Alain de Botton on the joy of being average (E218)

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance app. Available now, Roman Kemp, the broadcaster, opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health. Hi there, you're listening to High Performance, the award-winning podcast that unlocks the minds of some of the most fascinating people on the planet. I'm Jake Humphrey, and alongside Professor Damien Hughes, we learn from the stories, successes and struggles of our guests, allowing us all to explore, be challenged and to grow. Here's what's coming up. The ability to tolerate one's own averageness is the beginning of a certain sort of wisdom. And the insistence always on specialness is a kind of malignant situation.

0:46Love, intra-human love, is as important to our development as vitamins are to our healthy bodily development. And shortfalls of love lead to appalling defamations of character. that can have lifelong consequences. The trick of being happy is not to achieve anything and everything. It's to achieve what you feel you're capable of. I think that is what leads ultimately to happiness. The trick is not to have a problem-free life. It's to have a life where your problems contribute to something interesting. I am so excited to bring Alain de Botton into the conversation when it comes to high performance.

1:29I still feel that some people get high performance wrong. They think we're saying you have to achieve incredible things. That's not what this podcast is about. This podcast is about making people realize that actually it's about them finding their own version of high performance. And Alain de Botton published Essays in Love in 1993. It sold millions. He's gone on to write some other incredible books. And actually, his whole thinking process is that being average is okay. that the world is set up to trick us into thinking that we have to achieve incredible things to be validated and actually all that leaves is us constantly chasing a moment that doesn't actually bring us any more happiness if anything it's a toxic way to live so i know there's so many of you listen to our podcast because you want to go on to achieve incredible things i also know so many of you listen to this podcast and are maybe in a place where you're struggling at the moment This is the episode for you.

2:21This is such a powerful conversation. Alain is an incredible author, an amazing thinker, a super bright guy, and I'd love to know what you make of this episode. Let's get to it then, as we welcome Alain de Botton to the High Performance Podcast. Just a quick reminder that if you download the High Performance app from the App Store, then you can actually hear an extended clip with Alain de Botton talking to myself and Damien about parenting. Just go to the App Store, download the High Performance app and use the unique code H-P-A-P-P for access.

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4:41Alan, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. What is high performance? I quite like that phrase, becoming the best version of yourself, which we hear a lot. But what does it really mean? I think we're always aware that there are days, periods of our lives which kind of honour our potential more than others. And I think the trick of being happy is not to achieve anything and everything. It's to achieve what you feel you're capable of. I think that is what leads ultimately to happiness. I think all of us are aware of a sort of latent potential in us. But especially at the beginning of finishing school, maybe going on to higher education, you feel that potential in a very diffuse form.

5:26You sense there's something in you, but exactly what it is can take such a long time to work out. And I think a life where you've really exploited your own potential performance is one where you've located that sort of best self and you've put it to work. And I think that's going to be happiness for you. It's going to be very, very individual, which is why all definitions of success that aim for a one-size-fits-all are always going to be very wonky. We know certain things like a certain amount of money versus time. That money-time equation is going to fit different people. We know that sort of thing.

6:02But there are also other things. How much nature do you need around you? How many friends do you need around you? How much intellectual stimulation do you need around you? Such individual answers. and finding those sort of inner keys to your musical score is going to be absolutely essential. So what advice would you give people then for how they can find the answers to that question? Because there will be people listening to this to think, I've never even in my life considered what am I capable of. I've kind of gone along with the status quo. I've perhaps been derailed by the success of other people.

6:37I've taken on the sort of societal norms of a big house and a good salary and 2.4 children and two holidays a year. But I don't really know what I'm capable of. Well, I think, first of all, it's really normal to be puzzled by the question. I think sometimes people think, I don't know what I really want to do. Therefore, there isn't anything that I really want to do. I think that's the wrong way around. Not knowing is very, very normal. There are very few people who say, I want to be a brain surgeon and that's it. I'm just going to go for it. I knew when I was 12 and now I'm 93 and it was absolutely right for me.

7:10Very few of us are like that. I sometimes think of it like passing a metal detector over the ground. Every now and then there's a sort of beep at certain moments when you're coming across a future version of yourself. I sometimes think a really good guide to what you might be doing and who you should be is envy. Every time that you feel envious of someone or of a situation, someone tells you what they're doing and you feel, hmm, I kind of hate them. And if you use that hatred, it's often a sign that there's something that they're doing that you're capable of. That's why you've been triggered by it, because you're recognizing a kind of future potential.

7:49So using envy is, I think, a really useful step. And then just slowly assembling the jigsaw puzzle. Do various exercises like, you know, imagining 12 different scenarios of your future. And just going, you know, let's try and grade them on a scale of 1 to 10. You know, in 10 years' time, I am a da-da-da. How does that feel? In 10 years' time, you know, it's a Tuesday morning and I'm off to do da-da-da. How does that feel? Sometimes our minds are a little bit obtuse. I mean, you'd think they'd work that bit out. But no, we sometimes have to go through an almost childishly simple thought exercise to try and project ourselves forward and see how we might feel.

8:25I love that use of the word envy. I think reading your work, Alan, I think you have access to like a real emotional literacy that you're able to take words that in our society we might have a pejorative view that envy is a bad thing and you're suggesting it's a good one. Would you just expand on that for us a little bit more? Well, I think, you know, sometimes we're a bit too addicted to a positive image of ourselves. And we take fright too easily at things that would suggest that we're a bit more complicated, we're maybe not so normal, we might be, in the fur commas, bad. And we take fright so quickly that we cut ourselves off from some of our richer, more complicated possibilities.

9:09I sometimes think about this in relation to anger. Many of us get upset very often by people close to us, by little things that they do. And that hurt and anger can accumulate. And if we don't have a safe way to discuss it, to discharge it, what can happen is that we go numb. We maybe get weighed down by a diffuse but unanalyzable sense of despair, or we flinch when they come close to us. We don't want them near us. The real reason is that there's something we need to get off our chest. But because we're a little bit too rigidly keen on thinking of ourselves as good people, who are just very loving and kind and upbeat, we don't allow ourselves to go to some of these darker places.

9:52And then the problems start to accumulate. So I sometimes think of taking an emotion like anxiety. I think anxiety is often a worry that doesn't know itself. Now, why doesn't it know itself? Often because the anxiety is contrary to something that we want to believe to be true about ourselves. So we don't want to feel alarmed about something because it has no place in our sort of image of ourselves or of the world. Similarly, depression is often a sadness that we have no space for within our conception of what's normal for us. So let's imagine someone left us five years ago. Well, we're a normal person.

10:29Why would we still be upset about that? That's not possible. Actually, the mind is a strange and complex organ. Maybe we are. So allowing room for some of these more unusual ways in which our minds work can actually leave us feeling lighter in ourselves. So just to go a bit deeper on that, are you saying that someone with anxiety, part of the anxiety is caused by fighting the feeling? 100 % I mean this is you know we are the old expression our own worst enemies um in that we we know we're fighting civil wars you know that other useful expression being at peace with oneself you know we may be at war with others with with life with situations but so long as we're not at war with ourselves that's already a big burden of us and and often we are fighting these uh these wars.

11:17I mean, take somebody who feels that they need to adhere to a certain religious code, but another level, there's something in that code that's brushing up against something pretty substantial in their nature, constant, there will be a constant, unhelpful war. So yes, I think a lot of feelings that cause us most trouble are those where there is a kind of a refusal to accept that we might be a certain thing or a certain way. and your willingness to sort of lean into some of these more uncomfortable emotions i think is really interesting so take somebody feeling that they're ordinary and i love that you often say well that's a good thing rather than our society sets us up to believe that being ordinary is something is abhorrent or we should be afraid of it or rail against it would you explain why being ordinary or settling or compromising in a situation these often seem like quite bland or anodyne emotions but actually are really important to high performance i think i think we've got a really conflicted vision of the good life in in our societies and i think particularly sort of anglo-american societies on the one hand we're democracies and so we believe in the kind of the legitimacy of every single voice.

12:37Everyone needs to be counted. These are also societies with a predominantly original Christian background. And Christianity very much emphasizes the dignity of every life and every human. But at the same time, there are societies that are pretty aggressively hierarchical, where there's a sort of sense that the winner should take, if not all, a substantial part, and that mediocrity is associated with being like everyone else. I mean, you know, if you said to a young person nowadays in the United States, United Kingdom, and say, you know, I'm aiming for a life where I'm in many ways just like everybody else, that would be seen as spiriting, depressing.

13:19And, you know, we think very well of drama, drama and melodrama. And, you know, many great things are achievable, perhaps only with a certain level of heightened activity and stress and all the rest of it. But I think the ability to tolerate one's own averageness in many fields is the beginning of a certain sort of wisdom. And the insistence always on specialness is a kind of malignant situation. At School of Life, we like a phrase that if you've done well as a parent, your child should have no interest in being famous. Nowadays, a lot of people want to be famous. It's a very common aspiration.

14:04That's a sign that something is failing us in our understanding of an ordinary existence. Say more about that. I believe that an exaggerated desire for fame, for distinction, is often trying to compensate for a feeling of invisibility. And the more invisible someone feels, the more they feel that they must be up on a stage of some sort or another in a spotlight. And scratch below the desire for fame. What is it for? What's it really about? And here I'm really talking about desire for fame rather than desire for distinction on the basis of something you're doing. It's really the desire that other people admire you.

14:47Strangers, the people who don't know you, think well of you. And I think it often hides a sad story of some form of invisibility or injury. And I think that the more we create a society in which you don't really exist until you've achieved distinction, it becomes a kind of arms race. Well, then you have to achieve distinction because there is then no way of getting that distinction. What's the first question everybody gets asked in the modern world? What do you do for a living? And we work, of course we work for money. But we also work in order to have an answer to that question, which will deliver us that other thing we so want, which is a sense of being seen and of being respected.

15:29It's such a powerful human driver. You know, we speak of people feeling solid inside or not solid. What does that really mean? I think that a child who's had an extremely intense period of having felt at the center of the world grows up into someone who can tolerate not being at the center of the world. I think sometimes in our story of parenting, we exaggerate the dangers of giving children the limelight when very little. I mean, I'm talking, you know, one year old. There's a sort of feeling like, oh, no, that kid's getting spoiled. You know, they've been on the earth for all of 12 months and they are spoiled.

16:06I don't see such a danger there. I see a much greater danger in underprivileging, under-spoiling if you like someone in the very early years which then sets up a dynamic that they have to be you know aggressively on stage thereafter can i just delve a bit deeper then from a purely personal perspective because it's interesting you say this because we have a son who would happily not walk on a stage his entire life and is more than content just to be chilling out and doing his own thing and then we have a daughter who is wanting to dance act sing, perform, record, be seen, take selfies, all the other things that as you, you know, slowly edge towards your teenage years, start to reveal themselves.

16:52Yet she's also the one of the two that when we praise our son, she will go, oh, you never say that to me. Although we do. Or Seb, you've done well. What have I done well? Whereas if we say, Flo, that's amazing. Her brother would never go, well, am I amazing as well? And I've never linked the two things. Do you think maybe they are linked? Yes I mean look you know families are such complicated things I couldn't possibly you know wade in and and you know there may be really subtle things about about gender and you know and within the family dynamic mother father who you know where does the attention go um it goes to her mostly goes to Florence more than that but the reason why I think this is really interesting actually is because I think there'll be a lot of people listening to this who can relate to a child who seems so confident in some ways and other people would go, what a confident young lady.

17:44And actually, you know, the most confident child in our house is the one that is never pushing themselves to the front. That's right. I think the confidence to be, as you put it, chilled out and be in your room doing your own thing and just not caring. I mean, that is, if we're talking about success and freedom, that's the gold dust, you know, the ability to not care so much. Of course, you know, everybody wants the fine things of life, but to sort of have a relaxed attitude to that, that is a sign that emotionally you've hit the jackpot. It gives you such freedom, such latitude. It means you don't need everyone to like you.

18:22It means you're not a people pleaser. You know, imagine the ability to encounter people. And while not being necessarily rude to them, that's its own problem, aggression, but simply be slightly neutral. They might like me. They might not like me. I don't need them to like me. And if there were a tricky situation where there's an issue of like, do I tell them the truth or do I safeguard their affection by not telling them the truth, you have that ability to say, you know what, I'm just going to say it the way it is. Again, this is a sign of tremendous, you know, if we're talking about performance, high performance, success, happiness, this is where you're really hitting something extremely special.

19:06So can you give us a bit of a masterclass based on your school of life work and your numerous teachings? I think there's something really special about your ability to lean into those uncomfortable emotions and create a space where you can scratch a bit deeper and say, what is this telling us? What is missing here? Or what is it a real insight into what really needs? I can imagine there's a lot of people listening to this, Alan, that are interested about how do they do it. So they might have children, they might have partners, it might even be for themselves, where they have this uncomfortable emotion, but they want to explore it.

19:44Can you tell us how you go about doing that? Look, I think the way the human mind is, we're not obvious to ourselves. It takes quite a while for us to understand truly what we're feeling and then let alone expressing that to other people. So it's a sort of life's journey to be able to know oneself and then communicate oneself properly to other people. What are the blocks to knowing oneself? Well, a lot of it is, as we talked about earlier, an anxiety about what you'll discover. You know those moods when you don't want to be alone? I think they're always very telling. You know moods where you just think, I'm calling somebody up.

20:25If I'm really honest, I don't really want to call them up. I just don't want to be alone with myself. That's often a sign that something is struggling to break through into consciousness that is quite disturbing. Imagine those moods when you go to sleep, but you wake up at 3am and something's bugging you, but you don't know what. I often think that insomnia is a kind of revenge for all those thoughts that you refuse to have in the day that are coming back to bite you. And, you know, as I'm saying, a lot about who we are doesn't fit our kind of mental models. There's a wonderful psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott, who came up with this theory of the true self and the false self.

21:05And he argued that in proper healthy development, a child is able to reveal and know their true self before they have to grow and sort of nurture a false self. He also thinks that you need both. You need both a true self and a false self. Now, a true self is going to include some difficult material. If you let a child express their true self, they'll say things like, I hate granny, I absolutely hate granny, or that person's fat, or why has that person got no teeth, or I hate school, or daddy's an idiot, or whatever. And these are going to be part of what the expression of a true self will be. And sometimes, you know, in the parenting role, you can think, oh, my goodness, I'm bringing up a savage or a monster.

21:47I can't allow these feelings. I can't possibly reward the expression of this sort of emotions. And you shut that down. You basically say, you know, if you show me this side of yourself, I will not accept you. And this message can be delivered a bit too early. Particularly, you know, parents have so much going on. I mean, I don't want to blame parents. I've been a parent. I've been on the receiving end of parents. It's complicated stuff. But if a parent, for example, is struggling with depression, they can't deal with a child's despair. So they might feel, if there's any signs of despair and negativity in the child, and then the child might feel the need to be very upbeat.

22:27I'm sure we all know people who can't be sad. They're aggressively upbeat. How are you? There's manic energy. And I think mania is an interesting word. It's when you're are running, running, running from something, from feelings, true feelings that you can't bear to face. And that often does have a story about how the true self has been locked out. And then you grow a false self, which has got to be whatever it is, very strong, very upbeat, or indeed very weak. I mean, you get these fascinating things where children have to fail because their success is a threat to somebody in the surrounding environment.

23:01Fascinating kind of possibilities where, you know, often it's a father can be a mother too. You know, in order to protect their own position, they need the child not to do that well. And then surprise, surprise, the child keeps taking early retirement from things because they've been presented with an unconscious choice between either you succeed and you lose love or, you know, you fail and you can still be in the family circle. So all these very subtle messages are kind of passed down. So looking at your own life through the true self, false self model and almost saying, how much of my truth was allowed out and how much did I have to become somebody else in order to be loved and tolerated.

23:39Now, of course, in adult life, we always have to show a false self at points, at points, and one would be a very disturbed person if one couldn't. Give us an example of that. I mean, look, I think there's two extremes on this, the people pleaser and the manic rebel. So the manic rebel, we've met them all, they're about to sit there GCSEs And they decide that that's the time to tell the teacher what you really think about them. And it's in the exam that you're going to have to write. It's in your English exam that you're really going to tell the examiners what you think about this book or whatever.

24:15And you can't stop yourself. And then later on, when your boss is there and it's your first job, again, the manic rebel thinks, I've got to have to tell the boss, the boss is an idiot and they're going to have to know right now. And they get fired and surprise, surprise. So this person keeps tripping themselves up. What's going on there? It's almost as though their sense of integrity is so fragile. They think, unless I'm constantly putting up a battle for my true self, I'm going to be a compromised human being. So therefore, I've got to burn all bridges and generally make a big fuss all the time.

24:49Otherwise, I won't be real anymore. And that comes at a huge cost for somebody. But then at the other end of the spectrum, you've got the manic people pleaser. And they've got a problem too, because, you know, you ask them how they are and they're always fine. And in a relationship, how are they? They're absolutely fine until they no longer are. And, you know, it goes on and on until maybe they have a breakdown. A breakdown can often be a sign that you've not been bending very much to the truth inside you. And the only way of getting to that truth, that true self, is through an extreme breakage.

25:21And that's a very difficult psychological possibility as well, that the truth can't come out without a crisis. Now, sometimes a crisis is a good thing psychologically, and there are some people who can only start to get well after they've broken down. Say more about it, because again, that's how society says a crisis is something to be avoided. And that's an intriguing response to say it's a good thing. Well, it's a good thing because the alternative might be to keep going at too high a price. You know, I think our bodies, for example, are fascinating instruments of honesty sometimes. I always think that the mind needs to get certain truths out, and it will knock at our conscious door and say, you know, please, I'm a little bit unhappy in this relationship, in this work, with the way I'm living, with, you know, my friendship group, whatever it is.

26:16And either the conscious mind listens, at which point the symptom abates, or it doesn't listen. It's too difficult. There's some kind of conflict around that. And then the symptom has to go somewhere else. And one of the areas it can go is the lower back and the shoulders and maybe other parts of the body, which are places that, if you like, There are a kind of bodily conscience where if something hasn't found a way of expressing itself, you'll be doubled up in pain and unable to cross the room because you're not listening to a signal from within. So sometimes our symptoms, and they could include the inability to get out of bed.

26:53You know, sometimes moods and situations where people will find themselves moving from a so-called high performance life where they're very busy doing all sorts of things. And then suddenly they can't get out of bed or they can't even speak. You know, they might not be able to feed themselves suddenly. I mean, you get very extreme breakdowns where the basics of life kind of cease functioning. And I think those are interesting moments because there are there are search for health via the medium of illness. and I think that in our society which likes to give people a pill and then send them right back out again without exploring what might have made them ill in the first place we often miss the opportunities that are afforded to us through a proper deep reading of our symptoms which holds so many clues I think There's a question that keeps spinning around in my head relating to parenthood and children I just need to know whether I should be saying to my children you can do amazing things with your life because my fear if I don't tell them that they can be amazing, I might remove that spark that could give them this incredible life.

27:59I'm fearful, if you like, of saying to my children, hey, just be average. Just aim for the status quo. Look, I think we have to unpack the word amazing and what that really means. Ultimately, an amazing life is going to be relative to the individual you're talking to. And we began with this. It's a good life means properly exploiting the potential of every human who we happen to be addressing. And that potential is going to be very different. So there isn't a one size fits all. And the problem with words like, you know, if you went down the street with a microphone and said, you know, what's an amazing life?

28:36You'd immediately get a fairly standard answer. You'd have, you know, money would be high there. There could be certain renown. There could be, you know, a penthouse apartment, et cetera, et cetera. So, and that will be fine for some people, but actually not attuned to what others want. So yes, life has lots of potential, you want to say to children, but let's be very individual about what we mean with words like success. because no one is a success at everything. No one is amazing at everything. Every success involves a failure in another area because not all things are compatible. So you really have to cut a very personal path through these choices.

29:18So should they still aim to be ambitious? Should they still want to be the best of the best at their chosen thing? I think they have to get a powerful sense that the world is made by human beings, not by gods. This could sound a bit odd because you might think, well, no one thinks the world's made by gods. But I think we sometimes, it's a very natural childlike position. When you first show up at school, you're tiny, you're the size of a small chair. And the teacher is a giant, really. And it seems like they control the whole of the world and they tell you this and that, and you've got to learn this and you've got to do it like that.

29:51And from that, we take away a sense that the world is built according to laws we don't quite understand by people who are immeasurably more powerful and skilled. Something's going on in a room somewhere where people are pulling the levers, etc. I think to give your child a sense, it's a world built by humans, all of whom are basically a little bit like you, a bit scared, a bit worried, a bit flawed, a bit good, a bit bad, etc. And you can have a shot at shaping how you see your life. I think it's a very important lesson. You walk down the street. Why does the street look the way it does? because someone had a really bad idea about what urban design was in about 50 years ago.

30:33And that's why the street looks as awful as it does. There's no law in this. We could be living in a beautiful town, maybe. And you, child, might design the beautiful town if you get into that sort of position. So rather than saying the way it is is the way it has to be, in many areas there's much more flexibility. And I think traditionally this has been something that so-called privileged people have, because they see mummy or daddy is actually the prime minister. And so they're pulling the levers of power. So the child gets a sense, oh, well, it's just that idiot in the kitchen who I call mummy is actually also going off to, he's got a cabinet brief or something.

31:13And then you get the lesson automatically. And that's a certain psychological privilege to think the world is made by people that I could see in the kitchen. But if you think the world is made by gods who live on Mount Olympus, so I think anything you can do to humanise the structures of power, if you like, is a very useful thing for a child to know about. The other thing I'd like to expand on is that lovely quote that you say about so much of our life is done trying to impress people that we either don't know or don't even like or care ourselves. How do we go about teaching both ourselves and others to be able to immunize ourselves against trying to impress others and instead focusing on impressing ourselves?

31:59I think to really absorb the lesson that you can't carry everybody with you in whatever project you're doing, you know, that you will, whatever way of life you lead, create a certain amount of discord and enemies. And that doesn't have to mean that the life you're leading is wrong. It's just the necessary price of making a choice. Every choice you make in your life will alienate in some way. You could marry a person and that will annoy someone. Somewhere along the road, you'll have annoyed someone. If you do this job somewhere along the line, someone will think that's not right. It'll trigger them in some way.

32:38And we can panic a little bit too soon. Everybody creates envy and discord in others, not willingly. It's just an inevitable byproduct. And to not panic about that and to think, I don't need to carry the whole tribe with me, as it were, that I can, you know, I can have my own smaller circle and not everybody needs to agree. I mean, there's something manic and paranoid in the notion that everyone has to agree. Everyone has to approve. No, let it go. Let it go. Some people are not going to be with you. Doesn't mean to say you've made the wrong choice. It's probably a sign that you've made a rather determined choice.

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35:21Our next partner, you won't be surprised to hear, is AG1. Look, we've been working with AG1 for months and months now, and it is something that for me is a non-negotiable in my day. One scoop, first thing in the morning, and I've got 75 super high quality vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients inside me. And I honestly believe it increases my immune system, improves my mood. I think I sleep better. I've got more energy. I've told you this so many times over the last year or so that I thought I would invite someone onto my podcast, making their high performance debut to tell you what she thinks of AG1 because we take it together.

35:57It's my wife, Harriet. Hey, Harriet. Hello. So this is totally unnatural for her, but she promised me that she would give it a go because she loves it as well. So what do you think of AG1? I personally love it. I'm a mum of two small children and with you being away a lot. I honestly think AG1 has been so good for me. It's the first thing I have when I wake up in the morning. It's my go-to drink. And it's just a great habit that I've formed. And although it's just a small change in my day, I've seen such a huge impact on my energy levels, my sleep. And I think in the past year, I can't think of any times when I've been really poorly in bed.

36:34I've just been so healthy since starting taking it. So I'd highly recommend it. There you go. if you don't listen to me, maybe listen to my wife. And if you're interested in getting involved in AG1, if you want to take ownership of your health today, then why not give it a go? AG1 are offering you a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com forward slash high performance. That's athleticgreens.com forward slash high performance. Thanks, Harriet. Thank you. my fear though is that we can instill these thoughts into our children we can have these conversations with our partner we can discuss these things with our friends but the truth is we live in a society that doesn't a really good example i recently left my job as a football presenter not a single person came to me at a party or an event or you know a friend and said you must be so excited about freedom every single person had the same question but what are you going to do next what's your plan almost like i had to have something to define i was almost screaming inside to say why can't it just be enough to to be here why do i have why are you so obsessed with what am i going to do next i mean really really of course what one should say it's hard to say is um why is my freedom so frightening for you that's really what you should be saying to them, what is it my freedom is triggering in you?

38:07Is that why you think they're asking that question? Of course they are. Because it's a massive threat. They don't like the rigidity of their life, but they don't know how to get out of it. So somebody who's jumping out of the prison presents a huge threat. So if you've picked up a little bit of latent hostility or coldness, that's because you know you're you're posing a great challenge to them you're essentially saying why aren't you why aren't you jumping out the prison with me and that's yeah that's frightening for them so you know we're talking up here about a lot of symptoms if you like whether it's you know children that put fame high on the agenda whether it's adults or children caring what other people think more than caring what they think there's lots of things happening here i think the question I'd be asking is, why is this happening?

38:56Why have we, you know, we've been around for thousands of years, we've evolved as human beings, why have we not evolved to the point where we're having these kinds of valuable conversations and reframing what failure is, what success is, what high performance is, what happiness is? Look, I'd say that we're still at the dawn. We often think of ourselves as quite late on in history, like we've been around for ages. We're still getting going as human beings. We're still we're still learning to know ourselves at a very basic level i think that the whole field of psychology is is barely 100 years old you know as we know it today it's 100 years old you use that brilliant metaphor in your book alan don't you where you say that it's almost like our view of our understanding of our mind is like how we view 17th century doctors putting leeches on us to get blood out it's still quite rudimentary that's right that's right and i think one of the things that we're learning is our really perplexing and dispiriting sensitivity, if you like, oversensitivity.

39:54When biology got going in the late 19th century, and when we really started to understand microbiotic life, people discovered extraordinary things like in a glass of water, there might be microbiotic life that could kill an entire city. And you couldn't see it. In a clear glass of water. There might be certain germs or living that could kill a million people. This seems utterly implausible. And I think we're, at the psychological level, still learning that so-called small things, very, very small things, can have an intense impact on our psyches, which is what makes modern parenting, of course, so fraught and so interesting as well.

40:36But I think that we are learning that we are very, very delicate machines. I think for most of human history, we were looking to survive. Nowadays, we're looking to thrive. It's very different. If you're trying to set up a human being to survive, well, you know, you can give them a slap around the ear every now and then, and, you know, they'll live. They'll have a good life till they're 35, and then they'll succumb, which is what human beings did for most of our history. You know, we were dead by 35, and all we were looking to do was just to kind of procreate the next generation and survive until that time.

41:05We're now looking to live to be 90 and, dare I say it, to be happy and to develop our talents and develop our potential. So we're still working out what's a developmental path got to be for that. If that's our ambition, we may need to really retool how we're seeing development and massive implications. Yes, the family is the place where it all starts. I think we all know, you'll know, I know, people who will be in their 70s, 80s, and you'll talk to them at length. And they're not people who might otherwise moan, but it quickly emerges that what held them back for their whole life was something that happened when they were three or four or five or six or nine.

41:50And very often, it's what one might call a shortfall of love. It's quite a weird concept that love, which is a word we kind of too narrowly associate with going on a date and Valentine's and all that, but that love, intra-human love, is as important to our development as vitamins are to our healthy bodily development. And shortfalls of love lead to appalling deformations of character that can have lifelong consequences. I think we all wish it wasn't true. It's so daunting. What do we do with that information? It's such a terrifying piece of information. So what do we do with that information? I think one of the things we do is to look really very carefully at what a family is and how people are brought up.

42:44I mean, in the same way that people learn language, Think about the porousness of a young child. A young child between the age of nine months and four years is incredibly receptive to syntax, grammar, and vocabulary. And they end up learning Hindu, Finnish, English, Korean, whatever it is, whatever's in the area, they will learn that language. and without anyone sending them to school yet, it's just they absorb a language. And I think while that's going on at a linguistic level, at an emotional level, a child is also learning an emotional language, the language of what's a man, what's a woman, what's tenderness, what's love, what's a reward, what's good, what's bad.

43:31All these lessons are kind of pouring in while people are eating animal-shaped pastas in the kitchen and drawing pictures and doing handstands in the garden. It's all being absorbed. And I think we need to really reflect very carefully on that. We're all going to get it slightly wrong in the parenting role. Thereafter, I think we need to acknowledge that all of us will have tumbled through the kind of sort of whitewater rafting of childhood and probably be slightly hanging out the raft and lost the limb and be scratched all over. And we need to work out where are our wounds? Where are our particular wounds?

44:07What's particularly difficult for us? What are the ways in which we're not doing justice to reality? Because all of us have some pretty strange ideas about life that are bequeathed to us by our complex early histories. You know, we'll have odd ideas about, you know, anger, envy, kindness, success, or slightly in one area or another. Think about everyone you work with, everyone you were at school with. you know imagine a group of 10 20 people um quite quickly you'll think well okay that one always does that thing that one always does the other thing there's that one who just can't get that thing straight or whatever all of us are the kind of legacies of these of these complex upbringings and we're all and i say this with with love we're all a bit strange we're really all of all that's great though right let's be strange yes let's be strange but let's also find a way i mean there's good strange and there's tricky strange there's tricky strange which actually um trips you up and stops you from being the better version of yourself.

45:07Now, one of the problems we tend to have as humans is feedback. Now, feedback is so hard to receive. And we know this in an office context. And we know this also within a relationship context. I mean, one of the deepest wishes we go into relationships with is, love me for who I really am. What a difficult idea. I mean, really? You really want to be loved for who you actually are? In a way, yes, we want to never be criticized. We want just someone to welcome us as a full, you know, wondrous creature. And of course, no one can because that is asking too much. But we're so bad at hearing feedback and we're so bad at giving feedback.

45:43Normally, this happens at, you know, 12 o 'clock in the kitchen when the dishes need to be done and people are a bit tetchy. And they throw vicious words at one another because they're frustrated. And then those vicious words give birth to other vicious words. And, you know, you get into these terrible cycles. often you'll get couples who are trying to teach each other really important lessons but they're not speaking them properly and they're not listening to them properly so a major opportunities to grow are our myths and our pride gets in the way so tell us how how we do give a missing feedback better i think one of the things we do is to accept that it is entirely legitimate to see relationships as arenas in which we learn about ourselves and deliver knowledge to the other person about who they are, but that we have to do it very, very carefully.

46:32But there's nothing illegitimate about that. Because I think the notion of, you know, I had to break up with my partner because they didn't accept me for who I am. And normally people will clap at this point and go, brilliant, you got out of a terrible relationship. And I'm not discounting that. That could be a difficult relationship. But it could also be that the non-acceptance captures something important that needs to be listened to. To be endorsed for everything one is isn't love. I mean, that's, I don't know, a kind of euphoric demand for approval that breaks all respectable boundaries. It also means we're rigid.

47:10Accept me for who I am. It means I'm not going to change for anybody. How unsafe and toxic is that? Absolutely. So two people need to accept that they are flawed. I mean, the ability to go through life, and we're big on this at the School of Life, to actually say, I'm a flawed human being. Christianity used to emphasize this point, but because it was associated with lots of things about Christianity that were then quite dark and discounted, etc., it's not a way of thinking that's popular in the modern world. But the notion that we are all sinners, right? You say that nowadays. People go, oh, how do you mean sinners?

47:40I'm not a sinner. I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm beautiful. it's quite a good starting point to go you know we're all a bit broken in some way and that's okay it's okay to be broken we're just trying to you know fix ourselves and that's okay so it's a better starting point and it's particularly useful in relationships because it breaks what could otherwise be a kind of cycle of defensiveness and I think defensiveness is the great enemy of communication growth in friendship and in relationships so can you take us through the steps then alan about how if you're listening to this you're thinking in my relationship i want to start to explore i want to receive and to give feedback and to accept each other tell us how we do that i think a really useful question to ask on a date you know you go on a date with your partner and you say, it could sound a bit odd, how have I annoyed you recently?

48:37I probably annoyed you. How do you think I've annoyed you? And to be able to listen to the answer without going, that's not true. That's not true. You've annoyed me. Not to do any of that. Simply to listen. And therapists are good at teaching us this. To reflect back. So someone goes, I'm annoyed because every time I mention a friend, you somehow find something wrong with a friend. And rather than going, that's not true. I really like all your friends. To go, okay, so I'm hearing that you don't think I give your social choices enough approval. And the person goes, wow, I've actually been heard.

49:11I've actually been understood. Brilliant. You just rephrase what they've told you without butting in and saying, you know, I'm a good person. You allow yourself to tolerate the notion that you've made a mistake, that, you know, this is difficult for you. So what do we do to warm ourselves up to be able to hear that and to reframe it without letting our own ego get in the way or our own fragility, wanting to defend ourselves? It's partly a leap of faith. And of course, once you've done one round of this, and so they've done it for you and you've done it for them, that becomes very much easier to do the second round.

49:45And then another useful exercise is for each person to say, what is it about my background that's made something difficult for me? What's made it difficult for me that the duvet cover is never properly on the bed? What's made it difficult for me that you come home late and I get angry? You know, to try and explain, because so often we're not very generous in our explanations, both to ourselves and to the other person, about why difficult behaviors occurred. But there's almost always a poignant backstory. But we're unable to deliver it properly to the other person because we're so on edge and we're so angry.

50:21So to be able to give that backstory is another gift, both to ourselves and the other person. And, you know, at the end of the day, the more backstories are shared in a calm way, the more everybody emerges as worthy of love. Of course they do. Of course they do. It's the lack of a backstory that always brings out, you know, anger and cruelty. Why are we not teaching people to have these conversations earlier on? You know, I'm 44, right? I've been married. Well, I've been with my wife. We met very young, so nearly 25 years together. no one's ever said to me try asking your wife what have I done that's annoyed you what about me isn't great you know those sorts of conversations this work on our relationship the fact that marriage and you know long-term relationships take effort and time and care and I'd say the answer is um that we haven't valued as a society good relationships and flourishing um highly enough and you know we really value that people don't have car crashes and that's That's why there's an enormous industry around trying to prevent car crashes.

51:25We don't have such precautionary views around relationships. We just don't. So I think that it looks at slightly cynically, we don't care enough. And because we don't care enough, we don't put enough effort in. So there are some people, your listeners, others who do care very much, and they'll be starting to invest in this area. Maybe we don't know how amazing our relationships could be as well. I think that's true. I think that's true. I think there's maybe almost a kind of sunk cost fear that, you know, I'm 20 years into this. It's been really difficult. The thought that it could be better is actually, you know, quite frightening.

52:01And let's not forget that, you know, if you've had a life where your safe place has been, people don't understand me, I'm isolated, and there's a lot of conflict. If that's what you know, and you're built to handle that situation, because you throw yourself into your work. You have quite a cynical view of others. You don't put much trust in it. You're built for that. You're built for that kind of conflictual situation. Somebody comes along and goes, you know what? You could be close to another human being. You could let them in. You could lower your guard and it could be okay. One level you think, brilliant.

52:32Another level, it's a disaster. It's like, well, I've been leading the wrong life. So there's sometimes an investment in continuing down patterns of unhappiness or a kind of angry defensiveness because it's worked well for you in the past. I want to move on and talk about mental health. So can we change the way this world operates? Can we change people's thinking about being employed and their idea of freedom? Can we change our children attaching their happiness to being a YouTube star? Can we change people when they start their careers thinking they will only be happy when they earn a certain salary or buy a certain house?

53:10Like, can we change this? Yes and no. But I sense by the impatience of your question, which is an impatience I've been through a lot, but I think I've slightly outgrown. I think one can spend a long time looking for a cockpit and in the cockpit looking for a button that will change the world and think, if I press that thing, everything will happen. There isn't. I think the way to think about it is, you know, there's a giant river of humanity and all of us are standing by the side of the river and we can put a few things in it. We can get our picture of whatever our special juice is that we want to put in that river.

53:44And we will change in some way the current and texture of the river of humanity. But it's not in the power of anyone, even the most powerful human on the planet, to magically change the world. We want all of us. We massively exaggerate our powers. All of us are very fragile, evanescent beings. The most powerful human on Earth today has got a very limited capacity to change humanity. It's a broad river that kind of sweeps along and it does its own thing. If we can just change a tiny bit of the riverbank, you know, we slightly adjust something or slightly change the turbulence or quality of the water as it makes its way down through time, we'll have done well.

54:26And that's okay. That's okay. So, you know, you're running this lovely podcast. That's your contribution at the moment to humanity. And that's okay. And, you know, a certain number of people will listen to us, a certain number of people. also we never quite know our impact on others you know that's the other odd thing you can you can have a three-minute conversation with somebody that you forget about instantly and they'll remember it for the next 50 years and it will have you know huge consequences so we can never quite know so a certain amount of modesty but you know i think i know that feeling you get up in the morning go i nothing's changing it's all it's all you know can i pick up a word that you used at the start of that answer though alan where you spoke about patience or impatience and when i was reading your book i i was reminded of some research i'd read from um the author brad stolberg and steve magnus where they'd spoke about research about the perfect fit mindset and they said in our society we assume that when we meet somebody if they're going to be like a long-term partner we should feel fireworks right away when we start a job we should be hugely passionate about it right away and if it's not we often walk away from it or abandon the relationship when if we were patient and gave it time, it could possibly form into something that does last a while.

55:40I'm interested in what have you learned about developing patience and giving something time, whether it's to explore an emotion or to stick with something, even when it feels initially uncomfortable, and what are the benefits of doing that? I think one of the things I've learned is that self-awareness is by necessity a very, very slow process. And I think, particularly if you're writing, you often want to get to the point very quickly. And it's very frustrating. You think, something I want to say, etc. Sometimes the best way to work is to stop working, for example. And this could seem like a very local example, but I think there's a bigger lesson in that.

56:21Sometimes the way in which you're really developing your ideas is to go and stare out of the window and look at the clouds passing.

56:31It I think sometimes the mind is working things out at its own pace and is pushing you towards choices and decisions that you don't really know. You can't know for maybe a long time why something happened. But it might be next week, next month, in five years. You think, oh, okay, I'm starting to see why that thing took place. There was a deeper logic that was hidden from me at the time that's now becoming apparent. So I think the ability to be a little bit patient, to realize that you can't just step into your mind like there's a trap door and you can just go in with a torch and just say, you know, who am I?

57:08What should I do? What should I make the best choices? You might need to know yourself by bumping into bits of life and working out where the edges of the room are, what the contours of your own personality are. You can't get there in one go. And that's in a way a little bit spiriting because we want an instant solution. But once you can set yourself up for that, greater relief can come, I think. Talking of relief, you've described mental breakdowns as this quest for knowledge. Could you explain that in a bit more detail for us? Well, sometimes we think that we can know ourselves without pain.

57:45But I think we might need, at points, to have a certain amount of crises that alert us to things that we wouldn't be ready for until our pain reached a certain threshold. That we're simply uninclined to think properly about situations until they boil over. That would be lovely if that wasn't necessary. But I think in some cases it really is necessary. It's only when something goes quite wrong. And that's why sometimes, you know, illnesses of the mind or the body are moments where people think, okay, something's not right. And actually, if I'm honest, it's not been right for a while. I've been in pain for a while.

58:31And, you know, I mentioned the word mania and manic a few times. It's an interesting word. The idea of being in a manic state where you can't bear to look inside because there's something a little bit too confronting. and you use external activity. Work is a brilliant one, but it could be exercise, it could be family life, it could be pornography, alcohol, whatever you like. Something that keeps you away from you until such times you can no longer do it anymore because there is some sort of crisis that forces you back on yourself and leads you to ask, okay, what am I really trying to do here? What's not working at all?

59:08Let me be honest with myself. Have you been there? I've been there. I've been there. over small and large things, I'd say. And I think that's why I'm very alert to how long it can take and how humble one has to be over a life. I wish there were a straight path that you could just kind of say, okay, that's what I need to do. That's where I'm going to go. I think life is made up of a number of necessary crashes. It's the old thing of using a car crash, using the crisis, as it were, to develop your insight. So what steps can you highlight or advocate for anyone listening to this that maybe that resonates with them?

59:53They realize they've been disassociating the feelings and they're filling it with activity to avoid us having to have our own version of a car crash. How do we avoid that? Well, look, I'm a great fan of therapy. But let me also say that many, many therapists are very substandard. And so if there are listeners out there who go, oh, I tried that thing and it was no good. Well, keep going. It's like love. You can try it a lot and it remains a useful thing to aim for. But it's very hard to find the right person or a person who is going to be right for you. But really what we mean by therapy is time and committed space in which to explore not just to live, but explore how you're living.

1:00:38Why did I get angry that day? What am I feeling right now? Sometimes it can be done with another person. It can also be done alone to carve out time for a therapeutic reflection on your own life and to say, okay, even a very simple question. What am I feeling right now? Just give yourself a bit of time every day. You go, what's coming up for me? What's on the agenda? It could sound childishly simple. What do you mean what's on the agenda? but just shut your eyes sit in a room on your own and say to yourself what's coming up for me now what normally by the way the answer's there waiting for you just behind the door you know it's there waiting for you just open the door and you'll realize i know what it is it's that argument i had with you know x at 11 o 'clock you know now it's maybe seven o 'clock at night something but that argument is still vivid and there's something in it and then you say okay right well what was it about that thing what is it that's disturbing me what is it that's sad or it could be something happy and let's not always skew it towards the negative could be you know there's something so amazing when i walked out of the house this morning the trees the light there's some promise about that day and you're like okay right well what is it let's try and let's try and unpack it what was that excitement what was it what can you learn from it how can how can a bigger theme emerge from that you know all of us are unbelievably sensitive machines that throw up a huge amount of data.

1:02:02And you know what we do with most of the data? Stick it in the bin. We just chuck it all away. We register every day so much. In an average five-minute conversation with a stranger, in an hour of going for a walk or whatever, you will think more thoughts that are in the average library. You know, our brains are so rich, but we don't do them the honour of exploring them. We don't sit with our thoughts long enough to unpack them. Some of you go, well, I'm not schooled in this. I've not been to university. I don't know how to do that. Well, it's got nothing to do with that. We are all wonderfully well-equipped to look inside at what we're feeling.

1:02:39Just literally ask yourself, what are you feeling? What are you feeling right now? What are you feeling? Right now? Terrifically honoured to be with you guys. It's lovely. I've written this book. I've been on my own for a long time, writing it. Lovely to have a conversation. So I feel honoured. I don't know you guys deeply. I know your voices and I know your approach, but I don't, you know, it's the first time I'm in this chair and that's a lovely feeling. So broadly, I'm chuffed. But I'd also say that I won't really fully know what I've been feeling for a while. Feelings take time to emerge. And again, giving it time, you know.

1:03:17But again, yeah, just come back to the idea, our brains are wonderful machines. We don't treat them right. We don't give them the space they need. We don't get to know them compassionately enough. We're not curious enough. And that's why we run into so many mental problems and disorders. We're going to move on to our quickfire questions now. But before we do that, after all of the things that we've spoken about, I think what I need to know from you is, should we be aiming for happiness? My fear with happiness, if that's what we're aiming for, is that it's inevitable that happiness comes and goes.

1:03:51i've i'm trying to find acceptance rather than happiness because i think that whether you're happy or sad whether you're up or down acceptance yeah i see where you're coming from i like the word fulfillment yeah because fulfillment you could have a fulfilling life but be in a pretty bad mood quite a lot of the time you'd be have a fulfilling life but actually things have gone wrong today because it suggests to me a goal that is quite compatible with reversals with with difficult moves, with difficult stages. There is something about the word happiness that is maybe a little bit brittle. It suggests that unhappiness means that one has failed.

1:04:27And I think that, you know, the human mind is, you know, we are glass half empty creatures, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up about that. There are good evolutionary reasons why we're glass half empty creatures. You know, the glass half full ones all got eaten somewhere, you know, thousands of years ago. So we are the heirs of the great warriors of our species, the ones who did wake up in the morning noticing that things were difficult. And that's all right, so long as we're properly focused and we have a kind of philosophy where problems can be contributing to a good life. I think none of us need a perfect life.

1:05:00We need a life where the difficulties we run into make sense within our wider conception of what we're doing here on earth. That's what we need. We're now going to move to our quickfire questions. And the first one is the three non-negotiable behaviors that are important to you kindness has to be top of the list um thereafter thoughtfulness because that's so reassuring in oneself and in another person thoughtfulness um and thirdly laughter which is a sign that one's properly understood how absurd one is within the broader context of things what's the greatest piece of advice you've ever received and I think the best piece of advice is probably around the necessity of choice and every choice requiring sacrifice.

1:05:55So whatever you choose, it means you're not choosing something else. And therefore, you can't have it all. And therefore, regret is not some personal curse. It's part of the human condition. You will be regretting certain things. That's okay. welcome to welcome to the planet that's all right are we adding to the toxic narrative around success by calling our podcast the high performance podcast i think if you quickly nuance it uh it it can be the starting point for really interesting conversations so um to use a slightly cliched or or aggressive phrase but then turn it is i think quite a clever thing to do you could go back to one moment of your life what would it be and why Look, I think the adolescent me was very troubled and very alone.

1:06:47And I think more than trying to remove the problems, to simply say, these problems have a long tail and a long future, and it's all right. You'll learn to put these to use. The trick is not to have a problem-free life. It's to have a life where your problems contribute to something interesting. Are you happy? today yes tomorrow no yesterday probably not but i'm broadly on a good day fulfilled what's your greatest strength and your biggest weakness um my greatest strength is my ability to unpack feelings i think give me a feeling and i'll get to work on it try and work out what's going on in it so i think that's probably my greatest strength greatest weakness um anxiety and behind anxiety fear yeah too much of that um everything uh i'm a catastrophist um and everything is always on on the verge of turning into the worst version of itself i am that as well but i actually have worked out in my head that maybe that's actually a positive thing and it's probably kept me safe if you were a true catastrophist you wouldn't think that you'd think it was just a catastrophe that's true so i think i think you're not a jedi level are you at jedi level yes 100 100 100 so how does that i'm interested in how how does that manifest itself in your life and how how do you control it or manage that emotion um kind people around me have tried to point this out to me i think i don't trust situations i don't trust that that things can be okay.

1:08:29I'm learning to. And I know how to do this for other people, but I find it hard to do for myself. And I think that it can lead to cutting yourself off unfairly from possibilities. And, you know, there is something about a dark prognosis that, you know, you can end up making it happen when it didn't need to happen. I think that's actually a really powerful thing though to admit that you're still searching for answers at the age of 53 because there'll be a lot of people that listen to this that think wow i wish i was alan de botton he's got it all sorted he knows the answers to everything and i think it's important to say that that's not of course yes and i think um absolutely i mean hopefully is it something that emerges from your show maybe i think it perhaps something you could need to bait right into it i mean if anyone claims to know what on earth's going on um they need their head examined i mean it's a sign that they're not really wrestling with enough of the problems or they're not being honest with you of course we're all still at the very beginning of trying to work out what's going on and our final question your one golden rule that you would like to leave our listeners with for living a high performance life kindness to yourself and to others and what really what i mean by that is um kindness to accept that you may be stranger and more complicated than you bargained with and uh you're going to be kind enough to the world to make an accommodation for that and you're going to you're going to work on yourself so that you are uh you know not going to cause too much damage to those who have to come into contact with you and that's again for everybody work in progress i don't thank you so much what a fascinating conversation thank you

1:10:11damien jake an incredible amount of things to pick out from that i think the overall sense that I had was, are we spending enough time asking the questions that matter? Like, in all honesty, I don't remember the last time you and I had a conversation about things other than sort of high performance, like real, how are you? Like, what are you happy about? What are you sad about? What are you stressed about? I certainly have come away from that conversation that I'm going to speak to Harriet later and basically just say, like, I don't think I've loved you enough like we've existed really nicely and we've done some good things and been for some nice meals and whatever but like really like loving you do you know what i mean i don't i'm not sure i don't think i've done that well that's really powerful and very honest jake i think i think you're right i think what i've taken from that really incredible conversation was the power of emotional literacy just leaning into emotions whether that's good or bad emotions and learning rather than let them wash over you sometimes and stay with them and explore them you know so many of our guests i think of the conversation we had way back with steven gerrard when he spoke around the emotions of that moment when he got sent off against manchester united after 40 seconds and he said to us that if somebody would have just said to him how are you feeling how are you really feeling and he'd have felt safe and had the language to be able to articulate his disappointment his frustration his anger and explore all of those rather than let it manifest itself in such an explosive way he could have been even better and i think we can all be even better if we can learn to lean into these emotions and and understand and articulate them rather than sometimes deny the more uncomfortable ones even just the idea he spoke about just sitting around as a family and saying what's around the corner for me like what am i holding on to at the moment what is derailing me what does tomorrow look like what's the future feel like what am i feeling like and just do it as a as a family as a group like the simplest thing that takes maybe five minutes a week but done every week it would not just transform a family but it could genuinely transform society it would just change the way we feel and the way that we interact with each other yeah you know again the best time to fix a roof is when the sun is shining.

1:12:34So rather than wait for these emotions to explode in anger or recrimination, that question of what have I done that's annoyed you recently and put yourself in a position to really listen to it is a really incredible way to fix a relationship or to make sure that you stay on track rather than ignore it and hope that it disappears or fix itself naturally. So I think that willingness to go and explore and lean into emotions is what Alan's teaching us there that can be revolutionary for myself and hopefully many other people would you be brave enough to ask Geraldine what you've done that's annoyed her recently or would you be concerned the answer would go on for so long yeah well I sometimes think about like I remember a conversation with Geraldine once when I came home and she said is this how you thought married life was going to be and it was like you obviously don't so I'll let you go first and she opened up with some of the things that I was doing that I thought I was working away a lot I wasn't around as much and to her it was a frustration that she needed to be able to give me that feedback and I remember thinking it was a really elegant way in which she chose to open it by rather than attacking me just asking me what I thought married life was going to be and whether I was acting in accordance to it so yeah I think I will go back to that and invite it i'm not sure i like the answers but as alan said it's unless we explore these we don't actually get chance to live a fulfilled life well i enjoyed it and i know i'll take a lot away from it i know you will as well and actually one of the really nice things is that i think that everyone that's listened to it will take something very different it's not a it's not a clear manifesto of do this and life will change that so many small nuanced topics were covered there that people can pick up on a tiny thing that was said by alan who i really loved by the way and they can just explore that as deeply as they want in their own life yeah to me it's like a kaleidoscope where you look at it and you can see any pattern that you wouldn't i think listen to it with an open mind and i'm sure you'll take away something that makes sense for you in your life incredible author fascinating guy thanks mate Well, that's it.

1:14:52Listen, don't forget to share this episode with someone. I think people need to hear the kinds of messages that Alain is sharing. So please just send this to someone that you think would benefit from it. You can also watch on YouTube. You can join our book club. You can download the High Performance app. There are so many ways to keep your journey going with High Performance. But honestly, thank you so much for coming. Just remember to stay humble, curious and find your own version of high performance thanks for listening

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