#740: Greg McKeown and Diana Chapman

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers.
From every field imaginable to tease out the habits.
routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply.
And test in your own lives.
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its tenth year anniversary, which is insane to think about.
And past one billion downloads.
To celebrate
I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites.
From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade.
I could not be more excited.
To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these
The Super Combo episodes.
Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks.
But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider.
Stars.
These are people who have transform my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
Perhaps
They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
And for the bios of all guests.
You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo.
And now, without further ado.
Please enjoy.
And thank you.
For listening.
First up
Greg McEwen
The New York Times bestselling author of
Essentialism
The discipline pursuit of less.
And
Effortless.
Make it easier to do what matters most.
and host of the Greg McEwen podcast.
You can find Greg on Twitter at
Gregory McEwen.
People don't do moderation well. I decided to go off sugar
A year ago.
Almost a year ago, New Year's Eve.
Talking to somebody, I've been thinking about doing it for a while, they've been off sugar for twelve years, and I'm like, Okay, if you can do twelve years, I can do a year, I'm gonna make this decision. If I'd gone ninety five percent off sugar, I'll know.
I'm out before I begin.
Everything's an exception.
Well, that's you know, that's amazing cake. I gotta eat that. I mean that's
Oh, this is a holiday. I've gotta eat that is the weekend. I'm I'm going out with my wife. I gotta I've got to eat it now. She's eating I got
And everything's an exception.
So I think there's a variety of things in life that it's a much, much easier.
To go.
A hundred percent.
than it is to go.
Ninety five percent. Because what you're doing is you're taking out the decision
Process.
It's done.
We are not doing sugar.
Now I don't have to think every time and by the way, there's crazy amounts of sugar in this world.
Yeah. I don't have to think about it every time. The decision's already made. So first I want to just mention one of the concepts in Essentialism that I really appreciated is trying to find the one decision that removes a thousand decisions, such as the elimination of sugar that you
mentioned as just one example. I will tell you where I
Struggle.
And I think I'm better than maybe average Joe or Jane at saying no to things. I I'm quite good, but one of the great ironies of writing a book
called say essentialism or the four hour work week is that if those concepts hit and the books do well, you suddenly have a flood, a torrent
Of
Inbound.
requests and all sorts of new categories of things to contend with. And I find myself
struggling to say no to
People who probably land
On the spectrum of
good acquaintance to reasonably good friend.
who ask for help with various things. And there are certain things that I feel very comfortable saying no to, like the book blurbs.
But
I have
hundreds of requests. Those aren't all from friends, but dozens certainly for
promotion of their books on social. It's usually book related because people want their books to sell. Being on the podcast, you name it.
I feel like
Friends who do not
fully think of the ramifications of their
request oftentimes when it's last minute where they wouldn't ever go to the New York Times
the day before they have something come out and ask for everything to be reshuffled for their benefit.
that is what ends up happening to me on a fairly regular basis. So I think I
allocate too much time
to trying to explain myself to those people.
Or placate those people in some way.
And
I would love to hear your thoughts.
On
Best practices.
or heuristics related to that specifically. Because I don't view myself as a people pleaser, but nonetheless, with this particular subset of people, I do find it really challenging. And there are times when
people I would like to maintain a good relationship with who come to me last minute for help that I cannot deliver without massively
inconveniencing my entire team and reshuffling
Get
very piss in a way, or they take it very personally and
Maybe that's okay. I tend to think that it is, and I'm I'm going a little long here, but it's I think a a challenge that a lot of people face.
What are your thoughts?
Well
Let's just agree on the problem first of all.
Because
As a CEO friend of mine once told me, he said I take every
Time and resource.
Estimate that's given to me now.
And I multiply it by pi.
So
He's saying
I thought he was exaggerating at first, but he's saying
People so massively underestimate
Everything.
And there is another heuristic for this, right? It's called the planning fallacy.
The final fallacy is saying
We as humans underestimate
Almost all the time.
How long things will take.
And we do that even with things we have done ourselves before. Driving from point A to point B takes us fifteen minutes, but if we're in the middle of writing an email
We will convince ourselves we can do it in five minutes this time.
We'll get
You know, all green lights, everything's gonna work out somehow it'll be done in five minutes. Of course we do it doesn't take that long. It takes fifty minutes and we're late for the meeting. But we want to con ourselves into it.
What you're describing, I think
There's two pieces to it. The first is this piece and the second is the relationship impact of
How to handle this.
But what you're describing is a problem where somebody is really
Underestimating.
What their request is.
They're saying in their head, they're going
Yes.
Is a
Two minutes favor.
Tim, it's not hard.
All you have to do
is put out a tweet. How hard can it be?
Or whatever.
And so in their head their ask is very small.
But the reality
Is that their ask is much bigger.
They also don't think about the reputational risk or anything like that of endorsing something that I don't have time to read, for instance.
Well, that's exactly so. So I think that there is
Something around this. Again, before we get to the relationship impact of
Maybe you already did it.
But
of actually
Creating
one page or you've got the email bounce back
Document.
Having a page that says
But this is the real cost.
The total cost of ownership of me saying yes to this.
And maybe there's even once it's created, it can be used in a variety of ways. One is reactively, right? When the request comes in, okay, I need you to read this first, I need to understand.
But maybe there's a proactive approach, which is like look
I'm just putting this out there.
This is what this actually costs.
Because even what you just said reputational costs, not that people aren't thinking about that.
Yeah, they're just thinking about getting their thing achieved.
And so
being able to try and calculate all of that the total cost of ownership.
I mean that's what you have to do with the planning policy is we have to consider the total cost.
so that we don't start projects that we don't complete. In fact there's a a New York Times just ran a piece about exactly this.
that I'm aware of because it it's quoting essentialism in trying to address the problem, but of all these projects we start, we don't finish.
This is just a version of that problem.
They maybe are being thoughtless, maybe.
They don't think they're being thoughtless, they just think it's not a big deal for you.
And they don't understand the full range of impact. So I think
writing this out like almost like it's a recipe. This is the cost.
And in that I think
In the helpful side of it, you could say
So in the future.
If you want to be considered.
This is the process you would need to go through.
So again, what's happening is that you've got to help
Other people's problems
be their problem.
Right.
And there's a story I came across with a book that I really like on this principle, which is
I think it's a true story.
Can't quite remember now, but it's um Doctor Cloud.
He's talking about meeting with
A couple, a husband, wife, uh parents.
And they come to see him and they say, um
They they say look, you know, our our son, we have so many problems with our son.
He's on drugs, he's he's drinking all the time, he's living back at home with us now. I mean he's just not got a job everything
It's just such a mess for us. It's just so concerned. And he says, Okay, well, I understand. Where is he though? Where you have an appointment here.
To deal with this, where is your son?
They said, Well, you know, he doesn't really see that he has a problem.
And Dr. Patton's role.
I think
He's right.
And
They're shocked at that. What would you mean that he's right?
Oh even just described all the problems. He said he said no, he says he says, Listen, he says if you look outside your window in the morning
And your sprinkler head.
On your lawn.
Is faulty and it's
Spraying on your neighbor's
Grass.
And your neighbor's grass is green.
And your grass is dying.
Who has the problem?
You've got the problem, right? Because
Your grass is dying. Your neighbour doesn't have a problem. Their grass is fine.
Is it your son
Doesn't have a problem.
Because
Comfortable at home with you?
He has to do whatever he wants. He's he's looked after life is fine. He doesn't have a problem. You have a problem.
And your job now is to help your
Sun
To have
A problem.
What?
Let's
Your son.
Have his problem.
You've been well intended.
But you got it all wrong. You've got to let him own it.
If he doesn't have a problem, if everything's taken care of for him
You can't
Move forward, it can't get better.
And so now obviously it's a bit strong to use that example with the example that you led this conversation with, but it is a similar principle.
is that there has to be a boundary and there has to be an education of going
You've made this problem my problem right now. Let me just
Lay this out so that you can own the problem. So in the future
We can do this perhaps in a better way.
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I
I was told something not
Not too terribly long ago, maybe two years ago, which was along the lines of
A line you could use with such people.
Although you'd probably have to dress it up a little bit, which is, you know, your lack of planning does not constitute my emergency.
Right. Which is I suppose in theory makes a lot of sense, but it's sometimes
falls by the wayside in practice due to fear of social repercussions, which we can get to
In a second.
A one hundred percent Tim Ferris therapy session, but
Just so people know.
For those people out there who may be like, Oh yeah, that Tim Ferris, he never
Agree to X or whatever it is.
I've had instances where journalists from mainstream publications have reached out for book blurbs or help with their own projects.
I've pol very politely declined because I've been unable to help them in the capacity they required, and they've gone on to write.
Like hit pieces or hatchet pieces or slam pieces about me.
out of spite. And it's like that kind of shit happens. So I think I'm
A little once bit and twice shy.
from a lot of those experiences, but ultimately
Does any of that prevent me from doing the
Essential project that we discussed? Not really.
That right there

Here's exactly the point.
You know, one can say, let's take the opposite argument for a moment and I'll just
Play
non essentialist to the conversation, which is
Yes, Tim.
You're getting it wrong.
You're thinking about yourself.
Too much.
And every single request that
Someone from
Media
Or any friend or any acquaintance
Yeah.
Anything that they want from you, you should be saying yes. You know, you got
helped by lots of people, therefore you're under a total obligation to do it for everybody else.
And you got this wrong.
So
Is that argument right, is it really right? It could be right.
Is it right?
I don't think it's right and even if it were right, it's not sustainable.
Right, even if you're not.
If something's not sustainable, that's like
foundationally clear that it can't be right.
And like by definition, it's something that's not sustainable will not continue. It cannot continue. Right. So what you just said, which is awesome, is like
It's correct other than it's impossible.
Yeah right, right, right. But but you've just done for us a a favor, which is that you helped us to understand the basic
foundational error with non essentialism. Like
The problem with non essentialism is that it's the only problem.
happens to be alive.
It's just got that inconvenience associated with it. You can't
Actually do
Everything can you imagine?
How many books were being sent to Oprah at the height of her s the Oprah show and everything? Just insane.
Warehouses full. Had to be.
A going that way.
And she
had to get somehow, we assume she appeared to get to a level of peace with going, Look
There's no way I can even touch any of that stuff.
I've got to be truer to this voice within me.
of clarity about what my mission is.
and my essential mission and not all of this other stuff.
It's not being unhelpful to the world.
For you to say no to
Something that's less important is not
being unhelpful or selfish in the world.
I I don't buy that.
Your obligation
is to the highest point of contribution you can make. And but what I think happens a lot is that people get
Caught up.
In the idea that
Can I do this thing?
It's like they pretend there's nothing else going on in their life.
The request comes in and they go, Can I do this?
Well yes, I can do this. I know how to do this, I can make this happen.
And that's not life.
That's non essentialist junk. That's just rubbish.
The question is
If I do this thing, what doesn't get done?
What else gets pushed out?
Now I'm not saying don't be helped the people that come
requesting things that can be absolutely ways of helping people. I want to help people.
But if it's at the cost of
something that's actually more important, that makes a higher contribution. We have an obligation.
Not to do it.
There's one more piece here which is important, which is that you don't want to hurt these relationships and that's where
the concern really comes from. So the question is is how can you
Deal with this in a way
That minimizes the damage.
To you through
Some media outlet stuff.
Doing some hit piece.
or help people understand the context behind it.
And I think that still comes back to at least
for yourself writing this all out.
You know, this is what I am trying to do and why it matters. I mean, in a way, it's having the conversation we've just had.
Mm-hmm.
But written out so that it can be expressed again and again and again. The why behind
This answer the why.
It's the thing that we miss out on. So let's in fact move to step three. So step one was what is essential, step two is what is non essential, and step three is how do you create a system
that makes executing what's essential as effortless as possible.
It's a perfect way to get there at this point because
Because having this
written out document. I mean w how you'll use it is
I'm not sure yet about that in my own head.
But if you have it clearly written out, this is what I'm doing, this is why.
This is the cost of disrupting that.
This is what it does. This is who will lose out.
If I
Don't stay focused on this now.
All of that becomes like a communication core for yourself, a a place to pivot to.
When the request comes in and you Oh.
Maybe I can change, you know, everything today to make that possible and you go, Hold on.
Let's go back.
To the document.
My assistant was away for a little while.
Couple of weeks.
And the amount of damage I managed to do in those couple of weeks was ridiculous.

You know, the number of things I managed to commit to. I tell you she came back, actually she's gone for a month. I'm remembering now, it's for her honeymoon.
And
She comes back.
I was very positive.
I wasn't saying oh I've messed everything up.
I said, I said, let me tell you all the things that happened in the month you've gone.
And it was just kind of a little silence at the end of it all.
Because
She's like
Yeah, she didn't say it, but this is what's in the silence. It's like
What's wrong with you?
You
How are you thinking that you sh can take on all of those projects and all of those ideas?
You know like you aren't thinking fully about the cost of doing all those things. And she was dead right, and what grew out of that is we came up with three rules.
Mm.
But things that I
Would and wouldn't do.
And I'll give one
Of the rules.
was no personalization.
I don't do any personalization.
So if I'm doing
key notes, workshops, whatever. I'll listen, I'll understand what the company or the client at the conference needs.
But I'm not going to redo, rethink, rechange. I'm not changing the slides. I'm not changing the
You know, the subtle things you can do in the moment, but I'm not redoing stuff.
Because if you s personalize everything
Is I has a had a want to do.
It's like you're rewriting a book every time. I mean you have to rethink everything.
As that was one rule.
And we had two other rules. Are you willing to share the other two rules? I should know what they are, right? If I say those three rules and they were really useful to me.
Yeah.
So actually one was
Don't overcorrect.
Based on a negative feedback.
That's a little more vulnerable to share that one, but I think everybody suffers with that. That's that's why, you know, that which is most personal is most universal. I
So we
Do an event, do a conference, get good feedback.
One of the people
You know, in the comments says X, and I think
She's absolutely right. That is a valid criticism.
Let's change it.
Let's redo how we're doing this to address that concern.
It's the same sort of thing. It's w it's overreacting to it.
And frankly, when you overreact to this kind of feedback
You really cause a problem for other people giving feedback.
And I in hindsight can see how that's been in my life, right? Somebody's trying to be helpful, they're trying to be honest, they're giving the feedback and I'm
Multiplying the effect of it.
So that was number two.
And
I think number three might have been something like
It's like either no new projects like beyond what we'd identified, like we've already identified a couple of really big things I want to go after.
It's like no new project outside of that.
It might have been specifically no workshop business.
Which is
There's always a demand for it with essentialism. There's always been interest in it. I always feel an obligation because of
One
There's a need.
People are interested in two
Just I think there's there's a full business here and and it it could easily be or have been
successful business and those things have kept pulling me into it.
And I just
Whenever I start working on it.
Unlike if you need a
The supermarket, you see a kid on the floor.
Not throwing a tantrum.
They're just lying on the floor.
Like legs spread out, arms spread out, uh just like
They have no energy.
To even get up off the floor.
This is how much passion they feel to for being in the supermarket on this day. They're just like
Nothing here is interesting.
Not one part of me wants to be getting up and doing this.
That's how I feel in that business. It's just not what

And and my my poor assistant has had hear me.
Say that in one way or another so many times.
Oh okay, we should do I know I should do this. Okay, let's do it.
Oh yeah, we did. Make it happen.
And finally
She's just like look.
There's no part of you that wants to do this. Why are you doing this? And so we managed I think those are the three rules we got there.
Could you
Perhaps
Elaborate on what
The
Personal quarterly offsite is.
It's creating space.
for you to actually think
Long term.
About what really matters.
in the greater scheme of things. I mean it's the same as any executive team
They have a quarterly off site, an annual off site. Why do they do it? Because they know if they don't, they're gonna get buried in
Reacting to
Approximate.
Issues.
instead of seeing strategically where they want to be headed and what trade offs they need to make in order to get there.
And it's just the same for
At the individual level.
My wife and I um started doing quarterly off sites two or three years ago.
In fact, one of the things I did to try and c construct a system to make sure we followed through is that I did it where we had a few people come together.
And I was sort of
Of leading the process.
But underneath it.
One of the important intents of it was so that
An and I could actually
Have a full day
Once every quarter.
You know, away from everything else.
and to think about the long term goals and
out of that process for us.
what are you doing on that in in that process? You're you're saying, Okay, what's happened
Over the last
Big picture you can say, Okay, what's happened in my life?
What what's the long term perspective here?
Where am I? Where where have I been?
What's been going on?
So you you're trying to get
clear view of
of your life, what's been going on with it. And then you say okay going forward, long term perspective. What would I like to be achieving? What feels important. Again, it's not just success
Set it's not just goal setting.
You did set the wrong goals.
It's what's essential to me, what it feels like my mission.
to pursue.
And I remember
In that very first official session that we did.
And she was going through the process.
had identified a couple of things
that were really important and I could tell they were
They had been within her, but they just sort of came to a s the surface.
One of them was a
I don't know, it might sound funny to people but
Yeah, but it was like horses.
Horses. Like that's a weird thing to say, isn't it? Horses. That's not what you expect me to say.
She said.
I just have this vision
Of having
Place.
with horses. And it it's not necessarily even that we would own the horses, it wasn't even necessarily that.
We d we don't have any horse background, it's not like good horse people. I mean uh
Nothing like that.
But it was a sense of if we
Well
To achieve what that
means.
our children would grow up in a certain kind of environment.
You know, it was like a symbol.
of a certain type of childhood.
And our children were at the time were sort of in
The golden years.
Which means that he is
Before they're driving
And after their out of diphense.
And so
It's like a magical period because you can do things, you can make memories together, you can do it. We weren't living in a place at the time
We were in the middle of Silicon Valley, which is terrific in lots of ways, but it's not you're not gonna end up with horses, right?
You have to think differently.
And that
single insight in that quarterly off site shifted
A whole sense of intent.
And we realised if we want to do this while our children are still in this golden years, we're gonna have to move
Sooner rather than later.
to be able to achieve this dream. Otherwise we're gonna achieve it after
At least the eldest is out of the house and then what was the point?
And so it was an insight, a strategic insight that has had profound influence on a
You know, it's a one decision that makes a thousand.
There's a whole series of things we have to do to put in process
To be prepared to organise it.
to find such a place and so on, and it took a while to do it.
But
It took a couple of years, maybe, maybe as much as that.
Now we live in a community that
You're required to have space for horses. You don't have to have them.
You have to have space for them.
And that single criteria again makes a lot of other
influences change, right? You're going to be around a lot of nature, you're going to be
Even the kind of people
in some ways that you're around a certain value system that they care about.
All those kinds of things.
And so that's sort of an a personal example.
Of why to hold
personal course the offsite.
It shifts the whole direction you're going in. It tilts and bends
Your narrative.
As you go forward.
Do you have any recommendations for other
Format best practices or any best practices for personal offsites. Is it an afternoon? Is it a day? Is it two days? Is it
In your living room is it?
Off site.
I mean,
Here's what I think. I think it's off site.
It's
in nature or thereabout, it's somewhere that's quiet.
Uninterrupted.
I know of some people I've never done this, but I I know of someone who has a second phone
And their second phone is like one of these little credit card sized phones and
only two people in the world that have the number to dispose and so when they go
It means they can be reached for emergency, but that's it.
And so they are just gone.
so that they can have an unintroduced space, which is very hard to have these days.
So you want to be in an uninterrupted environment. You want to not have
Text and email and all of that available.
I recommend you either do it on your own
Or maybe with one other person, you know, a design partner.
that you can really go through the process, I think that
The longer the perspective is, the better.
The one I was referring to, we actually started prior to our life.
So started it.
Great grandparents, in fact.
Great grandparents' parents.
Your own life.
And then going forward
the end of your life, to your kids, grandkids
great grandchildren or if you never have children, it's just the people that you'd influence generations from now.
And it's that kind of huge
vision.
that kind of level of perspective that helps to draw up within you an unexpected insight.
something that you already know but somehow is being
buried because you're thinking about life in just sort of reactive ways. The whole idea is to create space.
to be able to
The C
Yeah.
voice
We will have lots of names for it, right? But we'll just
The voice
Your own conscience, your own.
Sense of direction
And to be able to listen to that.
so that you can discern again between all these good things, all these different pools and
And so on.
And really what you came here to do.
And that's the point of it.
I
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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And now
Diana Chapman
Co founder of the Conscious Leadership Group.
and co-author of
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.
Find Diana at
Conscious.is
Dana.
Welcome to the show.
So nice to see you.
Ah, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.
So I thought I would just establish some bona fides right off the bat and then we're gonna do a little
Chronological shuffling. So first I want to read a quote.
From
The team
portion of the website. So under your name at conscious.i.
S.
There's a quote.
From
Dustin Moskowitz. Now, for those who don't know who Dustin is, Dustin is co-founder of Asana. Prior to that, he was co-founder of Facebook in 2011. He was, at least at the time, the youngest self-made billionaire.
In history.
Uh
The planet, as far as I know. And here's the quote, quote, working with Diana has dramatically changed the way I react to challenges and stress in my life, preserving my energy to direct towards more constructive pursuits. As a coach, she has a gift for guiding me through introspection on the stories I create about events and people in a structured way that inevitably leads to perspective shifts.
We can't control the fact that bad things are gonna happen.
But how we react to those events is what really matters.
And that we can learn to control. When we have the right attitude and resourcing, adversity becomes strictly an opportunity to learn and grow. Okay. So this is the kind of quote that a lot of folks would kill for.
Maybe die for.
certainly amputate a few fingers for.
Before we
Dig into
all sorts of juicy bits that we could pull out of that quote as a jumping off point. I want to go back to nineteen ninety seven. So I
Did not expect to find this. I didn't expect to find anything in particular, but
This is what I found. This is on Critio.com.
In 1997, Diana Chapman was a stay at home mom teaching scrapbooking in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
quote, as mainstream a life as they come, end quote, she says.
I didn't know any of this. So number one, you can't believe everything you read on the internet. So is this true? And then assuming
Some aspect of it is true. Could you
Tell us about the gift from your brother-in-law.
Around that time.
Yeah, so it is true. I was the quintessential stay at home mom.
All things
Being with my kids, being part of the school, you know, head of the PTA, all that good stuff.
And I
Was though very interested in personal development, spirituality, human consciousness that was always in the background.
But I
was very devoted to my children. I was teaching scrapbooking.
to other moms. I mean, I was so cute. I was um I was really cute.
And my brother in law
Was
A top CEO in the country, and he was very, very devoted to personal development.
And he was a connoisseur of finding great coaches.
And I think
The truth was that he and my sister in law were concerned about my marriage.
And wondered if we were gonna make it.
And so
They recommended that we go out to California and take a training with Gay and Kathleen Hendricks of the Hendrix Institute.
And so
Actually they gave us five grand. He said, You can do whatever you want with the money, but I'm gonna recommend you go out to California.
So I joyfully
Could not wait to go.
I didn't know anything about them.
But he said they're the best. So off we went and it was a
profoundly life changing week.
And I thought to myself
Why am I just learning these tools?
And I'm gonna devote the rest of my life making sure people get access to them. And that's what I've done.
What did you feel?
or experience or what changes did you observe that led you to have such a strong
Reaction.
First of all, I learned about this thing called the drama triangle.
Which many people out there may have heard about, but
I realized my whole life is running around on this drama triangle.
And the drama triangle was created by Stephen Cartman back in the seventies, and he
Defined ways in which human beings get caught in victimhood.
That
create reactivity. And I realized
I'm on the triangle most of the time.
And there is a big cost to me and my people when I'm on the drama triangle. And so
That was the wake up call for me. And then I just
Spent.
Every day since
looking for all the tools I can for how to
keep myself out of that triangle as much as possible.
Since you mentioned it, let's just jump right into
the drama triangle. Could you
Give us an overview.
Of what it is and how you might use it.
Okay, so Cartman says
Many of us got trained to live in a state of victimhood, and there are three unique flavors of victimhood in the drama triangle. We call them bases.
So the first base is the pure victim. And the pure victim, you know, it's so hard here. I'm trying. I don't know. It's just any kind of a
Oh help, you know, it's got this very disempowered feeling.
And it's somehow like they've got the power. Somebody else has it, not me. And I'm very at the effect of things. So I could be at the effect of my bank account, at the effect of
this email that just came in at the effect of the traffic, at the effect of the new
Policy on going back to work at the effect of Covid. All those things are forms of
Being a victim.
Then the next role in the drama triangle is the villain, and the villain's job is to blame.
So I can blame me.
I should have known that, or I should have been more prepared, or any should have over here on me, or I'm not smart enough, or I can't count on myself.
That's all.
villaining toward myself, or we can villain toward another.
You know, you you're the reason why I'm not having as much fun as I could be having or
We could be a villain to a group of people, which is very popular.
In our culture, so we all know who's screwing it up for the rest of us, you know, it's that group over there, and everybody's pointing to particular groups.
Who are the bad guys.
So villain's very popular because it gets our adrenaline really kicking out. I think it's actually in the terms of service on Twitter that you have to play that role when you use the service. Anyway, just a side note. Right. Right. Who's screwing it up? Who's wrong?
Yeah, you don't know. You're wrong. I'm right. And so the last role in the drama triangle is the hero.
It's also called
The reliever or the rescuer.
And the hero's job is to seek
Temporary relief.
So
Oh my God, I had such a hard day today at work. Let me call home. I'm gonna
drink my alcohol or do my gaming or get lost in Netflix or whatever I'm gonna do to give myself some temporary relief and it works. But
I gotta do it again tomorrow.'Cause
tomorrow I'm gonna come home, potentially burn out again, and then I'm gonna have to do the same pattern. So heroine
Is temporary relief over and over again.
So I can hero myself, I could hero another, you know, oh you look like you're
struggling at work and let me take over some of your
Work that you're doing.
I could do that from a place of real presence, but when I'm in hero doing it
I'm actually
creating some codependence where I keep needing you to not be able to handle your work. So I can keep helping. And then I'll resent you over time.
And then we can hero them, you know, there's a lot of philanthropies.
especially in the past, they're getting better at this now, where we just throw a bunch of money at a population.
And then next year they have all the same issues and they need more money and nothing ever really changes.
So
The key thing is temporary relief. So we all know the story about you can give the man a fish.
Every night, or you could teach him to fish for himself. So the hero gives the man the fish night after night after night. And if you're off the drama triangle,
You shift to a place where
You see people as empowered and
The hero asked good questions to help
people get more effective around them.
So my next question I wanna
Share an observation.
From my rereading.
Of
The book.
And then the next question just to plant the seed is I'm gonna ask you why it's called the drama triangle, what drama actually means here. But in my reread.
which I'm in the middle of right now, of the fifteen commitments of conscious leadership, which was recommended to me by Dustin.
And I think it was also recommended in my last book, And Tribal Mentorers by Dustin. And
There's a section that I needed to reread, which was
related to the drama triangle and it pointed out that
The villain.
Could take the form of someone in a meeting.
who to try to resolve conflict, or maybe not resolve, to try to
minimize conflict.
always takes the blame. Like eventually at the end of the meeting they just say, you know what?
It's my fault. I should have done this, this, this, this, and this.
And it's easy, at least for me, to conflate
Radical responsibility.
With
overly blaming myself for everything.
And I don't actually
have a great way to approach navigating.
Discerning those two for me.
If that makes any sense. So we could try to unpack that or we could jump to why it's called the drama triangle.
But I'll let you choose the direction.
Well, let me do both. So the reason why it's called the Drama Triangle is because the whole triangle is set up for a na na nah.
It's
I'm right, you're wrong, you're to blame, or I'm to blame. It's not ask everybody to really take a hundred percent responsibility for how they're co-creating experiences.
So
If I'm in the drama triangle, the villain if I'm taking on
I'm more responsible.
What happens is I'll say oh
I'm here at the meeting, you guys, and look, it's my fault. I'll take some of your responsibility and take it all on me.
And so
There is a place to say, Hey, I have a part in how I've co-created this. Let me tell you my part.
That would be me taking my hundred percent.
I would also know that everybody else has a part to play too.
So I'm not taking
on their responsibility as well. That's the difference between
a villain and somebody who's just simply acknowledging I have a role to play here.
Got it.
Thank you. So we were chatting before we started recording.
And
You and I have have spoken.
quite a few times before we've met before spent time together. And you asked me why
I invited you on to the podcast and there were a number of answers I gave. One of them was related to
Kinesthetic awareness or
What our mutual friend and your
business partner, Jim Detmer.
I've called, at least in my in his notes to me for this conversation. This may be your term for all I know, BQ. So like
IQ EQ but body intelligence.
And I feel like you're very
well calibrated for this. And when we spoke
maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago, I was working on this no book, you might recall. And then as I kept working on it and kept working on it, I kept coming up with
great reasons to say no to the entire book, which was very meta
And I ended up stopping.
But we spoke a lot about
The whole body, yes.
And
I would love to maybe use that as a wedge.
to start the conversation because I found this so incredibly helpful.
when I am certainly prone to overintellectualizing everything into some extremely complicated matrix or spreadsheet or God knows what. So
Could you lead us into that in whatever way makes sense?
Sure.
The idea is that we have these different centers of intelligence.
So we have our head, our heart, our gut.
And IQ, EQ, BQ are
Some of the
ways we might be describing those things these days.
So body intelligence is
a recognition that I have an instinctual
Awareness
that
Is
known by my sensations
known by how the body feels.
And that
There's a lot actually there.
that if we start to drop into the body and pay attention
It's got a lot of it.
guidance for us, as does our emotions, as does our intellect.
And so
I do have a ton of access to my body intelligence. I think it's what I lead with in my own
getting clarity about which directions to go in my life.
And I put a lot of attention on it. So it's very
Palpable to me. My body screams often, you know, No, don't do that. Even though my intellect might ha have an understanding of why.
Let's
If you wouldn't mind, walk people through how they might understand and use the whole body yes.
Because for me
When something is screaming
I'm
decent at paying attention. But it's not always a scream. Sometimes it's
Oftentimes it is it is a little more nuanced. So could you walk people through
The whole body, yes, and what
That
Flight checklist, looks like.
Well I could
have people if we wanted to go through an experience of starting to feel what their whole body yes and no's feels like. Great. Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that. Should we do that?
It's very experiential, so it'll take about ten minutes and I'll have people
If they're listening, I'd recommend they close their eyes.
Wonderful. We have that work. We have all the time in the world. This isn't uh morning television.
Okay.
So the idea is that your body knows when there's a no.
When there's a yes and when there's a what I'm gonna call a subtle no.
And we say anything other than a whole body yes is a no. And to your point, it's easy to hear those screaming no's, but not so easy to hear the subtle no.
For example
Someone contacted our organization the other day and he wanted to
Talk.
And
it wasn't clear to me whether he was trying to sell us something or whether he genuinely had clients that he wanted to connect us with.
And even in my
I had suspicions that it wasn't as
Clean as he was suggesting.
And I asked for clarification and his clarification still
I couldn't really tell.
But
My body did know.
I felt this
flat feeling in my body when I thought about having the call.
And unfortunately
My head said, Well
Maybe you're not sure, so let's have the call.
And indeed it was a sales call and it was a not a good use of my time and
I quickly hung up.
That was a time in which I skipped over my no.
Because it was very subtle.
And my intellect started to get worried, like what if I'm missing something and you know, what if you don't know?
So
I use this all the time and I'm still learning as I did just last week.
Two
pay attention to the intelligences that are outside of just my intellect. And so for you all, if you want to learn more about this,
What I'd like you to do is close your eyes.
And
I'd like you to bring to mind an experience from the past that was deeply
Valuable to you.
It was something that was nurturing, it was something you would gratefully repeat that scene again.
It could be

made something valuable.
It could be a time when you were in nature feeling deeply centered.
So I'd like you to go back into that scene as best you can and
See the images of that scene.
And hear the sounds.
And as you're in that scene.
I want you to start to pay attention to the body.
And see if you can notice
Just simply
how the body is vibrating right now.
When you imagine yourself
In that scene.
Seeing those images.
Hearing the sounds.
How does your body vibrate?
Is there a particular direction in which energy is flowing through the body?
Now some of you might go.
Diane, I'm not feeling anything here. That's fine.
Just imagine if you were feeling something.
Might it be okay that it it might
Feel like pretend.
Just for now.
Is there
A certain temperature.
That you notice in the body.
For some people they might feel very specific sensations.
It might feel like shapes inside the body.
And some people might be auditory and hear tones.
Or see visuals in their mind's eye.
What you're doing here is getting a map of what does a whole body yes
You're like.
Just
strolling around inside of the body, feeling what you're feeling.
No right or wrong answers here.
And everybody is so unique. We all have our own different ways we feel it.
For me, my body.
It's warm.
There's that.
Uprising of energy, it flows up for me.
It's the
push in the flow for me.
But yours will be what it is.
And so then I'd like you to take one last
Like a memory take a memory shot of this.
So you can remember what this feels like.
And then I'd like you to shake it off.
And let it go.
And then I want you to think of a
seen in the past that you don't want to repeat.
And I don't recommend finding something
Traumatizing. Find
Something that you really
didn't feel like was a good use of your time, didn't serve you, you don't wanna repeat it ever again.
Or you prefer not to?
If you can bring that image to mind.
And again
See the visuals of that memory and hear the sounds.
And I want you to notice what happens
Now in the body.
Is there a different
Way the body's vibrating.
How is the direction of energy flowing or not flowing in this
Version.
Is there a difference in temperature?
Any other significant sensations or shapes you feel in the in or on the body.
And again tones.
in the ears or visuals in your mind's eye may also be included.
And you're getting a map for what no. This is a big no. Uh uh.
I don't want I don't want this.
I don't think this is gonna serve me.
Just mapping the territory in the body for what does this feel like.
And take one last picture of that.
And shake that one off.
And then we've got one more to do, and this is the subtle no. This is similar to what I was just describing earlier of
Taking a meeting.
You know, it didn't kill me to take the meeting. It didn't hurt.
Last ten minutes and I got off the phone. But I don't
It wasn't a yes, it wasn't an alive experience for me.
So this is called a subtle no. So I want you to think back everybody's got in the last two to four weeks.
Something that's happened in which it was a
Wasn't bad, wasn't good.
Yeah.
See if you can come back and
See that scene in your mind's eye.
And hear those sounds.
And you're gonna check and see what's a subtle no feel like for you.
How do you experience
That scene.
What do you notice in the body?
How does it vibrate here?
How does energy flow?
Or not slow.
Is there a difference in temperature?
What parts the body light up, sensations.
In tones or visuals as well.
Trying on here. And again, if you notice don't notice much, that's okay. Just imagine if you did notice, what would you notice?
And this is your map for what a subtle no feels like.
And you wanna remember this feeling so that the next time somebody says, Hey, you wanna go out to lunch or could you meet me
to talk about A B C that you if you feel this, likely it's an invitation for you to try no.
So you can shake that one off and then we'll
Bring our attention back.
to the ongoing conversation.
How was that for you, Tim?
It was a great exercise. It's been a long time since I've done an inventory like that and
I took notes. I took some notes and I'll share a few things just in case this
Helps other people.
I noticed that all three had different breathing patterns.
The breathing.
was very different.
Cadence and feeling.
Nice.
was seem to be of a very clear
Variable.
Mm-hmm.
across the three
And just the
Give an example of the clear no.
The strong no was frontal head tension.
Chest tightness, feeling hot.
None of which exists in the yes state.
As an example.
And then
I thought of this subtle no, which I I don't think I've spent much time on before, which is hilarious because of course it's probably where I need to spend the most time is assessing that. And uh I thought of this experience recently.
It was the first example that came to mind because
I really try not to say yes to things, but sometimes you say yes to things that seem like a yes, and then you get into the experience and it's not a yes. The the the bill of lading was deceptive. And I ended up at this dinner.
That was kind of play fancy. I didn't expect it to be play fancy, but it was an expensive dinner, and it just was not.
enjoyable. The food wasn't great and I didn't want to be there. And I was thinking of this experience.
And
I noticed that
In contrast to the strong yes and the strong no, both of which have a certain degree of focus.
I in the subtle no have a very I wrote down shifty energy and fidgety.
Like they're just like feeling unsettled.
Uh-huh.
And
That then I suppose becomes your
landmark off in the distance where you can orient yourself.
with respect to decision making or continuing or not continuing with something. So I found this very
Help and I should also
Just mention that this has historically been
A
What would we call it?
Uh
Development opportunity.
Aka weakness.
Growth opportunity slash massive Achilles heel.
this body awareness. I think there we could spend a lot of time on it. We don't need to, but just learn I learn to dissociate very effectively really early on in my life for a lot of reasons. And so it's getting reacquainted with feeling.
Has been a long
Process.
And
Thank you for that. I found that very
Help.
Could you help us connect this to how people would
Use this.
Inventory.
So I'd recommend starting out using it in really simple ways. So start with
Looking at a menu.
And as you're looking at the menu.
Just notice like does that fidgety come in when you look at this sandwich, you know, versus this sandwich, and see if you can start to see what yes feels like.
Or
you're driving back home and you've got a couple of different routes to take home.
you know, try on okay, I'm gonna go this way and notice what happens in the body versus I go this way. So
You're just gonna make
Make this a practice for things that don't have a lot of meaning that you know, it's not a big deal.
And then as you
You can also do it with time, let's say
You're thinking about
Gathering up with a group of friends.
And they say what time?
Try on like okay, well what if we met at five and just notice what happens in the body.
when I try five and then five thirty and six and six thirty and just see if you've got like a place where your body starts to hum, like oh
Wow, six thirty, that's where it really hit.
And then
Let's choose six thirty.
So that's a
And then what you'll notice is
least for me, I really liked the results I kept creating in these
simpler options and then I just kept
Using it more and more.
So with more important decisions. And then now
the biggest decisions this is something I choose regularly. I
And I
I've learned to trust it so that
You know I had a
client who I thought was in trouble.
In another country and
I contacted the family and said, I think you need to go help this person and you know they're like, You want us to leave and go
Go check on this family member.
I said.
My body was shaking.
With
clarity about it. My head was like, I I don't know, I'm not I couldn't tell you for sure, but my body knew.
And
They went and it turned out it was a really could have been a life
saving moment that they went.
And
Intellectually I had some data.
But my body was the one that really guided me to be aggressive and getting that person support.
Yeah, this this has been
Really impactful for me.
And
It seems so
Simple and on some levels.
It is, but I mean very often it's these simple, valuable things that we
Neglect perhaps because we think they are simplistic, but that's not the same thing. And
I think that it's
common also for people who are very head
centered intellect focused who have been rewarded for that.
Two
just end up being a hammer looking for nails, basically. And
I had a lot of trouble identifying what yes felt like.
And I still do, if I'm being honest.
There are times when it's super obvious when I'm just like the yes in all caps and like marquee lights and neon yes. Okay, fine. Then I I when it bashes me over the head with like awesomeness, I know what that feels like. But if it's in some cases a meeting or an investment or a person or a dinner.
with certain people.
It's hard for me to identify what a full body yes.
feels like, but I know what it doesn't feel like.
If I go from like head to chest to gut, if there's any tension.
In one of those three, it's a no.
Good, then then I would say your yes is a void of those sensations.
So let that be what it is. Let yourself go. That is a whole body yes. My whole body yes is a void of those no sensations.
Mm-hmm.
And that's enough.
Don't you don't need to make it any more than that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
And it makes sense to me that you might
Not have
the whole light up, you know, some people do have this zing.
You know, that they feel as a yes.
But some people don't.
And so just trust your own version of it. So you'll just know, Oh, my yes is
Just is.
without the reactive patterns I notice in my body when the no is here.
Let's use that as a segue in the fact that I don't have the zing. I'm not sure that the fact I don't have this uh zing, and I do have it when it's again, sort of an avalanche of
Spectacular goodness.
But otherwise, my yes response can be very muted. I do think that I have trained myself
Sometimes in the name of stoicism, I think often in the
hope to protect myself from disappointment to not celebrate. And I do think premature celebration of huge business deals and stuff can
bite you in the ass and that it's a good idea to temper expectations. At the same time there's a cost
There's a very real cost to
training yourself not to celebrate.
And one of the notes that Jim
As in Jim Detmer for people who are listening.
Sent to me.
Included.
I asked him what your superpowers were.
And he gave me a number of them. And one was
Play as a way to live life.
Increase learnings, deepen relationships, and lead organizations. Diana is the best of anyone I have
ever met at living a life of play and inviting others to play along. So for those who don't know Jim,
Jim.
Would not say something like this.
Lightly.

So
Could you please this is something that I want to cultivate in myself and I'm I really am not sure of
How to go about it. So I would love
to explore this and you can take that
Anywhere you would like.
When you were talking earlier about not sure you know about that yes, you think maybe you'd like to have more of that.
One thing I would say is
I think yeses are very
They're about igniting our creative energy and our creative energy is very connected to our sexual energy.
And so
For me, yes feels very sexual.
Yeah, I feel turned on.
And so I think
There are a lot of people who
Put that away.
For good reasons along the way.
And so one of the things that I think is important is for people to start coming back
And tween back into
Letting themselves be a sexual being.
Letting themselves have
Sensations.
That feel
igniting and
And that doesn't have to mean that you
when I go have sex or doing they're they're very different things. I know a lot of people are in sex without sexual feelings. So they're
Separate, but there's a I wanna invite people to
Feel how good you can feel in the body.
How do you do that?
I know that sounds silly, but it's like how do you
Foster slash
Allow that.
I'm not consciously I don't have any Catholic guilt or anything that leads me to consciously throttle that. I don't have a voice in my head that says that's
Not okay. I feel like it's more
If it exists in me, it's more subconscious.
Well, just in general
Just see if you can find one place in the body that feels pleasurable.
Doesn't have to necessarily be named sexual, but just
Where's the pleasure in the body?
And it could just be a tiny little spot, or you could feel something like for me right now, there's like a tickle in my chest.
I feel some bubbly
Kind of champagne bubbles coming up through my spine.
feels like it's coming up through floating out of the top of my head.
I feel some warmth in my feet. It's pleasurable.
And so it's just starting to put your attention on pleasure itself.
Mm.
And then
Keep attending to it, keep giving your attention to it, and then it starts spreading around. And then all of a sudden there's this really wonderful like, woo-hoo.
quality that's happening in the body and then
For me, that's
Part of then what ignites the play.
There's so much
Aliveness, joy.
Creative.
possibilities and then it's like okay, what are we gonna do with this? And then
How much fun could we have?
It's just sort of a
Water I swim in.
Has it always
been that way? Is this Diana out of the box? Or is it something
that either you've trained more in yourself or that you've seen people
Train effectively, right? In terms of turning the tide, because I'm sure you have a lot of clients, I have to imagine.
who are doing therapy, coaching
medicine work, et cetera. And they're like, God, I just need more play. I just need more plan. It's like okay, well, now what?
Right?
Well, I might say let's play with the fact that you need more play. Like can we make that bigger? Oh, I need more play. Oh God. You're like I I tend to say let's exaggerate everything, because that's one of the easiest, quickest forms of play is exaggerate where you're at.
So make wherever you're at bigger. And so if I'd like I can't play, it's so hard for me to play, I go, Okay, well let's play with that.
make that bigger until all of a sudden now you're kinda giggling'cause it seems funny.
And then
You displayed.
So exaggeration is one of my favorite ways. So when it when I am coaching people and they're in some place
that they say they don't want to be in. I say, Well then let's make it bigger wherever you're at and then it always
Pops them through.
I
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Tim.
Yeah.
Loving pressure. Let's talk about
Loving pressure. That was a term that Jim said over. Bringing loving pressure.
Two relationships. She's a genius at bringing the right balance of pressure, kick you in parentheses, kick you in the ass, and love, in parentheses, support, understanding, empathy.
And as a result, she's a black belt in practice and candor. So this is something that has always struck me in our interactions.
This is not gonna be a perfect segue, but I have to bring this up because who knows if what I wrote for the no book will ever see the light of day. I hope it will, maybe in a blog post or an article at some point. But could you please describe the voice
mail message that you had some years ago. Do you know the one I'm talking about?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hi, you reached Diana.
I may or may not respond to this call.
And I'm gonna just listen to
If you call I will, and if I don't, I won't. And
Yeah.
It was uh
You know, just very much of uh I'm gonna listen in and decide to whether I'll call you back and when I'll call you back. And so it was just basically saying don't have any expectations.
So you're
candor has really
jumped out as this sort of defining characteristic of Diana for me.
So that's sort of the end of this bullet that's in front of me, but
How should people think of
Loving.
Pressure.
Because I find myself flip flopping often.
between two polar extremes. This is especially noticeable in my
Intimate relationships where
Either I'm like the hard ass
Like Olympic.
Coach.
I'm kind of like
The coach in the Disney movie Miracle, if anyone's seen that in ice hockey.
Or
I am from my perspective extremely permissive and
overly supportive to the point of subjugating my own feelings.
It's not entirely dishonest, but I'm kind of dis
Avowing part of me.
to be really, really
Supportive. And this is especially true
With my girlfriend were
There are times to
I've learned. I think this is important. There are times for me to
listen to listen for her to feel heard and then there are times for me to listen
To help with problem solving. And it's very good for me to clarify which she wants in advance. But how do you think about?
Loving.
pressure and bringing that to relationships.
Well again, I think
In order to do that well, you have to be connected to your head, your heart, and your gut.
That's certainly been really clear to me that I have to be fully present to know then what's the balance of challenge and nurturing.
So for example, I had a guy who called me recently and was wanting to know if we could work together and he was very, very depressed.
And
I was asking him questions and he was really stuck, and he had a lot of critical thoughts about himself.
And he couldn't get motivated to do anything and
You know, asked him about therapy. He said, Yeah, I've been in therapy for a year. And I said, Okay, you need to fire your therapist. I said, uh
'Cause you got a lot of stories in your head that you're believing and nobody's challenging you. And the guy stood up, like he sat up really straight, and I
felt him like pop out of some haze he was in. Like the challenge are so
Woke something in him. And so
story always make up about that guy is he was just getting so nurtured, but nobody was bringing a challenge that could help him break out of
This
State he was in.
And so
Yeah, I just
knew that because and I was thoughtful of from my own presence here of what do I need to say to this guy that he can hear I care about him, but I also say cut it out.
'Cause where you're how you're organizing yourself here isn't gonna take you.
to this new place you want to go.
And he was really grateful and he said
Thank you, I really hear you. I need to
question these beliefs I'm holding.
So
That's my practice over and over again is being able to
Listen to my body.
I was with another conversation the other day and people were talking about their opinions about
the world and I just said, Hey, I notice I'm contracting, my body's contracting as I hear you guys talking.
And that's all I had to say. It was just I'm just gonna report what's happening over here and it was a form of challenge to them.
And they went, Wow, you know, you're right, we're really in some
peer based thinking here.
So
My body helps just sometimes I just report. I notice I'm bored or I notice I'm
But
drawing or I notice I'm getting confused or I notice I'm contracting. Those are ways I
Might just express a little bit
Pressure by just revealing what's here.
in not making it mean anything, but just saying, here's what's happening maybe this is about
Something I don't know about yet, but let me just tell you what's happening.
I don't think we do that enough with each other.
So let me ask a question about that.
Example.
So y there are some folks talking about
Whatever they were talking about.
And some kind of fear based
Or what they recognized as fear based.
thinking in conversation and you say
I'm noticing that I'm feeling contracted.
I just want to let you guys know.
Were these people and they respond
They responded constructively.
These are people I know well, and we know we play a similar game in which you've agreed to Yes.
This type of interaction. Yes, they would not I would not do this with just anybody.
Okay. Okay. So what would you do if if you're in a mixed group or with people who
Have not
agreed or made the commitments and
We could talk more about the fifteen commitments and commitments in general.
But is there a way that you can give voice to that with people who perhaps don't have
The same playbook.
in front of them.
Sure, I might say something like
So what I hear is you believe you're right that XYZ is occurring.
And
That could be true.
And I'm just wondering if you're open to another
possibility that maybe it's not as true as you think. So I might just gently

of asking them to consider that there might be another option.
That's another form of how we challenge each other.
Is
questioning the stories we tell'cause we're all just telling stories all the time. Or I might say
Oh.
I hadn't considered that perspective.
I've been holding this perspective and I might share my perspective and it just depends on
how well or not well I know the crowd that would have me be more thoughtful and
How I might respond.
When you're working with a client
And I'm coming back to the initial
Quote that I read.
From Dustin.
So she has a gift as a coach. She meaning you.
As a gift for guiding me through introspection on the stories I create about events and people in a structured way that inevitably leads to perspective shifts.
Could you
Walk us through how you might do that with someone.
For instance, this guy was depressed and he says, You know what?
You're right.
My therapist sucks.
I'm being handled with kid gloves, but that's making me remain a kid. So I I could use like a
occasional slap in the face from someone who's very supportive and challenging.
And you say, Okay, great.
That point then.
What do you do with those stories in this person?
I'm a huge fan of Byron Katie and I really love her work.
And I do the work with myself and I do the work with my clients and I say, Okay
Is it true?
Is it true this thing you believe? Can you absolutely know it's true?
And you know, I'm wise enough now to know I can't absolutely know anything.
And then
What's it like when you do really
believe you're right and
I help people find there's always some suffering.
And then what would it be like if you just couldn't believe it?
And
People find oh that's nice. That feels good. And then okay, great. Could we just go look at the opposite. You can keep your righteous stories, but can we also ask you?
to hold the opposites as that least is true, so that the mind can get to neutral and then
Something else gets to happen. And you're doing that with turnarounds of various types.
All the time.
I'm constantly asking clients to turn around.
Let's pick a hypothetical or real example just so people can get a flavor of this. So Byron Cady
The work
I also have found
Really.
Really helpful.
In a number of cases. And
She's an unusual
And powerful woman to
put it mildly. So so there are times when people will interact and I and uh I remember meeting her for the first time and I was like, I don't know if I can do what she does.
But

when you actually work with the worksheets and people can find this online, a lot of resources are available.
For free online from Byron.
Katie.
Can you walk through, say, a belief which I think she defines as a thought we take to be true or something along those lines.
An example of a belief and then what
how you would do turnarounds on that belief.
And walk somebody through that.
Well let's see if we can find something real for you. If you're willing to. Like see if we can find something that's irritated you lately.
Something where it's kinda like, you know.
Maybe somebody did something that bugged you or you're upset about some policy out in the world or
It's any place where you notice you get a little triggered.
It's it's more of a like a paradox of choice issue than anything else for me. Let me see.
If not I can find one. I'm I always have judgment so I can find something over here. Well, I'll tell you, this is I my relationship
We'll actually use one that relates to the client you mentioned. So I have had
extended depressive episodes.
the majority of my life. And so I have a lot of
Fear.
around slipping into depressive episodes and have viewed that
Whether it's now, whether it's a week from now, whether it's a year, whether it's five years from now, as inevitable.
Right and scary and dangerous.
So let's use that somehow.
Okay, and it sounds like the judgment might be something like I shouldn't slip into depression.
For depressive episodes, is that right?
Yeah, or exactly. I shouldn't, it's dangerous.
Et cetera. Mm-hmm. Okay.
So which one is it? Is I shouldn't or is it dangerous?'Cause it sounds like that one kind of lit up for you. It's dangerous if I go into a depressive episode. Yeah, I think yeah, that's sure.
Is that it? That is, yeah. Okay.
It's dangerous if you go into a depressive episode. Is that true?
I always struggle with the first two questions. The other ones I have an easier time with. Is it true? I think it's true. Yes. Yeah. I mean, most of the time when I have my judgments, I do think they're true in the beginning.
But then I go, Okay, Tim.
Can you really, truly, I mean, absolutely know it's true. Like you'd put your life on the line that if you have a depressive that it's dangerous if you go into a depressive episode.
Well, you know, it's kind of tragically comic that you would use that phrasing. So here's what I can say. I can say for sure that it has been dangerous because I almost killed myself in college.
Does that automatically mean that I will be
at the precipice in that same way in the future? No.
I can't say that with a hundred percent certainty.
Yes.
You can't say that with a hundred percent certainty. So we're just trying to get to I can't know for sure. I mean, I didn't kill myself in the end, where you're here.
Right. And we don't know if you would want to kill yourself in the
Yeah, in the future.
So we're just going I can't absolutely know for sure it's true.
So the first question is is it true?
Second question is can I absolutely know for sure that it's true?
You're saying no.
Third question is what's it like when you do believe that thought? So when you sit here and go, Whoa, it's gonna be dangerous if I have a depressive episode, what's it like for you when you believe that to be true?
It's terrifying. It's awful. Yeah. And any time I feel even a
twinkling of
a possibility that I might be slipping into
a melancholy state. Like I went to a jazz performance recently and they were playing very minor key music.
And
I felt myself getting very uncomfortable.
And actually that was the example I used.
In my own mind when we were
I it was the second example that came to my mind when I was thinking of
The whole body no.
recently. Even though there were aspects of the performance I really enjoyed, but
As soon as I started feeling myself slip into a sad what I would
Called depressive state.
There was a level of panic.
Mm-hmm.
Sure. So that's who I am.
Yeah. I'm uh
hypervigilant and panic prone.
Yeah.
Makes sense. I mean I
feel it right now. If I believed the story that if I get into a depressive state it's gonna be dangerous, I feel
panicky, I can feel that hypervigilance, I can feel like oh
Like really anxious.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's your experience. So let's just imagine that I have this superpower and your brain is a computer.
And
That
Thought.
It's dangerous.
to go into a depressive state is actually like a computer program. And I have the ability to delete that program out of the computer of your brain.
It's gone. So right now
I just did it. It's gone.
So we're just gonna pretend for a couple of minutes here. And if you just couldn't believe that anymore.
What's it like?
Oh, I think I would have
Almost certainly would have much more
Calm.
Much more
present, right? I wouldn't be future tripping.
And
Stuck in anxiety.
I would be much more joyful.
I would have more space for other people because I wouldn't be stuck on the
Me.
Show.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I like to even get it get yourself even more present. Like sit here and sometimes I even encourage people to close their eyes.
But let yourself drop in right here in this conversation.
And you're now a man sitting here who can't find that thought.
It's a little more meditative this way.
Using your breath, keep opening. What's it like to be here?
To be you.
To be in this moment without the thought.
No thought that's replaced it.
You're just here without that one.
Relaxed.
Optimistic.
Energised.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And my experiences the more I drop in, the more I get to experience
More
States of presence.
Especially like when you go into that relaxed, you could even drop in even a little more and it keeps opening up and these states can keep opening to more and more
States of well being.
Could I do a quick sidebar?
Yeah question which is
So I think a lot of people listening and even me right now.
I'm starting to get a little secondary anxiety.
By telling myself the story, Well, wait a second.
If it is actually dangerous, I think.
I don't want to just go into a place of denial where
I take off my seatbelt while I'm driving eighty miles an hour psychically. That sounds like a bad idea, right? So
Good. I don't want you to stop thinking.
So I suppose I just wanted to
get your reiteration that this is a
The objective is not to invalidate the belief. The objective is to do an exercise.
embracing other alternatives.
And the objective is to understand
the at the moment at least, a depressive state isn't what's creating the anxiety for you. It's the belief that it's going to be dangerous that creates the anxiety.
Right. That's what we're going after here is we're going after the recognition.
But
Your depressive state, we actually don't know how you will or will not be.
But
Right now the danger you're creating is in your own head by believing you're right about your story.
Mm-hmm.
And so
We're helping you question that so that you can now
Be aware and present for the possibility that you might be going into a depressive state in the future and how can you
Do your best to mitigate that.
w ride it if you do have it happen so that you're not at the effect of it.
Mm-hmm.

Thank you. All right, so what's the next step?
So then the next step is we don't want you to get rid of
It could be dangerous because
I don't know, maybe it could, but we wanna help you come back to
Recognizing that the opposite is at least as true, that it doesn't have to be dangerous.
So we're gonna have you go
It's not dangerous going into a depressive state.
Is at least as true.
Can you give me a real example?
One
Not just your head, but your heart and your body. Like there's something that your whole system goes, ah.
Okay, I can see how it's true that
It doesn't have to be dangerous.
If I go into a depressive state, can you give me real evidence of how that could be at least as true?
So doing two I'm doing two things here. I am doing the exercise with you and I'm also sort of providing an overlay for people listening.
Nice.
And please correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong, but what we're doing is we're taking
The belief as a statement.
And we're starting to play
With
that sentence and the words in that sentence and how it's constructed, right?
Yeah, we're specifically going after the judgment. So the your mind judges it's gonna be dangerous. If I go into a depressive state, it's gonna be dangerous. I'm right about how dangerous it's gonna be. So we just wanna go.
Can we just look at how the opposite's true is it's not gonna be dangerous if you go into a depressive state.
So the evidence
So now we're coming up with evidence for
How is that statement it won't be
Dangerous.
At least as true.
So I'll start with the present tense. The it isn't dangerous because the it won't be dangerous is harder for me, but I will say
The fact of the matter is I'm here.
And I've had dozens of depressive episodes.
Yeah.
And I'm still here. So
If
The danger is suicide, at least.
To this point.
It's
Abundantly clear that that has not happened. So
Yeah, and I want you to really get that not just in your head, but I want you to get that in your heart and your body,'cause I feel you get it intellectually.
Yeah. But I really want you to drop down and go.
Survey says
I've been in multiple depressive states.
And I'm here.
It hasn't been.
Dangerous.
In that I haven't killed myself if that's what you're calling danger.
Yeah, that's that would that would be it.
Yeah, and so we want you to get that
Down especially in the body. Like your breath go
Hi.
Oh God, really look and feel that.
Yeah, okay.
Many times depressive states. Here I am. Okay. Not dangerous.
Mm-hmm.
Give me another example of how it's true.
But
Not dangerous.
If I go into a depressive state.
Uh I'm having trouble, honestly. I'm wondering if you can help me brainstorm here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So
I imagine people come around you.
People help you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I need to get better at actually
Reaching out. But yes, when
I do have supportive people around me and
I'm very
Lucky to have people who love me who would respond at the drop of a dime.
Yeah.
So I want you to feel that feel how oh my goodness, I am surrounded by so many people.
And experts who could help me.
And have in the past, like it was hard to be dangerous if
There's all these other folks around me who got my back.
Yeah.
Yeah, I believe that.
For sure.
And so I can see it again in your head, like intellectually.
Part of what I want is for you to come back down in the body.
And really feel that.
It's a somatic experience.
That I'm wanting you to get.
How do you
I know this this is like the
the remedial class with me, but
How do you help people to do that?
Because it's it's challenging for me.
Just imagine one of the last times that you were in one.
See all the people who came around you.
Really there were people there.
And I want you to just let your body feel that, like feel.
Oh yeah, there were people who came and asked questions and gave guidance and offered support and listened and just
Let your body go.
Let your breath open up and
feel from the body the direct experience of support of non-dangerous that you did have in the past that wasn't just intellectual, it was a direct experience of the body.
Yeah.
Like oh my goodness, there was so much support, so much interconnectedness.
Breathe with that, feel that all the way down through the toes.
Yeah, I got it.
Yeah.
Nice. Yeah, thank you.
Yeah.
It's a whole different ballgame when you include the body.
Yeah.
Yeah, the intellectual side is just like a glancing blow. I mean it's not
It doesn't fully land.
Well yeah, and you're actually not
present here to have the experience of non-dangerous because if you're not allowing yourself to come down into the body, you're not fully
Here.
To access
the intelligence that's giving you a direct experience of not dangerous.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
So you go, Okay, great. And then we go, Okay, so
not dangerous is at least as true. We had two examples so far, so we're gonna go for one more.
And now you might even get more clarity of how it's not dangerous if you're listening to your head and your heart and your body, how is it at least is true.
Okay.
Going into a depressive state does not have to be dangerous.
Doesn't have to be. I mean sometimes
The episodes are very short.
I mean, that's maybe not as overarching.
A line item is the last two that we did. Okay, let's say it's long,'cause since long is the one that scares you.
So let's say it's a long one. How is the long one not dangerous?
I mean, this is something I've struggled with my whole life, so I I'm not
I could use an alley oop.
With maybe another.
I'm just trying it on myself'cause I gotta go in there.
I'm gonna try on being depressed and go in there with you.
So I can feel I'm not hurting myself. I can feel I'm surrounded by support.
Other way it's not dangerous.
Could be
What I'm noticing is like there's an awareness in you that knows you're depressed, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's a witness who's there watching.
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
There's a part that's never
in danger who's watching the whole thing.
That part's that part's not experiencing danger.
Mm.
Yeah, the witness. The the witness is there.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. So you could go, Oh, when I'm
in the depressive state and I'm
In my witness, it's not dangerous for that one.
Mm.
Yeah, let me
Let me sit with that.
For a second.
Yeah.
It's challenging for me. I'm I'm part way there.
It's like it's partially landing.
Since it's also the witness who panics, it's uh
Well I actually don't think I don't think if you're real the witness
can't panic if you're in witness, if you're truly in witness. The one who's just a watcher.
Without a judgment.
One who just says, Like I have a witness that's like oh check you out, Diana, you're
Scaring yourself about being on the Tim Ferris show.
No, that was I I literally said that to myself this morning. Oh, check you out. Now my witness is just watching, thinking I'm adorable, that I'm scared and doesn't have an opinion about it, just watches and oh, there you are.
I just wonder.
If you have
Oh
a relationship with that part of yourself that just can watch and observe and
Welcome whatever's happening without judgment.
There are times when I do. That's that is a relationship that I want to continue.
And
Need to continue to cultivate.
Yeah, great. But I think that's a good third.
Sort of third leg of the stool on the
So then we go, okay, we want you to keep it's dangerous. Sure, it's dangerous to get in depressive states. That can be true.
But it's also at least as true that it's not dangerous.
And we can see examples of how that's at least is true. So what we're trying to get the mind to do is to see, okay.
Will give you both. You could they both can be true and therefore they're both not true.
So then what?
Then we get to be with what's underneath all the judgment.
There's just
What do you notice if
You get to say they're both true, they're both not true.
Then what do you notice when you imagine that you might
Go into a depressive state at some point.
Well if I'm
able to hold both of those
Equally
Then the likelihood of panic.
and anxiety about possible panic. It's like panic about panic. Right. Right. Is is going to be less if I can hold those two things.
Yeah, I call it walking the line.
It's like I walk a line right down the center where I'm holding both is equally true.
And I value both sides. Like sure. Cause I think
I don't want to be stupid and I want to dismiss something and be naive.
But I want to be honoring that
Hey.
I'm not right meaning righteous.
about this story I have over here,'cause if I am, I'm gonna cause myself some kind of reactivity.
So now I just sit with okay.
Depressive.
episode may happen and then ideally if I can walk that line then all I'm gonna do is learn.
I'm gonna be able to stay present to what's happening and lear along the way what needs to happen.
Yeah.
Thank you. And then I get to start to welcome I might you know
My experience is
I have a lot more
trust if I just am willing to welcome whatever's gonna happen.
Yeah, with a preference. I have a preference not to go in a depressive state for sure, but if a depressive state is what happens, okay, we'll learn.
Yeah, there's a I don't want to take us too far off track, but a friend of mine actually just showed me a book which has been recommended a number of times. I have not read it, so I can't vouch for it, but called Feeding Your Demons, but I at least
like the title and it's on this
This exactly
Yeah,'cause you feed the demon every time you believe you're right that it's gonna be dangerous, you feed the demon.
And so then you're just gonna keep amping up the anxiety. And then of course you have that much anxiety, over time you're gonna burn out, you're gonna get depressed.
Because the body's gonna get intelligent and go, I can't do I can't run this anxiety all the time. Let's get depressed and just chill out for a while.
Yeah.
To connect this also for people with the
process. So thank you, Diana, for taking me through that.
And also these turnarounds, these rephrasings with
the objective of or at least the step of gathering evidence.
for each of these turnarounds could be applied, and please correct me if I'm wrong, if we took, let's just say a belief that's causing you pain is
Who knows? My sister is selfish.
Right. So it could be my sister is selfish. Maybe there's something with your parents and the sister's not pulling the weight.
And you're pissed off and so your belief is my sister's selfish.
And and I might change it to my sister shouldn't be selfish.
Oh yeah, that's great.
That's great. Right. So my my sister shouldn't be selfish. And then you could have, you know, my sister should be selfish. You could have
I should be selfish. I should be selfish. I should be selfish. Exactly.
And
At the very least, I mean in my experience.
when I am triggered and I'm just so dysregulated that
The idea of problem solving or coming up with good strategies is just a joke because I'm so emotionally
dysregulated that doing this type of exercise at the very least just turns down the volume on the system reactivity and then
I can just breathe.
So I found it very helpful as a pattern interrupt.
Yes, and to your point, this isn't a good tool to use if you are really dysregulated in the moment.
I would recommend first using breath and movement to relax the nervous system.
To get yourself into more calm first. Because if you just try to use this
As your first
thing you might likely use it as a weapon and just intellectualize it all.
that'll just give you some temporary relief over and over again.
So I do recommend first g getting yourself use some movement, use some breath.
Calm the nervous system, we say
you know, handle your blood and brain chemistry first and then this is a good tool.
Yeah. For me it's just go lift some heavy stuff. Go to the gym.
Just stuff. Well, I also you know, if I were working with you, I'd have you say
I
shouldn't have a depressive state. I should have a depressive state.
And I'd really go argue for why you should.
Mm.
Mm-hmm. And do that so that you get it in your body.
Not just into your head, but I should have a depressive state again.
Because that's the other thing I hear is there's a arguing with
it would be bad or I shouldn't have it or I'm trying to avoid it instead of
Well
If it happens, it happens.
Yeah. And I and it should happen instead of it shouldn't is at least as true.
But that would be a good one to go play with'cause I think that would also help
You be more
Open.
to life happening the way it does through you. For sure.
For sure.
Thank you.
I would like to, if you're open to it, shift
A little bit.
To
relationships.
And
I wanna ask you.
specifically about your partnership with Matt. So here's one of your
Superpowers as listed from the
Mr Jim. Creating and sustaining a wonderful intimate partnership with Matt, her husband and lover, since they were teenagers. Have her talk about the risks she and they were willing to take to keep the relationship alive and vital, growing and intimate.
If you are game to talk about that, I would be very
Interested.
Yeah.
To hear more.
Well
It's a challenge. It's both a great gift to be with a partner.
Since you were young get to grow up together, there's a lot of
shared memories and shared friends and
there's a sweetness that it started out with you get to keep. And there's also a great challenge of
The fact that we are different people who evolve and change. And so several times, at least three key times in our relationship, we've been willing to let it all go.
And
Which
Basically killed it off.
Just said the relationship as it was is done.
Now let's just check and see.
What is the relationship that wants to happen moving forward?
Maybe it's just friends.
Co parents, maybe it's lovers, m staying married, what is it? And so
We have a lot of courage, both of us, to be willing to let go of what's not working.
And trust.
That
the right form of the relationship will reveal itself. And it just so happens that
It continues to be us married.
And
I think
We play around often. Sometimes we'll get up in the morning, I'll say something like
Hey, you want to be married today?
And he'll say
Oh, well, what would that mean? What kind of a husband do I need to be? And we'll giggle and play around with, Well, you you know, how about this and this? And then we choose. And it is for me.
We are
Always choosing over and over again, and we always are willing to
kind of to the point of using the work with Byron Katie of
I'm willing to open to the possibility that
Not being married is just as okay as being married.
And what that has created is an incredibly vital
creative ever evolving passionate marriage
in which we're freed up to
Keep exploring new ways of
Being together.
And
I am really proud of my relationship. I think it's one of the greatest things I've ever done.
is the marriage that I have. We get a lot of feedback that
It's an inspiring marriage to a lot of people who
Look to it.
And I do think it comes with
the courage to say no.
You mentioned it f at least I think you said three times.
that you've had this type of
Conversation.
I would like to zoom in on the first conversation.
Were you both already?
prepared and trained to initiate that type of conversation.
Did one side initiate
The hay. Let's decide if we want to
remain as is, or if we want to
take one of these other forms. I'm just wondering for people who are listening who have never had one of these conversations, maybe they've been at the breaking point, but they've never had this conversation.
I initiated it. It wasn't Matt's
idea. I said, Hey, I'm
It isn't working for me the way we're in relationship.
And there's a
Different kind of a man I want to be with.

than how you are. And I wanna another
possibility and so
I didn't know how to do all this. I was just
Toddling around trying to figure this out.
And
Yeah, I said I I don't want to do it this way anymore.
And so
I thought that might mean that we needed to be separated and that we needed to end the marriage.
And I was willing to we actually
Got some support from
Counsellors about telling our our kids that we were gonna divorce.
'Cause that's the only direction it seemed like
We were gonna go.
And then I had this great advice from a friend who said, Okay, Diana, I love you both. If you think divorce is what needs to happen, that's great. But I hear you complaining that
There's a certain man you want.
him to be that he's not.
And she said, Who is the woman you would need to be?
to call forward that man.
And my stomach dropped.
And I thought uh I don't wanna I don't know about that. What? And uh
I realized oh, I would need to be a different woman.
So
We said let's kill off this old marriage and let's
See if we can create a new one. And I'm gonna keep asking myself, who do I need to be to call forward the man I wanna be with.
And about six months later
I was with the man I wanted to be with and I remember saying to him
You really change. And he said, No, you really changed. And and the truth is, we both really changed. But I was really grateful for that.
First conversation of
being willing to let it go and then getting the feedback of
Hey, if you're the creator
Of
Who's showing up over there? Who do you need to be? And
Or
many months I felt like I was gonna throw up twenty four seven, learning to be a much more vulnerable
Needy.
Women
Who called forward the man who
could protect and lead.
in a way that I hadn't been willing to be in the past.
Mm.
How did you thank you for sharing all this, by the way.
And very courageous and vulnerable and
How did you f
Figure out
Who
you needed to be who that woman was to call forth the version
of your husband or the man
Who you wanted to be with.
Did you have help?
Was it obvious once you sat with it?
in terms of the changes that needed to be made on on your side or the things you needed to cultivate or drop.
How did you arrive at the
Answers.
At first I didn't know. I just knew I was really scared when I asked the question.
I believe that fear
Is
When we're present is
And intelligence, it says something needs to get learned.
Something needs to get learned. So when I had that fear, I thought, oh wow, something needs to get learned. There's I don't know something here.
And so
That was my first clue that
Her question was powerful.
is the fear that arose in me.
And then I just kept asking the fear.
What needs to be learned. I just kept being really broad in that curiosity.
I got into a state of wonder. I wonder.
Who I would need to be to call forward the man I most want to be with.
I just kept asking that. I wonder and I let it be okay that I didn't have to know because I didn't know.
I've been, you know, with him for a long time and I didn't know so I had to
Be willing to listen and learn from something
Greater than my own
experience so far.
And so it was in that level of curiosity that I just
Found my way.
And it was
baby steps, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there. And
We've had several versions of that often, uh or not often, but the the three versions were all some version of me.
Something needs to get learned.
for the next evolution here.
of this relationship.
Do you have
recommended resources or practices
That couples
Can
Seek out.
What?
Embrace
so that they are better prepared if they get to these decision points or just overall with respect to
nurturing sort of a healthy
Co created.
relationship.
Any books, any
Particular.
Practices that you would highlight?
For folks.
Matt and I studied with gay and Katie Hendrix for years.
At the Hendricks Institute, they did a lot of relationship work. They still do a bit of it, but I learned so many tools there on
how to get off the drama triangle. I learned about personas and about how
I get caught in these personas that then unconsciously require uh the persona of my partner to show up in a certain way that then I complain about.
And I learned about how to unwind those or
shift them when I wanted to
I learned about
The importance of feeling my feelings.
I learned about
really questioning my stories. I learned about polarity and how important it is to honor polarity that shows up in couples and
making sure that I honored both sides of the clarity equally.
For example, a lot of couples
Argue about money.
And almost always there's one that we call the gas and one who's the break and somebody who's more
Free flowing with money and somebody who's more
Controlling about money and that's a
Can we honor these polarities and can we see the value in both of them? Because usually
I was the one who
Wanted to spend the money and and my husband wanted to hold on to the money. And we would get into a battle about, you know, you're keeping me from having joy in my life because you're so
stingy about money and he'd say, You're gonna make us all broke because you're just
So unconscious about spending it. And so
Honoring that those two sides of the player there are actually allies.
That are here to create just the right balance.
to take care of ourselves and have fun. And so
Those are all different skill sets. There's so many different tools. And I would say that
Our book.
The fifteen commitments of conscious leadership
We wrote it for leaders, but really it could be a perfect guidebook for couples if you just apply
couple examples in there because that's what
really created the beautiful relationship that I have are those commitments.
And those all have
tools and skills that are associated with them.
Could you give us a few examples of some of these commitments? And of course I
I would recommend people read the book. I think it's very valuable.
But can you give us a handful of examples of what these commitments
Or
We got a lot of these from gay and Katie Hendrix. They were the ones they wrote the first two commitments word for word.
And the first two commitments, the first one is all around I commit to take radical responsibility.
for the results in my life.
And
That's a cornerstone commitment.
And
You know, that looks like some guy uh who I was coaching the other day called me up and said, My CEO is not giving me the feedback I need to grow as a leader.
And so I
Had him teach me the class.
How do you create the CEO not giving you the feedback you want?
He's like, What? I'm not creating that. I'm not the effect of it. He's not giving it to me. I said, teach me the class.
So he
Actually thought for a moment and said, Well
value the CEO's time more than your time.
Don't reschedule when the CEO breaks your one on one meetings.
Don't ask directly for the feedback you want.
And he started to giggle and realized, Oh
I'm the creator of not getting the feedback I want. That's radical responsibility.
So
People often we say
The thing you're complaining about is often the thing you're committed to creating and if you can own that, that's radical.
And then the second commitment is all around letting go of wanting to be right. And what we mean by that is the defending yourself righteously.
that keeps you from learning and growing. Those are the two cornerstone commitments one and two.
I think we even say in the book, like you could stop right here and just practice these for the rest of your life.
But then there's the commitment to really feel feelings and specifically what I noticed and we talked about this you and I a little bit when you were
thinking about writing this no book was
How much we're trying to control each other feeling feelings.
So like I don't want to say no because I don't want you to have a feeling over there.
And I
really think I'm right, you shouldn't have them. And I don't want you to have a feeling because then maybe I'll have a feeling. And I see how much of
Our drama in the workplace and at home is coming from suppressing feelings in ourselves and each other.
Candor's a commitment to be able to
Say what's going on rather than
Can seal it.
Which then causes me to have to start to withdraw.
And ending gossip.
Is another commitment.
really being impeccable around agreements so that I do what I say I'm gonna do.
Another commitment.
First six.
That's what we focus a lot in the business world when we come in and work with teams, we have them work on those six commitments.
To help secure the identity and relax drama. And then once that's done, then we have things like let's look at appreciation, the commitment to appreciate.
The commitment to play and rest, the commitment to live in our zones of genius.
And then the commitments get even deeper into
being a source of approval control and security rather than trying to source it outside of yourself, which is probably one of the most difficult commitments of all.
And also the commitment of experiencing that you already have enough.
Which most people also
struggle with especially
at least in the business world, I rarely ever come across anybody who has enough time.
And then they go on from there to being able to create a win for all solution, which is one of my great joys to
work with a team where there's a lot of different needs and it seems like they can't come up with a solution where they all win and helping them do that.
And
Finally, be the resolution to that which you see missing in the world.
So if they're not listening, be a better listener.
If they're not taking care of things, take care of things.
Do you still
Use
Or recommend people use Mind.
Jogger.
I read it.
That at least for a period of time you used
An app, I believe it was Mind Jogger, that would ask you multiple times a day, Diana, in this now moment, are you above the line or below the line?
Yeah.
Yeah. I still use it. You s you do, all right. I still use it. I use it every day.
And
I ask that basic question, where are you? Are you above the line, meaning are you in a state of trust or are you below the line in a state of threat? So I ask that.
I have it seven times randomly per day.
It pops on my screen.
And I pause and look and check.
For me it's like lifting weights every day.
So that's one. And then I use other questions that I rotate around. Like one I'm really liking right now is
Is this exquisite?
Diana, is this
Moment exquisite. And then
It gives me a pause to think about how could this be more exquisite.
What does that mean to you?
Exquisite is whole body, yes, to me.
You know, is this a whole body yes? Is this ah is this
Yes, I'm in my zone. I feel fully alive. I'm
doing what I most want to be doing, I'm on purpose.
What other prompts do you have?
Or do any others come to mind? Oh yeah. I have a question for each of the commitments. So I rotate them around like what are you feeling right now?
So if I need to keep checking with my feeling states.
Another one would be what do you appreciate about somebody around you right now?
And then I'll use that as an opportunity to speak that out loud.
Because I'm really a big fan of lots and lots of appreciation.
Another one, do I have enough time right now? I use that one. Are you experiencing enough time right now as a way to pause and go, Oh good, that's I'm glad I asked myself that question because I can feel I'm in a scarcity of time and let me stop and pause.
And get back into the present moment where there's always enough.
If you could email those questions slash
Prompts that you have for each commitment. I would love
Two.
Mind jogger this morning. I would love to start playing with those if you're open to it.
Oh yeah.
Absolutely, yeah.
Maybe we could put them in the show notes as well. That way people can find them for themselves.
I have to say, you know, I really think you are a master of prompts and questions, and uh we we don't have to
go through it at length. I was actually gonna read every single bullet. I'm not gonna do that because it'll take a bit of time, but you have a piece on LinkedIn.
It's an article called How to Assess Self Awareness in a Hiring Interview. Now people might hear that and say, Why the hell?
You're bringing that up. It sounds so niche. It sounds so specific. It's only gonna apply to
three percent of your listenership, but
It's a great example of
Questions and prompts.
for uncommon insight. I was very impressed.
with the questions. I'll give just a few
Examples describe a time when you were tempted to blame someone else for something, but instead resolved it by owning part of the issue.
Right. What percentage of agreements do you currently keep with the people you live and work with? What causes you to break agreements the most?
How do you approach broken agreements? I mean, these are outstanding
questions. Not just, by the way, for hiring people.
But uh I I found these questions and prompts to be outstanding. So I will also link to those in the show notes and people will be able to find that article.
Well my clients were asking me, Hey, how do we interview if we want
People who
wanna come and be in a part of a culture that doesn't have as much drama.
What should we be asking?
that would make sure that we knew they were good fit for the culture we're creating here.
And so that was what
caused me to put those questions together.
And
I use them myself. You know, we were just we just did a couple of big hires at the conscious leadership group and
We almost exclusively focused on self awareness.
And
People's ability to
Have candor.
Take responsibility, keep their agreements as as the
One of the primary things we were looking at because
you know, they were already very successful candidates, so we knew they were
They'd had a great pedigree already.
So we wanted to make sure they were a good culture fit'cause we're really committed to
No or very little drama in our workplace.
Diana
We could go for hours and hours and hours. Might just have to do a round two sometime. I'd I'd love to
Just because I'm curious, quite frankly, to know what books outside of the fifteen commitments of conscious leadership have you gifted the most?
To other people.
Or gifted a lot.
Doesn't have to be the most, but what books have you gifted a fair amount to people?
The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks is probably the book I've
Gifted the most.
And the one I've recommended the most of any other book.
And
Also
Conscious loving for couples,'cause you asked that question earlier.
Conscious Loving I think is a fantastic book for couples who are wanting to
Get more
Connected.
Is another one I've
Gifted a lot.
Those are the two that come top of mind. Two primaries. For people who just want a preview.
What is the big leap?
About or what is it for?
The big leap is all about learning to live in your zone of genius, which I think is just the most fun thing.
And to take a look at what are the things that keep us from living in our zone of genius. And so
I tell every leader I coach to get it and a hundred percent of them have said it was a valuable read.
And gays just come up with a
follow up book on Zone of Genius that just came out last month that I imagine will be another book I'll be
recommending and gifting.
Because I find that
Inside of all of us is
Some creativity that
When we are in that place, time and space go away. It's so
Fine.
And makes life so worth living, and I really am excited about.
supporting people and
I mean
as much as possible in that zone of genius.
Well, I think you did uh a uh damn fine job of it. It's been fun to get to know you. It's been fun to also get to know you.
in this chat a bit more and doing homework. It's always fun to do research on friends, which would otherwise be super creepy and like Google stalking, but I have a pre- I have a pretext and excuse, which is doing interviews. And people can find the conscious leadership group at conscious.i.
S and certainly all the social and so on.
can be found from that jumping off point. You also have a lot of PDFs and resources.
Four people.
on the website. So I encourage people to check out the website. We'll link to that. We'll link to prompts. We'll link to everything that we discussed in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast.
Diana, is there anything else that you would like to say or ask any request of the audience? Anything at all that you'd like to
Add before we come to a close.
I feel pretty heartbroken these days about
The drama that is happening amongst us.
And
I'm actually grateful for the heartbreak because
It's helping me connect more with
With love.
And
One of the things I'm doing is facing.
I'm really facing the cost of
The drama that we're having.
Um, and so I think one of the things I most
hope people will do is have the courage to face.
The cost of the drama that we are creating
in our workplaces that has people so overwhelmed at work.
The cost politically
Environmentally
And if they're willing to face it, let their
Hearts break wide open and then from that place.
Get curious and excited about what else could we create together.
What else is possible?'Cause that
Really excites me, and I think.
I don't wanna argue with the way the world is. It's just fine the way it is.
And I have a preference for a lot more play and creativity.
and togetherness and and curiosity that I find when we drop the drama.
That is an excellent place.
To close and what?
What a uh enjoyable and I think very helpful for me.
conversation. So thank you very much, Diana, for
For making the time and being so present. Thank you.
Uh my my great pleasure. I'm I'm
So grateful for
All the ways you go out into the world and
bring forward things that help people live more
connected and valuable lives and
It is one of the things that I believe your depression has been a great gift.
is I don't know that you would have done this if you hadn't have had the depressions that you had and needed to find the tools that you needed.
So I I'm grateful for your depression.
And uh and uh and for your own unique journey that has now enhanced so many of ours. So so thank you so much.
Oh, thank you so much, Diana. I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
And
For everybody listening.
Stay strong, get curious.
Check out the show notes at Tim.blog forward slash podcast.
And until next time.
Thank you for tuning in.
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