Jim Dethmer: The Pillars of Integrity

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/878399756f2c5918

So those are the four pillars of integrity. Take responsibility, feel your feelings.
Speak candidly, authentically, reveal, and be impeccable with your agreements. Now in my experience
When I live like that.
I feel incredibly alive. Now we could also talk about, you know, do you eat well? Do you get a good night's sleep? You know, are you exercise? All of that, of course, would be part of feeling fully alive, but seems everybody knows that. We might not be doing it, but we know it.
But not everybody is playing the game of
Let's be fully alive and play with integrity.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parish.
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My guest today is Jim Detmer.
Jim is the co-founder of The Conscious Leadership Group and was previously on episode 60 of the Knowledge Project.
If you listen to that episode, which is one of our most popular, you'll see that we only started to scratch the surface of what we can learn from Jim.
I wanted more.
In this episode, we pick up with the four pillars of integrity.
Intimacy, what it is and how to have it, relationships and why men struggle.
Different types of trust.
And we do a bit of a live coaching session as Jim explores my need for other people to have a good experience.
Even
when it's at the cost of my own experience.
For anybody who's ever hosted a dinner party and wants everything to be perfect and runs around frantically
Wanting other people's experience to be amazing.
This is for you.
Jim walked me through it. I've seen the world different ever since then.
I think you'll love this episode.
It's time.
To listen.
And learn.
Uh-huh.
When I was thinking about
Where to start with you.
I I listened to our last conversation, I was just struck by how timeless it was.
And I think I wanna start with integrity and sort of the four pillars of integrity.
The four pillars of integrity I got from uh Katie Hendricks, Doctor Katie Hendricks.
It's been a cornerstone of my life for
thirty years or so. So let's begin by
Just
differentiating the way I want to speak about integrity from the way it normally gets talked about.
You know, when integrity shows up as a value inside of a company, for example.
And then you ask people, what does the value mean?
The normal thing that people say is do the right thing.
Which is beautiful.
I get that.
Great.
Integrity then tends to have more of a
Like a moral or an ethical.
kind of orientation.
And the way I play with integrity
Yeah.
None of that.
But again, let's just do a little etymology here. So integrity.
From the root
Uh same root as integer.
So think of whole number.
Think of
wholeness. So that's where I like to go.
Think of wholeness.
So to me integrity is
Energetic
whom us.
Now
What that translates to very quickly for me is
Four
Aliveness
So when I am in integrity, I am energetically whole.
I am fully
Alive.
We illustrate it sometimes with uh
doesn't work so much in work'cause I think they fixed this problem, but when I was a kid
And you put uh
holiday lights at a Christmas tree.
Kind of the deal was that if
If one of the lights went out, the whole strand went out, you know, first it might blink a little bit and then it all went out.
And if you think about the circuitry
Of those Christmas lights.
Being
A circuit of wholeness
And then
If one little light goes out, then they start to dim and dim and dim until they all go out.
So what I work with in my own life
For many, many years is
Am I fully
alive
I also love the question, what am I willing to risk for full aliveness? We'll come back to that, because that's a fun question.
Ah and then when I am not feeling
Fully alive.
Alive in my head, alive in my heart.
Alive in my
Got.
Alive in my
balls if I can say it alive in my spirit
If I'm not feeling alive.
Then I want to go check.
These four pillars because
What reliably has been true for me is they are like the light on the strand, and if they get loose.
My aliveness tends to diminish. It doesn't go out all of a sudden, but it diminishes.
So what Katie Hendricks articulated as the four pillars of integrity, the first pillar is
Radical responsibility.
It's really the decision to move out of blaming
And criticizing
Out of being at the effect of the world
And move
into
Claiming responsibility or agency. A sure way for me to blunt my aliveness.
My day to day experience of my vitality.
is to live in victimhood.
Blame the weather.
Plain the traffic.
What I notice is if I stop blaming and I choose to move the locus of control back over here.
And I choose to have agency
To be responsible for my experience, not the external world.
But to be responsible for my experience.
there's a surge of energy that comes back in the body. So that's the first pillar, radical responsibility.
The second pillar is
Am I willing to feel my feelings?
I was a non feeler.
much of my life. Now I came into the world like I think everybody does.
as a full feeler. So as an infant, I was a full feeler. I had access to my anger, to my rage, to my fear, to my sadness, to my joy, to my sexual energy. And then like most people, I got a little bit socialized out of that.
But then I had some trauma in my life.
in my family of origin.
That came meaningfully to a head on my seventeenth birthday.
This is really relevant to
me and feelings on my seventeenth birthday
I woke up about five in the morning.
To the experience of my dad having a massive heart attack. He happened to be sleeping in the single bed next to me. We'd gone to bed the night before watching a Chicago White Sox game.
And I woke up with him having a fatal heart attack.
And I was a 17 year old young man kid, and I was all of a sudden introduced to the death process, which I'd never been introduced to before.
And that was
Traumatic in and of itself.
But then
We followed the ambulance to the hospital and
We walked into the hospital into the emergency room and my dad had been wheeled into one of the bays there.
And then the nurse walked out.
The nurse walked out and handed me his watch and his ring.
Handed it to me, not to my mom, who was there.
And said
He's gone. He died.
I
Walked away from my mom
And I walked into a bathroom.
And again, this was early in the morning, the hospital wasn't crowded, and I held my dad's
uh ring and his watch in my hands, and I remember just melting down the wall.
disintegrating into
grief and heartbreak and loss and
Complete unknowing.
And then I
I love the phrase.
I pulled myself together.
I stood up.
I walked out to my mother.
My mom at that point was um
A functional but a meaningful alcoholic.
And
didn't have a lot, she hadn't mature to develop a lot of adult coping skills. So I was in a role of caretaker and helping her.
I picked her up, I held her, I helped her.
Went home, I called my older brother, told him that my
Dad had died, called my sister, neither of them were in the home.
And it's like I made a contract with myself in that moment, Shane.
Which is
It hurts.
Two
Bad.
To feel these feelings, and I
Consciously, unconsciously, some dance there locked them away.
Until my late twenties at least, probably early thirties.
Here's what I didn't know.
Is the amount of
Energy
It takes to repress and suppress emotion.
I tell people now it's like your emotions are like a beach ball, you know?
And you take them and uh you
Try to hold them under the water.
And the more inflated the ball is, the harder it is to hold under the water. And if
You know, one beach ball is sadness and one beach ball is anger and one beach ball is fear.
And after a while you're holding these things
Under the water.
You get exhausted.
And I got exhausted. I was actually, I think, mildly depressed. And a a reason was that I was depressing.
My feelings.
So now
This second pillar of integrity is I just ask myself every day as part of my morning rituals.
Is there a feeling here that wants to be felt? And I've learned that these feelings can be felt very
Simply and efficiently and beautifully.
And the thing that I was terrified of was being overwhelmed by the feelings doesn't occur at all.
They become a natural
enlivening part of life. They actually allow life to appear in technicolor and not black and white. They allow life force to come back into my body. So that's the second pillar.
The third pillar.
is candor.
So if I wanna be out of integrity
If I want to
Dampen my aliveness.
All I have to do is start accumulating withholds.

Things that I'm not
Saying.
Thoughts that I'm having.
Wants that I have.
judgments and opinions that I have.
beliefs that I have.
All I have to do is start.
holding back
Being authentic.
being revealed.
I will immediately feel less alive.
When people reveal
When they become more authentic.
They immediately feel more alive.
Now I just want to put a little asterisk by this.
They also usually immediately experience chaos.
Because
I and we
Have been withholding
For good reason I put air quotes around that because
It made sense to withhold.
So I'm not questioning whether there's
A reason to withhold.
What I'm questioning is its effect on integrity.
And its effect on aliveness.
And when we talk about integrity in relationships.
And does the relationship have integrity, whether it's a personal relationship or a uh public relationship, a professional relationship? One of the questions we want to explore is how revealed are we? We say we use this little formula. When you withhold, then you withdraw.
And then you project.
Which means you disconnect from relationship. So when we look at
high performing teams, one of the things we see is they don't have many withholds.
Everything is transparent.
to the track to the decision process. Okay.
And then the fourth
Pillar of integrity is
Am I impeccable with my agreements? So an agreement is just anything I've said I would do.
Or anything I've said I wouldn't do. Real simple.
It's just
Who's gonna do what?
By web.
And I find that
One of the ways people bleed off life energy is they don't make clear agreements.
When they make clear agreements, they break their agreements.
Which creates a life force diminishment.
It also creates drama and relationships.
They they rationalize, justify, and explain why they didn't keep their agreements rather than just taking responsibility for it.
And they don't get back into integrity.
I just find it so beautifully simple and enlivening to go
We agreed we'd meet at the top of the hour. Let's just meet at the top of the hour. There's no
Yeah, but you're not wondering, you're not having to email or text me.
So those are the four pillars of integrity. Take responsibility, feel your feelings.
Speak candidly, authentically, reveal, and be impeccable with your agreements. Now, in my experience
When I live like that.
I feel incredibly alive. Now we could also talk about, you know, do you eat well? Do you get a good night's sleep? You know, are you exercise? All of that, of course, would be part of feeling fully alive, but seems everybody knows that. We might not be doing it, but we know it.
But not everybody is playing the game of
Let's be fully alive and play with integrity.
There's so many rabbit holes I want to go down right now. Uh I'm trying to think of how to organize this. I think we'll just start with the first in terms of taking radical responsibility and sort of ending blame.
It's one thing to know that.
Yes, I should do that. What does it look like to do that?
It actually begins before there is a given stimuli in this moment.
It begins when I'm
sitting on my chair in the morning or I'm in a silent retreat.
Or I'm
Away with my team or my intimate partner.
And I'm asking the question
How do I want to live life?
So it begins with a foundational
Commitment.
Commitment again, not being ethical or moral, commit being more energetic. In other words, it begins by me saying
declaring
I want to go to San Francisco.
Not Austin.
So I get real clear.
I get on the web and I buy a ticket to San Francisco.
Now I know the difference between San Francisco and Austin, so it begins
in quiet reflection or it begins on retreat or it begins like I said with a team deciding
Do we want to play the blame game or do we want to take responsibility?
So it begins with me
declaring to myself and deciding
I want to play a different game in life.
I want to play the responsibility game. I don't want to play the blame game. That's really important.
Because
Only then
Do I know how I'm gonna be with life when it shows up?
No, let's let's keep pressing the analogy of an airplane.
So let's say I decide I'm going to San Francisco not Austin. So I buy the ticket to San Francisco, which means
I'm gonna claim responsibility for my experience.
Now, I've been told that no plane flirt and true, so it it drifts off course, you know, it's always course correcting.
It commits to San Francisco, but then it drifts.
And then it shifts back on to course.
Great. So
Now I start living my life.
I have gotten my ticket to San Francisco. I wanna play the no blame game. I wanna play the responsibility game.
Debbie does something.
Debbie looks at me a certain way.
That look that an intimate partner can have, which is not a look that says, I love you, I adore you, I wanna you be close to you. It's that look that says,
Oh you.
No, that look. Okay.
Now
I get a pop quiz.
Boom.
All right, so now I get to go
Okay, am I gonna claim responsibility? In other words
Her face
Is not the cause of my experience. This is what radical responsibility is. In the blame game.
Her face, that frown, the particular, you know, brow that she has
That particular way she's uh forming her eyes.
In blame, I go, why are you looking at me like that?
I didn't do anything because I think the cause of my uncomfortable experience on the inside is her face.
So then of course what I want to do is I want to get her to change her face.
Because I believe that if she looked at me differently, I'd be okay.
I'm not okay because she's looking at me the way she's looking at me.
Claiming responsibility goes
She is looking at me.
And you know, a video camera would record a particular mouth structure or a particular brow structure. You know, those little micro expressions in a video camera would record something.
But it is not
With the cameras recording.
That is causing my experience.
It's an internal
mechanism inside of me.
That is generating my fear.
It's a mechanism that goes something like this.
Oh no.
Debbie is disapproving of me.
I can't be okay.
If Debbie is disapproving of me.
I've outsourced my need for approval.
to Debbie.
That
victimhood. And by the way, I want to distinguish between
Bina victim.
And victim consciousness. This is a really important distinction.
There are genuine victims in the world.
Victim consciousness is
If I'm seventy years old and I'm still blaming my mother, my brother, and my father.
For my current experience in life.
So I wanna stipulate there are real victims.
Now
Let's fast forward. Debbie's making that face.
I'm not a real victim at that point.
The experience I'm having on the inside of nervousness, apprehension, anxiety, fear.
Uh resentment, anger
I am the cause of that because I'm believing I'm the source of a belief about Debbie.
And about my needs for approval.
And about my needs for control, there are these core wants approval, control, security, and oneness. And at that moment.
I think those core wants are being threatened because of Debbie's face.
I've outsourced them to her. Okay, now
I'm in the pop quiz.
I'm on the airplane, it's drifted off course. Now I get a choice.
I can say
Why are you making that face? I didn't do anything.
I told you I might be a little late. I told you the golf game might run long.
You know, now I'm justifying explaining, rationalizing, now I'm fully in victimhood.
Now I get to go back to the commitment I made a day, a week, a month, a year earlier and say, Hold on a minute.
I chose to end blame and criticism.
And I chose to take responsibility.
It's not gonna happen in that moment.
It's not you can practice.
Till it gets to where it does. But at first
It might be an hour later.
After I've said to her, Don't make that face at me.
Then an hour later I go.
Uh-oh.
I drifted off course. I went back into the blame game.
No problem.
An hour a day later.
I recommit. And what that looks like is
I come back to Dev and I say, Hey
I
drifted off of my commitment to end blame and criticism and I was blaming you, whether outwardly, inwardly,
I saw myself as a victim at the effect of your energy.
I take responsibility for that, Deb.
I was the cause of my experience.
You didn't do that to me.
When I drift, I just recommit. So it begins with a clear commitment inside of yourself.
Then it begins with growing in self-awareness so you can feel the difference.
between blaming and criticizing and taking responsibility?
And then it moves to a very simple practice.
And the simple practice is this.
Hm.
I'm triggered. It always begins with noticing I'm triggered.
Because when we blame we are triggered.
I'm in a threatened state.

Right now, as you make that face, Debbie, I feel
Threatened.
Again, it's a threat to my wanting to be
Approved of.
To have control over her.
A threat to my safety and security, and a threat to my wanting oneness. I feel threatened. So the first thing I do is I go.
I'm triggered and I feel threatened.
No big deal, just acknowledge it.
And then I say
Well that's all'cause I'm scared.
And can I just accept myself from being scared?
For just a moment.
Acceptance is the antidote to fear.
And until the fear gets met and faced and felt and relaxed, there isn't an option for a non reactive behavior.
It's a really important principle.
So then I accept myself, then I say.
Am I willing to choose?
Claiming
responsibility. And then we have a set of questions we go through.
when we're claiming responsibility. Questions like
How did I create this experience?
How is this familiar?
How is this a pattern in my life?
What are the payoffs I'm getting?
From creating this experience.
How do I keep this experience going?
These are
insight oriented questions that create a whole new learning
that are just never available to us as long as we're in a blame and criticize mode.
So we commit.
When we drift we recommit.
We become aware of being triggered.
We accept ourselves for being in a threatened fearful state.
And then we reclaim responsibility.
and start asking a series of questions. By the way, it could happen again in the intimate relationship, could happen on a team at work.
Hey, we missed our quarterly numbers. Great, we could blame and criticize.
But we agreed we were gonna go to San Francisco.
So in our postmortem
Let's
actually start to look at how we co-created the experience.
And then we'll get massive learnings.
This is all wow. Yeah, this is great.
Uh uh I love the depth and the insight you're providing here. There's a couple of areas that I wanted to sort of follow up with here.
One was
The
Nature of the airplane.
and constant adjustments. It's like there's an active stability to it.
Right. You need to be conscious and active in order to stabilize.
And then the other thing around the core wants that you said, so approval
control security oneness. Can you explore those a little bit?
So I first heard about these from Hale Dwaskin.
who is the teacher of the Sedona method. It's a really great method. And he I believe got them from his mentor, Lester Levinson.
They're not original, I'm sure, but I that's where I heard them. I want to give credit.
So the four core wants of all human beings, and these are
natural. They're not wrong. They're natural. They're instinctual.
The first core want
is approval.
It's the desire to be liked.
Loved
Valued, respected.
Wanted
The second core want is for control.
It's just simply the desire.
For the world to be the way we think the world should be.

All of us have a belief about the way the world should be. The world could be how fast my computer's running. The world could be my desk. The world could be my children. The world could be
Mm.

Economic
variables going on.
Right now.
We all have a way we think the world should be and a way the world shouldn't be.
Control is just
Our desire to make the world be the way we think it should be. So I say to people all the time.
We're all control freaks.
We don't our s very survivability is at threat.
When we
Lack approval.
And when we lack control.
If we get cut out of the clan ostracized from the tribe
Because we're not approved of
That's a death sentence.
So it's natural and normal that we are looking for approval, love, connectivity.
When we feel out of control.
It's threatening that third one, which is security.
Safety.
survivability literally it means I don't want to die
But it's not just that, it's I don't want to experience harm.
I don't want to experience ego dissolution.
I want my identity to survive. These are all just as natural and normal as can be.
And then the fourth one is oneness, which is just simply
A sense of connectivity, it's probably
Ultimately
A deep thirst for spiritual ones, if you don't like that word.
Just a connect to the a connection to the transcendent, a sense that I am not fundamentally alone, fundamentally alienated. So these are the four core wants that human beings have.
After about the age of
Four to six.
We forget that we already have all of these on the inside.
And so we outsource them.
And we spend the rest of our life
thinking that if we get enough money we'll feel safe and secure.
If we get ourselves bulletproof at work so that we can't get canceled.
We'll feel safe and secure. If we get enough.
alarm systems on our house or enough guns or enough if we if we get enough um
passports to live in other countries in addition to our dual citizenship here. If we if we have the resources to buy a secure place on an island in the Northwest where we have all the fresh you know
We start thinking if only
I could get secure, then I would feel secure.
Course anybody who's run that racket down very far, you go
Uh oh.
That didn't work.
If only I could get so and so to like me, so and so to value me, so and so to want me.
If only I could get my mother to finally say she loves me f before she dies, then my desire for approval.
would be shaded. I wouldn't need that anymore.
If only I could get control of fill in the blank.
But
It never
Works.
So the
Ultimate
Outsourcing is outsourcing our core needs and wants
to people circumstances and conditions and
The growth path of life I've been playing a lot with.
these four stages of life. And what happens in the third stage, you know, the first stage is learning, the second stage is doing
The third stage is mentoring, the fourth stage is arriving.
As I move out of the doing state, which is all about
ticking the boxes of approval control, security and oneness.
That I think will stabilize you. I love the word you stabilize my sense of okayness.
If I'm self aware, I start to go, uh oh.
It worked in the short room.
Run, but it hasn't really stabilized it. So now in the third dimension of life, I get to see actually test.
Is there an okay on the inside?
So now I start start outsourcing it.
I start resting in it and this is not a belief. It's not a theology. It's not an orthodoxy.
It has to be a direct experience or it's of no good whatsoever.
But if I can actually experience a profound sense of okayness related to those four things, the entire game changes. That's what happens in the third and fourth stages of life.
If I'm outsourcing approval to Debbie's facial expression
I'm
Vulnerable.
To
being disrupted.
If I have a profound sense of approval on the inside.
Then I might
Get momentarily triggered by Debbie's facial expression.
But I don't need Debbie's approval to be okay. It doesn't mean that it doesn't feel good.
But I don't need it, so I don't become reactive and hyper reactive.
And I can come back into a higher learning state. So that's how the four core wants.
relate to being triggered
and how to come back off of drifting. You use the word stabilized, you know.
Uh in the Buddhist tradition they talk about
First you recognize something
Then you realize it.
Then you stabilize in it.
First I recognize
that uh I've lost my shit. I've outsourced approval control and security. Okay, great. I've right and then I have a momentary recognition, not in that moment, but maybe the next morning when I'm sitting quietly or that night when I look up at the stars, I lose a sense of self and all everything is okay. Maybe I have a momentary taste.
I recognize it.
But I don't yet realize it's my natural state.
Should I have to do practices to create realization?
and enough practices and then it becomes stabilized.
I I love that. I think, you know, when as I was thinking about this, I was thinking sort of in terms of
our biological instincts and our you know, we're all hierarchical, we're all self-preserving, we're all territorial.
And we we tend to think of those things like a dog sort of pees and, you know, marks its territory and so we we we conceptualize these things as like a physical
Territory.
But it's not. It's our identity is part of our territory. So when somebody infringes on our our identity, our sense of self.
Something that we see as part of our core self.
We tend to react without reasoning.
Just like an animal, because it's embedded inside of our biology.
For most people
The infringement
is actually not like the infringement of a dog. It's not territorial.
This isn't true of everybody who's gonna listen to this podcast. Some people live in a world where the infringement actually is that.
But for most of the people you and I know.
They've created a world
where they're safe and secure enough that the infringement isn't that.
The vast majority of the infringement
is the infringement on the identity.
It's the infringement on the ego.
Identity.
And here's the deal.
As long as I think I am my identity.
Then it will be infringed upon.
Yeah.

It has to be. That's one of the gifts, actually, of having our identities infringed upon, not in the early stages of development.
But later, one of the gifts of having our identities infringed upon, in other words, being disrespected, for example.
The gift of that is later on in the journey is
It invites you to go
Oh it happened again. I re identified
with an identity.
That I am smart.
Or that I am, you know, famous, or that I am kind.
Whatever comes after the I am is always an identity.
I re-identified with an identity, it got questioned or threatened, and I went into a reactive state. That's great. Then later in life, you just go.
Oh, thank goodness. Now I can disidentify from that a little bit and come back to the deeper truth of what I am because I'm not my identity.
So what you're saying is actually
The gold mine that you get that it's not territorial infringement, it's the infringement on the ego identity, what Locke Kelly, one of my friends and teachers, calls the mini me.
I love that phrase. It's a little mini me that we think lives someplace between the front of our head, the back of our head, and our two ears. This little identity.
Who's craving approval, control, security, and oneness.
Who does it by identifying
And then when the identity gets threatened, it just goes batshit crazy.
I I love this. What's the counterbalance in terms of how do we
Get the proper perspective.
in order to step back from this infringement,'cause the infringement's gonna happen.
We're gonna be triggered.
How do we
I I I mean most things most problems come from blind spots. Most problems come from misunderstanding. And if you understood, you would have the patience to sort of see things through without reacting.
That comes with perspective. How do we what's the counterbalance to add the the perspective that we need?
to sort of like let the situation diffuse instead of escalating in the moment.
If what we're doing here is we're exploring
Our identity
And it being triggered.
And I'm suggesting that that happens when we have over identified
With a role that we play in life.
Or
with a notion of who we are. Okay, good.
So the deep work that needs to be going on all the while in life
is practices
Where we actually understand
The truth of who and what we are.
I would put a plug in for meditation practices.
That are not just about developing uh concentration.
They're not just about being able to focus on the breath or a mantra or a candle.
Mm.
So now we would be looking at practices in the Zhouchen tradition
or the Mahamudra tradition in practical terms.
I'm a huge fan.
Uh Lock Kelly, like I mentioned.
And I'm a huge fan of Sam Harris.
Nowadays.
I recommend
Waking up.
Because
Of what we're talking about right now.
that everything on that app, including
the momentary glimpses and the ten minute practice, but also the library of stuff that Sam has got by the way, I don't know, Sam, uh you know, I'm not
advocating for him for any personal reason whatsoever, just the advocacy of the app.
The practices rooted in there when done in a reliably disciplined way
Help us move through the illusion.
Of thinking we are our bank account.
Or we are our reputation.
Every day.
For a few minutes.
We reconnect.
We recognize for a moment the truth of who we are.
Ten minutes.
twenty minutes a day, maybe once a month doing a little bit longer, maybe once a year going on some sort of retreat. Again.
Where I'm seen through the illusion of my identity.
Now here's what happens. Now when the identity gets triggered.
I have an understanding.
That I am not that.
I am that
Which is actually
Always
Already
Same.
Which is actually
Always are ready.
Fully approved of.
I am that which is already totally in control of anything that needs to be controlled, and anything that I'm not in control of doesn't need to be controlled. It's an already always experience.
Of that.
Do a damn practice every day.
Sit your ass in a chair for ten minutes.
'Cause that will lead you over time
All the way to
The most profound understanding.
Of what you really are. This is why
Ramana Maharshi, you know, you taught us inquiry.
And his inquiry was
Real simple. It was just basically
Who am I?
Or another way of saying is, what am I? That's a profound inquiry, because as long as I think I am.
A man.
A seventy year old man. A seventy year old white
Six.
Man, a seventy year old white cis rich man who lives in Michigan who and I
As long as I think I am a grandfather, as long as I think I am
Those might be roles that I play, those might be things that I occupy periodically, but they're not the truth of who I am. As long as I'm confused about that.
In your words, until I understand the truth of who I am and what I am.
I am always vulnerable to destabilization.
So the practice is
Do those basic simple things so that you start to stabilize and understand the truth of who you are.
Two things here. One, you said in a reliably disciplined way. So it almost
indicates that rituals are the counterbalance to sort of some of those
Yes, absolutely. And I love the word rituals. I love that you're using that. I I'd
I'd love to actually probe with you what ritual means.
How you use it because
To mi it's like a semi-technical term.
And
I make a distinction between
Discipline with practices
And devotion
To rituals.
And they're very different things in my experience, so
Go deeper on that. What what do you mean by that?
So a practice is just
Something that that I do that I have a desired outcome.
And I want to accrue a benefit.
So it could be that I um
You know, wanna do cardio training three days a week.
So now that becomes a practice, I'm gonna do a hit or something like that.
Now discipline is
that I'm gonna show up and get on the bike with some regularity. And discipline, of course, is the whole idea that I'm going to um postpone gratification. That's the basic idea of discipline.
So to me the difference between a practice and a ritual is
If you look at the word ritual, you know it it comes from traditions, often spiritual traditions, ecclesiastical traditions.
And what a ritual was
was something that I or we did.
In the фізикол.
that pointed something in the other realm.
Rituals they're actually beautiful.
Things.
So there's a big difference tween between whether I'm doing a practice or a ritual.
And whether I'm exercising discipline or devotion.
So the difference between discipline and devotion is d discipline is this idea of delayed gratification. I love it, it's essential.
Devotion is this idea, it's like
It's like I'm offering. I'm offering.
something it's a very different energy
And when I'm
devoted or in devotion
I'm offering
My attention.
I'm offering
My time.
So let let me let me illustrate a couple of different ways.
So at our home in Michigan, where I spend most of my time.
We live in the woods, and I love to wander in the woods. I love to go for walks in the woods.
Okay.
I could be disciplined doing a practice, let's say I want to get 10,000 steps or some amount of climb or elevation.
And you know, I want to do that X number of days a week. So I'm disciplined. I get up, I put on my shoes, I go for my walk.
That's disciplined in a practice and there's real value.
Devotion to a ritual.
Is a very different thing, and the way that I
Now normally encounter the woods.
Is
As a ritual.
The woods
А an invitation to something beyond.
I have on my desk almost always a poem that I first heard David White.
I it's David didn't write it. I think it's David Wagner who wrote it.
But it's called lost.
And a lot of times before I head into the woods.
I'll just re-read the poem.
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you.
are not lost.
Wherever you are is called.
Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.
Must ask permission to know it.
And be known.
The forest
Breathe.
Yeah.
Listen.
Yep.
Answers.
I've made this place around you, if you leave it, you may come back again saying
Here.
No two trees
are the same to the raven, no two branches are the same to the wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you.
You are surely
Lost.
Stand still.
The forest knows where you are.
You must let it.
Find you.
When I
Take that as my
presence and then I move into the woods.
In devotion.
I'm offering the woods
My time
And my attention.
I could go get my 10,000 steps, disciplined in my practice, walking through the woods and listen to a podcast.
But that's so different than offering the woods.
My attention.
My time.
And then when I move through the woods
In this practice, I'll still get the same four or four and a half miles in, let's say, but I often pause.
And I listen.
That's very different.
But I'll give you another illustration.
Um
Debbie and I do a sauna most every day that we're in Michigan, and I intentionally got a wood burning sauna because as opposed to
An electric one because I wanted the ritual of starting a fire every morning in the dark.
Okay, so I have a ritual around starting the fire, and that reminds me of a whole lot of things.
And then Debbie and I enter into the sauna. So I prepare the sauna and we enter in.
And
It is
devotional
Time.
I'm there giving Debbie
My full attention and vice versa.
We're not covering the logistics of the day.
were there in a devoted usually fifteen to twenty minutes.
Practice.
Of really getting with each other, and we're using the heat and the fire to create a context.
Where the devotion of what our relationship is, the mystery beyond just a man and a woman and a sauna.
is being reflected.
I listened to Huberman long ago on, you know, heat treatment and cold treatment. I have a cold plunge right next to it. So some days I just go do heat treatment and cold plunge.
It's great.
That's discipline in a practice.
Devotion to a ritual is a very different thing. The last illustration I'd give Shane is
How do you spend time with your children?
So many people know the value of being with their children and they do it as discipline in a practice.
And it has all of the attendant
energy of that.
Versus
Devotion
to a ritual.
The ritual is that I am seeing them as
Sacred beings.
It's a way that I attend to them.
I don't enter into the ritual of being with them for whatever period of time while checking my
phone if it goes off or while watching TV over their shoulder.
There is the devotion, the giving of my full attention, the giving of my time.
which is devotion to a ritual of seeing them and seeing the essence of who they are.
That's a great distinction. The difference.
Between discipline
Which implies willpower.
And devotion
Which implies
A wholehearted offering.
It doesn't take will power.
Forмі to
give my attention to Debbie in the sauna, or stand still in the woods, or get fully present to my grandchild while he plays.
Again.
very different energy.
And I I just want to say
In my world, obviously not everything is ritual.
But I'm clear that there are some things that are ritual, the operative term being what's happening in the physical realm.
is a portal.
A window.
A passageway.
Into something beyond that.
The material
is a representation of the immaterial.
There's a reason.
for for millennia people have had rituals and of course rituals can be
bastardized and turn into fundamentalism and all that. But when they are what they were designed to be.
I think they were designed to give us in the individual and the collective.
A direct experience of something
bigger than ourselves. Yeah, to hand ourselves over to to something else. Yes. You know, rituals when they're done
In that way
Are they create awe.
They create wonder.
They create a sense of um well positive ones to you. Yes.

Yes.
Okay. So so we
We we've started talking about the pillars of integrity, and the four pillars were sort of taking radical responsibility.
uh being revealed and not concealing, feeling feelings and being a
impeccable with your agreements
We went down the rabbit hole of taking radical responsibility and that's how we ended up here. I I wanna reorient, go back up. Let's talk about being revealed and not concealing. So again, if we if we review, you know, integrity is
being energetically whole.
No interruptions to flow.
Another way of saying that is uh being in a fully alive state.
All right.
It just think about when you tell a lie and you know you tell a lie.
Almost everybody.
Can feel a contraction.
in their body.
They can feel
a dampening of their
Energy. They can feel their life force dwindling, which can can show up in the form, unless you're a sociopath, can show up in the form of guilt or something like that.
Okay.
What most people don't always feel is that when I am not revealed.
I have stepped away from being fully alive.
So again, if I go back if I go back to me in depth.
The the model that I like to use is
There's kind of two columns, imagine two columns. On on one side is
When I withhold
So this is something that I'm thinking.
Feeling
Wanting
It could be a judgment, a perception.
It could be any of those things. It's occurring over here in me.
And I'm withholding it from Debbie.
By the way.
Usually when we withhold, me personally and most of us
It's because
Ви скер.
Of the consequences of being revealed.
That's normal. I'm scared that if I reveal this thought.
it's going to affect Debbie a certain way. Or what I'm really scared of is if I reveal this thought and it affects Debbie a certain way, then she's gonna react and that's gonna affect me a certain way.
Or I think, you know, God, we've had this conversation before it's not worth having this conversation. So I withhold.
Okay.
Now what happens in relationships is right after I withhold
I withdraw from the relationship. Now the first step back is subtle.
It's just a little bit of withdrawing.
No.
The other side, the other column starts with
I reveal.
And that revealing is always
Risky.
No, it's not.
I revealed to her like this morning we did our ritual of sitting together as we do and connecting with each other, and at some point I said to her, I'm gonna reconnect with Shane today. Well that wasn't risky.
But
There's almost always something that if I were to reveal to her, it would feel risk.
Like here be an example. We're talking a little bit about Thanksgiving, and we're counting we're gonna have like uh 16 people for Thanksgiving. And then I had the thought to ask my daughter if she wanted to bring uh somebody she's in relationship with right now. I didn't know whether he was available. She wrote back and said he was.
So I said to Depp, now I got a little bit scared, just a little bit scared, because she's managing the dining room table.
Got it? And this is a
This is an important thing for her.
So it's like a little pinch in my body.
To go
God, you know, he's available, I'd really like him to come.
Okay, now wasn't a major risk.
But it was a little bit of a risk.
And
I could feel
I could withhold that for another hour, another day. I don't have to say it right now. I could slip it in later, and that would be a withhold. Then I'd withdraw. I'd be a little cautious that she might find out through my daughter or something. But I just say it. I just risk, hey, he's available. I'd really like him to come.
Okay.
That's the risk.
Then the next thing that happens when I withhold, I withdraw. When I reveal, I connect.
So I'm either withholding and withdrawing, or I'm revealing and I'm connecting. I'm opening myself up for connection.
Tander is the gateway to connection.
And the last thing that happens when I withhold
I withdraw and then I project.
So let's say I have a judgment about Debbie, uh what would be a judgment I might have about Debbie, a real judgment. Sometimes my judgment about Debbie is she doesn't make decisions soon enough.
So I would have this judgment that you don't make decisions. You gotta make some darn decisions.
Okay.
If I withhold that and I don't reveal my judgment of her, then I withdraw.
I back up a little bit.
Then the next thing that happens is I project.
Unto her my judgment.
As though it's right.
I project onto her that she's a slow decision maker and she should be different.
Now from that place I start seeing her through the lens.
Of being a slow decision maker, and guess what? I find confirming data to prove that.
I when I see that, I withhold that, I withdraw, I project. Now I'm in the death spiral of a relationship. Withhold, withdraw, project.
I said it to her the other day, so I revealed
My judgment is that you're slow in making decisions here.
I open myself up for connection because once I reveal myself, now what I want to do is sit with her while she has her experience.
Does she get angry? Does she get scared? Does she get sad?
Да сі реакти фенсивли, а стей презент.
And I'm available for connection.
So I
Reveal I connect. Now here's the last step in this column.
I own my projection.
So I look over there and I see her being slow in decision making and it's bothering me.
Then I say, Let me see in my life where am I not making a decision?
So I eat my projection.
And how's it bothering me?
Then I get insight from my projection and I can share it with her.
Or I could go the opposite way.
How am I addicted to making decisions without giving them the time to actually come to full maturity?
So now
When I reveal
And I connect.
Then I get learnings that I can offer back into the relationship.
Now.
Integrity is full aliveness.
In relationships you're either withholding, withdrawing, and projecting professionally or personally.
Or you're revealing
You're connecting.
And you're owning.
Which creates aliveness. I know this because over the years the hundreds and hundreds of couples that I've caught.
Coach.
Whenever they're a little bored in their relationship, whenever there's a little deadness, whenever they're starting to look outside the relationship for something else.
Almost always I'm certain
That they are not being candid with each other.
There's something they're not revealing.
Because I guarantee ya, if you practice
the pillar of being revealed of speaking authentically
You won't be bored in a relationship.
You won't be bored. It might be chaotic and messy, but you won't be bored.
So that's the second pillar. Am I revealed in life? And of course
It doesn't mean that I move through life revealing to everybody. I don't reveal necessarily to the barista every thought that I have as I order my latte.
But when I'm in a relationship with somebody where we are co-committed, as we talked about, co-committed, we're both going to San Francisco and we both want to practice being revealed and not concealed, so we can be fully alive.
Then
I'm in devotion to the ritual of revealing.
Because it's a portal.
to intimacy and connection.
and aliveness.
Wow. I mean, just wow.
I think
W where my
Where my reaction goes at
Is that we tell ourselves a story
about somebody else and we see confirming evidence of that story.
And and and if we don't ever bring that story to light, it just becomes a self fulfilling
Prophecy, effectively.
And to your point about withdrawing
The more we're telling ourselves this unchecked story.
This fiction.
Right? Because it's not it's not sort of
standing the test of bringing it up.
But the more we tell ourselves this story, the more we take a step back.
in a relationship, whether it's friendship, your your partner, your
Customers anybody.
Co workers, colleagues.
And that space creates an opportunity.
Um
For
not only does it reduce intimacy, but it creates an opportunity for somebody else to enter.
That relationship.
And because if somebody if somebody feeds you in the way that you've withdrawn
another affirming a part of you
Then uh I can see how that would spiral really quickly.
Yeah, absolutely. So
You know, if you want to go the other way.
I love what you said, you know, we make up a story about somebody.
Well
A real simple hack here is just to say
Uh hey Shay.
Just so you can know me.
Over here on Planet Gym, this is the way I'd say it over here on Planet Gym.
This planet where it has its own view of reality, its own rules, its own way of seeing the world.
I'm making up a story about you.
And
I just want to reveal my story so you e you can know me.
So I won't withdraw from you, and in some cases
I just want to check out my story with you.
So so we did this actually on because this podcast, this is we're recording part two. It'll be part one for everybody who
is listening like it'll all just be seamless, but we had a a hiccup in the first recording and we had to delay
Uh the second sort of recording.
And I was talking about my experience and sort of like how I felt bad about this not working out. I was projecting
on to you and I was revealing and not concealing. But walk me through that conversation again from your point of view and and and how you you you saw that'cause I was
stating my uh you know, I'm I'm
I guess stereotypically Canadian, right? I'm always like
How is how is the other person feeling? How do I, you know, make them feel better?
Uh I want everything to go right. I want it to be perfect, and if it doesn't go perfect
Then somehow I haven't done all the things within my control.
to do yeah, I haven't done everything within my control.
And I don't remember the details, you might have to cover some of it with me, but it began with you
I think apologizing
I'm sorry.
I feel bad.
I said, now hold on a second, because we had just talked about responsibility. And I was telling myself a story, right? This is what triggered this memory of this. Yes. Yes. You were tell the story that it was a bad experience for me. You actually said at one point, you said, you know.
It's your time, you know, like your time is valuable, you know, and
And like I'm
We're taking your time or we're wasting your time, something like that. So you're over here making up a story about my experience.
that because we were having technical difficulties and we're gonna need to gather back again.
That I was having a bad experience, that I was in some way upset, frustrated.
Something like that.
And that you were in some way
Wasting my time.
So you made up that story and you didn't check it out.
Yeah.
You assumed you were the cause of my experience.
All right.
So, from assuming that you were the creator of my first, you assumed I was having a bad experience, then you assumed that you were the cause of my bad experience.
And then from there
You apologize.
And you felt
Yeah.
Okay, that's normal human interaction. Yes, Canadians have a you know like a PhD in that, that's true, but we all have a version of that.
Here's the way that could have gone.
So you say you start with you and you might have said
Hey
I'm feeling bad over here.
And you could have dissected what is the exact feeling? Are you scared? Are you sad? Are you angry? Is it some combo? You're having an experience over there.
I'm making up the story, Jim.
That this is a bad experience for you.
That you're in some way upset about that.
And the other thing I'm doing is
I have this little self blamer.
Who thinks that I'm responsible for your experience.
Okay.
Now you're playing
above the line that term we use are you're playing from presence because you're revealing yourself.
All right. Now remember when we talked about 100% responsibility. Here's what it looks like in relationships that I'm in. And I'm in a relationship with you. Here's what I'd say to you: Shame.
Get me about this.
You are not the cause of my experience.

You're not.
However much we ever relate in life.
You are not the cause of my experience.
I would say it this way.
I actually won't grant you
That
Power.
Ам the cause of my expires.
You act, and in this case technology acted and it stopped working.
Yeah, there was an action.
But
You didn't cause anything over here.
Okay, that'd be the first thing I'd say. So therefore
You don't need to step over there and try to make me feel better as though you were the cause of it. So that'd be the first thing. The second thing, you could check out your story. Hey Jim, I'm making up the story.
That this is a bad experience for you. You know, you're a busy guy, you know, uh this you got a finite amount of time, you know, you give it.
And I want to check out my i my story about you.
Is this technical glitch a bad experience?
Well, if you had done that'cause this is what I said to you, I actually said, you know
I I said to you, it's not a bad experience over here at all.
None, in fact.
I'm glad before we knew it wasn't gonna start again, I said I'm glad I'd you know I've been expending some energy, I'd like to get a drink.
Nice place for me to pause, feel energetically how we're doing.
It's not a bad experience all. Over here on Planet Jim, I'm present.
I'm happy.
So
If that's the case.
There's absolutely no need for you to be apologizing. In fact, apology seems like a silly thing.
If if you want to take responsibility, you could say
I feel happy because the technical glitch is allowing you to take a breath.
Pause.
Get present and have a sip of water.
Okay, and then the other assumption was you had this assumption
That time is something that I have.
And that time is something that is scarce.
And that therefore
You're intruding
And uh
management of this finite resource.
Now.
You might believe all those things about time. I don't believe any of those things about time.
Any of them.
So again
We could come back to presence and you would just say, Hey, I feel bad, sad, scared, maybe a little bit.
I'm making up the story that you're having a bad experience.
I can feel myself wanting to rescue you from having a bad experience. And I just want to tell you about all that and check it out.
That's candor.
That's actually speaking authentically.
And then I can say thank you for telling me all that.
Now if you want to know me, here's what's going on. I'm having a great experience.
And I've been chewing on that conversation ever since, especially the times when I catch myself
uh in like a host role with friends or something and I'm about to say, Oh, I'm sorry.
And I'm like, Oh, this is that thing again, right? Like this is
me projecting and
uh giving myself
Uh
unwarranted agency over your experience as well, right? Like
But this is what we do all the time. W uh not not only
W not only we do it both ways, though, right? In in one way we do it is like we assume
that were the responsibility for other people's
uh experience. The other assumption that we make
Is that we have no agency over our own experience and somebody else's the reason that we're not happy or we're not
uh in a good place or our days not going right or things didn't work out and we blame people and we blame circumstances
Yes!
Yes, and that's why the first pillar of integrity is that hundred percent responsibility.
Where you get to take your hundred, just your hundred.
And I get to take my hundred
And then from a place of co creation, we get to have our experience.
If we come back to the idea that integrity is aliveness.
There's so much more aliveness available to us when we're playing that game.
If you're over there
Feeling bad, blaming yourself because you hosted a party and something didn't go exactly the way, you're guilting yourself.
You're
Out of presence.
You're actually out of presence. You're not available to your guests because you're in your own mind doing your racket.
Or if I'm over here going
You know, you invited me over for dinner. I told you I was allergic to shellfish, and you served shellfish.
I feel disrespected. You disrespected me.
Which, you know, some people would relate to the world that way.
Okay. At that point
I'm out of presence.
So
If we're both out of pra and you say, Oh God, I feel so horrible. Now we're in some drama based cycle.
That doesn't allow for
Maximum learning.
Whereas if we take responsibility and I let you have your experience and I have my experience and I have agency for mine and you have agency for yours.
Then we get to learn.
But by the way, I just want to catch this because some people
When I say I grant you agency for your experience.
That's not doesn't live in me as a license for me to be an asshole.
It doesn't go there. It doesn't say
Well, you're responsible for your own experience. If you're upsetting yourself, that's your problem.
So I'll talk to you however I want.
It's not that at all.
There's something I better be aware of underneath that.
So
I grant you the right to be responsible for your experience, and I want to come toward you with you.
From a spirit of fill in the blank love, appreciation, open heartedness.
Taking on a percent responsibility isn't a license.
To be, you know, an uh
Yeah.
You know, to be a mean person, it's not that at all.
That makes sense. And the next one sort of like feeling feelings, and and we've sort of touched on this a little bit.
Um
Well.
I think you you have more you want to say on that.
Well in my mind this is a huge one, uh again.
If I understand your audience, especially for many of the people who um
really, really join you in your
Podcast.
Many of them have
Fantastically developed
IQs.
They've really leveraged their thinking center.
It's been key to their success, their ability to discern, to distinguish, to make decisions.
They're just brilliant at that. Absolutely brilliant at that.
But they're a little more cut off from their EQ, from their heart space, from their emotional center.
And in my experience
Greatly cut off from their BQ their body intelligence.
A great way to cut yourself off from energetic wholeness or from aliveness is
Із to repress or suppress філін.
Feelings are

Gift.
That allow life to move out of black and white into full color.
Feelings are just sensations. If you if you actually break it down, all a feeling is is a sensation.
Or set of sensations in and on the body.
That's all they are.
They often arise with a thought accompanying them. So there's a cognitive stimuli.
But then there's an emotive experience. That's the sensations in the body.
No.
What we find is people aren't used to being with those sensations because
If you bring your full attention to the sensations, let's say anger arises in your body.
Андер уже сета і купи хіт.
It could be tension in the jaw.
you know, gripping in the fists. It can be tension in the back of the neck, the shoulders, down the back, on the top of that. That kinda tends to be the anger's all.
Now there's a thought like
That
person shouldn't have cut me off in traffic.
That's the stimulating thought.
Then anger arrives.
Okay.
Most people either
Експрес з
Or they repress or suppress.
Most people don't know how to be with the anger.
With full attention
Ту эксперєси
Until it releases, and it releases in a fairly short period of time, which is just
Wow.
My face feels hot.
I'm gripping the steering wheel so hard I could snap it in two.
Take a breath.

I'm not trying to get rid of the feelings. I'm just saying
Could I just let the body feel what it feels? Could I actually be so present?
to let all those sensations be there.
And then what we discover is
The half life of any set of sensations tied to an emotion is fairly short.
It's minutes.
Maybe even seconds, it's not hours and days, and then I'm alive.
The same with sadness, or the same with
Ah fear the same with joy.
People repress and suppress'cause they didn't know how to feel their feelings. Most of us weren't
We're getting better at this with children. We can say
Honey, you look like you're really angry.
I'll just sit here with you while you feel your anger. In fact if you want to take
a whistle ball bat and go hit the couch
And feel your anger and scream?
Dad will just sit here with you. I'll just witness your anger.
I wasn't raised with people like that. So we were taught to suppress and repress. And then that cuts off our full aliveness.
Now again, if I come back to relationships.
There has to be a shared commitment to feel feelings.
And to do it in a way that is safe and friendly for me.
For you and for the environment.
Meaning our house.
So is an adult though.
If if you weren't brought up in in an environment where
That was okay. And I read somewhere that feelings last like sixty seconds if you actually let yourself feel them.
And you suppress them and that comes out as like passive aggression.
Or aggression, aggression in some cases, right? Like you you suppress so much and then
uh the littlest thing goes wrong and all of a sudden it's it's you know uh ever the whole world is uh out of your way and wants to run away and
Uh and it wasn't that one thing that triggered it. It's the series of all these little suppressions. But if we haven't been taught how to do that.
How do we learn to recognize the the physiological signs that okay, we're having a feeling, whether it's
uh we're we're sad, we're angry, we're happy, we're
And then allowing ourselves to feel that is that sort of
Um
like a pause or a ritual or something that we do where we can just be like okay
I I notice these tingling sensations. I notice that, you know, my blood pressure or my heart rate is beating faster.
I'm just gonna take a breath, close my eyes, and be with this sensation.
Until it passes.
Yes, yes. Okay so like many of these things that you and I are talking about, first
I like to
Have people practice
In a way that feels friendly and safe.
So let me show you what that might be.
Would you be willing to let me coach you for just a second?
Yes, oh gosh.
Nothing like doing this in front of a half million people.
We're not gonna do any big thing here, just it we're gonna do a little thing, but I wanna make sure it feels friendly to you.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, great. So all you need to do is just take a breath.
And then just allow to come into your consciousness.
A situation or a person is
And
When that situation or that person comes into your mind, you feel irritated.
you feel a little frustrated.
Maybe even a little bit angry.
And you don't have to say what it is. So just
Do you have one? Yes, totally. Okay, beautiful. Great. So the first thing we're gonna do is I'm just gonna ask you to let
the movie play.
So go ahead and see the person or persons.
If they're talking, go ahead and hear them, or if they're doing whatever they're doing, go ahead.
Great, so we're actually using the mind to stimulate to dr bring up
A feeling state.
Yeah.
So there's some irritation.
Frustration, anger here.
Good. So now we're gonna move from the mind.
Where do you feel it in your body?
It and this is not a big one, I don't imagine, unless it is, which is great too.
Where do you feel the irritation?
Frustration in your body. My jaw.
Beautiful, great. And just so everybody can ride along here, what do you feel in your jaw? Is it
Hot cold tents.
Like tense. It's it's it's like not relaxed. It's it's on.
It's working harder than it should be. Beautiful.
So I feel tension.
Hard. It's on. It's working. Okay. So now here's the magic move.
Bring your attention to your jaw.
And as best you can.
Just let the tension
Be there.
So I'm not trying to get rid of it, change it. I'm actually just giving it a little bit of attention.
Almost
Welcoming.
The tension.
Oh, there's tension.
Mm.
And as you bring your attention
To your jaw.
And you just allow the jaw to have its experience.
Tell me what's happening. Is it getting more intense, less intense, moving?
Yeah.
Because of a
It just goes away.
Great.
Alright.
Now this is exactly what we're talking about.
So we use a cognitive stimulant.
You thought of someone or something. That's great.
We use that simply to prime the pump.
To get the body
Having
A feeling.
Which is gonna be sensations.
Now this is really important.
Then we interrupt
The thinking.
We stop thinking about that person.
And we move our attention from our thought.
to our sensation
We rest.
Our attention on the sensation.
And we just
Watch it do.
What it does.
In your case, in probably a few moments,
It went away.
Now I do want to say this.
In some cases
It'll get more intense first.
It'll get hotter.
It'll start to quiver.
Okay.
What I'm doing is just resting my attention and letting the body do its thing.
Now
What that will do is it will release that wave
Of feeling.
Mm-hmm.
It'll release that. Okay.
So
Actually on our website and we can link to this.
Um
I've recorded a meditation which is doing exactly what I just did with you. I think it's like a 10 minute meditation where you can just sit and practice.
This with any feeling. We could do the same thing. Think of something in your life that makes you sad. Think of something that makes you scared. We stimulate it with the mind.
The body
Gets activated.
We bring presence.
Арнес акцент
loving attention to the body.
The body releases.
Okay.
Now
Here's what happened. So now we've got the cognitive stimuli.
The body reaction.
We interrupt.
the stimuli, bring our attention to the body, the body relaxes.
Now if I said think about that situation again.
You could think about it and you'd check.
Does the body light up again?
If it does, you relax the body. Now eventually here's what we go'cause
then you're in what we call a cognitive emotive loop.
Cognitive a thought, emotive the body feels something.
This is a really important thing for people to learn who want to experiment with this.
When you're in a stimuli, the person cut me off on the road, they shouldn't have cut me off. The body is in anger.
Or scared.
I stopped the mind from judging the person.
I bring it back.
I let my body relax. Then I go up.
And I
Deconstruct
The thought.
I have to do a work on the thought.
Where I see my attachment to being right about my belief, and it's my righteous attachment to being right.
That is stimulating the feeling. So people can spend years.
in a cognitive emotive loop.
My father in law disrespected me.
When he walked out of last year's holiday celebration.
Okay.
I could think that thought, see him walking out the door, I could get pissed off again.
Now here's the deal. I don't complete it in my body. My body lights up. I don't complete it.
I actually use the energy in my body to fuel the thought.
That son of a bitch, how dare he walk out? Now I'm literally back in the scene again.
Yeah.
The body lights up some more. I don't complete it in the body.
I use that to fuel the mind.
That turns into this cognitive motive loop.
Which you can stay in for years, and to your point, that turns into a mood.
It's not a feeling anymore. Now it's not a feeling of anger, it's a mood of resentment.
It's a mood of
Bitterness.
Now it becomes a pasture.
All because
I didn't release the energy out of my body by giving it a moment of attention.
And I didn't deconstruct the thought.
To become free from my righteous beliefs.
Well, before you practice with your father in law the next time he shows up or the somebody cuts you off in traffic.
Just I might say
For a couple of weeks, just do a little morning practice, couple of days a week.
Where you do just what I did with you.
So you get real familiar at, okay, yesterday I did an anger thing. Today I'm gonna do a sad thing. Just think of something in your life that brings up sadness.
See the picture, really let the movie play. Where is sadness? Okay, it's in the front of my chest, it's in my neck, it's in my eyes.
Could I just let the sadness be or the sensation? I don't make it bigger.
Till it goes.
Do the same thing with fear. Do the same thing with joy.
F and you're learning to let
the body have its experience without interrupting it.
By the way, this is something
Our children knew
Right from the beginning.
You watch an infant, they do this automatically.
We just had to socialize them out of it because we were afraid it would be too chaotic if everybody just kept feeling their feelings.
And and and this brings up a an
A really interesting point, I think. You know, we think about
Low me to explain this out here for a second. So we think about
these big moments in life like marriage and
uh what job you have and how much of an impact they have on your life.
But it's really these
The the series of these ordinary moments
That accumulate
Uh
Into sort of
Your position.
Right. So so if if if I
In this case, you know, I get angry over my
My stepfather or father in law or whatever.
And I allow that to eat me. I'm spending energy on this, and all the energy I'm spending on this could go to something more productive.
Something more productive for myself, more productive for society, more productive for this relationship.
At some point I have to ex uh like maybe I don't, but if I'm going to, I have to
expend a lot of energy.
to repair
This relationship.
So I've now spent a lot of energy that didn't do anything for me. And my relationship is now in in this worse situation if I don't repair it.
So it's fragile.
Right, so I'm not well positioned to withstand the next sort of
uh slight or a front. So I'm increasingly
get it into getting in a a worse and worse position.
And so
I think these ordinary moments that nobody thinks about and nobody talks about and nobody teaches you how to handle
turn into extraordinary results
Or almost like a death spiral.
And and it's how you handle these moments, the these sort of like decisive moments, if you will, or whatever you want to call them.
That nobody's ever talked about and nobody ever teaches you, but these are the moments that sort of
determine your future. Are you are you getting
Closer to what you want, or are you getting further away from what you want? Is your trajectory improving or is your trajectory declining?
Are you
Taking steps towards being the type of person you want to be, or are you walking away?
And making that harder and more difficult. And then if you are making it more difficult, unintentionally, because I don't think this happens consciously.
Eventually
The gap becomes
so large that you just bury your head in the sand. So if you're you have a slight with somebody in a relationship context, whether it's your partner, your kids, it, you know, somebody at work, somebody driving, it doesn't matter, but you don't repair this. You don't get it back to equilibrium.
Th then you're in this spot where
Things just go wrong.
Right?
And they start going wrong in other areas of your life.
And and I I think we just don't think about these ordinary moments because we all put all this effort into who you marry and what job you take, and we're taught to be rational about these decisions, but it's sort of like
It it's almost like a micro um
These these micro moments have more of an impact on your life.
than that in a lot of ways because
You know, if I I might pick the right spouse.
But if I don't turn these ordinary moments
Into extraordinary outcomes.
It doesn't matter, like that whole choice is like a multiply by zero.
I can pick the perfect person
But these ordinary moments are what makes that relationship amazing or
Terrible.
Yeah.
Well
People are just listening unless they're watching. I have a huge smile on my face and my heart feels
Like yeah, I just want to go.
Mm.
'Cause it's such a
Profound
Insight.
Then it's
A million little moments.
That I didn't
Handle.
It's not that I didn't have
The slight.
It's not that. It's not about creating a life free from slights. You use that word.
It's that
I didn't know what to do with the slight.
Or I just handled the slights
The way I my personality automatically handles slights, and then one slight
A whole accumulation. And it could be
In an intimate partner, it could be with my business partner.
And then you have these
Dozens and dozens of little slights.
That slowly over time.
Corode
The partnership, the connection, the intimacy
And now this is where we're back to integrity being wholeness and aliveness. Now all of a sudden.
I'm not fully alive. I'm sleepwalking my way through life.
Now I I wanna grab one more thing that you said.
You went like you know, okay, so now I've got this disrupted relationship with my stepfather and my father in law. Okay, it's taken a ton of energy to get to this place because I had these slights, these resentments.
And you know, I've repressed it, suppressed it, I've held a position, and now it's gonna take a ton of energy.
To fix it.
Now what do I do?
I do want to say something.
There are two dimensions to repairing that relationship.
One is literally repairing it with the other person.
But there's a repair that can occur.
That doesn't require
or even need to involve the other person.
That's incredibly important.
Because I don't need the other person to cooperate.
And to be
co-committed to repairing our relationship.
For me to repair myself.
on the inside so that I'm
Free.
And again, if we did there are many other tools we could use, but we'll just stay with these four pillars.
I don't need the other person to do anything.
For me to claim agency and stop.
Living in
Victimhood.
I can take responsibility.
I don't need the other person to be involved for me to feel my feelings all the way through to completion.
I don't need the other person to be involved for me to bring up all of my thoughts, judgments, and reveal them. I don't even need to reveal them to the person. I've learned over the years if you pick a surrogate.
And reveal them to the surrogate.
You will experience
The liberation of candor.
So
You can repair
Meaningfully just by yourself, then from a repaired place, you can decide do I want to have a relationship with my stepfather or not? The answer might be no. But here's the deal. If I say no to having a relationship with him.
I still get to be alive on the
Inside.
My wholeness
Isn't
damaged. I've done my work.
And then we can decide if we want to repair the relationship, but that's gonna take a co commitment.
to repairing the relationship.
So here's the like I I I like this.
Mm.
When you talk about deciding
It's so interesting because
That
Implies
you've you've thought of this as a decision.
And what we're talking about with these ordinary moments, like if somebody were to tap you on your shoulder as you're uh having an argument with your partner at home.
And said you're making a choice.
In this moment.
to
Escalate or de escalate the situation.
Your rational brain would sort of kick in and be like
I don't want to do this. It's not worth it. I don't even know what I'm upset about. I'm just reacting without responding. I'm an animal.
Right. This is what we are. We're animals. We're we're reacting without reasoning.
Which is what animals do.
Uh other than humans.
And if somebody were to tap you, you'd be like, Yeah, I'm opting out.
And both partners or both parties in in this sort of situation would opt out.
Right, everybody would see what's going on.
And their ability to think rationally would kick in. And when you think about decision making, it's so fascinating to me because.
We have a gazillion books on decision making.
And they all imply that we're we're not
Rational.
Right. If only you were more rational.
You would
make better decisions. But I think as we're talking about this and and we're sort of working this out a bit in public here,
It it's not.
That were not rational.
It's that we don't even know that these ordinary moments are decision points.
That again.
Make the future easier or harder. Move us towards who we wanna be or who we don't want to be.
And and they sort of aggregate over the period of our relationship.
Yes, so

How do we
Interrupt the pattern when it's occurring.
'Cause like is how do we metaphorically tap ourselves on the shoulder?
That's you know, you said what if somebody tapped you on the shoulder? You'd go
Hold on a minute, let me take a breath.
Yeah, this is crazy what I'm doing.
How do we do that?
Okay, yeah.
That tap on the shoulder, that interruption, that pause
doesn't occur naturally.
We have to train
For the pause.
You have this fight, you both get into your pattern, you know, you're going that pattern you've been to a million times before. Okay.
The next day or a week later, on your next date night, you say
Hey.
Would you be willing to have a conversation with me?
Where we can take a look at the pattern. We're not gonna review the content of last Tuesday night's fight.
Cause the content just the content changes. Actually, we recycle the same content all the time, but the content can change. Can we look below the content?
Can we see what we do? So now we're doing a post mortem, we're deconstructing. Now the way we do that is
I take responsibility for looking at my pattern. You take responsibility for looking at your pattern. We look at the third pattern, which is the pattern of the relationship. Okay, so we start to get some awareness.
Then like I said last time.
We have one of these conversations where we say
Hey, I want to play a different game with you.
I really do, and I want to check, would you be willing to play a different game? And the game I want to play is
I just want to begin to end blame and criticism.
I want to value
Responsibility and curiosity.
I wanna start to value appreciation over in time. I just want to play a different game.
Okay, so now we have
Started to learn our patterns.
We've co-committed to a different game.
Okay now
It's the next Tuesday night and we're back in the fight.
All right.
In my experience, most people still won't tap themselves on the shoulder in the midst of the fight because it's the pattern.
Is there again, and we're in the grip of the pattern. That's great. But now on Wednesday morning.
When I'm having a little bit of meditation or I'm doing my journaling, I say
Oh, I did it again.
Hey, honey, I said I was gonna shift out of blame crit. I was in blame and criticism. I wanna back up.
Okay, so now I'm learning after the event.
Okay.
The next time I learn an hour later.
The next time in the midst of the event.
And this is you know what we've done in the world is we created all kinds of tools that you actually use real time, like the drama triangle.
You put it on the floor and you say, We're in it. We're in our pattern. Let's exaggerate it and make it bigger by getting in the drama triangle. So now we're doing it real time.
And then eventually we can start to feel the stimuli come up and we can interrupt that with a different breath pattern, something like that. So we're training, training, training.
So the and that's in my experience the way we do this in relationships.
I think that's super powerful. Are there other tools you mentioned, the drama triangle, what do you do in the moment? What are the what what's another tool that's really effective?
in the moment where you said you have a physical sort of like these cards or whatever it was that you put on the table.
uh to to get people out of this. Uh what are the other things in the moment we can use or one other tool that's really effective?
There are a couple of other tools to shift on the fly in the moment when you're in the midst of the conflict. By the way.
You have to
pre decided that we're gonna shift.
So
Like in our relationship, either of us can call the game whenever we want.
Either of us can.
It's like
We have a card we can play which says
Унастоп с конверсай.
And we're gonna do something different.
Now that's just an agreement that we have.
Lot of teams that we work with have this agreement.
Okay.
Now when I call the game real time.
We've predecided we're gonna do this. Here's a couple of
On the fly shift moves.
First of all.
We're gonna do some conscious breathing.
Because we are animals. And when we are triggered, there is a blood and brain chemistry that is running the show.
So the first thing I have to do is I have to deal with my blood and brain chemistry, otherwise I'm just gonna stay in fight, flight, freeze, faint reactivity. So it might be
We're gonna do uh four seven eight breathing, or we'll do um four by four breathing, or just for thirty seconds or a minute. We have like seven different breathing techniques.
That we're just gonna bring our attention away from the conflict.
And to our breath.
Okay, now that changes my blood and brain chemistry.
The next shift move to do in the midst of conflict.
Істо
Hey.
I stopped listening to you fifteen minutes ago.
You said these words, and I got reactive.
Now that I've come back to a stable blood and brain chemistry.
I want to recommit.
to listening to you.
So I'm gonna practice conscious listening. Debbie and I
We don't get in drama much anymore, hardly ever, maybe never. But when we used to
One of us would say
Sweetheart, I stop listening to you.
You know.
Like a day ago.
I just wanted to argue with you and prove I was right. So I'm gonna back up.
And I want to deeply listen to you. Would you tell me again?
what it is you're saying. And then we just use conscious listening techniques where I might say,
What I hear you saying, is that right? Is there more? And then I might drop into my heart and say, God, when I hear you say it, I imagine you feel scared.
And then I drop into my belly and I might say, Sounds like what you really want is this.
And my whole purpose is to get her.
So
Interrupt change breathing.
Choose conscious listening. The drama triangle really is big. That's Cartman's drama triangle.
I'm holding off my plastic cart.
They're in my office. I have them in my bedroom. They're in our kitchen. There are three cards that say victim, villain, and hero.
We throw these down on the floor, we start a timer for two minutes, and here's the key. You exaggerate the fight.
You don't stop the fight.
But you stand on the bases.
And you make the fight bigger.
You know Diana Chapman, you've had her on, and Diana is my partner at CLG.
She is world class at turning drama into play, and I've learned so much from her.
And the drama triangle is one way to by the way, kids love the drama triangle too.
So that would be another one. And then I'll give you one more little shift move, which is incredibly useful.
And that is
Okay, let's separate fact from story here.
We're having this conversation about money.
Let's deconstruct.
What are the facts unarguable video camera would record
Unarguable facts.
And what are the stories we're making up about the facts?
Because here's what you learn.
Facts never cause drama.
Stories cause.
Drama.
And then you learn that you are the source of your stories.
And that your drama is caused because you're wanting to be right about your stories, prove you're right, and make the other person wrong.
So Deb and I, or bus Diana and Eric and I, my business partners, we do this all the time. We'll differentiate fact from stories.
The facts are these. Let's just write them on a whiteboard, put'em up.
Now let's all tell each other all the stories we're making up.
And that distinction between fact and story relaxes us.
And brings us back to responsibility because I'm making up a story.
By the way, you'll make up stories based on
Your ego structure, your personality, things like that.
So those are four shift moves. Breathe.
Conscious listen.
drama triangle and differentiate fact from story.
Some of them are instant shift moves.
And some of them are practices.
That
can start to create a different dynamic about how we're being in relationships.
That's so powerful. Thank you for sharing that with us. I wanna come. I'm not losing sight of this. I know we're going down a lot of rabbit holes here and a lot of uh asides. I think
It it's incredible. I I wanna come back to sort of the fourth pillar of integrity, which is being impeccable with your agreements. What does that mean?
So an agreement, let's just start there. An agreement is anything I've said I would do or wouldn't do.
That's an agreement.
And an agreement, I can make agreements with myself.
I make an agreement with myself to work out every morning at whatever time, something like that.
But agreements often exist between two or more people.
So an agreement is anything I've said I would do or wouldn't do.
And an agreement involves who's gonna do what by when.
So
A lot of drama in life is caused because we have unclear and unkept agreements.
Just think about it.
So much drama is caused, so much energy is wasted.
You're in a team meeting and you say, I thought you said you'd get me that report by five o'clock.
And the person says
No, no, I said be next Tuesday. Or the truth of the matter is we never said when it would be, so I just assumed it would be five o'clock. And I thought the scope of the report would be this, and you thought the scope of the report would be that. And so we're just
Wasting
massive amounts of energy.
with unclear agreements. So the first key to being impeccable with your agreements is
Make
Clear agreements.
Who?
Is gonna do what?
By when?
So simple.
When
People and teams get aligned to be impeccable with agreements.
They start keeping about 90% of their agreements. Now, when you go in and you look at a relationship or a team that's working together and you say,
What percentage of agreements do you guys keep with each other?
Usually it's down in the thirty to forty range.
And I just want I then know how much.
energy they're wasting on explaining, justifying, criticizing, rework, missed opportunities.
So one
Make clear agreement you have a whole body yes to two.
Keep your agreements.
Three.
As soon as you know you're not gonna keep an agreement.
Let the other party know and renegotiate. So let's imagine that this morning at uh
Or let's imagine yesterday afternoon, I realized
Ah, something's come up.
Uh, you know.
I would like to renegotiate our start time from eleven to eleven thirty. As soon as I know, I reach out to you and I say, Shane.
We have an agreement to meet at eleven o'clock.
I would like to renegotiate our agreement to eleven thirty. Now that's not a unilateral announcement.
It's a bilateral relationship.
Are you available to that? You say sure, no problem. We renegotiate.
So trust.
Doesn't get ruptured.
Now if I'm renegotiating eighty percent of my agreements, you won't find me trustworthy.
But if I'm
periodically renegotiating, you'll find me trustworthy. You'll count on me.
And then the fourth thing is if I break an agreement
Technically I broke our agreement today because I don't think I was on Zencaster to like eleven oh one or eleven oh two.
This is really important to me because
Tom Peters years ago had that great quote, There's no such thing as a small breach of integrity.
Well, there are different consequences for integrity breaches, but energetically there's no difference.
So I was out of integrity. So I get on with you at eleven oh one and
And I clean it up. I just said, Hey man, we sit we had an agreement to be here at eleven.
I was here at eleven oh one.
I take responsibility. I didn't pay attention to Zencaster. I went to
Gourmet.
Now here's the key.
I just want to know if that affects our trust at all.
I imagine you'd say
No big deal.
But if I did that all the time, if I was always fifteen minutes late, we'd have a trust problem.
So what we find is
Energy goes up.
Dramatically
When I make clear agreements I have a whole body yes with.
When I keep ninety percent of'em.
When I renegotiate ahead of time and when I clean up broken agreements without making excuses, justifications, or re rationalizations, I just take responsibility. What happens is my aliveness goes up and our trust.
goes deep.
А меджор різен.
Trust is where it is in many relationships is because we're not
impeccable with our agreements.
I I love this concept. I wanna dive a little deeper at something you said at the start here, which is you handle people who
uh you don't know if they can keep their agreements. I think you use the word untrustworthy in a different way. And I'm curious as to what that is, because I know for many people,
Myself included.
There are people in your life.
Who are chronically late.
Yeah.
And
It really it's one of the few things that drives me crazy for some I don't even know why, right? I've often like tried to think about why does this bother me. And I I think it does come to the agreement, right? Like we made an agreement.
I'm here upholding my end of this agreement.
And it's also been a source where I've chosen to let people out of my life.
Because of their un
Uh
inability, I guess, to keep their agreement.
Especially in this. If you're chronically late and it drives me crazy.
Like, I just don't want any part of that because I'm sitting there, you know. So I had this one person years ago where I would actually tell him.
that we were meeting a half hour before we were actually meeting.

And one time.
He showed up and it was hilarious'cause he showed up five minutes.
Before I got there.
And
Mm.
He was like I thought you said we were meeting at like six thirty and it's like six fifty five. And I had said six thirty'cause I knew we'd be there at seven.
And I was like, Yeah, I mean like I just
I just thought you'd be late. And so I planned around it. And he's like, How long have you been doing this? And I've been like, Years.
So great.
And it really
It it opened his eyes too, right? Into this this sort of he's like I I
Didn't
And I was like, Because otherwise I'm sitting here for a half hour. Like that's not
fair you're breaking the agreement the time that we had planned, right? And so I I'm curious as to how you handle these.
Here are three things you can do.
Let me let me I could illustrate with a couple of a casual one and then a meaningfully important one.
So like um
Uh I get uh used to is gone now, but the person right around the corner I'm in downtown Chicago now, the person right around the corner cut my hair.
And so I went to him and I formed a relationship with him. And uh, you know, I started noticing
I'd show up to get my hair cut it.
Eleven o'clock or whatever it was?
And he, you know, after two or three times I noticed he shows up at like eleven ten, eleven fifteen and says, Okay, I'm ready for you.
So I go, Great.
No problem. So I sit down in the chair.
And I said to him, let's say his name was Ben or whatever it is, I say Ben.
It's gonna sound a little weird to you.
I imagine.
But the way I like to live my life is
I like to make agreements around time and then keep them.
I just found that it works really easy for me in life and
So
It's the way I wanna live my life. Might it's not the way everybody wants to live their life. Might not be the way you want to live your life.
Yeah
You get to live your life however you want. But when we're in relationship together.
I wonder if you'd be willing.
To keep your agreements with me around time.
So if we have an eleven o'clock appointment
I'd like to be seated and ready to go at eleven o'clock.
Now, you notice there was not there's not a lot of judgment or criticism. He gets to live his life however he wants, you know? And I That's so much better than what I do. Well, he thought about it a little bit and he said
Yeah.
Six months later.
There was a time I had, let's say, metaphorically an eleven o'clock appointment.
I get a text.
From the person who works at the front desk saying
He's running ten minutes late. I thought I never even talked to him about renegotiating agreements. He's renegotiate I show up and say Ben.
Thank you so much. Okay.
I'm illustrating this because
Option number one.
You can talk to people in your life.
And you can invite them not from a harsh judgmental time cop place.
But from a place of presence
In our relationship would you be willing to play this game with me?
Now I found
loads of people who want to do that. You know, I've coached a lot of
you know, meaningfully high powered
See you.
Some of whom are notorious.
For being late.
Well
I remember I was in it the first time I had an experience with this one CEO, you know, fairly common household name.
I'm in the meeting room, his whole senior team is there. He walks in, he sits down in his chair, he's about ten minutes late. Now we'd already contracted to coach and he wanted feedback.
So he starts the meeting.
And everybody been working on their computers so they get there and I said
Hey, before we get started, I just want to clear something with you.
We had an agreement to start at eleven o'clock. We were all here. You weren't here. Those are the facts.
There was an agreement, a video camera would record.
So I notice I feel angry.
And I want to use that anger to get into right relationship with you.
And I wanna ask if you'd be willing
To keep your agreements with me.
Around time.
And then I said, and I wonder if this is a pattern for you.
At which point his whole team is laughing.
Because the way they actually ran their lives were
Will show up.
But the meeting never starts till he shows up.
And then
You know
Now we start sho he shows up ten to fifteen minutes. Now I start show now we've just got a shit show going on.
He looks at me
Pauses and goes, It was really great'cause he got present, he said
I will do that with you.
I still coach this guy, this is like six, seven years later.
He's impeccable with his agreements with me. Okay, so we can ask people to get in the right relationship with us. That's option number one.
Option number two.
This happened with one of our kids.
Uh, one of our kids is notorious for not keeping time agreements. I mean
He just
He just full of life and there's always one more fun thing to do. And we were he at that point lived out in Newport, California, and I was out there doing a workshop or something, and we were gonna meet for dinner.
And uh
He showed up. Now here's what I I talked to him a couple of times about it, and I said, Hey, listen, here's the deal.
I want to be in relationship with you.
I do. And
I don't want to be in drama in my own mind about whether you're gonna keep your agreements around time.
So I'm gonna count on you.
I'm gonna trust.
You
To not keep your agreements around time.
Notice how I say that. I'm gonna trust you to be you.
I'm going to show up taking care of myself.
So because I like to keep my agreements, if we're gonna meet at seven, I'll still be there at seven, but I'll bring a book or I'll
Listen to music or I'll listen to podcasts, or I'll just admit it doesn't matter. But I won't be sitting there going, Where is he?
Because I trust you to not be there on time.
No drama.
На дисайм.
If it goes a particular length of time, I might choose to leave.
Just'cause I didn't want to sit there any longer and I'll give you a heads up that I'm leaving.
Okay.
Now this is option two.
Stay in relationship with people.
Who don't keep their agreements, but don't suffer.
This is the key.
Suffering is optional on my part.
And one way to suffer is to think that they should be different.
Or that they're going to be different. That's a formula for suffering. It's a way I could destroy my relationship with him.
Instead
I just trust you to be who you are.
Keeping your agreements around time isn't important to you. Great. I still want to be in relationship with you. That's option two.
Option three is the one that you mentioned.
Which is
Oh.
Many times in my life.
Автовінда конверса
Hey.
Again, just over and I always say something like this just over there on Planet Gym.
I just like to keep my agreements around time.
And especially people in my inner world.
I populate my life with people who keep their agreements.
It doesn't look like that's the way you want to live your life with me, as evidenced by the results.
So I want to ask you, would you be willing?
Oftentimes they will say yes.
And then what I basically do is
After the third time
Of them not keeping their agreement, I say, listen, I hear that you want to keep your agreements.
But you're unwilling to keep your agreements as evidenced by the results.
So I'm gonna go ahead.
and end our relationship.
I still value you, like you, love you, but
I still think you do great work or whatever it is.
I'm not blaming you for what's occurring.
I'm just saying
I'm gonna choose
To be in
a different kind of relationship with you now.
And it sort of takes the blame or not the blame is the wrong word, but the agency off you. Right.
'Cause you're not really doing anything. You're you're you're just sort of like
Why do I have to end this? No, this person's ending this relationship. I'm just the one who's gonna tap them on the shoulder and tell them.
That as a result of their behavior, if it continues, this is the path that we're walking. I'll still love you. I still think you're a great person.
But this is a type of agreement that I can't
uh you know, that we have that we need.
And we all have these relationships in our life. And to your point about energy, they consume so much energy because they're constantly in our thoughts, right? Even when you're booking a meeting with these people, like they're
They're probably like laughing, right, in their head because they book a meeting and they're like, He's not gonna show up for fifteen, twenty minutes.
Right. And so that it becomes a joke, too. And when it becomes a joke, it also takes on this power.
And it causes resentment and it causes passive aggression.
And over years it wears on you to the point where you start acting differently, behaving differently.
Right. And then at work you're not fully present.
Work becomes a job instead of something where you're all in and you're committed because you don't feel like you can be all in with somebody who's violating.
or or not maintaining their agreements with you, who's not showing you respect by keeping their time. So how can I go all in for this person? I'm not gonna go all in for them. I'm gonna work nine to five.
And I'm gonna do my job and I might do it really well.
But you're never gonna get that five X or ten X performance because you're never gonna get that all in attitude that you need to get that.
Oh God, that's good. I'm reminded one of my favorite quotes by I've mentioned Gay Hendrix before, one of my favorite quotes by Gay, because it's such a profound statement.
Then you can test whether it's true for you.
All drama in relationships.
We just start with that. All drama in relationships.
Is caused by
Unaligned commitments.
And or
unclear and unkept agreements.
So remember at the beginning we talked about commitments are a big idea about what you're aiming for in life. It's the San Francisco.
Okay, so it's like
I imagine, you know, you and I have only met this way, but if we were going to become friends.
And really good friends.
I think we would have a conversation which looks like
Hey.
I commit to take responsibility.
I commit
To uh
be responsible for myself and let you be responsible for yourself. And you'd say yes, same thing. So now we're co-committed. So now if we do that thing where you apologize and think, you know, it was a bad situation, I'd say, hold on a second, we may we co-committed. Let's back up.
Great, we back up. We commit to be candid, so we're really revealing our judgments and opinions about each other.
We do it, so we're co-committed.
Drama occurs when we're not both going to San Francisco. One's going to San Francisco, one's going to us. Okay. And then the second thing is exactly what you were pointing at.
We don't have
clear agreements and we don't keep them. So all drama comes because we didn't get aligned on where we're going and we're not impeccable with our agreements. And I really offer to you and to others
Test that almost all drama.
Is caused by one of those two things.
implicated in it, but those are really big ones.
I think that's such a powerful concept.
Jim, I could talk to you forever.
I think this is a good place to end this particular conversation'cause we
We've hit on the four pillars of integrity.
I know if we go into another topic, we're gonna be here another two hours, uh, and I'm conscious uh of
Of not mixing these things into uh I think this is a great
This is one of the best episodes we've ever recorded.
Thanks, Shane. I just
I love co-creating with you. It's really fun.

You know, it's a one plus one equals four experience for me. I just
Love it, so thank you.
Hm.
Thanks for listening and learning with us.
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And more.
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Until next time.