Summary
Joe interviews Stephanie Harrison, author of “The New Happy,” about the old model of happiness and what actually works. Both share similar origin stories—high-achieving careers that led to physical breakdowns (hives and rashes) before they questioned their approach to life.
Stephanie identifies three fallacies of the “old happy”: (1) you’re not enough / something is wrong with you, (2) you must achieve certain goals to be happy, and (3) you have to do it all by yourself. Joe connects these to his own work on self-awareness versus self-improvement, pointing out that self-improvement starts from shame while self-awareness starts from wholeness. They discuss how perfectionism drives the achievement treadmill, how extreme self-reliance creates loneliness, and how the giving-receiving balance in relationships mirrors the internal relationship with self.
The conversation turns to anger—Stephanie shares her journey of discovering repressed anger while caregiving for her sick partner, and Joe offers the reframe that anger is love, since we only get angry about things we deeply care about.
Key Concepts
- Self-improvement starts from shame; self-awareness starts from wholeness
- Perfectionism is the critical parent’s voice internalized
- People want connection, not perfection
- Receiving requires vulnerability
- Joy won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome
Key Quotes
“The idea that self-improvement is shame inducing—it starts with the idea that there’s something wrong with you. Self-awareness starts with the idea that there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.”
“If you want to drop bad habits you just need to feel them.”
“Service is not self-sacrifice, it’s self-expansion.”
“The idea that there’s something wrong with you as a person is so deeply painful, especially when you are put in an environment without the tools or the resources or support to know that that might not be true.”
Transcript
I was living in New York City which was my life dream I had my dream job I had this lovely apartment I sort of had everything I had ever wanted and yet the core pain was in the experience that oh I I must be flawed and broken and what was Perfection going to get you happiness hey everybody it’s Joe and uh we’re here today with Stephanie Harrison who uh wrote a book called the new happy and I have been a fan of her Instagram account I just think that it’s uh the illustrations and the the care that and uh conscientiousness has put into the account has always been something that’s fascinated me and so we’re having her on the on the program to talk about her new book um and the book is called the new happy and my first question is Stephanie anything you want to say about yourself before we get started and then I have then I’ll have my first question no no you you’ve done a job just ask away ask me your questions I can’t wait okay so the first question what made you write a book on happiness like what was the personal reason for writing a book on happiness I think because I knew very deeply what it was like to be unhappy and it was that personal unhappiness and misery that eventually compelled me to want to study the topic to figure out what I was doing so wrong and where I had gone astray in my life and then ultimately the more that I learned the more that I wanted to share but it really was kicked off with my own experiences of suffering and can you go into details about what those experiences like how how bad did it get what was what was the bottom like I think you know it was first really triggered by my experiences when I was in my early 20s I was living in New York City which was my life dream I had my dream job I had this lovely apartment I sort of had everything I had ever wanted in many ways and yet I was experiencing so much pain um it started with physical pain so I started coming down with these rashes that would cover my whole body and my face and um they were you know agonizingly painful I would um they always came on when it was hot out and you know these like really humid New York City Summers and I was so embarrassed and ashamed of it that I would be wearing you know turtlenecks and long sleeves in 90 degree heat trying to cover myself up because to know what was going on and no doctor really could give me anything that would fix it ironically a lot of what the doctors gave me actually made it worse um like the creams and all that kind of stuff and so I had no idea what was going on there and then I started feeling a lot of emotional pain and suffering and having panic attacks at work or when I was driving in my car commuting to the client I was working out at the time I started feeling an overwhelming sense of Despair and sadness and it never really left me no matter what I did and I just tried to distract myself and you know forge on and persevere and all of that fun stuff and it never really worked and eventually you know one night I sort of had a breakdown and found myself lying on my bedroom floor crying and it was at that moment that I actually was fortunate to have a kind of Moment of clarity amidst the chaos like the eye of the storm and thinking you know well something must be wrong here in the way that I’m living my life and I wonder what it is and up until that moment I had never questioned anything about what I was doing I had never reflected on hey maybe these choices you’re making aren’t actually contributing to what you think you want or what you’re trying to experience and um you know that that little kind of Moment of clarity was ultimately what sort of set me on this journey of trying to better understand happiness and well-being yeah yeah our stories aren’t too different that way I was doing International stock lending gosh 1996 or something like that I think I’m significantly older than you and um breaking out in hives I was working 12 hours a day making a tremendous amount of money for my age um but absolutely miserable and I think as soon as I broke out in hives I was like yeah this is done like I knew has to change we were like moving billions of dollars around every day it was like this very crazy high stress situation and I was just like yeah this isn’t this is not gonna work for me and I quit everything and moved out to the desert and recorded an album out of all weirdness to do but that was that was I think we have a similar story in that yeah that’s amazing I mean your job sounds way more stressful than mine so kudos to you I would have broken under that pressure but I um I think it’s interesting isn’t it how it happens like these moments that are that are so transformational to me they they often are related to these moments of suffering when you can attend to it and notice the pain and actually try to identify the messages that are within it they hold these amazing Treasures but of course I could never have really seen that at the time yeah it’s funny I just did a Twitter post and I basically say you know how do you drop a hot frying pan all you have to do is feel it and you’re going to drop the hot frying pan if you want to drop bad habits you just need to feel them is the Twitter post and I can’t I got more backlash from that Twitter post I think that almost any others like I had to block a couple people from the account because a lot of people were so offended that like their identity of an addict or their identity in the bad habit could be dropped just by feeling the pain and it’s it was interesting like people get religious about politics and their food but they also get religious about like the pain that they identify themselves with I have noticed that as well that’s fascinating I think you’re so right like and isn’t most behavior in that way a way to avoid the pain right like addiction is a way to avoid dealing with the pain and you know burying ourselves in work was my way of avoiding dealing with the pain and all of that stuff and yeah to suggest that you um face it is I think really scary for a lot of people and goes against so much of what they’ve had to armor themselves with over time yeah yeah okay so so now I know that you have like the three things about the old way of being happy in your book and the new way but I so I want I don’t want that answer but we can go into that in a moment what I what I would love is like a slightly different answer so at the time when you realized that you were in this pain you were suffering you’re breaking out and rashes what was it about like right now my guess is you could go and do that job again and not be miserable right yeah so what was it about your mental framing that made that situation so miserable maybe you would still be miserable in that job but not as miserable right like your mental framing has changed what is it that what is it that was it about your mental framing that made it so hardcore for you like the the inner voice in your head the the the inner critic what was it telling you that you believe that made this so hard I think that you know it was the the inner critic the voice in my head was saying what the hell is wrong with you what’s wrong with you you know why why can’t you figure this out why can’t you hack it everyone else seems to be fine everyone else on your all the other people who are hired along with you are doing a great job and they seem happy and they’re being successful and why why are you the one who’s broken that’s probably like the deep down message that was creating so much pain for me yeah so it was the assumption that you were broken the assumption that other people weren’t broken it was comparative mind and it was also that you’re supposed to be doing something there’s like this subtle we teach something called the question the Assumption and one of the assumptions in all that is that you were supposed to be productive for some reason like as if that was going to make you a good person or something yeah exactly like if I could just figure out all of the you know magical ingredients and assemble them into this stew then I would finally figure out you know the secret to pulling it all together and um the the idea that you know I think the idea that there’s something wrong with you as a person is is so deeply painful especially when you are put in an environment without the tools or the resources or support to to know that that might not be true that maybe you’re just somebody who’s having a hard time or maybe you’re not in the right environment and this place isn’t the best fit for you or as you saying like you have these beliefs that are driving you that need to be examined in some way and for me the core the core the core pain was in the kind of the experience that oh I I must I must be flawed and broken deep down yeah yeah yeah so that’s where our work really I think has the most overlap is um you know in the deeper courses that we do we talk about our inherent goodness and but but our entire approach isn’t self Improvement it’s selfawareness because our our thought process is just the idea self-improvement is shame inducing it starts with the idea that there’s something wrong with you self-awareness starts with the idea that you’re there’s nothing wrong with you and the more you understand yourself the more it works right like and it’s just a matter of not understanding and I think so let’s talk about the the three things about what you say the the old idea of Happiness um has these three fallacies I think just generally there’s fallacies that prevent happiness but what what would you what what are those three things and I think the first one we’ve discussed but but go in go into them a little bit if you’d like yeah of course so the first is um as we’ve talked about you’re not enough there’s something wrong with you which I think is really at the core of all of this um and then builds off into these other things um the second is that you have to achieve certain goals or pursue a certain outcome in your life in order to be happy and then the third is that you have to do it all by yourself you can never struggle you can never lean on other people you can never ask for help and if you do it means that you’re weak and not worthy which then takes you right back around to the beginning into the cycle of trying to prove that you’re good enough through our society’s culture of achievement which then contributes to aloneness and loneliness and then again creates this this pattern that I personally found myself stuck in and know that many other people do as well yeah so let’s go to the second one for a moment the the achievement back then when when you put yourself in the you know rash New York City turtleneck era what were you doing it for what were you telling yourself you were doing it for all the achievement yeah I mean really like it was to be perfect like I thought it was it was to be as perfect as I possibly could and of course no matter what I did never got close to being perfect um and part of that idea of perfection for me was grounded in achievements and the things that I was supposed to do in my life and the work and the progress that I was supposed to make there and the way that my life was supposed to look to other people um so the the pursuit of these achievements became something that I used as a way to justify my self worth or to grounded in that as like as though it was a fluctuating thing of you know if I got the promotion that I wanted then I’d be good enough but then very quickly obviously it would lapse back to you’re not good enough anymore keep going right and what and what was Perfection gonna get you happiness so yeah which I think is the what I see with a lot of people they think that happiness has to be achieved or earned yeah or you have to be improved or something to that effect it goes I love what you’re saying about your philosophy of self-improvement right because as you’re as you’re describing it oh if I can just improve myself into a more perfect person then I’ll be happy right it’s almost like there’s this kind of dark side to the natural and wonderful quest to grow as a person can be very warped if you’re not mindful of how you’re approaching it yeah I the way I think about it is like a like an oak tree the acorn is perfect and the then the young sproutling is perfect and the full grown tree is perfect like meaning that growth is part of our nature it’s our Evolution if we understand ourselves then we grow naturally like it feels like the the idea that we have to put effort into the growth is is to some degree there there there feels like effort or there’s like maybe leaning into difficult feelings etc that are required but the idea that like if you don’t really try you won’t grow I think is a is a fallacy in itself yeah I love that metaphor that’s absolutely beautiful and I agree with you like you know I think about um there was this Theory from uh I think it was Carl Rogers um that he called the OVP the organismic valuing process which basically said that humans are naturally and instinctively motivated to grow and to move towards the things that that matter most to them that help them to express themselves and to uh stay aligned with their values and really it’s about getting clearing away the stuff that’s in the way so you can grow Yeah Yeah Carl you want to hear something crazy I don’t know if this is true but I there’s a guy I know who worked with Carl Rogers apparently and uh I facilitated something with him like way back at this um place called 1440 and he told me the story that Carl Rogers would have like 500 people come into a room and he would be for this transformational weekend and he’d have like 26 different like facilitators there and they just wouldn’t do anything and then eventually people would complain and and the facilitators would come by and they’d be like yeah I really hear that you want us to start I really hear that you’re frustrated right now and just give them unconditional love and make them feel deeply heard in their suffering wow and he would that’s all they would do for like three days oh my go that’s amazing I I do some intense at our Retreats no doubt but that I just I want to try that out at some point I really want you to and I would like to be a participant so I can be on the other side and then we can have a debrief after because I can picture the the pain that that would cause the participants that’s absolutely incredible yeah it’s um the the the the theory however is exactly what we do and everything that we do is like our job as facilitators is to hear people and give unconditional love to them because when that happens the way I look at it is like all the boils come to the surface pop and heal just underneath that light and it’s what we it’s how we try to approach uh almost everything we do it’s beautiful wow um okay so uh the third one can you remind us of the third one again yeah you have to do everything by yourself you’re separate from other people you know you’re not connected to anyone or anything yeah so this one is interesting for me because you have some studies on loneliness that you quote and um tell me what you like for you what’s the upshot of what you’ve learned about loneliness what’s the I have I am really passionate about the topic of loneliness because I think that there’s a lot that we’re sort of missing about it and a lot of a lot of uh different approaches that I think would be really powerful for people and the you know the first one is that if you fundamentally believe deep down that you are you know an island that you’re separate from everybody else then in many ways think you’re always going to have a pervasive sense of loneliness that sticks with you and clings to you in some way even if it’s at a low level because you believe yourself to be completely separate from others and so at the end of the day what only matters is what you do for yourself and you can’t really rely upon anyone else no one’s going to show up for you and no one will be there to help you when you need it and that feeling is very um very vulnerable and very I think terrifying like vulnerable in a really scary way for people because what do you have to do you have to build up your Fortress of the self in order to overcome that right you have to you have to earn enough money to always be able to take care of yourself or you have to earn enough power to be able to make things happen even when people don’t want to cooperate with you you have to always be prepared for the worst case scenario and know that you can be there to do something for yourself because no one else will be there for you and that extreme self-reliance um that so uh kind of underpins a lot of our culture is I think really harmful for people and creates a lot of pain and that to me is one of the contributors to our sense of loneliness and something that we have to reckon with if we want to overcome it yeah the you know the longest study that Harvard ever did is all about like what makes people you know about it I’m I’m assuming and yeah I mean basically it’s saying that that sense of community that sense of togetherness is huge part of what makes us healthy physically and happy and um so what my experience my experience in loneliness with that this particular kind of loneliness there’s kind of a depressed loneliness which I think is somewhat different but the especially the loneliness that you experience my my thing is that that kind of self-reliant Super Hyper achiever loneliness um often comes from a parenting like a parenting technique where um we’re we’re taught that that has happened an example would be I was with a parent the other day and um this child came two year two three-year-old came scared I’m scared mom and like okay you need to be a big girl it’s like that kind of like I’m not going to be emotionally with you yeah is the like that underpinning of of that like oh I’m alone in this because to some degree that is what we’re telling kids these days um my question to you is like so we could call it culture we could also call it the way that we’re parented um my question to you is like how how how do you see those two things related if at all and and and what do you think if if it’s what is it about specifically the culture that you see creates that sense of loneliness if it isn’t from the parenting I think parenting is one contributor but um it also comes from you know media from institutions that we participate in from um you know from the schools and the way that we’re conditioned in terms of um how how we perform and what we do in order to get praise um so parenting is one of those that you know I think it’s really hard for us to contemplate like oh this is the my child is the person I love most in the world and um the ways in which I’m communicating my my beliefs that are below my level of awareness which I got from the culture from my parents or from whatever it is could end up hurting them in the future right like that feeling of oh um I want my kid to be you know parents want their children to be self-sufficient right they want them to be able to navigate the challenges in their lives they want them to be uh resilient and to bounce back from challenges and if all they know is the school of thought that says just buck up and do it yourself and like kind of hide your emotions away and pull it together and then they they teach that through those little moments like you’re talking about you’re totally right like as a kid you learn what you have to do keep it all inside don’t share it with anyone you know if you do they might leave you they might think you’re weak they might not love you anymore and what could be worse than that right yeah so it’s an interesting thing it’s like we’re teaching the the idea is like the intent is to teach children how not to be abandoned and then yet we’re teaching them that they’re always abandoned yeah right and that their emotions are you know something that’s wrong with them again right so like once again if you’re by yourself all the time like this is how I feel like feel when I think about this for myself so it might be different for for you or for anyone listening but it’s like for me if I’m if my emotions are too much for somebody or um they violate some unspoken rule of how I’m supposed to be then every time that I feel that way if I get angry or sad or despairing or frustrated then I go right back to being not good enough and then I want to hide my real self from the people in my life who if I want to have real relationships with them I have to share my real self with them right and so it’s such a tricky trap yeah yeah I mean that’s the core of our work is is allowing expressing moving your emotions and and and that what I notice is that it is not an intellectual process obviously they’re emotions but the body actually has a lot more you can tell somebody like oh you can feel your feelings but if you’ve been told your whole life say not to get excited or not get sad the body will like say no to it and then the mind will just come up with reasons and that there’s actually a lot of work that can be done with the nervous system and with breath and everything that allows those emotional experiences to be able to come through sometimes we have the choice but not not always yeah it’s so hard like I think I it feels I’d be curious to hear about what you’ve seen but for me it’s like there are certain emotions that are were just like nogo areas like you cannot feel that those are out of out of bounds you know like sadness might be okay but anger God forbid you get angry right like it’s almost like these little hot spots that you have yeah yeah it’s um what I noticed it’s very cultural and it’s very sex dependent for which ones were not okay you know um so there’s some cultures where fear was definitely the thing you could not express because you’d be prey if in the neighborhood if you were fear was shown um and so parents are like no you can’t show Fear um you know in like upper middle class white culture men being angry is far more okay women being sad is far more okay but men being sad not so okay you know so there’s there’s different cultures and and in different cultures different emotions but the interesting thing is the positive emotions that I find are the are actually the most challenging for people to feel um meaning like settle down Jimmy settle down like don’t feel excited don’t be exuberant those are those are feelings that are actually really hard and usually people getting in touch with them um once the they’ve move through some of the negative ones that have been held back I have a um I have a saying that says joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome oh that gives me full body Goosebumps that’s stunningly beautiful so so it’s actually a question that I wanted to ask you too which is what makes it happiness and not joy and what’s the difference for you in those two things it’s a really good question I mean I think um so interesting I’m going to be reflecting on that saying of yours I really like the work of George Vaillant who was the before Robert Waldinger led the Harvard study and he wrote a book about um what he calls the spiritual emotions and he talks about joy in there and what he learned from his research and he says that Joy is connection and I think that that is really to me like kind of sums up the heart of it and so he talks about the different forms that connection can take but the image that he writes about that always really stuck with me is the joy of a child running to its mother with her arms open waiting for her right like I just I love that image because it’s so pure and beautiful and sums up that feeling um and then happiness is more uh zoomed out from that emotional experience I would say it’s the feeling of I’m happy with the way that my life is going overall I experience Joy but I also know how to experience all of my other emotions as well like a happy life has room for every feeling and you know one of the as a sidebar I think one of the problems that we have is we think that a happy life is a life where you’ll never be sad or never struggle or never have a hard time right like that’s what I used to believe I thought okay I have to get rid of all this pain then everything will be okay um but I think a happy life includes space for every feeling and um it’s more so about that broad sense of like my life is my life is Meaningful my life has purpose my life is filled with relationships that matter to me I get to grow as a person and I embrace the challenges that I’m a part of and I embrace the good parts of my life and I am interested in continuing to like live in this way that’s sort of the how I would describe the experience more broadly oh interesting so you’re you’re you’re using happiness in a bit like a stateless State meaning like no matter what I’m feeling no matter what’s going on in general I can take one step back and go oh this is like I feel satisfied in in this in this overall experience yeah I think so I think it’s that broader evaluation of one’s life and like you know if I’m having a really hard day and like really struggling with something like I had one of those days last week right really just one of those experiences where I got overwhelmed and didn’t didn’t like show up for myself in the ways that I wanted to and then it kind of spiraled from there and all that stuff just a difficult day like we all have and um I could still take a step back as you’re describing and think okay like I’m happy with my life like I’m not happy in this moment I’m not experiencing like a feeling of profound Joy or excitement or contentment or anything but but I know that it’s there like once the emotion almost like once the wave of the emotion passes like what what remains what is the the the experience for you that remains after that yeah so um for so what what would you if you were if you were describing the gifts of the what we would call negative emotions like the sadness or anger or anxiety or fear how do you what you could listen to what you just said and say oh they’re just there’s something that yeah they’re going to happen and you’re going to deal with them but it’s still something that is not wanted or you could say oh like there’s a gift in in Anger there’s a gift in happiness there’s a gift I guess if if it is the second what is the what are the gifts that you see if it isn’t the second tell me how you see it I think it is the second so I think that you know sadness is what connects us to people it’s what helps us to be empathetic and compassionate anger helps us to protect our physical and emotional bodies as well as the communities that we care about loneliness is physiologically designed to help us to reach out to other people to reconnect to them um anxiety is or or stress indicates that you’re doing something that you care about something that matters to you you know all of these all of these emotions are a part of living a good life because you know how could you how could you have meaningful relationships or meaningful work or uh like work or work towards an accomplishment that matters to you without experiencing all of those feelings you couldn’t so you’d have to give up that Pursuit and therefore we have to embrace the the journey and the process of experiencing them yeah so yeah so for me connection is I mean our our our like foundational course is a connection course and you I have never heard that quote it’s such a lovely quote it’s connection is joy is that yeah so and for me connection means a lot more probably than most folks in the fact that there’s um connection to self which is an important thing connection to reality and connection to each other and that they’re all reflections of each other is what I noticed my ability to connect with myself is a reflection of my ability to connect with you um the the question I have is you don’t I in the book I didn’t see that you really deeply go into connection um but I see you go into helping people like that there’s a really important part of helping so can you tell me about the how you see those relate or how you see them as different what what do you what do you notice between connection and helping I think I mean I think that connection is the heart of everything as well I think it’s it’s the heart of Happiness it’s the heart of well-being it’s the heart of Health all all of the things that we that matter most to us um and you know when I um when I was in grad school there’s this quote that um comes from the founder one of the founders of positive psychology uh Christopher Peterson and he says that positive psychology could be boiled down to three words other people matter and um I spent a lot of time reflecting on that quote and starting to think about well if to go deeper into that quote what does that what does that really mean like why why do other people matter what is it about it and what I landed on is that it’s other people matter and relationships matter because that’s where we give and receive that’s what our relationships are made up of is I offer you something you offer me something back and then through that experience we create a greater relationship or we create value in the world or we create a product or something that had never been made before right there’s everything is fulfilled through this interaction of giving and receiving and um to me I think the secret to happiness is that if you want to be happy try to help other people to be happy and the best way to do that is by using your authentic self to to share who you really are and to offer up your unique gifts and talents um and that experience of of giving and receiving is so taken for granted um even though it’s at the heart of everything else and so it’s almost like to me the way I perceived it was that we take our relationships for granted right we just view them as the fundamental fabric of the world and if we’re not careful we can destroy them because we do that and then we lose what matters most to us but they are so a part of our lives in every possible way that we can’t imagine a world without them but then at an even deeper level we take for granted the fact that those relationships are based upon this act of sharing and of receiving and to me the more that we can embrace the fact that we are here to help one another that involves me offering what I have and you offering me what you have and receiving it then the greater happiness we can create not only for ourselves but for other people at the same time and so the the kind of Heart of this message is like where can you help what can you do to uniquely help and that will be what leads to your own happiness and fulfillment so there’s so I might have qualms with this but I might not so I want to explore it a bit which is and qualms is strong but the the first one is that I see is there are some folks out there where giving is from guilt or obligation or um because they feel like they have to and and I don’t see that kind of giving actually make people happy I see that kind of giving actually create a disempowerment and a fear and it’s um Because unless the giving actually is something that so to me it’s like to give is useful because it creates the desire to give right but the real happiness comes from giving through the desire to give not just giving that there’s an actual like intent in uh so so and then the second part of it is that I noticed that a lot of people need more help learning how to receive especially those self-reliant folks right actually learning how to receive is actually a more of a challenge for them than giving yeah so I’m wondering like how do you make sense of that given totally given the book I think I those are those are wonderful points and I agree with both things both points um real giving is not something that if you want to give and get the benefits it can’t be forced it can’t be done through a sense of shame or guilt that’s not that’s not what I’m referring to at all you know I say in the book service is not self-sacrifice it’s self-expansion and I think that this is something that’s really important for us to recognize because if we’re being forced to give then it’s not really a gift right like it has to be self-determined to be able to get those benefits that you’re looking for and that’s why I really want people to expand the way that they think about giving you know I say these things and I think people assume okay like that means I need to go spend my weekends volunteering or I need to quit my job and work at a nonprofit and if that calls to you fantastic like go do that but if it doesn’t that’s great too like there are so many other ways that you can give through your work and in your family and in your community and to the greater world and it’s really about finding the ones that bring you Joy at the same time so that would be the first the my first point there um in response and then the second yeah people really struggle to receive um it’s really really hard for a lot of us and again you brought it back to the point that I make as well which is it all comes back to this kind of individualistic sense of self that we have that I can’t I can’t ask for anything I can’t lean on anybody else and what I would say in response is that all of this idea of us being connected right it’s it’s this it’s grounded in this idea of interconnectedness we are all connected to one another we all need each other we’re a part of this ecosystem and if you shut down your part of interconnectedness if you’re just like a oneway giving everything away that you have and never accepting anything in return you’re not a real part of it you’re not actually really participating in the ebb and the flow of what’s involved and for you to deny somebody else the chance to help you you’re actually denying them the chance to be happy if helping other people is what leads to happiness and so if you actually if you want to serve others if you want to be somebody who’s a giver you have to let them help you at the same time um and so I think that that takes time and practice and you know coaching and support and all of that but we can learn how to be more open to accepting and receiving especially for those who might be you know kind of like overgivers who really want to show up for others this could be a new way for them to conceive giving yeah there’s this interesting thing is one of the things that I notice is the in ayurvedic medicine or in traditional Chinese medicine they have this thing where if there’s an imbalance in your system you should be able to find it by looking at the eye or by looking at the fingernails or by looking at the lips or the tongue or that that the the imbalance should be able to be seen in all the parts or or at least a lot of the parts you should be able to see the imbalance so you can find out what’s wrong with the kidney by like looking at the tongue for instance and and I noticed is the same thing if you just watch two people have a conversation and you can see like how much they’re in the other person and how much they’re in themselves and are they in that balance meaning are they giving completely in the conversation are they receiving completely are they are they not allowing giving or receiving in the conversation like what’s interesting is that like you can see this in all the conversations and to some degree it’s what we’re teaching when we’re in the connection course where we’re teaching about how to communicate we’re we’re going to the same level that you’re going to just in a very different way we’re doing it like right now right here here’s the moment where you get to practice amazing I love the idea that the conversation as a microcosm of the relationship that’s absolutely brilliant and is such an insightful way to approach that almost as a diagnostic that’s that’s incredible the other thing that’s interesting for me also is it’s also about the relationship with the self that’s been like meaning how the voice in the head treats you how you can give and receive to yourself right also is because typically what I notice is like there’s a voice in the head it’s critical and there’s not a lot of giving and there’s a lot of like trying to please the voice in the head and yeah that that kind of internal relationship reflects out into the way that someone does the job it reflects into the way that right I’m supposed to be of service to this voice in my head then I’m supposed to be of service to the job then I’m supposed to and so they don’t they don’t like so it’s a very interesting thing how it reflects both in the inner Dynamic but also in the Fascinating People yeah that’s that’s so true so insightful yeah so so so question for you is what are some of the daily practices that um folks can do so you’ve got these big broad things like you know look at look at um like the fact that you you’re not broken but that might not be something that someone can just go oh I’m not broken totally fine I’m fine now everybody’s here supporting me like they have a hard time getting from Like A to B um I don’t have to work to feel valuable um I don’t have to produce to be valuable um what what are some of the daily things that you recommend to help folks to make it practical and and you know like the conversation like what’s the daily thing that they like if they work on it there it’s going to show what’s happening in the rest of um you know one one practice I think that can be really helpful to your point about the relationship with the self and the voice in your head and how that can Ripple out is um something that I do on a daily basis as well and have found Great Value in is every time that you make a mistake or something goes wrong or you know you feel a difficult emotion anything that violates your idea of what you’re supposed to be in the perfect version of yourself um try and catch yourself before you make this leap to I’m unworthy as a person because this thing happened so you know like it’s really silly but think about a time that you um you know you dropped a glass and it shattered everywhere and there’s you know like it’s all over the floor and you’re late for work and instantly the voice in my head would go God you idiot you’re so stupid how could you do something like this right and instead what would a Kinder way to treat myself that valued myself be um oops I dropped a glass mistakes happen I’m a human sometimes these things happen right anything that helps you to separate your self worth from the outcome or the behavior that occurred that you deem as less than acceptable will help you to start rewiring your brain a little bit to be to be treating yourself with more of that unconditional acceptance that we’re really looking for and that kindness that will then be able to Ripple outward and the thing I love about this is like everyone is really busy you know everyone has a lot on their plate I don’t want to add things on to your day but these these mistakes and human moments like I like to call them like they happen no matter what they’re always going to happen so when they happen how can you use them for good as a way of improving your relationship with yourself um that’s one practice that seems so small but has really had a profound impact on me in the way that I perceive and understand my self worth yeah I I have a I have a practice that’s similar where your voice we do it like similarly like so the voice in the head will say whatever it’s going to say but how you relate to it can change dramatically so you’re an idiot you know it’s like oh could you manage me better that’s like that’s really bad management or you’re an idiot and oh okay I’m an idiot like or you’re an idiot it’s like I’m an idiot like what are are I mean oh I love you I see that you’re really scared and that I’m gonna make a mistake and that’s okay you can be scared like there’s a thousand different responses that we can give to the voice in the head and it seems like it’s pretty similar in the and the ideas behind it yeah I love that it’s like instead of the default response of you know like cowering or shaming yourself you can change it right you’re you’re empowered to shift your response in that way I love that often easier to shift than the voice in the head because so automatic yeah yeah cool awesome well I oh wait you know there’s one more question I wanted to ask you you so you went through the negative emotions for us moving anger is a huge thing um typically I see repressed anger as a big part of depression and a big part of anxiety I see anger itself as as love we don’t get angry at anything that we don’t have a deep care for right there’s like like even you know we might get angry over like the coffee machine not working but that’s not what we’re really angry about like you know so but what we’re deeply angry about and so I was just wondering how was your journey how has your journey been with anger like in your process did was there did you have movement around allowing anger was anger part of something that changed or is it just always just been in the background and not accessible how how has it been for you I think that um I grew up repressing any anger that I felt um and feeling as though it was a real sign of Badness of of being of being unlovable and unacceptable um and the idea that anger is love would have been really freeing for me at the time so I thank you for that um really like it’s a very healing way to look at that emotion I think um and I um I didn’t really come to terms with my anger until um I went through a really difficult experience over the last few years when my when my partner got sick out of nowhere and came down with this incredibly debilitating illness that left him bed bound and I had to become his full-time caregiver when I was in my 20s um and I had to confront my anger I had to I had a lot of anger about it I was like I was angry at the doctors who couldn’t fix him I was angry at the plane that broke his wheelchair I was angry at the people who were able to walk down this tree when he was stuck in his bed lying in the dark I was angry at myself for mistakes I made when I was caring for him and I had no idea how to like give him a shot of his medicine and I accidentally ended up hurting him I was angry at everything and I had to go on a real journey of like learning how to accept that and to figure out how to how to process it out of me um and it was um and it took me a while to even realize that that anger was like such a difficult presence within me right just after that years of suppression and thinking and then of course the other thing about it is I I layered on top of it this idea of like the perfect caregiver that I was supposed to be and like you know perfect caregiver would never get angry at anything right they’re just always Pleasant and calm and competent and all that stuff um and so I started processing it really through movement that was sort of the first way that I was able to access it so um I would literally spend like 10 minutes um punching my pillow or like doing like um Furious like jumping jacks or something like that just trying to express it and I got really into like high intensity workouts because I felt like it was a way for me to like Express that emotion in some way and then as I did that I started to become more and more comfortable with it and like then I could touch on it through journaling and like through expressing it in that way with freewriting and all of that and then eventually I was able to like finally kind of process it more cognitively through talking about it but it all started with more of a bodily practice Yeah Yeah I find the the the most profound way when you can get to it is physical punching beating something like that with words to process it the quickest not just the physical not just the expression but but all together that’s been my experience with our our yeah it’s such a um it was so difficult right like I would never have a problem crying like I would never have a problem being sad right and to your point about you know being a woman like sadness was never a problem but God forbid you get mad at something that would be really out of line um right and so reclaiming that anger has been really valuable I think and um I think that I was also really um I learned a lot from reading about how men process anger and like their relationship to it as well and I think um it’s almost like we have a lot to teach each other about like our different emotional experiences in different ways you know yeah yeah there is a so my I do a lot of teaching with my wife and whenever we do an anger demonstration she always is the one to do it because to watch you know a 50-year-old woman have more access and Clarity with her anger than like a 25-year-old boy wow right like this thing that like it immediately shocks everybody into like oh there’s something here that I can’t that I thought I knew but I didn’t know because there’s like that’s a louder sound that’s a bigger movement that’s like a more embodied experience of anger than what I see in society to be angry it’s really it’s really cool to watch that sounds that sounds very um very profound and very moving I would I would love I would be honored to to witness that someday yeah it’s cool it’s I always like looking at the faces when when she does it I just sit back and I just like look at everybody’s faces and see them go what the just happened absolutely amazing I love that awesome well a pleasure to have you on the call on the on the podcast yeah thank you so much for having me it was so wonderful to talk to you and learn from you yeah very nice and and I really appreciate learning from you as well yeah thank you thank you