happens in secret. I mean, you're not like addicted with other people. Could be, I suppose. I guess you could be, but like in general, like think of a porn addiction, you're not doing that with other people. Like that is, that's a solitary endeavor. And I think that that is a great litmus test for, is this an addiction? You know, when I talked about, uh, much less dramatically, you know, my, what I feel like is my addiction to Instagram, you know, I'm not like looking at Instagram with my family and, you know, like getting my friends to come over and, you know, like that's just scrolling mindlessly wherever I am.

1:01:07Ian Cron:Anytime something is a little bit uncomfortable or boring, or I just kind of want to check out, like that's the means to do it. And I think that's a very helpful way to think about it. That is pun intended sobering because you realize, oh yeah, you know, where am I doing things by myself that are damaging relationships or other things in my life? One of the things that resonated with me that you said when you were talking about that is that you get irritated when people try to interrupt you from that activity. And I thought, wow, you know, I got my own issues or versions of that. That's a pretty good indicator too.

1:01:45I love this. The whole point of the 12 steps is to facilitate a spiritual awakening so strong it expels the need for external fixes.

1:01:57Ian Cron:That was profound because, again, it's not about willpower or brute force. it's about connecting with the thing that we're most made for. You know, it's like, I think it was Oz Guinness who said, we have a God shaped hole inside our heart. Right. Isn't that who said, who said that? And I think that's really true. You know, you can try to put all kinds of other shapes in there. It just doesn't work and you spend your whole life and all your money searching for it and, and never, never find it. And I think that's a good reminder too, especially in an age of distrust and cynicism that at the end of the day, we are made for something so much more and we settle for so much less.

1:02:35And, you know, this isn't a faith-based show, but Megan and I are people of faith. And, you know, we welcome that perspective because it's kind of our worldview. And if it's not yours, then, you know, you can create your own version of this, whatever. We don't certainly mean to exclude you, but I love this quote. Transformation is giving God consent to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. And I think that all of us in life come to that place where we're sort of at the end of ourselves and we realize that we just can't power through it. We just can't muscle through it. The mask has been removed and now we have to do some serious business.

1:03:10So you probably feel this way too, but I know I'm going to be thinking about this conversation for the next several hours and hopefully the next several days. But it's so, so powerful. And I think it's easy to write off the 12 steps as, oh, that doesn't apply to me or, oh, I know what that's about. Right. But I promise you, you don't. Not only share a recovery group, and you might be tempted to write this off and think it only applies to those people, but it honestly applies to us. It is, as Ian said, a roadmap to human flourishing. It is the best way for us to become the best version of ourselves so that we can reach our God given the potential.

1:03:51Yep.

1:03:52Ian Cron:And what a great message for this time of year when self-reliance and I'll fix all my own problems really is being shouted from the rooftops. I think what a great message to think differently about how you step into the new year. again guys we want to encourage you get this book the fix give it to people you know I mean I'm 21 pages in and I'm going to order a bunch of these and I'm going to hand them out to people I love because I truly think it is a gift the message itself is a gift and it's one that leads to freedom and peace and life and that's what I want for the people I love the most so I hope you'll do the same and order yourself a copy and then give it away as well if you want to find out more about Ian, you can do that at ianmorgancron.com, ianmorgancron.com.

1:04:40Ian Cron:Of course, we'll link to that in the show notes. But we can't wait to hear what you think about this book and this conversation. And guys, if you found this helpful, as always, we would encourage you to rate and review it wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps us get more visibility of the show. It feeds the algorithm the right juice so that more people can be exposed to the wonderful guests that we bring on. So hope you've enjoyed this. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.