The Exchanges

Q good place individually to create that space together and build that safety, no matter where they're at, whether they're at the beginning of the journey or, you know, sort of like they've been together for 20 or 30 years. How do you maintain it with your wife? How do you coach people to sort of develop that at the, you know, we just got married. How do we develop this?

A A couple of years ago, um, my partner Allie and I, what happened was I was sitting at the dining table And, uh, or she was sitting at the dining table and I passed behind her with a load of laundry in my hands. And I was headed down to the basement to do the laundry. And she poked her head up and said, the story I'm telling myself is that you're leaving me. And I said, hon, I'm just doing the laundry. And it was a funny moment, but in that moment, she was able to reveal something that might have been shameful. Like, what are you crazy? She just named the feeling that came up for her because part of her old trigger is being abandoned. I'll, I'll turn it around and I'll tell a story about myself. Just two years ago, um, you, you, you read Reboot, so you know that I grew up under pretty adverse childhood circumstances, a lot of violence in the family, which led to a very, I wouldn't call it full-on body dysmorphia, but a really complicated relationship with my own body. One day, I'm in the, our closet, and I'm getting dressed, and I pull on a pair of jeans, and Allie, who loves me, looks me up and down, Right? In her mind, she's saying, do those genes look good on him? And what triggered in me was shame. It was like a lightning bolt. It went right back to childhood and all sorts of negative experiences I had as a child. Now, I had a moment. I had a choice. My response was going to…

AI assessment note: “She just named the feeling that came up for her because part of her old trigger”

Q Do you have a ritual around journaling? Do you ask yourself the same questions? What does your, your routine of journaling look like? And how is it powerful?

A Well, to be clear, I've been journaling since I was 13. And I turned 60 this year. So, journaling is a fundamental part of who I am. What I do is I take stock of myself. I'm tired, or, um, my back is hurting, or I had a wonder, like yesterday, I had a wonderful phone call with my sister Ann, and, um, I told her about, uh, having visited our home, our childhood home in Brooklyn last weekend. And that brought up all sorts of feelings. Um, and we shared feelings, uh, that, and I wrote about all of that this morning in the journal. And in a way, it's kind of like processing what happened for me, and then it clears the day, and then I meditate, and then I will exercise, right? And that tends to be the ritual. Now, I hesitate because I've often spoken about journaling and morning rituals, and there is a A little bit of a tendency in our world right now to place a little too much emphasis on the form. Where do you, where do you journal? Oh, do you meditate? And I just want to bring people back to the function. Cause the function is taking a fix on your life. How are you feeling right now? And how is it impacting your life these days? So that we're raising consciousness so that we're not operating on autopilot.

AI assessment note: “What I do is I take stock of myself... and then it clears the day”

Q I like that a lot. I want to, I want to take that to relationships and talk to me about how stubbornness manifests itself in a relationship where we end up sort of butting heads with somebody we love and we care about and we don't intend to. We're not consciously thinking about it. How do we get out of this loop where we're, we're both being stubborn about something?

A I promise I won't ask you about your relationships. I think you're absolutely right that this shows up in there. And, and there's a couple of things that I would say about that. One, again, using the same tools of unpacking and understanding what's important to you. So for example, in my own life, one of the trigger points for me, that's very well known in my partner, Ali knows this very, very well. It's very important for me to be generous. And if I feel that my generosity is being taken advantage of, I go from being Spider-Man to being the Hulk. And that goes back to childhood where I felt that my compassionate, gentle nature was taken advantage of. Okay. So that is programming that lies deep with inside of me. And I'm fully conscious of it. And it will still run occasionally. So you asked, how does this discernment show up in, in good relational skills? One thing, uh, that, uh, my partner Ali and I practice that is very, very helpful. And this is a line that, um, comes from Brene Brown and it, and it's simply the story that I'm telling myself. So imagine, uh, Hulk in me gets triggered with discernment, with the self-knowledge, with what I call radical self-inquiry. I know that that Hulk lives within me. And rather than naming that with shame, which I used to, oh, you're right. Oh, it's terrible. I, I've welcomed in that part of me and understand that that part of me shows up…

AI assessment note: “a new line, which is, okay, the story I'm telling myself is”

Q two friends talking and solving problems, but it's a bit vulnerable, too, because you're also going to get to listen to Jerry work through some of my issues in real time. It's time to listen and learn. Music You were a great VC. You became rich. You accomplished all of your goals that you thought you wanted. And yet you wanted to kill yourself. You felt hollow inside. What happened?

A Well, that's quite a way to, to start the conversation. Um, if you, if you disconnect for a moment, what one does from how one is and how one has been, um, and I want to be clear cause though there's a relationship between those two, but if you disconnect it for a moment, um, It becomes a little bit easier to see through the myth that we all carry, which is that if I achieve a certain pinnacle of success, then it's milk and honey and sunshine and rainbows for the rest of my life. Of course, as soon as I say that, we know that that's not true. For me, That moment, and you're right, I describe it as feeling hollow inside. A way to see it is that I walked around with a shell that was tailored to other people's projections of who I should be. And my skill set and my intellect and my work ethic still shone through. But I wasn't necessarily doing the thing I was put on this earth to do. And that led to this disconnect between the inner me and the outer me, which on a prolonged period of time leads to depression.

AI assessment note: “I walked around with a shell that was tailored to other people's projections”

Q I think so. Does that relate to one of the questions in Reboot was, I want to make sure I get this right. How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want?

A You got it. That's the core organizing question. And, and it's really important to unpack that question carefully. I chose the word complicit for a reason. I often talk about being the accomplice in a bank job, not the one who sticks up the teller because the responsibility of More often than not, becomes part of that family lineage. Well, this is the way we do things. Right. And so for, in order for me to belong, I adopt a methodology and I become an accomplice in those conditions. So that's part one of the unpacking. Part two of the unpacking is I say I don't want. So if we go back to the, to the woman CEO that I was talking about today, I spoke with last week, she says she doesn't want the staff to always turn to her. But boy howdy does it make her feel good.

AI assessment note: “You got it. That's the core organizing question.”

Q Well, I need to go deeper on two things. They're not operating on autopilot and processing emotions. When you say that, The words, I just sort of understand them, but when I think about what that means, I don't know if I do understand that. What does it mean to process your emotions?

A Um, and what you're hitting upon Shane is the fact that we're not socialized to pay attention to feelings, but feelings have consequences in our life, regardless of whether or not we pay attention to them. For example, you might be feeling afraid of the market going down and you've lost money. And you're carrying that feeling, and you open, you start your day, and then your son comes to you and says, Dad, I need 20 bucks, you know, I'm going on, oh, what am I, made of money? Right? So now, what we've just done is ask your child to bear the burden of your anxiety about money, For which he is ill-prepared and totally not at fault. Or it could be job related, or it could be the world related, or it could be that you had a fight with your spouse, or it could be, and what ends up happening is this unprocessed stuff spills out and impacts other people. Right. Um, you could, you could, without processing it, you could go to the gym and be feeling really like, and you're not paying attention. And then you do a deadlift and all of a sudden you blow out your back because you're not present. I'm really trying to make pedestrian examples of unprocessed To, so that we could make sense of what it means. You asked the question, what does it mean to process the feelings? It means to take them down, to examine them, and then to put them back so they don't plague you for the rest of the day. So …

AI assessment note: “It means to take them down, to examine them, and then to put them back”

Q like, Nobody's sort of modeled how to end a relationship. Nobody's sort of modeled how to have a difficult conversation with a friend. Nobody's sort of modeled. Uh, in fact, it was just the opposite, right? It was like, you avoid difficult conversations. You, you don't have them. You, and I think that the teenage boy thing is like, you become an asshole until the woman breaks up with you.

A Exactly. It, we, we have two choices basically that we present mostly males of the species. But a lot of folks say nothing and passive aggressively act out until you can't take it anymore and you active aggressively act out. And we have these two choices. Okay. And there's a whole range of human experience in between that is bypassed, right? We don't teach children to say, I'm scared. Or that we, we allow it until a certain age. And then our expectation is somehow they're going to self soothe their way from fears. There is no moment in time where we say, I'm done. Fully realized adult. Maybe the Buddha is, maybe the Dalai Lama is, but I don't know many people who are totally free of these things. But the practice of growing up, the practice of becoming the adults that we want to be.

AI assessment note: “Exactly. It, we, we have two choices basically that we present mostly males”

Q Well, I didn't mean that, but like somebody started an electric car company, right? Because they were motivated to do so. I wasn't specifically mentioning.

A I think that you're partially right. Think of the most brilliant ideas that you've ever had. Think of the eureka moments that people, uh, often have. In my experience, those real innovative moments actually occur when the brain is relaxed, when the heart is relaxed, ok? When we are not terrified that we are not enough. Now, if, if, if we know that that's true at the individual basis, What is the, uh, expression of that on a communal basis? And the, the expression of that, I think, is when we feel collectively that Whether it's at a country level or a company level, when we can relax into the joy of doing something magnificent, something magical, greater innovation comes. You look at, you know, a classic example of a community coming together, the United States space race. Okay. And that was motivated by a lot of fear of not being enough and being competitive. For most of the, what's it been, 5060 years, we have balanced both the negative aspects of that, oh my god, it's a cold war and we've got to compete with the Soviets, With the positive, reaching for the stars, creating something extraordinary. In fact, I would say what has sustained us is the reach for the stars experience. You know, Robert Browning, the poet, has a wonderful couplet. He says, man's reach should exceed his grasp, or else what's a heaven for? And I think that the, the, the counterbalance to using I'm not en…

AI assessment note: “I think that you're partially right. Think of the most brilliant ideas”

Q choosing and that that's part of being an adult, but also part of being an adult. Which we haven't talked about that involves discernment is the people you surround yourself with your friends. And why do we keep people in our lives that bring us down or that we know aren't, aren't right, but we're scared to detach and let go. And how do we, how do we change this?

A Well, I think you just answered your own question. We're scared to detach and let go. Right? Cause the first question I was going to, when, when, when we look at patterns in our lives and maintaining relationships that are not good for us is a good example of a pattern, right? I remember working with a client who was complaining to me about her boss and her boss's name was John. And one day I, I said, wait, wasn't your last boss named John? She goes, yeah. And the boss before that, wasn't he named John? Yeah. What's your father's name? John. When we look at those patterns, it is so useful to ask ourselves, without inducing shame or blame, what is the benefit? Why do I keep this relationship going when they hurt me? It's like what we need to develop is a kind of, you know, body hacking device that tells us don't do that. You, you do that and you see this friend and all you feel is terrible about yourself. A, why do you persist in seeing this friend? And B, what is it about the relationship with this friend that makes you feel bad about yourself? You see that discernment coming in again? That, what, what I call that radical self-inquiry? You know, we, we go see that friend that makes us feel bad, and then we come home and we feel bad, and we take it out on our spouse. We don't ask the question, why did I go in the first place? Like, like I asked that, that, that CEO, well, who hi…

AI assessment note: “Well, I think you just answered your own question. We're scared to detach and let go.”

Q That persona, that, that alter ego maybe perhaps, but it makes us feel as we don't have enough and that we should be doing that or, you know, we should be, why aren't I on vacation now? Why don't I have a new car? Why aren't I flying around in a private jet? How do we, how do we learn to come to grips with enough?

A I think that you, you hit upon a core motivation that really, um, distorts almost everything that we do. Right. And our children are growing up in a world where, um, they are repeatedly shown a message, which is that they are not enough. And there's a lot in our, um, economic systems that are built on this, right? Advertising. Activates that. Effective advertising says, you, you may be great, but you'd be much better if you had this car versus that clunker that you're driving, right? And, um, we know that, that, that this is true, right? We, we have myths and stories, uh, that we use to teach parables that, that, that, Um, try to reinforce the message that just as you are, you are enough. Just as you are, you are enough. And, uh, but it is, for all the reasons that we talked about before, the Teflon that exists with inside of you, there is this subtle secondary benefit Uh, which is, if I feel that I am enough, then I will somehow be a complacent slug. Now again, I want, I'm going to do something unfair. I want you as a parent, as a father, imagine your two sons. Never feeling that they are enough.

AI assessment note: “you hit upon a core motivation that really, um, distorts almost everything that we do.”

Q that game, but it's too late because by the time most of us realize that we're, you know, 70, 80, uh, 90, it's near the end of our life. How do we call, how do we switch out of that zone so that we can recognize Am I doing this consciously because I want to do it or am I doing it because other people want me to do it?

A Okay. So the first thing I want to say is that it's never too late. And I think that that's a really important message. You know, the Buddha had a teaching which basically goes like this. If you sit down to meditate with the intention of meditating for 20 minutes and spend 19 minutes while gathering, But in the last minute, wake up. Congratulations. You had a wonderful meditation session. So even at 70 or 80, it's not too late. And that's a really important message because part of the myth is that it's always too late. Oh, it's not. I'm 19 years old. It's too late. I'm 30 years old. It's too late. I'm 50 years old. It's too late. It's not too late. It's not too late to wake up to realize for the pursuit of love, safety, and belonging, we shape ourselves, ourselves, we shape shift ourselves, kind of like a Marvel superhero to fit the expectations of others. The forces at work are Insidious and relentless and ubiquitous. One can make the argument that the real purpose of life boils down to discovering who you really are and living into that, and then you inject a little bit of kindness into that, and then we have A fully actualized person. I know that was a long-winded answer. I just want to put a pin in the fact that you also asked, how do we get there? And that's a different question, but I did want to give enough space to the folks who might listen to this and, and recognize j…

AI assessment note: “you also asked, how do we get there? And that's a different question”