I’ve been reading a book about personal change and anger, and one paragraph early on in the book stood out to me:
[If you want to change yourself, do it] very slowly, no matter how crazy or self-defeating our current behavior appears to be.
It exists for a reason and may serve a positive and protective function for ourselves and others. If we want to change, it is important to do so slowly so that we have the opportunity to observe and test out the impact of one small, but significant change on a relationship system. If we get ambitious, and try to change too much, too fast, we may not change at all.
Instead, we may stir up so much anxiety and emotional intensity within ourselves and others as to eventually reinstate old patterns and behaviors, or we may end up hastily cutting off from an important relationship, which is not necessarily a good solution.
– The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner
In this episode, I talk about the benefits of slow change, and why radical transformations are often all sizzle and no steak.
Transcript:
So read you a paragraph out of this book, uh, the dance of anger, and then it would have to just stay. They sect it. I know that when I read it, I highlighted it and it touched something in me and I thought, I don’t want to even explore this too far.
[00:00:15] I’ll just talk to Romina about this on the podcast. So it’s actually the very beginning of the book where she articulates. What the structure of the book is what the purposes, how one should read it. But then there’s a part where she says, how does one make use of this book? And then I thought her answer was very interesting, very slowly, no matter how crazy or self-defeating our current behavior appears to be.
[00:00:41]It exists for a reason and may serve a positive and protective function for ourselves and others. If we want to change, it is important to do so slowly so that we have the opportunity to observe and test out the impact of one small, but significant change on a relationship system. If we get ambitious, and try to change too much, too fast, we may not change at all.
[00:01:03]Instead, we may stir up so much anxiety and emotional intensity within ourselves and others as to eventually reinstate old patterns and behaviors, or we may end up hastily cutting off from an important relationship, which is not necessarily a good solution. So that stood out to me. there’s something inside of me that loved that.
[00:01:25] Basically her answer to how does one make use of this book was very slowly and carefully because, I mean, this seems such old advice, but also Sage advice, but it, it’s not modern at all. It’s not contemporary. It’s not something you. I don’t think you would find that kind of energy, almost Amy kind of advice we give today, especially advice to people that are seeking out big changes in their life.
[00:01:57] Right. We’re in such a world. That’s about the shortcut, the final solution, the transformation, the things can happen quickly. Once it clicks the, once you change your behavior in these areas, everything in your life will change. it stopped me in my tracks to read, you know, how you should use this book.
[00:02:15] How about slowly and very carefully? How about. Instead of changing everything all at once. Instead of making hastily decisions and conclusions on what relationships are good and bad and cutting off of them, or being very dramatic about the way you want these things to change. How about you do one thing at a time in your take your time to observe.
[00:02:40]How has this changed impacting me? How has it really, how does it feel? How does it sustain? Not just when I did it that day, but over a week, over multiple weeks. And then as you observed that, you can add the next step, take the next change. But if you do too much too quickly, you might be killing a pattern that was there for good reason, that you didn’t fully understand.
[00:03:04] You might be killing off a relationship because you’re overwhelming yourself and others in a way that is not going to enrich your life. Now that these people are gone or this person has gone from your life or you might do so much so quick, that all you’re going to do is you’re going to do a three 60 all the way back to your original self in a very short.
[00:03:23] And there’s also another thing you can sometimes observe where people. Make so drastic changes and they get so caught up and excited and enthusiastic about all the intensity of it that they lose themselves in the intensity. And don’t really notice even what’s actually going on, right? It’s like you can kind of fall in love with the how strong something fields without actually knowing what direction it goes.
[00:03:45] Yeah, I love that. I love the way you said that you can fall in love with how strong something feels, how intense something is. Right. We equate the intensity with lasting change of finally, arriving at some destination that we’ve been seeking for so long.
[00:04:02]But the destination is rarely our life when you truly have changed. Or at least when I look back at my life at the inflection point where I feel like I became a different person, I made a big internal change. Oftentimes that change felt very peaceful. It was more of a letting go of something. where I looked at it flying away and I went, Oh, that’s it, that’s gone now. Yeah. It had a lightheartedness to it, then a jumping and holding off to some crazy, you know, uh, we use junction kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Yes, exactly. We would jump off a cliff and hold onto something. You’re like, ah, I made it unsafe.
[00:04:42] Now. It doesn’t feel like that. I’m a changed person. I’m holding the change in my hands and it’s saving me. It doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels more like letting go of something older, going up. That’s gone now and it’s effortless almost. It’s just, it flies away on its own. It’s done. There’s a peacefulness to it.
[00:04:59] That quiet peacefulness is feedback for, something that has longevity that will last something that’s deeply rooted. Versus anything that’s too hasty. Anything that’s too wild, too loud, too intense is not grounded. It’s not deeply rooted, still flying in the air being, caught by the wind.
[00:05:19]but, there’s a theater too, which is enticing and exciting and there’s a thrilling delusion. wow. Finally, I found what I was looking for. Or I finally had enough and now I’m going to rock the boat. There’s something cool about that too. Like we, sometimes when you’re really unhappy about something for a very long period of time, When you’re finally willing to do something about it.
[00:05:42] Maybe you want to overdo something about it. That’s the problem. Like you have the desire to cause trouble because to a certain degree, then you might get reassurance that you’re really changing because it’s so loud and everybody is affected and everybody’s responding to you or, you know, versus what you make a quiet change.
[00:06:01]And nobody knows nobody notices, and there’s not, it’s not like a chute drama thing in your life. Maybe then you would have to deep down be sure that the change has happened. And when you are lacking that sense, you’re looking for it in some other way. I’ve been thinking about this for months now, and it’s never.
[00:06:18]crystallized to a degree where I could talk about it, but for a long time now I’ve been observing certain people in my life. some that are close friends, but also some that are not close friends at all. Just people that I know that have been following along on their journey to some degree, on social media and.
[00:06:38]One thought that has come up is that some people and I used to be that way and I, and I see the allured it, and I still can find enjoyment in it, but there’s something inside of us sometimes where we, in order to change or improve, we want to challenge ourselves ideally with something distinct, like, let’s say.
[00:07:00] You know, uh, I want to be more disciplined, so, you know, and I like, I, I read an article or listen to a podcast about Wim Hof, the Iceman, and then I go, I’m going to do the 30 day, ice cold shower challenge. and, then I’m going to do the, I’m running a marathon next month challenge. And then I’m going to do the every day, I’m reading a book for two hour challenge.
[00:07:24] You know what I mean? The, the, that sort of, I need a challenge, project, something I can social media about something that if I told a coworker or a family member. About that beat impressed, some big bang thing in my life. And those things are the ways that I try to create a better me or change my life.
[00:07:48] And the allure of that is really great. And these things can really work sometimes, you know, they can really be the beginning of a lifelong. Thing changes inside of us, or sometimes it can just be fun right away, switch things up to make life more colorful, to have a bit of fun. Like again, like we’ve said many times on this podcast, it’s not what you do.
[00:08:12] It’s the how and why you do it. That matters. It doesn’t matter if you buy a Ferrari or you do yoga all day. none of these two activities is holier than the other, because the reason why you do it, how you feel doing it matters a lot more. But there’s something about it that I’ve started contemplating that is disconnected from what feels to me like truth in some abstracts or real life, maybe let’s call it that, I know people that can do very difficult challenges, They can do the. every morning, I’ll jump into a ice bath and every evening I’m going to do whatever the fuck, like I’ll run 30 miles and they can go through these really difficult things if they are in the framework of a challenge, but they can’t. Get their life together, They cannot make their startup work or their business succeed.
[00:09:04]They cannot have a relationship, with a partner that is happy or they can’t have friendship that has lasted, they cannot find inner peace or happiness. They’re never, you know, at ease with themselves or they can’t, have an original thought of be creative. Like they can do things that are proxies for certain abilities.
[00:09:24] Wow. you would think this person is incredibly strong, incredibly resilient, incredibly disciplined, incredibly tough. So smart, so determined surely with all these skills and all these master challenges. This person is going to be a master of a universe of their universe. But then they’re not because the reality is that your life is not a movie and it’s not a 30 day challenge either.
[00:09:48]It’s in the mundane day to day, moment to moment it’s in the unremarkable that you truly are writing the script of your life. It’s not in the, one big moment. Like in a movie it’s in the everyday moments where we form who we are and most of those everyday moments are not going to be as exciting as in thrilling, as I just read a book, I read David Goggins book, and now I’m going to dedicate the rest of the year to do 2000 pull-ups, which is dope.
[00:10:18] Right. I fucking love that. Like all that shit is awesome to me. Yeah. But I’m just saying, just because you may be doing 2000 pull-ups, we’ll swap over to you changing your life. That can happen. I don’t know exactly what is necessary for one to lead to the next, probably an inner openness to truly change, but there is a danger in it.
[00:10:39]That distorts, that is just because it’s big and exciting. Doesn’t mean it will translate to all of your life also on the flip side, just because these other moments are not within the framework of a challenge or a book or podcast episode, or somebody that inspires you or something that you could tweet and share, just because it seems like a small throwaway moment doesn’t mean it’s not truly significant meaningful, and that it matters.
[00:11:04] And It’s in the translating one to the other. I think that sometimes we get lost maybe more so now than than before where there’s just so much of this, right? There’s just so many people that do interesting things on social media that you can follow and get really inspired by. There’s so many interesting new books or podcasts episodes, or YouTube videos or documentaries.
[00:11:23] It’s very easy to read something or see something get really inspired to do something. In a sprint kind of way, this year challenge, the new year’s resolution, the 30 day challenge, the, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. But then when, when you look, try to look at who is this person beyond this thing, how do they live their life?
[00:11:43] What, what are they accomplishing beyond all these little challenges or whatever? oftentimes many of these things fall apart. Yeah. Even if you think about Saints of the past. they all have it miracles, right. These miracles. But I was also thinking, yeah. and this is like very blurry memory, but Moshe fed in case, is, is some kind of like, I don’t even know what you would call him body worker.
[00:12:06] Right. And he, he used to have this method where he would make very small, like you would kind of look at you doing certain movements and then would make very small adjustments to. Your posture or the way you make a certain movement or something. And then that would have kind of a slow motion chain reaction.
[00:12:24]and there were people who had like serious, serious problems, but all he did was like, he’s a very small and seemingly insignificant changes and adjustments. and after, after I read his books, actually like try to find someone who can do this and their life practitioners now in the book, it was, you know, very, very fascinating to read.
[00:12:41] And I fell in love with that idea with the practitioners that I at least bet it wasn’t like this, but I still love the idea. Also I was thinking of a niche. Erickson is Interventions. Right. Because some of these, he tapped on some small thing in a conversation. Right. And that, that led to some, major change.
[00:12:59]I think that as anything and everything in life, There’s not one way. Right? Of course. Can we find many examples where a big dramatic moment was the moment that changed my life? Yeah, of course. But More more often than that. We can find people that made many cumulative, small, good decisions that compounded over time.
[00:13:26] The problem with that is that it’s not as compelling a story because the potency of it. Is so watered down, right? It’s like, you you’ll get really healthy if you drink this for the rest of your life is different from take a sip of this and you’ll be charged, right. Charge up. And from a storytelling perspective, we gravitate towards, we need something that can be told, in a couple of minutes or an hour, we can listen to something that would be told over 40 years, right?
[00:13:55] Like we’ll fall asleep, along the way of somebody’s life. That’s a big thing. I remember him in exact contradiction to the quote that I just read from the dance of anger. Remember one of the things that I loved most from Richard Bandler’s philosophy on change was that change is always fast.
[00:14:11] He’s like change is always fast. There’s no thing that is slow change. Maybe it takes you 40 years to get to the point. But the moment you change is instantaneously. It’s one second and now you’re changed. Yeah. And I remember when I first heard that I was like, fuck. Yeah, that’s true. And there’s a lot of truth in that as well.
[00:14:28] Right. There’s a lot of truth in that, that oftentimes it just takes us a long time to accept the change or to decide fully to commit. But then the, the acting of the change can be really instantaneously. It doesn’t oftentimes does need. You know, years and years of painful practice. But the thing I liked about the quote and the dance with anger was that it highlighted maybe because this is also a book about relationships that when you’re not happy about your, how, who you are and how you are in your real intimate relationships and anger might play a role.
[00:15:07]We in general, I find this oftentimes happens in intimate relationships when people find themselves unhappy in life and they look at their intimate relationship either with family or with their partner and they ask themselves, what about this leaves me so empty and how can I change my life? We might act too fast and too.
[00:15:25]Brash too quickly, by the time we’ve made a decision because we were holding on so long and we’ve been unhappy for so long that then we need kind of the release of drastic action. But that doesn’t mean that that’s not going to cause even bigger pain down the line. Right. But that’s really going to be helpful or healing in some way.
[00:15:44] It is releasing. I think that’s maybe also something that’s an interesting distinction between the feeling of release and the feeling of healing. Cause sometimes I think we can get confused about the two. I can have a big thing where, you know, where I tell somebody how I really feel about them. And I tell them all the things they’ve wronged me with and I blame them.
[00:16:04] And I speak up for the first time. And the reaction is, let’s say they even are remorseful and everything where they might not know how to respond because that. Made some good points at the end of that more aggressive exchange, I might feel great release, which will feel really, really good, but great release does not mean we have a better relationship or that we have healed, or I have even healed the wounds I had.
[00:16:36] Right. It’s almost like I felt this person was injuring me over the years. I’ve never tasted any of these injuries. And now I just injured that person and something about that was felt good, but that doesn’t mean that my wounds are healed. Now that I’m whole, that I’m healthy. I just injured the other person as well.
[00:16:58] Maybe that was important to necessarily to stop them from what they were doing to me. I’m not saying that that is never the right thing, but feeling released. Of tension of all the buildup of all the frustration, which can feel amazing is not the same as I have finally changed, which is something I’ve seen many times and I’ve experienced myself.
[00:17:18] I’ve done this myself, where I built this was building up, building up, building up, and then I did some dramatic thing and I felt great for all the release tension. And it was like now, see, I only have to act like this every day in my life will be amazing, but you cannot act like this everyday. Because you don’t have the buildup of 10 years of tension to get this great of a bang of a release.
[00:17:40] It’s just not realistic that this is new. Your new self is now dramatically screaming at people every day or whatever it was, you know, even if it felt great, it is not a new you or a sustainable way of being for you, maybe. Um, and, and I think when something feels truly great, We just want to hold onto that and go, ah, I feel so great.
[00:18:03] This is my new me. This now means I finally changed. Maybe, maybe not, you know, doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel good. Doesn’t mean that it, you should do it, but don’t confuse this for real change and don’t confuse this for what you truly want in life. Like what we all, I think aim for more often than not in this example is to never have the buildup of this tension to live a more tension free friction-free life to be more at peace, to be more happy.
[00:18:35] So there’s never the, the, the need to have these shoes releases of anger. That’s the kind of relationship we want to have a relationship where we’re not getting injured and we don’t have to injure people back. But when, when something just feels dramatic and big and releasing, I think we all might stumble into the illusion of, yes, this is my new life.
[00:18:57] And I finally, I finally made it, I made it to the other side. It’s like, hopefully, maybe, uh, let’s see. I really, it’s funny that something like this in a book that is about people that want change. I thought it was such a refreshing take too early on in the book read. Well, the way you should go about this very slowly, right?
[00:19:24] These are important things. Some. Of your patterns that you don’t like, maybe they’re there to protect you. We have to take a good look, be patient before you change everything. Some of these relationships that you’re maybe ready to shake up might be really important. And you don’t want to break up in a rush.
[00:19:42]And if you do too much too quick, It’s going to just increase anxiety. And it’s going to turn the volume up so much that you might just end up back to where you were after a little while, because it’s not sustainable. I love that. I think that it’s very Sage advice. It’s not sexy at all. People that are in dire need for change that are at the point where they’re buying a book because they can’t take it anymore.
[00:20:05] They don’t want to hear that. but it’s sort of the, difference between like, it’s the, you go to the doctor and you’re like, how can I make this problem go away? And the doctor says, well, I can prescribe you some medicine or we can do the surgery. But really for this, not to return for this to re be real healing, you need to change your lifestyle, which is you need to sleep more.
[00:20:26] You need to eat different. You need to make these different choices. That’s the part of the advice. Well, don’t want to hear, I’m like, I don’t care about any of this. I don’t want to do any of this. I just want, give me the pill. Give me the surgery. Just fix this now. Make me feel better now, but the true healing doesn’t happen in the emergency room, right?
[00:20:45] In the emergency room. All that happens is survival, right? But the healing happens one day at a time with all the choices you make, making sure that you are taking care of yourself and that’s not dramatic. That’s not fancy. but once at a time it’s compounding. The beauty of that is that once you get to a certain point, it’s like almost like subscription revenue, you know, where it starts off.
[00:21:10] So small, it’s like $250 in subscription revenue. Like. Could just get one consultant, client would make 10 grand, right? Why do I bother with this app that we’re building over a year? They give 300 bucks now, you know, and it just builds up so slowly, so slowly, but it never stops building if you do it. Right.
[00:21:29] And then a couple of years later, you look at millions and millions and millions and you know, you can’t stop it anymore every month. It just keeps going up and up and up and up. and that compounding effect is true for change as well in all areas of life.
[00:21:50]you want to have some kind of process to figure out the, what the small changes that you invest into, right? Because it usually plays out kind of over long period of time. And especially in the beginning, know, when you make a small change slowly, that’s an uncertainty.
[00:22:07] Is this the thing that will eventually lead to the right outcome? And I think it’s easier with some things like, you know, you want to lose weight. You want to get in shape very obvious, a fucked up relationship. With someone who’s like really important in your life and that you don’t want to lose and you want to make it work again, but that’s a risk, right?
[00:22:25]That I feel is more tricky. It is more tricky. I think one way to think about this is to think is the small change, If I made that. And I kept doing that thing for the rest of my life. Could I even imagine doing this for the rest of my life? Beginnings are such delicate times. Right. So in an example, that’s a good tremor, right? In the example of, when I became a dad at age 30, the first time, and I had edited 10 kilograms.
[00:22:55]Then back pain when I was picking up my baby boy and I thought, all right, this is now the time for Steli Ft to enter a gym. Like I need to lose weight. I had made a bunch of changes in the way that our approached business, where I went from dramatic, big audacious goal spreads that burn and crash to everyday small changes, building momentum.
[00:23:18]Focusing on sustainable habits. And so I remember thinking I’m not going to, and I’ll set a 30 day goal of losing five kilograms. I’m not going to die, go to the gym five times a week, run a marathon because that’s what I’d like to do. That was my old mean. My younger me was only motivated by these like dramatic displays of heroic accomplishment, nine out of 10 times, not accomplishing any of those.
[00:23:39] Right. But that’s the way I was motivating myself. And I, and I remember saying. I’m just going to start so slow that it will seem comical to me because then there’s no way I can have an excuse for not doing it. So the first thing that I did was I started walking for 20 minutes a day from the train station to work and from work back.
[00:24:00] Right. Instead of taking a different stop, I took a stop there. I could have a little bit of a walk as well. Then did that for a month. And then I said, you know, we were on the 12th floor instead of taking the elevator, I’m going to be taking the floors up in the morning when I go to the office and then I can take the elevator for the rest of the day.
[00:24:17]And so I kept adding these tiny little things. One nice thing was that when I was thinking about these actions, I was thinking. if I, for the, for the next 30 years had to walk 20 minutes a day, would that make my life better? Even if I didn’t lose weight because of that. And the answer was yes, like that’s, that’s something I could see, be part of my life, walking a bit more.
[00:24:36]Now, if I told myself I’m going to do an ice bath every morning and run, 15 kilometers every day. I don’t know if I want this for the next 40 years, every day of my life. It’s much more of a dramatic action, which is the similar framework of if you don’t want to work with somebody for the rest of your life, don’t work with him for a single day.
[00:24:52] I think that something similar applies to these kinds of habits where you have to ask yourself if this is not something I would want to do for the rest of my life, let’s not do it for a day. Let’s start with something. Today that I’m like, this is kind of nice. And I could see myself doing it my whole life.
[00:25:05] And as you build and change momentum, maybe these things will change. Maybe in five years, I would think I want to run a marathon every month of my life, because now I’m passionate about running. Then I can add that to my habits, but I can’t, when I’ve never run a single kilometer go, I want to run a marathon every month.
[00:25:23] It’s such a big leap. that’s difficult, not with regards to relationships. It’s so tricky. It’s so much more, emotional, these triggers that we have, the insecurities that we have around other people and certain people in our lives. And then also, whatever our behavior is, it’s not just in a vacuum.
[00:25:41] They will respond. Right. And we’re afraid of their responses. So it is tricky with people to ask, to be thinking I’m very unhappy with my relationship with person X. How can I now take a small step towards something? But let’s say I have somebody that always bullies me right.
[00:26:01] Or is unpleasant towards me, is too aggressive or too. Is it unfair in the way they treat me. And I go, all right, I don’t like that treatment. I want to protect myself better. I need to start speaking up now, depending on what the situation is, I might have to, you know, if I’m being beat up every day, then dramatic measures might be, necessary.
[00:26:23]But if it’s just somebody that’s that intimidates me, let’s say without doing anything to me, Then, if every day when you look at me, I feel slightly intimidated. And you’re kind of the dominant person in our group. And I feel unhappy about how I feel around you. The right response is not tomorrow to come with a baseball bat and beat you to the hospital.
[00:26:42] So that’s a dramatic change, you know, I don’t, I don’t feel intimidated anymore. So, you know, I beat down the, the person that was intimidated me. I was empowering myself. everybody would recognize that that’s not the way to do it. There might be. Ways internally to me of how I feel, how I act. Maybe I would just work on my, you know, dialogue.
[00:27:04] Maybe I speak up, you know, once in a while, when you say something I disagree with, maybe I make these small changes. And you know, one weird thing I think is that we are, people are very sensitive to change and sometimes a small, like if I sense that somebody is. Incredibly insecure around me. And I’m, let’s say very egotistical and also insecure, but I, the way I use my insecurities, I overplay it by being loud and dominant.
[00:27:30] I will seek out the weak in the group to play out my dominance and get reassurance and feel confident because deep down I’m really as afraid, more afraid than others. When that person’s energy shifts even ever so slightly, and they’re not as intimidated anymore. I will very quickly find myself drawn to somebody else.
[00:27:52] So sometimes even the smallest of change might adjust somebody else’s behavior in a small way. Where in. Addition, it’s quite, it leads to quite different outcome. Now, all of a sudden the person hasn’t changed, she’s still may be very intimidating. I haven’t made a big scene, but funny enough, for whatever reason within a week, this person is now bothering somebody else.
[00:28:18] And I feel good around them. And they’re actually really nice to me. And this problem is solved itself by a small action, a small shift of energy. But it’s all tricky business one way or another. It’s tricky, but it’s still simple. I think at the, when you step back enough to see the big picture, I honestly believe that the truth is always simple.
[00:28:42]Maybe it’s difficult to do, but it’s simple. Like the answers are quite simple. it’s broccoli and workout, right? You want to lose weight, just eat green stuff and move your body. It’s not that complicated. Uh it’s when we seek complicated answers is. When we run away from the simple truths and we try and for more convenient answers.
[00:29:00] And I think the same is true in our relationships. it’s just that we are more, I think, involved maybe in a ball of hormones and emotions and all kinds of things that make it even harder for us to see the simple truths.
[00:29:13]
[00:29:13] did I write you yesterday that I love our podcast? Yes. You know why I wrote you? This is because I was listening to the latest episode and I was both enjoying the experience. And at times I was thinking, Ooh, This is such a good point. I forgot. We made that point. It made me think, and then I thought this fucking podcast is dope for me, right?
[00:29:43] I’m not saying this is a popular thing. I’m just saying, isn’t it awesome that we’re able to record something that I listened to a week later and I will enjoy listening to it, which is something not much of my content in the past was hitting that note. Right. It was, I was saying things and I w you know, but I was not able to listen to 40 minutes of me rambling about something and go, wow.
[00:30:10] I’ve really learned something. I enjoyed listening to myself. I didn’t. So that feeling of, I actually like listening to the podcast, fill my heart with joy. That’s awesome. It’s also so different from where we were, let’s say a year ago, right? Because here ago we were still like, Oh, yeah, we should be listened to this, listening to this after we publish it too.
[00:30:34] My to-do today, my broccoli listened to the podcast I recorded. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, but it was also, I think a year ago. not the inner work podcast yet. Right. It was, it was the desire to become that, but not knowing it, it was just such, such a, we know kind of what we want and we’re making our way there, which goes back to what we were discussing earlier about.
[00:31:07]Sometimes the difficulty to get there is. The trust that you’ll get there with small steps. I think that’s another, maybe a major component is the trust piece to make small steps. You have to really trust yourself into trust. Right? You have to have faith in yourself in life. That’s why the big 30 day change everything about yourself comes from such a nervousness of, I don’t know if I will change, but if I change in the next seven days in these dramatic ways, then I’ll feel it.
[00:31:41] I’ll see it. And it’ll be now next week. That does require faith. Yeah. Typically, always in these things as, also to be like some Charismatic person, right. Was making a big promise. Right. And then has, 30 success stories as well. And James did this and Jane did this.
[00:31:57] Right. And the reason why I bring this up is that when we started the podcast, I knew a whole list of what I didn’t want to do. But I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do. And it required real faith to keep the shipping way at it, without knowing and not arriving there quickly, it took over a year. And at every step of the way it was unsettling.
[00:32:21]It really was. And I had this, the urges to do these things I knew I could do well. And then I was like, but. Are those really the things I want to do now? I don’t know, but they would be big. I’m like, I don’t want to, I didn’t say I want to do something big and then I’d have to relax back and go, just have faith in the process.
[00:32:39] Go slow Once you find it, things will click into place. You don’t have to rush there and still with all my experience and all my knowledge, it was a battle every step along the way. Because it also was painful to take the time, invest energy, record something, and then feel disappointed about the recording at the end, and then force myself to listen to it and then be really disappointed about it.
[00:33:03]And then finding the energy to not fix it quickly with a 30 day challenge to blah, or let’s do this format. That will be kind of cool. Yeah. But to also add it. Yeah. And we’re also have been so easy and, you know, reasonable to, nine months in say, okay, we’ve really given this a shot, but this is just look at it.
[00:33:24] It’s not working at nine months, you know? Nine, what you can, you can put a human being into the world in nine months, and this is what this is not going to work. This is let’s do something else. Right. So it’s awesome. and it was part of also what we wanted to do. We said, let’s record something along the way before we figured it out and let’s put it out there.
[00:33:46]Even just for ourselves to challenge ourselves. We’re not, this is not going to be some huge thing that millions of people listen to. But from a very early point on people listened. And a lot of the people that listened were people that, we know, well, I know well, but we never considered that.
[00:34:02] This is the, the, the purity of this podcast so far. Let’s see if we can continue this right. But the purity of it so far has been that popularity has not played into it or making this something like there’s no, there’s no desire to make it something to generate an outcome, a preconceived outcome. There’s only a love for the process, for the art, for the exploration.
[00:34:24] Let’s explore, let’s play, let’s stumble along and see what uncovers itself not let’s go and let’s go and kind of. Find this thing or catch this thing that we know we want to get to. so yeah, dude, I’m super grateful for this.