126: The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest

Climbed any mountains lately, Mike? Just uh, the mountain that is me? All right, before we climb mountains together, maybe we should catch up with what we've done since last time. And uh, I suppose I can go first just cuz. Yeah. And uh, some of the follow-up I've got from the last book that we covered uh involves taking morning and evening walks. And I've continued. I think I talked a little bit about my evening walks through the woods and such. And that's something that I have continued to do.

Something I was not expecting that cropped up since we last had our chitchat was that my daughters wanted to join me for that. Which is super cool, but at the same time, like, wait, some of the purpose of this was to get away and be alone, and they want to go with. Which I'm certainly not saying no to, but does that defeat the purpose? Do I have to do it twice now? I don't know. So many questions that came up. I was not expecting that one to manifest itself. But about two-thirds of the time, it's still just me, and then the other third of the time, I have one or multiple children with me. So, still a fun adventure.

Have not started the morning one yet, but that won't, that one won't start till October, till we move into the house. So, great fun. That's the one where you can get away by yourself, probably. Yes. The morning one, because for me, that would be super early. It would probably be at like 6, 6:15, something like that, in the morning. So, anyway, that's one.

Another one was to journal in the morning and at night, but also once weekly. And I did start doing the morning journaling. I'm not as consistent on that one as I am at the evening journaling. And then I have done the weekly one once because of the timing of when we did this. So, there's no way I can tell you that that's a regular thing. Uh, it was fascinating to me just to try to do what I normally do on a morning and evening daily journaling, but on a weekly basis. That just had a very different feel. But at the same time, it was strange because it had an air of the GTD weekly review coming into it, which I was not expecting nor aware of that connection until I sat down to do some writing. And that kind of turned me off to it when I realized that. But thankfully, I didn't realize it until after I had done it. So, I don't know if it's going to stick, just because there's a little bit of me that's like, I don't know about that weekly thing quite yet. There's that. Cool.

And then the last one I had was figuring out how to rotate environments. This comes from trying to use specific spaces to do work, like different types of work. And I have kind of my desk area here that I operate with, that I do a lot of my work from. But with an assistant who's in this space very regularly throughout the week, it kind of makes it a challenge to do some of the more deep work scenario stuff. Mhm. So, working on a couple spaces that I can bounce to and from throughout this building to use for those, but I don't know that they're actually going to be locked down. It's probably going to be more of a, "this is a space I can go to when X, Y, and Z." Take my laptop and go over there and do it. It's probably going to be. I mean, you've been here in the building. Like, there's a lot of places you can go. The easy one to go is the balcony. Nobody looks up there. Great fun. Anyway, that's what I got.

Nice. I got a couple things. Yeah, go for it.

All right. The first one was to take my DNA test, which I did. I used the 23 and Me health and ancestry kit that I got off of Amazon from Prime Day, I think, where it was like 50% off. So, I did the the test, which is kind of fascinating, the process that you go through in order to to do that. They have this little tube that you're supposed to spit in. You got to spit up into a certain line. Not supposed to drink or eat anything for 30 minutes before. And then they have this little thing cap with a capsule of liquid in it. And when you close it, it forces the liquid open and it drips down into the tube. And you take that whole part off, screw the cap on, send it back, and then they've got the tracking number, the number on the tube matched to the number of the the box that they give you to send it back in. And then they have all these different steps inside of the app that you can use to follow the the process. So, mine is still waiting to be delivered. So, I have nothing to report from this yet, but I've done it. And uh, I'm hoping it'll give me some interesting insights, but I guess time will tell.

Sure. Find out if you're German. Actually, funny story about that. So my grandpa just pulled that out of nowhere. Well, Schmidtz is a very German name, and I don't, I'd never dug into the ancestry side of this a whole lot, but my grandpa, I remember growing up, he would always justify his crankiness and his emotions like, "Oh, I'm just a stubborn German." Like, he said that phrase over and over and over again. And I remember before he passed away, someone said, "Actually, we're from the other side of the border and actually you're Swiss." His whole identity was like, broken. Nice. So, we'll maybe find out some interesting stuff there. I, I don't know. Yeah, that would be fascinating. Like, oh, your whole life has been upside down. Yeah, I was probably like five or six at the time, but I distinctly remember somebody sharing that with him and he was like, "What? No." Oh, you got to love it whenever people like ruin your whole life's thing right at the end of your life. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, next one for me was to list some collaborators. And these are really just people that I enjoy collaborating with or would like to collaborate with. And I did make this list. I have this as its own separate note inside of Obsidian of just people I want to collaborate with. So, I think it's going to kind of be like a running list and I'll add to it over time. Uh, don't worry, Joe, you're on that list. Yes. But I'm not doing anything other than listing the people at this point. Uh, doing this exercise, it has helped me kind of like, one of the people that's on that list, I'll just share this, is is Nick Milo. And I did a lighthouse session with him recently. It's not on YouTube yet as we record this, but once it is public, I will share it. And I just really like that guy. I really like his perspective. I really enjoy every time I've had a chance to talk to him, the conversation's just been awesome. And I'm, as I was making this list, put him on there and I'm like, I got to figure out another way to do something with Nick. So, I don't know if that was like an intended, unintended consequence of making this list, but I'm like, motivated to try and find ways to collaborate with some of the people that are on there.

Cool. And then the last one here is to create a weekly planning template. Also did this inside of Obsidian, which took a little bit of finagling, but I'm really happy with the the system I have for this. You want me to walk through this real quick? Sure, why not?

Okay, so Obsidian has the these plugins, core plugins and community plugins. And one of the core plugins is the daily notes. You're familiar with that one, right? Yep. Basically, you create a folder and then you create a new daily note and all those daily notes end up in that specific folder. You click the button, you go straight to that note for today. Okay. So, there's a community plugin that goes with that called Calendar. It is the most downloaded community plugin if you go look for those inside of Obsidian. And what it does is on the right sidebar, it gives you the month view. You can click on the individual days and then you can jump to those days inside of your daily notes. Pretty cool. There's an option with that calendar plugin to turn on week numbers. Okay. There's another plugin I think developed by the same person which takes some additional functionality that was in the calendar plugin for those week numbers and moves it into a separate plugin because it's extending the daily notes idea for weekly notes and you can also toggle on monthly notes. So what I did is I toggled on using this other plugin which is called periodic notes weekly notes and now I have a separate folder for planning. That's where all my weekly plans are going to live. And I've done this once, but I'm hoping this sticks. I think it will. I can click now on the week number in the calendar, and it will create, using a template file that I created, it drops in the date format of year, year, space, dash, space, and then week, space, the number based on the number from the calendar plugin. So, it's pretty cool. I can do this, you know, on Friday of this week and then it creates the note using the template for the week that I clicked on. So I can work ahead this way, even though it's the template formatting is designed to take like the current formatting for the the date time stamp. You know, this allows me to create the plan without having to type anything for the next week. And then I've got, let me just pull up my template file here and I'll walk through the pieces of this. Uh, at the top, a section for known events. What do I have to work around this week? And this is where I've got, that's a second level header. Third level header is for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And then I just jot down the big events that have to happen on those specific days from looking at my calendar. And then I've got my top priorities. What do I want to accomplish this week? And I've got up to five things listed there. And then at the bottom, painting success. This week is successful if. And this is the one I'm not sure if it's going to stick, but basically helping me land on like the one thing that would make this week uh a win, basically. And I'm pretty happy with this. Uh, I don't have enough experience with it to say, yeah, this is my process going forward. But it, I I think it'll work. I've I've eliminated quite a bit of friction getting this template to work the way that I wanted it to. So, that's what I did.

Interesting. That whole process is one I've done for a while, actually. As weird as that is to say, uh, I've had that calendar plugin in place. I've used weekly notes in some form or another, actually for close to a year and a half, even pre-Obsidian stuff. So, it's been a thing I've done, but the whole templates have been created with TextExpander or Alfred for me. Like, that's just how I've done those. I will say Obsidian makes it much easier to do that. So, it's pretty simple to just click the button and there you go. Brings in the template. Mine has all sorts of bash scripts and stuff. I'm sure yours is probably possible to create from your phone. Mine just fails and doesn't know what to do. Yeah, mine is is just text. There's no scripts running that's going to pull in, you know, this is the stuff I checked off in Omnifocus or anything like that.

Cool. Cool. Well, that's interesting. I hope that works out well. So, you've done it for one week. Yep. I assume you're going to continue doing it. Have you done like the future ones? As in, you've used it for a week, but you have multiple of those notes created at this point, or you just have the one note?

I did not because we recorded last week, Monday. Monday. Yeah. So since we recorded, I implemented it this week, earlier in the week, for next week, basically. And then the goal is every Friday, as part of a shutdown routine, I am spending 15 minutes looking at this. That's the thing that's always been hard for me is like the weekly review and I always think, oh, this is going to take forever and I resist it. So, I want to make it as frictionless as possible in order to get it to stick.

Sure. Yeah. No, it makes sense that it does. Sounds like you got a mountain you're climbing with it. That's for sure. But on that note, we should jump into today's book. Gotta love the segues. Uh, The Mountain is You by Briana Wuest. I looked this up. I don't normally look it up as as far as like how to pronounce author's names, but I did this time because I really wanted to get this one right. So, it's Briana Wuest is how she pronounces it. Anyway, uh, The Mountain is You. Basically, what's the tagline on this? Transforming self-sabotage into self-mastery. And I, I have to admit, I got more than I was expecting out of this. Like, there was a lot more to this than was originally on my list of expectations. Like, in my head, I was going to get like, here's what self-sabotage is. Here's how we tend to do it. Here's what you do about it. But there's a lot more to it than that as you go through this. And we'll dive through a bunch of this. I have a fairly long list of things, at least for me, in the outline, but I think some of these are going to be very quick. Um, could get long, but I think they will be fairly quick. So, I certainly did not pull this out uh in the detail that I feel we normally do. Some of that is because, what is it? Eight chapters in this entire book. Some of them are very long. Some of them are somewhat short. And it's very far from a three-part book from what we would normally get. And it seems like it was put together like from a, from a structure stance, it feels like it was put together based on how she felt the process should go and had nothing to do with what is best to fit in a book. Like, hey, I can kind of appreciate that. So, yes, very interesting. But the concept here is that the mountain is you. Like, if you take that, you know, which is how she starts the book. If you take that, what she's referring to is that the mountain of self, I guess, self, I guess you would say self-improvement, but like making yourself a better person. Um, that is the mountain that you need to climb. So, the mountain is improving yourself. And having read the entire book, and I want your take on this, Mike. Having read this whole book, I felt like I got an in-depth manifesto for why the growth mindset is exactly what you should be doing. And that was kind of how this is put together. Like, this is how you improve yourself. And yes, by the way, you can improve yourself. You're not just stuck the way you are. I kind of got this as like, this is kind of an ode to the growth mindset. In a lot of ways, it's more detailed and in a lot of ways it's more vague, of course, than that. But did you get that hint out of this? Have that feeling at all? Am I just crazy? It's okay to admit the latter.

There's definitely flavors of growth mindset in here. There's a lot of emphasis on taking responsibility for your own life. One of the first things I jotted down is something that she said, "There's nothing holding you back in life more than yourself." However, I, I don't know, this book, I have conflicting emotions about because I feel at different points in this book, she goes into what I will call shrink mode, where you feel like you're sitting on the couch and she's telling you exactly how to go, uh, go through the this difficult process of of dealing with the the demons that you maybe have been resisting for a a long time. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. I can see maybe some benefit to doing that. My initial reaction was, I don't really want to just stop everything and ask myself where am I unsatisfied with my life. Maybe that's a hint that I should, but I, I don't know. I kind of got to the end of this and felt like maybe I'm not the right person for this. Maybe there's a lot more trauma and pain in people's lives than I have experienced so far. And maybe I'm not the right person to be reading this. Like, I'm not who she had in mind when she wrote it.

Sure. Yeah. I, I would say that the book and the way she wrote this is definitely geared towards people who have dealt with, I, I don't want to say just traumatic things, but a lot of difficulties in childhood and early adulthood. It seems like that's definitely the group that this is geared towards. Knowing I work at a church, right? So, we have a lot of folks that come to the church asking for help. I know that that's a very common thing for most people and there are some exceptions where people have like almost none in their background. And honestly, the folks who have almost none in their background either have one of two routes that they tend to take. Either one, they're very grateful for that, take advantage of it, and I don't want to say take advantage of it, but they're grateful for it and they're able to be content with that. And then the others have kind of this weird complex where, yes, they were brought up really well, had a great childhood, had, you know, a a great early adulthood, and they almost feel guilty for that. And it, it's like they feel like they should have been rebellious so that they could have a better story, if that makes sense. Like, it just doesn't add up. Kind of how I felt reading this. Sure. A little bit. Yeah. But I also, I also want to add, you know, that I'm not projecting that I don't have issues. I just think that I've gone through them. So if I've worked through them in my mind, I've checked the box and that thing that happened when I was growing up, like I don't deal with that anymore. Maybe that's a wrong assumption. You know, maybe if you've never gone through that process, this thing is the, you know, perfect for you. But if you have, am I supposed to just continue to hang on to those things so that I have something when I read something like this? I don't know. Hold on to grudges just so you have something that you can, you know, complain about and work through. As our friend Josh says, let that stuff go. Yep. Exactly how he says it. But yeah, I don't know. This is, I, I'm with you in the fact that I felt like I was conflicted by it. I had a lot of cases where it's like, yeah, like you just spoke to my soul. And I'm not one that has a super easy childhood growing up and haven't had like the fairy tale story and such, but that's, it's also hasn't been terrible by any stretch of the imagination. So, that all said, like I know a lot of people. We had a guy in here two days ago that was in bad, bad shape. And we did what we could to help him, but he's been through a lot of the things that she refers to in the book. And you could definitely see how these things would help someone like that. And it's one of those cases where there's the one side where I feel like there are pieces of this that are super helpful and she's really hitting home for me. And then the next four or five pages, like, all right, this is just too fru, like I just, no, this is all to, you know, change your mindset and you can be happy and, you know, have good feelings and love everybody. Like, it has some of that feel to it, which has always felt very fake and unreal, which is like polar opposite of what I was feeling five pages prior. And I felt like I was back and forth on the mountain and valleys thing, if you will, through that process and reading the book. So, I'm kind of conflicted about my opinions on it at the moment. So, I'm hoping we can process those here today. That's my hope.

Sure. Well, the first chapter here, "The Mountain is You." This is a, a good one. And this is kind of laying the foundation. I think this is the one I liked the the best because there's nothing specific here. This is kind of general stuff that she's talking about. You know, she's identifying, like I said, that there's nothing holding you back more than you. Take responsibility for your own life. Our abstract fear is usually representation of a legitimate fear. Uh, one of the things that she mentioned here, which I really like the idea of this, is that there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be. Have I ever talked to you about the gap versus the gain?

That sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't place it. So, maybe reiterate.

Okay, so this is something I picked up from Dan Sullivan, the guy who did the unique ability stuff. And picture, if you will, like three dots from top to bottom. Okay? And the dot in the middle is where you are at. Okay? And then the dot above that, that's where you think you should be. Okay? And that's what she's calling, you know, where you are and where you want to be. Uh, the problem with that and the differentiation there is like, you always start with, this is where I want to be, but then you don't make progress as fast as you think you should and you get discouraged by that because you see then the the distance between the dot in the middle, where you are, the dot where you want to be, where you think you should be, and that is known as the gap. Okay? And that is really frustrating because you're like, man, what is holding me back? Why can I not do these things that I want to do? I'm motivated to do. These things are important to me and I just suck at getting them done. But the alternative is to look at where you are right now and compare that instead of to where you want to be, to where you started. And then you see from the habits that you've established and the things that you've done consistently, you've actually made quite a bit of progress. You know, you can look back at 126 episodes and say, "Wow, I guess I am a reader." Because I've read 126 different books. That's a really basic example, but you get the idea. You know, I had a guitar lesson this morning, and it's easy for me to to watch my teacher and see how fast he's going through these scales and these exercises, and I'm like, man, I'm just terrible because I can't even go half as fast as that. Right? But when I look at where I'm at now to where I started, even in November of last year, I can see how much I have grown and that is exciting. That causes me to keep going. This kind of gets into the difference between goals and habits in in my opinion. Sure. But I, so I agree with that idea of like, that that gap does in fact exist. She just leaves it right there. You know, the gap in the gain says then you need to, once you realize that that gap is there, shift your focus in order to keep going because that's ultimately going to lead to a higher quality of life, a more fulfilling existence. You're going to have joy in in your journey, and you're not just going to be frustrated all the time.

Yeah, I can see how that makes sense. It's very an, like that's a very interesting way to lay it out, like comparing now to the past versus the future. That's for sure.

So, let's let's jump into, I don't want to say the next part, next section, next chapter. There's a different area in the book where she starts explaining what self-sabotage looks like. She's got a whole bunch of these and she goes through each one, explains how it works, and basically what do you do about it afterwards, but they had three of those that I pointed out here that just struck a chord with me. Feel free to add to these, Mike. The first of which was maybe a little too close to home for me, which was uprooting. And that like sometimes things start to go well, but you feel guilty for them going well, so you stop and you go do something else and you move on to the next thing, or you think it's potentially going to have some success, but you're a little bit afraid of what's going to come as a result of the success, unconsciously put it on hold or cancel it, move away from it, etc., etc. That one kind of got to me because I feel like that's a thing that I do. I don't know if there's a fear underneath of that that's led to it. I've always chalked it up to, Joe can't focus and it's ADD, but kind of made me wonder like, okay, well, maybe is there something else going on there? I don't know. It's a thing I'm, I'm still processing. My walks in the evenings have led me to consider uprooting as an issue and making me wonder, is there something going on there? I don't know. I need to reconsider that one a little more.

Well, this is interesting because this is coming from a chapter where she says that actual chapter title is, "There's no such thing as self-sabotage." And then she says, "People do what they want. If you're hanging on to something, the trick is to figure out why." And you mentioned the ADHD aspect of this. So, how does that filter or figure into this equation? But I think just the blanket statement she would make is, without the consideration of possible medical influence here, is, well, if you're constantly uprooting, then ultimately that is tied to a desire internally. And I'm not sure that you can map that 100%. But it, it's interesting, and that's probably the approach we have to take for the rest of this discussion. Yep. And I do think there is truth to this uprooting, this being one of the signs of being in self-sabotage that she lists in this chapter. I'm not sure I, I'm not sure I identified with this one, but I do think this is a thing. I think that there are definitely people who are on some level scared of succeeding, would be another way to describe this, maybe. And like they talk about, I want to do this thing. I'm going to do it someday. Let's just use writing a book as an example. But we go back to what we're comfortable with, she talks about in a lot of the other spots in this book. So, I think there is an element of truth here where you attach to this idea, like, I'm going to write this book. I'm going to make this thing and my life is going to be significantly different. And at some level, that's kind of scary. Even if you predominantly think it's going to be better in a whole myriad of ways, it's probably not going to be as successful maybe as you think it's going to be. That's, that's where, where I, I get trouble here. And then perfectionism is the next one on the list. I definitely fall into to this one, is like, well, let's just make this thing absolutely perfect. And I've had to work against that over the years, but again, like, I, I have worked through that. Not that I've completely beat this thing, but I feel like I've made a ton of progress. So, should I feel bad about that, Briana? Yeah. I don't know. This is, this is where it starts to get like, okay, like one of the other ones that stood out to me was disorganization. Okay. Some people are disorganized partially because being organized, which they feel they're capable of, whether they realize it or not. But disorganization is a cover-up for, if I'm organized, I have to fulfill an action that I'm uncomfortable with because then you have everything put together and you can do a good job at it. But if I'm disorganized, I have an excuse for not doing it really well. But if I get myself organized, then it should be really good, and I'm afraid of that. Like, that's, that's the thing. Like, there's so much of this fear-based issue that's kind of underlying things uh with this. So, I, I don't typically think of myself as a disorganized person, but if you were to look at this desk right now, it is far from organized. So, that's just kind of the way it is. But it's one of those, like, I tend to just leave things out partially because I think I'm going to get back to it a little bit later. So, I'm not sure it's like a fear of anything. It's just, uh, I just didn't put it away. That's all it is. But well, that one specifically, I, I think if you have a messy desk, I don't think that's a sign of some deep down internal trauma that you're trying to wrestle through. I, I think there's something to be said for just having a whole bunch of stuff in your environment, especially if you're trying to design your environment to follow up from the conversation last time with willpower doesn't work. I mean, there's a whole Drew C, Drew Kaufman had a whole Twitter thread of like the the messy desks of brilliant creatives. And I dug into that a little bit. There's some research behind like having all of these things that are in your field of view and then kind of constantly being reminded of those things and divergent thinking based off of those notes. Even if you don't see those things all the time, like it's not registering with your brain. I am thinking about this thing right now if it's in your field of view. Going back to liminal thinking, like we take in all this information, but we can only focus on a certain aspect of it. Uh, I, I, I'm not as convinced that that's a bad thing as, um, as I used to be, let's say.

Sure. Sure. I do think there's an element though of disorganization being like, you have no idea what your day is going to look like and you have no idea what's going on. Because she does say in chapter 7, and I agree with this, that mentally strong people are planners. You, when you feel like you're in control, then you want to set your direction. If you feel completely helpless and hopeless to change anything, then you're just trying to survive the storms of life that keep coming your way.

Yes. Which kind of leads us into the last one I wanted to bring up here, which was being quote unquote busy. Mhm. And that one, I know, is all over the place. And you see it like, how are you doing? Busy. Like, I hear that a lot and it's a thing that comes up very often. So, it's one that I think, you know, a lot of us will talk about how busy we are. We've got a lot going on and the, the world is busy. And it makes me wonder, you know, especially after reading her section on it, it's like, I wonder if a lot of people do that as a way of numbing. Like, is this a thing that we tend to do? Because if I'm not busy, if I'm not overwhelmed with things to do, you have to notice and you have to pay attention and you have to be more intentional.

Yeah. Or at least you can and will, somewhat. It seems like whenever people stop and they're not busy, we get uncomfortable because then you start to notice things, right? Like, this is the whole mindfulness concept. If you're not numbing yourself with inputs and and commitments and things you should be doing, you tend to pay attention to details that you didn't see before. And this was, I had this conversation with my girls when all three of them went with me on a walk one evening. I, I was talking to them about why I go on this walk in the evenings. And one of the reasons I brought up was just being a good steward of what we have and paying attention to it, such that we can take good care of what we have. And I know one of the ways that we did that on the farm was walking around equipment all every day, multiple times a day. Whenever you got a break, you just walked around and looked at it, which always seemed kind of funny to me when I was little. But it occurred to me that when you did that, if you did it that often, you got to where you knew what it normally looked like. And if you had a line or like a hydraulic line or something that was leaking, you would notice it right away because you were so used to seeing what it looked like when it was in good working condition. It's the same thing that I'm doing at night somewhat. I'm noticing all the trees and all the plants and everything that's going on. I can tell you when certain plants have started to bud out, like what is happening? Are they stressed because of the drought? Did they suddenly boom whenever we got a little bit of a rain? Like, you can see all of that in quite a lot of detail. That doesn't happen if you're overwhelmed and still running full speed. You have to stop long enough to pay attention. I wonder if that's some of the busyness issue. Like, if you know, if we're sabotaging ourselves, if that's a thing, if you're sabotaging yourself by being overwhelmed as a way to have an excuse for not paying attention to things. So, I don't know. Maybe it's a thing. Maybe it's not.

Well, you just gave me an action item to walk around my house every day. Makes a big difference. I know that. I like that. Just being able to to notice the things that are different. That makes uh a ton of sense. Yeah. I, I like what what you're saying about the the busyness piece. Uh, I think the, uh, the mindfulness aspect of that busyness connects to it, but it doesn't necessarily prevent it. You're right in that we do go to busyness in some ways as a coping mechanism. It's how we self-medicate. We don't want to stop and think about the way things are. So, we just keep running from thing to thing. I don't necessarily, I've been struggling with this lately though. I, I don't know. I understand the idea of margin and I know it's really important and I know when I don't have it, I get stressed out. I also think though that if I were just fighting to protect margin all the time, I would miss out on some of the most rewarding experiences that I have had in my life. Um, one of the things that comes to mind is coaching soccer. I'm helping coach my son's middle school soccer team. I have an eighth grader and a sixth grader and they're both playing soccer. So, it's kind of a fun thing that we could do together. I think I talked about this last time. I had this limiting belief around coaching soccer that it wasn't even an option for me. Even though I love soccer, played it in high school. My high school team was state champions, actually. U so I'm pretty good at it and it's something that I love to do with my kids, but I just assumed, well, they have practices multiple nights a week and I can't be there for everything. They don't even want me to to try, you know. And then Rachel convinced me I should reach out to the coach and just see, you know, if there's room for me to help in any capacity, even if I can't be there half the time. So I said, "Okay, here's the deal. You know, I can make Mondays. I can't ever make Thursdays. I can sometimes make Fridays. You still want me to help?" He's like, "Yeah, that that'd be awesome." And turns out that he's kind of doing it because there was a need for someone to coach. This isn't, he he doesn't know a ton. So, I'm able to work with these middle school kids and it's the, the perfect spot for me because even though I don't really play anymore, I am, I have a decent amount of skill still. So, I can show them things and I can, you know, scrimmage with them and explain like, here's what's going to happen, you know, and then it happens and they're like, "Wow, you really know your stuff, right?" No, it's just I'm a little bit beyond them and uh, it, I can help them see things that they can't see and develop this the skills, see how they can be applied and stuff like that. It's like all the drills and things, you know, it's not just boring. We're doing this in a vacuum. When am I ever going to use this? Because I can explain exactly how they're going to use this and then set up the situation in the scrimmage. Like, see, this is where it where it comes in. And seeing the light bulb go on for a lot of these kids is incredibly rewarding. And I've been thinking about that lately, like if I was so focused on just like, never, I need more margin in my schedule, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have agreed to do this. But I'm really glad that I did. So, yeah, I'm trying to trying to wrestle through this. I think the key for me is to uh, close the feedback loop quickly. So, go ahead and try something like this and if it ends up not being the right thing and I am stressed out because I don't have margin, every three months as part of my personal retreat, I'm asking myself, what should I stop doing? And I'm constantly putting everything on the chopping block, looking at it objectively, and picking something to stop doing so that I have, you know, the margin to to try new things. I think that's one way that I've landed on working with this.

So, she walks us through like different types of self-sabotage and kind of what to do about some specific ones, but then she walks us through after that, some of the triggers for that self-sabotage. And this is where I start to get a little like, what? Because this whole section is based on feelings. Maybe this is because I'm male and that might just be part of it. I don't know. But to me, this section was a little odd. But I still have a few here that I want to to talk about because she's talking about how these feelings can be triggers and those are your guide for correcting or preventing this self-sabotage process. Okay? And well, let's just jump into one or two of them here and that I think that'll maybe help out. So, the first one I wrote down was regret. And this is where obviously you feel as though you made a bad decision. You did something you wish you hadn't, didn't do something you wish you had, in some form or another. So, that feeling of regret shows its face and then you say yes to a commitment because you don't want to let something slide by. Thus, you're perpetuating the being busy. Now, could potentially say that Mike made that choice based on regret to coach soccer. I don't know. Very unlikely in this particular case, but let's say that that was a thing that happened, right? So, that in her case, she would say that very likely, to use that example, Mike, that maybe you regret making a decision and saying no to something in the past, thus you said yes to this one and now you're being busy and you're sabotaging the margin that you've set up for your life. Now, that's all completely unfounded and completely not true, right? But that's kind of the, I think that illustrates like that's how that could work. Mhm. Right? Like that's how that could go. Now, again, that's not what happened here. But and that's the issue I have with this is like, so should I feel guilty that I'm enjoying this? Or should I be constantly looking for something negative to to dig up as the motivation behind this? I kind of feel like at some level, just, nah, it's not a big deal. Just have fun.

Yeah. Yeah. I think this, I think the part that gets hard here is identifying what is self-sabotage. This is, this is one of my problems, I guess, with this is like, I know that I sabotage myself in a lot of ways. I, I know that I do that, right? But I also know that I can work through that and work my way around that. But the way that she has this positioned here, it's like these are unconscious feelings or unconscious decisions that you're making, which means that in order to work against them, you have to somehow bring them into your conscious thoughts. And that is not always an easy process. Um, she does have a four-step thing later that can help you through like moving past some things. But are you saying this is a systems book? There is a system in this if you caught it. It's very short, but there is a system in here. And this is, this is, I think one of the hard parts with this is when it's an unconscious decision to sabotage yourself, how do you know what the trigger is? When is it a triggering of a self-sabotaging action? And when is it just acting on a feeling that you think could be good and making a wise decision? I don't know. Like, that's, that's where it starts to get messy here.

Well, one of the things she said specifically about regret is that it tries to get you to live up to your own expectations. And I feel like it's harder or it's easier to beat yourself up about not living up to your expectations if you never clearly define them because there's always things that you should be doing. And if you're taking the planner's mentality to this and you're being intentional about the things that you can do, you are forced to select some things that you are not going to do. And when you already say, "I'm not going to do this," then it's a little bit harder maybe to feel the regret from not doing it. Maybe not. I don't know. Maybe that's just my personality that once I make a decision like, "Okay, this is what we're doing." You know, I'm going to go back and revisit it after a while, but I'm not going to be questioning it the entire time that I'm working the plan.

I, I want to talk about the next one I wrote down is chronic fear. So, chronic fear is one of these triggers that could trigger self-sabotage. I wrote this one down not because it resonated with me directly, but because this is one that I feel like I see almost every single person that comes through our church doors who wants help in some form. Like, especially, I'm going to specifically refer to people who want monetary help. Okay? Finance needs in general. Whenever people come in, there's usually something. They were in jail for some reason. They got kicked out of their apartment for some reason. There's something going on with mom and dad. There's an alcohol problem. Like, so many things. It could be. And I see these regularly, almost every single time that person is in that habit, that issue, that situation because of chronic fear of some sort. And it's generally fear of a couple different things. One, succeeding. I, I would lump in succeeding and having a lot of money together. People are afraid of that. And I think some of that is because there's such a, a portrayal of rich people are evil. Like, there's such a big push on that that people are actually a little bit afraid of having success, which is so backwards in my mind. But I see that fairly regularly. So, that's, that's a big one. People are afraid of, uh, the success that comes with it. The flip side of that is they're also afraid of failing. So, they don't start anything. They don't stop smoking cigarettes because they're afraid they're going to fail. So, they never even try to stop smoking because they're afraid they're going to fail at stopping. Like, so then they just like, do you realize that just doesn't add up? Like, like it's just so, but some people can't see past that. And that's, that's the difficult part is like helping someone see that fear that they're working through. And that's where maybe this is a good thing to work through because then if you can see it in someone else, maybe if you see something in me, Mike, you could point it out, or if I see something in you, I can point it out. And then it makes

It's easier to get it out of that unconscious action process. But all that to say, chronic fear, I feel like, is a big one that's out there. I don't know if it's something that I personally deal with. I don't know if it's something you deal with, but I know that it's something that's very prominent that I see coming through our church doors fairly regularly.

I think you're right. I'm not sure that I deal with this. Uh, but I do want to address the comment you made about how I could see this in you, you could see this in me. I agree that we don't see our own blind spots. I have learned, however, people got to be in the right frame of mind and allow you to point out their faults. Yes. You cannot just go around being like, "Here's what you got to do to fix yourself." Yep.

Which is difficult because even if you sit down and have a rational conversation with somebody and use logic to get them to the point where yes, I want to grow. I want to make myself better. Sometimes they still deep down I they don't really want to. Their head is saying yes. Their heart is still saying no. Which I think is kind of what Brianna is getting at in this book is like you got to dig deep enough to confront what is really there. And I think chronic fear is definitely a a thing. I almost that one though specifically I I don't think I would ever feel comfortable telling somebody like okay so this is what you're dealing with. Maybe if you're a certified counselor I mean this is assume I'm assume part of your job so you know how how to identify this thing and and bring it out. But the anger, sadness, guilt, embarrassment, jealousy, resentment, regret, those I could I could deal with. You know my small group at church I could see us talking about some of that stuff but I cannot envision a scenario where I'm like, "Okay, Joe, we got to have a talk about your chronic fear. I just don't see that ending well."

Sure. Yeah, that's a good point. It really is. I I can think of a couple cases where I have talked to somebody about this. Maybe that's just me, but it's it's in situations where I'm fulfilling kind of a mentor role. And in one case it was someone who was my age and in one case it was someone who was definitely younger than me and who was trying to find their way in life I guess. And in both cases like okay you got to stop being afraid of this. Like I get that it's scary. I get that it can be uncomfortable. Stop it. Like that that has been a thing. So, I think it can come out, but it's going to have to be in it's almost like in a designed situation where pointing things out and helping someone through it is the point of the conversation and not just a hey, come here. We got to talk about something like that. That's not going to happen. Like, it's got to be. And in both cases, it was only after we had been sitting and talking for at least an hour before we got comfortable in the situation to be able to talk about it. So yeah, that is a thing as well. So it's not just going to be like, "Hey, can we meet for coffee? We got to talk." Like it's not going to happen.

It seems to me this whole chronic fear piece, this maybe is an easier conversation to have with a stoic. Oh, sure. Yeah. I I'm thinking about if you got people on board with the idea something like Tim Ferrris's fear setting exercise that he explained in his TED talk where okay let's just paint this worst case scenario and rip the band-aid right off. Let's call this thing what it is and then the stoic approach would be okay so that is if everything goes completely wrong it's probably not going to go nearly as bad as that so you're good. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be interested to hear what Broner would say about that sort of approach to this.

Sure. Last trigger I want to talk about here is jealousy because again, this is another one that I feel like I I I probably deal with this one a little bit from time to time. It's like, okay, that person is doing really good at running sound. We'll we'll pick on like my my fun topic running sound. They're way better than me. I wish I could run sound that good, but I'm not going to go through the process of trying to learn how to do it better because that's going to require me asking the person I'm jealous of to help me. So, we're not doing that. Like, this this is a thing that I know I do. I'm sure a lot of people do. Like, the one person who can help you in a situation in a lot of cases, you can be somewhat jealous of them and that's okay, but you have to work through that. and ignoring the path to get better just because you're jealous of the person that can help you. Sure. Ain't going to work.

Yeah, I could see that. I don't think I struggle with this one. Um I I probably did at some point, but I feel like this is tied to the whole abundance mindset versus scarcity mindset sort of a thing. That's where this would have manifested for me in the past is with a scarcity mindset. Oh, that person is doing really well. Well, they got all the success there is to be had in this particular area. And that's unfortunate that I wasn't there first and this is the thing I really want to do, but I can't because they've already beaten me to it. And uh even talking through that now, saying those words feels really weird and wrong. Sure. because I 100% believe there is no limit on the amount of success that is out there. Just because I've had some doesn't mean you can't have yours. There's more than enough to go around if you're willing to do the things that need to be done to get to that point. And I I suppose there's some point where that that uh falls down. I mean, if you're desiring to be the number one person on YouTube and Mr. Beast has got 66 million subscribers, you know, then maybe you you can't quite get to that level. Uh because there are a bunch of people already that are firmly established. I I don't know. I just have trouble even going there as a thought experiment. Like, sure, I don't I don't think that far ahead. Maybe I've I've gone so hard against goals that like I've broken that off of me, but I just see the next step. You know, what is the next milestone for me? I got to 100 subscribers. I can get my own URL now. That's awesome.

Sure. Yeah, I get it. I mean, sometimes we get where we wish someone else to do well. Sometimes we wish they wouldn't do well. It's kind of I feel like that's the thing. Like if you don't want someone to do well, like you're envious of that person in some way generally. But I mean, I know that I do that at sometimes and I know other people like it's not even on their radar. So, I get it. I get it. It's different for everybody.

The uh the next section here is building emotional intelligence. I had to at least put this on here because I knew if I didn't put it on here, you would bring it up regardless. So this is and I I only have one point here that I wanted to bring up which is not even really part of the main purpose of the chapter. So you can take this where you want to go after this particular point Mike but the one thing in here that stood out to me is the difference between breakthroughs and micro shifts. Those were the terms that she used. Yeah. And the breakthroughs are kind of like these great big aha paradigm shift type thinking versus call them your daily habits. And we've talked about this before. I just haven't seen it used in like haven't seen it explained with this specific terminology before. And it it did make sense to me that she explained it this way. But basically like a lot of times we try to go through the process of like I need my great big life-changing moment. Sure, that's great. But life change happens more often in tiny micro shifts than it does in the great big moments. Like the great big moments that I know of that completely change somebody's life, you don't want to go through. Like they're they're not pleasant experiences. They're usually quite life uh challenging I guess as in could take your life and that is what leads to massive life change and you hear those stories right somebody beat cancer and then they go on a mission to save seals I don't know but they have something that they've always wanted to do and then they make that their life mission afterwards and that does happen but more often than not changing what happens happens dayto-day with your routines and rituals. That's actually what will change your life, not waiting for that big moment. So, micro shifts, not breakthroughs.

Mike, and what does that have to do with emotional intelligence? I don't know, but it was in that section. Exactly. Exactly. So, back in chapter 2 under the signs of being in self-sabotage, she says, "Limited emotional processing skills." And I was like, "Huh, I bet emotional intelligence is going to pop up at some point." Yeah. And then she gets to this chapter and mentions that self-sabotage is a byproduct of low self-esteem, which is a emotional intelligence skill. Okay, cool. And then she goes on to talk about the micro shifts. She talks about psychic thinking. Yep. And I was like, this is tactical stuff. This is not emotional intelligence. Yep. That's my perspective on this. For people who are new to Bookworm, I have worked with the family business for a very long time. One of our core products is an emotional intelligence assessment and skilluing system which has at this point I think over 9 million administrations and 160 doctoral level papers and books written on it. So everything from like taking this assessment going through this skill building system will improve your GPA by a whole point to increased student retention to uh you'll stay in your job longer, you'll make x% more. All that kind of stuff tied to this specific assessment. Now that assessment isn't the only valid emotional intelligence assessment. There are other ones out there. We read a book on emotional intelligence by Daniel Gleman. He's kind of the guy who came up with this whole thing. So, credit to where credit is is due here. But the assessment that we use has all of these scales identified. So, self-esteem, self-esteem, self-management. Uh there's going to be things like sales orientation on there, which is not, you know, sales in terms of used car salesman, how can you close a deal, but more can you sell people on an idea. It's all built around this intrapersonal and interpersonal communication. So, how do I understand what my body is saying? What the how do I communicate with myself and how do I communicate with other people effectively? And all of the things that she talks about in here, the fear, the worry, all that kind of stuff that is all tied to emotional intelligence.

This chapter though, I was like, "Oh man, what a letdown. I I have to say and and this is exactly what I expected you to say because I felt like it wasn't about emotional intelligence and I am very far away from having the knowledge about it that you do and when I started going through it's like okay and like I just brought up like the breakthroughs versus micro shifts that was the thing that stood out to me but there's a lot in here about like okay this is some of the neuroscience this is which is a small piece There's like logic gaps and like there's there's a handful of these like flaws in thinking that were brought up. Yeah. But this is emotional intelligence. This isn't mindsets like that. It it was a complete disconnect to me. And I get that they're related, right? So I I get that. But it it seemed very far away from the actual point. The point that she's really making here is the psychic thinking which puts emotions in the place of logic and that is tied to emotional intelligence but kind of not. I mean basically her her definition here is feel your emotions and then manage them effectively and replace them with the logic. Emotional intelligence would not discredit the emotions at all. It would say, "Here's how to accurately interpret what your emotions are saying." Which is her that's what she's saying in the rest of the book. But I feel like if she's going to call this building emotional intelligence, there has to be something practical to build emotional intelligence, not say, "Well, your emotions are lying to you and so trust the logic." which is maybe unfair, but that was kind of what I got out of this particular section because of all the things you just listed.

Yeah. And and I'm with you. Now, I I want to point out this is also the this is the point in the book where she shifts from explaining what is going on to what you do about it in a in a macro level. Like she's done that in some minor levels up to this point. like here's what you do if this is your self-sabotage method and here's what you do if this is your feeling that triggers that self-sabotage. But this is where she starts to transition into here's how you build your life to work against self-sabotage. And emotional intelligence was her starting point, which is probably valid as a starting point. Mhm. But I don't know if this is just the fact that I have you as a co-host or we've talked about emotional intelligence in a lot of detail in the past, read an entire book called emotional intelligence. Like I don't know what it is, but I read this and I had to put the book down when I was done with this chapter. It's like what? I I don't even get it. Like I don't follow I I struggled to follow what she was getting at with this one. So take that.

Well, I agree because in the next chapter, Releasing the past, she talks about how we process stress in three parts of the brain. And this is where she gets into some neuroscience stuff. Y and she defines the amydala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex. And she defines them wrong in my opinion based on the research I've read. That okay. Well, she she makes she's painting with broad strokes here, so I understand what she's trying to get to. She mentions the amydala. That's where rumination and creativity. Hippocampus is emotion and memory, but the amygdala is really the emotional center of the brain. So, right away when I read how she defined that, I was like, not sure I agree. Cortex, that's logic and planning. Yeah, I agree with that one. I just am not real happy with the way she carved these up. And I think this is kind of building on what she's the foundation she's trying to build in chapter 4 with building emotional intelligence. So at this point, you know, the rest of the book is very shaky for me. Yeah.

No, I get that. So like you were talking about releasing the past. So she goes from the triggers into this emotional intelligence section. And then we're starting to get into the what do you do about it to build yourself up to work against this sabotaging and releasing the past was the next step here. So you're building emotional intelligence. Do it the right way. Releasing the past. And there there's two ways that she specifically points out here that I wanted to bring up because I feel like they were the big points here. The first of which was revisiting the events of your past. Just what you would think of, right? If you had some big event that you feel transformed the way you think and who you are in your past. A lot of times we haven't dealt with that. I would suspect that you have given your family and the business that you guys operate in. But I know a lot of my childhood friends and even myself like there are events in the past that I know I haven't processed fully and there are reasons for that but anyway that's one thing revisiting the events of your past in order to process those. Uh the second one was meditation which I was not expecting to come up here but it did come up but she has it specifically called out meditation not for calm for feeling. So, she points out that meditation is a way to help notice how you're feeling about something. Yep. And that is not the way I've had meditation proposed, though I've have seen that talked about, just not as the forefront purpose behind it. It is kind of like an ancillary extra that comes along for the ride. It wasn't the point. So, I'm curious, what are your thoughts on that, Mr. Meditator? That's always the thing that seems to come up when we read these books.

Yeah. Well, I still haven't gotten it to to stick. I don't think that these are competing ideas, by the way. Sure. I think that when you if you were to take the approach to mindfulness meditation that I just want to see what sort of frantic feelings are there, that will produce the calm. And I think anybody who really understands this stuff would say the same sort of thing because I've had these kind of conversations with a a couple people who have done this sort of thing for a long time, gone to the retreats, you know, studied it with a teacher and they've experienced something like this. So I think there's truth to this. I didn't necessarily see it as this or that. So, I I've kind of viewed it as an an and and I think it definitely fits with all of this stuff on emotional processing. I I don't know though uh the releasing the past part of this. Uh I do want to address real quickly. You mentioned like my background growing up and so maybe I've done all this. So, I would argue that the people who understand these sorts of things maybe are the most susceptible to not doing it. Sure. I kind of when it came out of my mouth, I kind of wondered about that. Yeah. Well, I don't want to I don't want to paint this picture of myself as the expert because I I struggle with it maybe more than even than other people do. But that coupled with some other experiences specifically like going through some of the curriculum that we go through in in our church for our men's group, I have had to wrestle with some things and gone through some things and seeing like I've been able to release these things and now I don't have to worry about that anymore. I I'm a significantly different person than I was before we started going to the church that we go to. And I credit my pastor and the staff there for helping me work through a bunch of this stuff. Uh, a lot of it is based off of the curriculum that we we do, but having the right person in your life who can help you navigate this stuff. I I totally understand the value in that which makes me kind of skeptical of doing this via a book because the whole time I'm trying to wrestle with these things that she's telling me to wrestle with. Like one of the action items, the only action item I jotted down way at the beginning is make a list of all the things you're unhappy with. And then the rest of the book is kind of okay, let's figure out why you're unhappy with those things and what's the root issues here? What sort of trauma is in your past? And I kind of feel like there going through this in a book is is very very dangerous. Like unless you're sitting there with me and you see the moment that I run smack into these things, there's a question in my mind of could this actually do more harm? I I don't know. I mean, it it didn't happen when I went through it, but if you're really having to deal with some of these demons from your past, not having a licensed professional in the room seems a little bit dangerous.

That's a valid point. I hadn't thought of hadn't thought through that one because that's that's very possible. There are people who Well, now that you say that, I know of at least two people who are friends who have some pasts that it would be very difficult to sit and try to process this stuff by yourself. So, you might you might have something there. Releasing the past. I mean I mean there she's probably referring to some of the lighterw weight stuff, but like there's some pretty rough stuff out there. So, well, this is the place where she talks about trauma. It's true. It's true. So, anyway, if you're going to release the past, do it carefully and maybe find somebody who knows what they're doing to help you through it.

And I think that that brings us to building a new future. In which case, there is a four-step process here. Mike, did you catch it or did you just completely reject it by the time you got to this section? Step one, face the fear first. Step two, notice how your future self looks. Step three, ask for guidance. Step four, imagine them handing you the keys to your new life. Now, this is a visualization technique that she's spelling out to connect to your highest potential future self. I like that term. I like the term. But how do you feel about the four-step process?

Uh, I think there's a lot of power in visualization. Uh, this kind of gets into emotional intelligence again. I can think of a research study specifically done at the University of Chicago which talked about visualization for basketball players and they had three groups. One group shot free throws for an hour every day for 30 days. One group did nothing. One group visualized themselves shooting and making the free throws. So, one group actually did the work, one group thought about it, saw it in their mind, and then the other group did nothing. And after 30 days, the group that did nothing, obviously, they didn't improve at all. I forget the exact percentage of the group that actually put in the hour worth of practice every single day. But I do remember that the group that visualized, never touched a basketball, mind you, but visualized themselves making the free throws improved almost the same amount. It was 1% less. So if you can see yourself doing something, it does it does have an impact on your ability to actually do that thing. This particular visualization exercise where I am looking at 50year-old Mike and asking him, hey, what should I do? That doesn't really click for me. But it probably does for some people because I know some people think about, man, if I could go back and I could talk to my 18-year-old me, this is what I would say to them. So, yeah, if you've ever had that thought, you know, maybe this visual visualization exercise is is for you, but doesn't work for me.

Yeah, I I feel like this one's a little bit backwards in that it's it's good to look at like Okay, so she's she's asking you to picture a future version of yourself, invite them into your mind, and then ask them questions essentially, and then say, "Okay, now how do I go about doing something?" And like to me, that's a little bit strange. The one that's very similar to that that I've I feel is helpful is imagine where you want to be in 20 years and then process what it would take to get you there. And then that's that's not necessarily me asking my future self how to do that. It's me determining how to get where I want to go. So, it's me putting the goal out in front of me and then me putting together the plan in order to get me to said goal versus asking the goal to tell me how to get to it. Like that. That's a little odd to me, but I I get what she's trying to to get across. So, anyway, I didn't know I was getting a systems book here, but there is a four-step system. It's two pages for that. Two, maybe three pages is all it is in this whole thing. I feel like the what you latch on to and how you define your future self here also kind of determines the success or failure of this. Because if you define success as a big fancy house, fancy car, whatever, like the it's tied to a dollar amount, you I think you have less chance of success with this than if it is something like um relational. And and that's just my two cents because I have gone through this specifically with my family. Rachel and I several years ago got away for a day and just spent the day thinking about what do we want our family to look like. And it wasn't, you know, we live in this neighborhood and these are the schools that we go to, these are the things that we do. It was more like these are the we want we explicitly said we want our kids by the time they are teenagers to feel comfortable talking to us about anything. That's not the experience I had growing up and we wanted to make sure that we were doing everything to create an atmosphere of trust basically and then working backwards from there. Well, what are the things that we need to do in order for that to be true? And there were a bunch of things we identified. Prioritizing our relationship first, so weekly date nights, uh, one-on- ones, so every every week up until COVID, and this has shifted a little bit, but we do still do a version of this where, uh, I would go to a coffee shop with one of my kids, and then they would rotate every week, and we would just play games, I'd get coffee, they get hot chocolate, we just hang out, talk about stuff. U I have a 13-year-old now and I am seeing the fruit of this and I am thankful that we've been doing these things for the last several years. And so that's the example that really resonates to me and that's not the thing that I naturally would have applied to this four-step process that she's talking about with this visualization exercise. I'm not saying that it's two separate things, though. I definitely could have. Just the way that she defined it, that's not where my brain went. And I think that's probably the more effective approach, focusing on the things that you can completely control.

Sure. Basically, the point of this is determine what your new future should look like and figure out how to get there, which involves emotional intelligence, being willing to understand your feelings and know that as she mentions in the last section here, feelings are not always facts. What's the phrase you tend to tell me, Mike? Like the way that other people see me isn't like they're not looking at me. They're looking at what is it? People judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. You got it. Yep. Something like that. Yeah. So, the way that I feel that other people are perceiving me may not be true and is likely not true. Uh, you know, we were at staff meeting on Tuesday and one of our youth assistants made the comment that a lot of middle schoolers are very absorbed with how other people perceive them and they're afraid of how people are going to think about them. And then by the time they're a senior, they realize that no one ever paid any attention to what what they were doing. They were too self-absorbed in themselves worrying about what other people thought about them to worry about what they thought about someone else. So, so it's just interesting how we think other people are really processing us and they're not and we need to work through those feelings because they're not always facts. That's that was my main takeaway from that last chapter.

Yeah. Uh I I like this chapter a lot. She says it very strongly. She says, "Nobody is thinking about you the way that you are thinking about you." Yeah. Yeah. There's some other cool stuff in here. She talks about inner the inner peace versus happiness. And if you're striving for happiness, you won't always be happy, so you'll think it's not working. Uh, I like that visualization. I had a little bit of trouble. The inner peace thing just makes me think of like kung fu panda and uh what's the the like a mouse sort of character who is oh shifue master shifue right he's the whole movie he's like trying to get inner peace and he's just so emotional and and worried and then the end of the movie he finally gets it so that's the picture I got here of inner peace this feels very Buddhist to Honestly, a lot of the terminology that she's using here, monkey mind, u your head is always going to constantly seek out those situations and experiences that will affirm itself. That term monkey mind, I've I've heard that a lot before. And I'm not saying that that necessarily is is wrong, but just some of these terms felt a little bit foreign for me. And I don't know, did you feel the same way?

Uh, it was a little bit foreign. Yeah. But okay, so like inner peace for example, I don't know how she could have done it differently, but I feel like there's another term there that could have been more broadly applicable. Sure. I don't know. Contentedness maybe. Maybe. I don't know. Don't know. What else do you want to say about the book, Mike? That being said, I do think this is one of the strongest chapters of the book. This and the first one. Sure. Started well, ended well. Yeah. Uh, I have one action item unless there's something else you want to go through before jump into that, but I have one action item that I wrote down from going through this. Uh, and it comes from releasing the past. And remember how we were talking about you need to be a little bit careful with this one. And there is, you know, one of the bigger things in Joe's past is uh that my parents were divorced shortly after I was married and the circumstances around that were very difficult for me to work through. It was a complete shock to me when it happened and it took me a long time to process that it was a thing that happened at all. So, it's a thing that has still continued to come up. It still brings a lot of angst with it. And I'm pretty sure I am very far from processing that event, even though it's been a long time ago at this point. And it's something I feel like I need to work through. So, if anything, this has told me that that's something I should do. I'm not certain what the right path is for that, but like you were talking about, it's not to do it live on the next episode of Bookworm. I'll tell you that much. Absolutely. And it's also not something I think I'm going to do alone in any way, shape, or form. So, it's a thing that I'll take on. There's not going to be a follow-up on that one. So, it is just a thing that I need to work through. And it and this at least sparked that I need to do that. So, there's that.

Sure. All right. What you got? Well, I have two action items. one from the book which I'm not sure I want to do anymore and that is write down everything I'm unhappy with that was right at the beginning. Sure. Sure. And then the second one which I do want to do not attach to this book but that's walk around my house every day thanks to you just so I notice more. Yep. If you notice what's wrong you can fix it. Yep.

Well, as for style and rating, like I said early on, I kind of appreciated the style here in that this was not laid out in your typical three-part setup. It feels like it was set up to where this is the chapter that needs to be next and she wrote to fulfill it in the way that she felt it needed to be fulfilled. So, from a stance of style, that was nice. Part of the style I didn't like in the thing that we've talked about in a lot of books is like the stories are really great. That wasn't the case on this one. Like I feel like yeah, there are a handful of stories, but there's not much to be honest with you. It made it a little bit of a difficult read for me anyway. I don't know if that's because I've become used to the good storytelling books because I feel like we've had a lot of those. Uh this is not would be my take on it. So, this is the other side of that coin. And it I didn't feel like this was a super simple read. Like, yes, the way that she's forming paragraphs and sentences is done very well, but it's not proposed in a way that I feel like it resonates super well. And maybe that's some of the angst we have with it. I don't know because we didn't feel like I didn't feel like I connected with it 100%. Like, there's some pieces that stood out. There's some parts that I was like, "Yeah, absolutely." And then there's a lot of it's like, uh-uh, nope, not for me. So, that all said, like there's a lot of little good tidbits I would say in this, but as a whole, I think you've probably picked this up by now. I feel like it's something I've struggled with quite a bit. So, I'm not going to rate this one very high. I am probably not going to recommend this to much of anyone. That is to say, uh, I'm going to put it at 3.0. It It's got to be somewhere mid-tier there because it just there there's a lot of stuff I struggle with. There's some tidbits that are good, right? But I don't know. It just didn't strike a chord in many ways at all. So, that tells me that it's not that great of a book considering all the ones that we've read recently. So, there's that.

All right. Well, I had a negative reaction, I think, to reading this. However, my initial response was, "That's my problem, not the author's." Sure. Sure. I don't know if that's true or not. I do think that some of the topics she speaks to in here, other books we've read speak to them better. I also recognize that the task she undertook with this is herculean. Yeah, that's true. And I respect her simply for that. Some of the chapters where she's digging into all of those lists that we talked about very briefly, you know, the signs of being in self-sabotage, the resistance, the uprooting, the perfectionism, all that kind of stuff. When I read her short little descriptions of those, I felt she did a very good job of explaining them in a very short period of time in a way where if you had never really considered any of those before, you would get enough understanding to say, "Oh, yeah, that one maybe I deal with." And again, this is where the curse of knowledge comes in for me. Because of my background in emotional intelligence and the fact that I've worked through a bunch of this stuff myself, I'm trying to put myself back in the shoes of somebody who is maybe coming to this stuff for the first time. I feel maybe there is somebody who this book is absolutely perfect for. I would all I would temper that with this book is not going to be the solution. It's going to be the first step in a probably very long journey. And the way that it's written, it kind of feels like you get to the end and there, now we're done. And now you just keep moving towards your ideal future and everything's great. And I cannot picture how that would ever [Laughter] work. So, I don't know. I'm I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt though and assume that my issues with this book are not the issues that everybody would argue with. And I'm going to rate it at 3.5. Uh if you were to ask me what do I think of this book, it would be less than that. But from a perspective of how do I feel about this rating it for bookworm, I think that bumps it up a little bit.

Very fair. All right, let's put it on the shelf. What's next, Mike? Next is The Art of the Idea by John Hunt. Did you get this one yet? I haven't. It's supposed to show up soon. That's what I was told. Okay. Why? Uh it's it's uh it's just an interesting looking book. It's got this like hard cardboard style cover to it. Sure. It's it's it's different. And I'm just curious what your first impression is. We can revisit that next episode, though. So, yeah. This is one that was recommended based off of um a mentor of mine who also recommended liinal thinking. Uh it's about the same time that you picked it for for bookworm. Okay. So I am excited to go through this one. I feel like it is going to be very good just because this person very rarely steers me wrong with with books. But it's not one that I had heard a lot about. There is just two excerpts on the back. One of them is Seth Goden who says something along the lines of every single page is awesome. So, in my mind, that's a pretty great recommendation. Yep, that's a solid.

Well, following the art of the idea, uh, I have selected Daily Rituals by Mason Curry, which is how artists work. I've kind of wanted to do this one for a while. I don't know that we've talked about it, but this is this was one of my gap books a while back. Yeah, I remember you talking about it. There was another book that I debated doing, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to commit to it because it was going to lead me to an action item that I know I would want to take and I don't want to do. So, it may come at some point. But anyway, daily rituals. I would love to know what some of the great minds of the past have done dayto-day. So, I think it'll be kind of a fun conversation. I think that one from a bookworm stance is going to definitely have a different feel, but will have a lot of fun stories that come with it. So that's my suspicion. So anyway, daily rituals, Mason Curry. And there's no chapters with that one. You're gonna you're going to have to put some thought into what sort of a outline we want to have for maybe we just pick a bunch of them like we did with the the art of thinking clearly, Ralph de Belly with all those different biases. Yep. because it's basically a bunch of little glimpses into famous people and their routines, right? So, I think that'll be an interesting one. It'll take some thought to figure out how to do that episode. As for GAP books, Joe's GAP book is figuring out how to put HVAC in a house and run electrical. So, that's not happening anytime soon. And in between researching and YouTubing, I've been reading the Bookworm books. So, what have you got, Mike? You've got a little more margin than I do right now. I'm a soccer coach. I don't got any margin. Oh, that's true. So, you got nothing. Yeah, I don't. But I have a sbatical coming up. I'm pretty sure I will have a gap book during that week, but I do not yet know what it will be.

Sure. Cool. Cool. Awesome. Well, thanks to you who are watching us live. Hi. And if you're not watching us live, you should. And you can find us on YouTube. Do a search for Bookworm. I know that it shows up fairly high on that. So, you can find us on YouTube, watch us live, join the join and get these a little bit earlier. Uh, and huge thanks to those of you who are Bookworm Club members. I know there have been a few of you who have joined that within the last couple weeks. So, huge thanks to those of you who have done that and we're super grateful for those who are a part of that membership. If you want to join that bookworm.fm/membership m/membership and it's five bucks a month. Helps us pay all the hosting, helps us now pay an editor, helps us to basically keep things running, buy us some books once in a while and such. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that. But it's not just thanks that you get for that. You also get a special Bookworm uh wallpaper. You get some old Gatbook episodes that I've recorded. You get uh access to a special area in the bookworm club.bookworm.com. bookworm.fm, but also you get all of Mike's mind node files, which are just chalk full of stuff that I don't always remember. So, there's that. So, again, bookworm.fm/membership. All right. If you are reading along with us, which you totally should, pick up The Art of the Idea by John Hunt, and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.