#178 Jerry Colonna: The CEO Whisperer
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Being able to be resilient is a wonderful adulting skill. But what we're really after is the equanimity that says, I may have made a mistake. And with remorse, I will learn from that mistake. But my sense of self-worth is not at risk. I will use the positive experience of that mistake to learn and grow and do a better job.

for the joy of doing a better job, not because I'm being chased by a demon that says you're a piece of crap. Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.

If you're listening to this, you're missing it. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand-edited transcripts, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link. My guest today is Jerry Colonna, founder of Reboot.io.

Colonna is a certified professional coach, but before all of that, he played a prominent role in the early development of Silicon Valley. With Fred Wilson, he launched Flatiron Partners in August of 1996, which quickly rose to one of the top VC firms. But like many of us, he reached all the goals he had set out for himself, only to find how hollow and unfulfilling it really was.

People call Jerry the CEO whisperer, and you'll see why. This conversation is personal for me. You'll get to listen to two friends talking and solving problems, but it's a bit vulnerable too because you're also going to get to listen to Jerry work through some of my issues in real time. It's time to listen and learn. ♪

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You were a great VC. You became rich. You accomplished all of your goals that you thought you wanted. And yet you wanted to kill yourself. You felt hollow inside. What happened? Well, that's quite a way to start the conversation. If you disconnect for a moment what one does from how one is and how one has been,

And I want to be clear because there's a relationship between those two. But if you disconnect it for a moment, it becomes a little bit easier to see through the myth that we all carry, which is that if I achieve a certain pinnacle of success, then it's milk and honey and sunshine and rainbows for the rest of my life. Of course, as soon as I say that, we know that that's not true.

For me, that moment, and you're right, I describe it as feeling hollow inside. A way to see it is that I walked around with a shell that was tailored to other people's projections of who I should be. And my skill set and my intellect and my work ethic still shone through.

But I wasn't necessarily doing the thing I was put on this earth to do. And that led to this disconnect between the inner me and the outer me, which on a prolonged period of time leads to depression. I think we all feel that to some extent. I really want to dive into two aspects of that. The first is...

You said you're playing by other people. I'm going to use the term scoreboard. You're playing by what other people expected of you. You're playing by, these are the things that society or culture, friends and family tell me that I should want. And I feel like we're all doing that to some extent. How do we get out of that? How do we recognize when we're doing that in the moment? Because it's all unconscious. Yes.

We're unconsciously doing this. And then we, we, it's like we reached the top of the ladder and we realized we climbed the wrong ladder. Like I didn't want to play that game, but it's too late because by the time most of us realize that we're, you know, 70, 80, 90, it's near the end of our life. How do we, how do we switch out of that zone so that we can recognize, am I doing this consciously? Cause I want to do it or am I doing it because other people want me to do it? Okay.

Okay, so the first thing I want to say is that it's never too late. And I think that that's a really important message. You know, the Buddha had a teaching which basically goes like this. If you sit down to meditate with the intention of meditating for 20 minutes and spend 19 minutes wall gathering, but in the last minute wake up, congratulations, you had a wonderful meditation session. So even at 70 or 80, it's not too late.

And that's a really important message because part of the myth is that it's always too late. Oh, I'm 19 years old. It's too late. I'm 30 years old. It's too late. I'm 50 years old. It's too late. It's not too late. It's not too late to wake up, to realize for the pursuit of love, safety, and belonging, we shape ourselves. We shapeshift ourselves.

kind of like a Marvel superhero, to fit the expectations of others. The forces at work are insidious and relentless and ubiquitous. One can make the argument that the real purpose of life boils down to discovering who you really are and living into that. And then you inject a little bit of kindness into

into that and then we have a fully actualized person. I know that was a long-winded answer. I just want to put a pin in the fact that you also asked, how do we get there? And that's a different question. But I did want to give enough space to the folks who might listen to this and recognize, just the way you did, recognize this propensity that we have. I once had a client say to me, I was bred

to make my family members feel better. I mean, what a powerful statement. Yes. Yeah. And this is important to understand that this is part of a family legacy. If we grow up in an environment where in order to say, make our depressed father feel

less depressed or our anxious mother less anxious by shape-shifting the likelihood is that we will pass that pattern on to our descendants and so your your core question which is how do we shift this how do we change this is quite profound because what you're really talking about is breaking lineage breaking ancestral patterns and

Well, I think we're going to get into that a little bit throughout the episode. And I don't know if diving into it right now is sort of the right moment because the cost of pleasing others is giving up yourself. Amen. You know, at 38, 39, it felt like I had been hoodwinked because I did the things that one is supposed to do.

according to those external forces. And I still wasn't happy. I felt hoodwinked. I felt tricked. I felt like I'd been sold a bill of goods. And to be clear, it wasn't purposeful. It wasn't like, hey, let's screw with this guy's head. It was a function of the way that families operate, the way societies operate.

that creates this phenomena of shape-shifting the person away from who they were born to be. I think that's really powerful in terms of understanding where we start to go astray. I think one of the other things that I wanted to dive into that you mentioned in the opening answer was the relationship we have between work and identity. Mm-hmm.

Why do we get caught up thinking that our job or our title is who we are? And then when that gets taken away or we're not as successful as we want to be, somehow we feel less than we should feel. And I would imagine this is especially true for entrepreneurs and founders where you're just expected to keep going and keep growing and push and struggle and endure. And then when you leave and walk away,

for your whole life you've been, I am the CEO of X, I am the founder of Y. And then all of a sudden you're left with, I'm just a person. And there's a sense of loss. You asked, why is it that we attach our sense of self to an externality? Once you begin to see that pattern, you can see the roots of it. It might happen in school.

And it might happen even in our family system dynamic where I am the peacemaking youngest child. I am the one who has been early parentified. Or I am the student who gets A's. Or I am the athlete, right? And so what happens is very early on, we start to attach our sense of self to that.

And in a way, all of the struggle is a struggle to free that sense of self, that identity from all the different mechanisms. And I think what happens is that we get to around midlife, which is where I was, the system starts to break down and it's no longer sufficient. One of the most important ways to unpack the unconscious self

structures, is to ask yourself, what is the benefit? So for example, Shane, I'm imagining you can relate to this structure. Do you have your own story of outsourcing your identity and sense of self-worth onto something else? Do you have that

Yeah. And what was it? Just so I have some context. Well, sort of, I get wrapped up in this, right? Like I'm, I am Farnham street. I am a podcast host. Yeah. So what is the benefit to you for me to see you not as Shane, the, the, just the nice guy who's struggling to, you know, balance good and bad behavior and just trying to be a human being. What is the benefit to you?

For me to see you as Farnam Street. It's almost like an alter ego, right? Like it's almost like a different persona and that can be good and bad I would imagine and but what's the benefit to you to having say? Me have a positive view of you through me personally or through me as like Farnam Street you as Farnam Street. I

Cause it's a protective shield, right? So it's like, you can have a positive view of Farnham street, but it also protects me from all the negative reviews and all the people who don't have a positive view of it. So it's sort of like, I wouldn't say an alter ego, but it's,

It allows me to protect myself and have the shield around me. Right. So you go to the head of the class, right? Why would I attach my sense of self to Farnham Street, for example? Well, because it's a protective move, right? And so the benefit to you, and you learn this as a child, you learn this as a skill, right?

as a child. The benefit to you more often than not, if you go back to, to the construct that I've written about in reboot, my first book is love, safety, and belonging, right? The benefit is if I shape shift, I'm going to feel loved. I'm not going to get kicked out of the family or, you know, extent in this case, it might be the community.

and I'm going to feel safe. Now, it's really important to understand that the mechanisms we're talking about, more often than not, were created to keep you safe. I say this because when we start to unpack these unconscious patterns, one impulse is to criticize ourself. Look at me. I operate behind a false front. I'm such a bad person.

That's also designed to protect you from getting to the core issue. The real benefit of being curious about these structures goes to the heart of the question that you asked before, which is how do I transform this? Because until you see it, until you see that there's a benefit to you, let me give you an example. I was working with a woman who's a CEO of a small company last week. We were at a

an offsite or retreat, you know, she has 15 employees and she was talking about one of the, you know, how the employees just drive her crazy. And, you know, nobody works as hard as she does. And what's the problem here and all this. And I said, well, who hired them? And she smiled just the way you did. And she's like, oh, well, yeah. I said, okay, so you're in charge. Yes. And I can't stand it. I said, yeah, but what's the benefit to you for being in charge?

And this sneaky little grin kicked in and she said, well, I'm the boss. Now, until we get to the point where we're willing to risk the thing that this system was set up to protect, we're not going to change. See, it was really important to me to be perceived as safe.

a financial wizard as a really successful VC, it was really important because it overcame decades of a sense of poverty that I grew up with. I had to be willing to be poor in order to be free. Does that make any sense? I think so. Does that relate to one of the questions in Reboot was,

I want to make sure I get this right. How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want? You got it. That's the core organizing question. And it's really important to unpack that question carefully. I chose the word complicit for a reason. I often talk about being the accomplice in a bank job, not the one who sticks up the teller. Because the responsibility...

more often than not becomes part of that family lineage. Well, this is the way we do things, right? And so for, in order for me to belong, I adopt a methodology and I become an accomplice in those conditions. So that's part one of the unpacking. Part two of the unpacking is

I say I don't want. So if we go back to the woman CEO that I was talking about today, I spoke with last week, she says she doesn't want the staff to always turn to her. But boy, howdy, does it make her feel good? Is she aware that it makes her feel good? Like, are we aware of that consciously? Or is that like an unconscious sort of dopamine almost response? Well, I'll tell you, there was this funny moment where she's aware now because

Yeah, how do we get that awareness? You're telling somebody that you're creating the conditions that you say you don't want, but those conditions are giving you a positive benefit. Okay, what's happening for you right now? Because we started making the connection between your identity and Farnham Street.

What's the benefit to, what's the downside? Let's talk about that for a moment. How anxious do you get if a podcast guest doesn't show up or a conversation doesn't go well or whatever?

How anxious do you get? I don't get anxious about that. I think I get anxious maybe about, I think one of my big fears is like disappointing people. Like I don't want to disappoint people. And what would happen if you disappoint? What would happen if you disappoint them? I would feel like I let them down. So what? So you let them down. What's the risk? I don't, I don't like feeling like I let somebody down. Like I don't like feeling I wasted somebody's time or. Okay. So do you hear the little voice in your head that says,

Shane, come on, you wasted my time. Now notice the feelings. Feelings might be shame, really powerful feeling, might be guilt. And without unpacking it so deeply that it feels like a Jeremy session, right? How old are those feelings? As long as I can remember. There you go. Now let's name a truth, okay? As a bunch of protoplasm in embryo,

in uterus. You didn't have shame. So somewhere between conception and today, you learned to feel shame if you wasted someone's time. Now, you asked, how unconscious is this? We just spent three minutes

this issue so it's not as deeply unconscious as we think it is but it's not Common that we talk about it. What is more common is you might say to your team on the podcast? You might get

nervous about whether or not it was a good episode, and I don't want the listener to feel that they wasted time, and they could sense what's going on around you. Family members might respond to it. And then all of a sudden, you, as someone who holds power within your organization, are starting to impact the psychological safety of those around you because you're not really talking about what's going on. What's really going on is, God, I would feel so ashamed.

If all the effort that went into this episode and listeners sat there and said, oh, what a waste of time. I can't believe this guy. I mean, he used to be good, but he's gone off the rails here. Right? That totally is a loop in my head. Yeah. Right. That song is on repeat a lot. See, now what you're doing with a little laughter and a little levity,

is starting to release yourself from the grip of it. Now imagine every time that loop starts to play, you get to blow it a kiss. Because here's the truth. People don't listen to a podcast like this for one episode. They develop a relationship with you. And through your skillful questioning, they come to understand people. And you make their lives a little bit better.

Not every book we write, not every song we write, not every painting we do is going to move people in exactly the same way. But that doesn't mean you failed. So it's interesting when you say that. My typical reaction, including right now, my default, if you will, is I don't hear any of that. None of those positive things happen.

They're not like in my head, they just go in one ear and out the other. They don't, there's no sticking. So it's a little Teflon. Yeah. But negative. Oh, like those stick. Why do I remember those so much more or those feelings? And sometimes they're super positive. I want to preface this with sometimes they're motivating and they drive me and they give me energy and it's, I don't think it's a bad energy, but maybe it is in talking with you. Like there was this time, a comment on the New York times profile that they wrote on me

And it literally, you know, I framed it and I put it in the office and it was like, this guy's enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. And it drove me to be better and to work harder and to pursue more of what I was doing in a way that I thought was healthy, but maybe it's not. Well, just for this conversation, let's put aside the discussion of whether it's positive or negative.

Okay. Okay. Because I want to really unpack it. So we've been talking about what a psychologist would call the secondary benefit. What is the benefit of a particular behavior? Okay. So in this case, you've got a Teflon coating inside. And so when a positive statement comes in, like, you know, a fried egg, it just slips right off the bottom of the pan. It cannot stick.

All right. What is the benefit of not being able to hear positive praise? What's the benefit to you? Because you just touched a little bit on it. I don't know. I don't know if I see it because the benefit to me of not hearing it would be it serves no purpose. I don't need positive reinforcement. I want to know what I'm doing that I can do better. So that you can do better. Yeah. But the

But the positive offers no sort of like what I can do better. Maybe, I don't know. Like I'm just thinking out loud here. I've never actually explored these questions yet. Well, Ben, and I feel honored that you're allowing me to explore these questions with you because we're backing our way into some of the questions, the answers to some of the questions that you have, which is what is, you know, how does this start to get unpacked? You said to me that you framed that snarky comment. Yeah.

he's enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. And you use it as motivation.

Yeah. Tell me again that you don't know what the benefit is. Oh, that's just total motive. It's a fire that doesn't go out like it burned. Okay. It's a fire that doesn't go out. It burns. And the result is you get better and better and better at what you do so that you could quiet the voice in your head that might say, yeah, he used to be good, but he's not good anymore.

Or any other feeling, right? You might feel competitive. You might feel like I need to be the best. All of those feelings. And like many of us, you have been socialized to use negative to motivate others.

Do we get socialized or is that like inherent? Because I can remember doing this as a child from the time I was like five or six. Okay. So now we get to the nature versus nurture question, which I'm not really sure. But I will tell you, it's really hard for me to imagine when I picture a little baby sitting there saying, I'm going to not poop. I'm going to, right. I'm like making these decisions.

Now, is there an evolutionary benefit to this kind of thinking? Possibly, possibly. I can definitely see family cultural benefits, right? So for example, if, and I notice this a lot with the descendants of immigrants or the descendants of those who might've survived pogroms or the descendants of those who might've experienced famine.

There's a particular attachment to holding on to the possibility of negative outcome, catastrophizing to drive themselves further and further. Because in the psychological construct of the being, if you relax, then fill in the blank, something bad will happen. And I want to be clear. Remember before I said, let's remove positive and negative just for a moment.

I can see how this drives outcomes that we want, right? I grew up terrified of not having enough money. And I got to the point where like my grandfather, I felt I finally had enough money. And it was the emptiness in that moment that shattered me because the, the, the negative belief system, which was, I will never have enough money to feel safe.

was so positive in driving me and so effective in driving me that it literally drove me crazy. Let's put this construct to the side for a moment and take it again out of positive and negative realm. And let's go into this other realm that we've been talking about, which is what I would call conscious adulthood. So like it or not, Shane, you're starting to wake up

It's the last five minutes of your 20-minute meditation session. And you're starting to wake up. And you're sitting there going, there's a cost associated with not hearing the positive, isn't there? What's the cost to you of not being able to take in the positive?

Well, all the benefits, right? Like knowing that I help people and knowing that I impact people and feeling like I'm doing something meaningful and rewarding and offering something into the world that people resonate with. Okay. I want you to hold that thought and let's imagine, forgive me, I can't tell. How old are you? 44. Okay. Let's imagine you're 84 and on your deathbed, you are still unable to take in the positives of your life.

But boy, you were really driven by those negatives. How does that feel? It feels pretty hollow, I would imagine. What word? Hollow. Say that again? Hollow. You see what I'm talking about? Yeah, it's like you worked your whole life and you got to this place that...

Similar to you, right? You got to this place and you help people, but you didn't appreciate or you didn't feel like you did. You didn't have any of the rewards of doing that, I guess. The internal rewards, not the external rewards. The intrinsic sense of self-worth. There's an aspect to that of forgiving yourself for your mistakes, for your flaws, for your slip-ups, for your...

How do we do that? Like, how do we learn to forgive ourselves? Notice when I said, what is the benefit? And I moved away from the impulse, which is to see the benefit we're seeking as something negative. Oh, I'm just trying to feel safe. Yeah. Now, if we can project into little munchkins in our lives, rugrats, people that we love who are just kids, and we see them struggling,

Mm-hmm. What is it we want them to feel about themselves? We want to help them. We want to take away that. Like I think of my kids, right? And my intuition, which I often have to consciously overrule. But my first gut instinct is to like jump in.

to save them, to make things easy for them. And I would imagine that a lot of people are like that. - Yes, no plowing. Just clearing the road. But the feeling, I think, how old are your kids? - 13 and 14. - God bless, preteen, teen years. - Two boys, so yeah. - Self-esteem really challenged. - Yeah. - Really, really challenged. And what is it that you want them to feel about themselves when they're 45?

Oh, resiliency, right? Like I want them to be able to handle all the ups and downs of life and feel good about themselves. And feel good about themselves. Yeah. When we're stuck in this mode of using the negative to motivate ourselves, it's really, really hard to let go of the negative and forgive ourselves. We would like your sons at 46 and 44, respectively, to have the resilience to

To be motivated to do good in the world, to do good work in the world, to be a positive force. But when they fail or when they disappoint, for them not to see themselves as a piece of crap. But to be able to take in the joy of good work without being devastated by failure. Psychologically, emotionally, psychically devastated.

Now we want this for them. Can you, can you feel that for them? Okay. So here's the unlock. You have to do that for yourself first because the Teflon rejection of the negative that motivates you, they're learning every day.

These are one of the unconscious rules that we pass down to our kids that we get as kids as well that hold us back or hold us in place. That's right. Because what do they want more than anything else in the world other than pleasing their parents? I'm going to be just like him. Or for those of us with negative situations, I'm going to be anything but him.

that person. I think that's in part where, where I come from, right? Anything, but there was a person in my life. I don't want to get into too many details, but anything but that person, but notice the positive and negative, positive and negative. You know, we, we talk about resilience. I often talk about equanimity and equanimity as the, the real goal that resilience is the path being able to be resilient against the

the forces is a wonderful adulting skill. But what we're really after is the equanimity, the equanimity that says, I may have made a mistake and I regret making that mistake. And with remorse, I will learn from that mistake. But my sense of self-worth is

I think it's hard for me to relate to that because, you know, for my entire memory,

It's like a chip on my shoulder, right? And that has served me very well, right? Like in life. And it's sort of, I always viewed that as a positive. I always thought chip, you know, a chip on your shoulder would be, oh, that's not bad. That motivates you. It drives you. It doesn't like get in the way of you. It doesn't get in the way of you.

Yeah, but it can cause you paralysis. It can also just cause you to do nothing. So I think chips on shoulders tend to go in two different ways. They tend to end up being like Tom Brady or they tend to end up being people who struggle through life and blame it, they're a victim and sort of blame it on those circumstances. That's the fear.

The fear is if you acknowledge the chips on your shoulder, you're going to somehow come across as if you were a victim and you can't stand people who go through life as victims. Am I right about that? Yeah. Yeah. So that, that's also another belief system. If I let the positive in, in a sense, the risk is that I'm going to be complacent. I'm going to be the victim and,

I'm going to be sort of drifting through life and I won't accomplish anything. Josh Wolf, who is a VC at Lux Capital, likes to say chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. And he is right when he speaks about that. And I am less focused on helping people become outwardly wildly successful than

then I am focused on people, including people who are outwardly wildly successful, people feeling resilient and feeling that equanimity so that they don't wake up at 45 years old feeling hollow.

Can you walk me through this a little bit? So you get a negative comment on a book or you catch yourself thinking friends who have more money than you and you should have more money or work harder or however, you feel less of yourself in that moment. What is the internal voice in your head saying? How do you get out of that loop? I'll speak about money for a moment. My best friend's

in business and my best friends in many ways are Fred Wilson and Brad Felt, two of the most successful VCs in the world. And I walked away from the business when it was the three of us making hay. And so I can sort of look at them and go, oh God, why did I walk away? And yet I

What constantly comes back, I mean, I had lunch with Fred a couple of months ago and he made me cry because he looked at me and he said, you know, Jerry, you are on fire. You do work that you were literally born to do. And, you know, it's one thing to feel that about yourself. It's another thing to have somebody whom you love.

say that about you. And that's quite powerful. So there's a feeling that comes in, which is, oh, if only I'd stayed in the venture business, right? I'd be a mountain of gold. And then what would happen is, oh, I would do such good work in the world and I would help this person and I would do that because I don't want to be motivated by greed. Then what happens is, and literally this will happen in a journaling session.

And I'll say to myself, but dude, you have enough. You literally have enough. And so for that experience, enough is a powerful antidote because enough was an elusive concept. Enough was something that just never seemed possible. For teachings on that, the Buddhists have this notion of a hungry ghost.

and wraith-like figure who eats and eats and eats and never feels satiated. And Shane, dude, there are millions of hungry ghosts in power positions right now. They could have all the money in the world. They could win the game of Monopoly. They could bend the game of life with all the toys, and they're still hungry ghosts. And so those notions are really, really powerful for me.

On the writing question, that's the hardest one for me. That's actually harder than money. And it's hard because the little boy in me values so much the ability to write well. It motivated me as a child to know that my words impact positively other people, gives me a sense of meaning and purpose.

And so if I hear a negative comment, it can be really hard. And you're a creative. As a creative, you put yourself out there and you wonder, oh, how are people going to react? What I have learned over time is to lean into that edge and ask myself, am I proud of what I've written?

And so if I can get to a point where I feel proud, there's a liberation that comes from that. I want to go back to the word enough. I think that's a really important word that people struggle with because it goes back to what we originally talked about in terms of playing by other people's scoreboard. Bigger houses, better cars. We live in a world where

Instagram and all these other social media apps feed us the very, very best moments of other people's lives. It used to be we would live on the street in like 1920 and maybe somebody would get a new car. But our comparison group was sort of our neighbors. And, you know, we were socioeconomically pretty close. We were politically, probably politically aligned. You know, we had a lot in common with people and people got farther ahead together. And now it seems like,

We can see everybody in the world. We can see the best, most happiest moments of their life or maybe not happy moments, maybe just the moments they want us to think are happy. It's that persona that they're projecting. That persona, that alter ego maybe perhaps. But it makes us feel as we don't have enough and that we should be doing that or we should be, why aren't I on vacation now? Why don't I have a new car? Why aren't I flying around in a private jet?

How do we learn to come to grips with enough? I think that you hit upon a core motivation that really distorts almost everything that we do. And our children are growing up in a world where they are repeatedly shown a message, which is that they are not enough.

And there's a lot in our economic systems that are built on this, right? Advertising activates that. Effective advertising says, you may be great, but you'd be much better if you had this car versus that clunker that you're driving, right? And we know that this is true, right? We have myths.

and stories that we use to teach parables that try to reinforce the message that just as you are, you are enough. Just as you are, you are enough. But it is, for all the reasons that we talked about before, the Teflon that exists inside of you, there is this subtle secondary benefit

which is if I feel that I am enough, then I will somehow be a complacent slug. Now, again, I'm going to do something unfair. I want you as a parent, as a father, imagine your two sons never feeling that they are enough. When you say this, what comes to mind is that

individually, this is terrible. Collectively, it leads to a lot of progress. Right. So as an individual human, it really sucks. I don't want my kids to ever feel that. But if we zoom out,

not feeling enough, not feeling like we have enough, not feeling it drives us to innovate. It drives us to do new things. It drives us to take risks and chances. And those risks and chances make medical advances. They, you know, send satellites into space. They start electric car company. You know, that feeling also propels society forward. Or am I wrong? Or take over some preexisting electric car company. Yeah.

Well, I didn't mean that, but like somebody started an electric car company, right? Because they were motivated to do so. I wasn't specifically mentioning Tesla here. I think that you're partially right. Think of the most brilliant ideas that you've ever had. Think of the eureka moments that people often have. In my experience, those real innovative moments are

actually occur when the brain is relaxed, when the heart is relaxed, okay? When we are not terrified that we are not enough. Now, if we know that that's true at the individual basis, what is the expression of that on a communal basis? And the expression of that, I think, is when we feel collectively

whether it's at a country level or a company level, when we can relax into the joy of doing something magnificent, something magical, greater innovation comes.

You look at, you know, a classic example of a community coming together, the United States space race. Okay. And that was motivated by a lot of fear of not being enough and being competitive for most of the, what's it been 50, 60 years. We have balanced both the negative aspects of that race.

oh my God, it's a cold war and we've got to compete with the Soviets, with the positive, reaching for the stars, creating something extraordinary. In fact, I would say what has sustained us is the reach for the stars experience. You know, Robert Browning, the poet, has a wonderful couplet. He says, man's reach should exceed his grasp or else what's a heaven for?

And I think that the counterbalance to using I'm not enough as motivation is reaching for heaven. Okay, so I am enough. I don't have to write another book. I'm enough. But what if I wrote a book that changed the world? What if I wrote a book that made somebody who's struggling feel a little bit better about themselves? What if I reach for those stars?

That's when I think the better angels of our nature come forward. What does that mean, better angels of our nature? Well, remember when we were kids and we'd watch like the Flintstones and Fred Flintstone would have a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other? Yes. Well, it's actually a phrase from Lincoln in which he talks about the better angels that exist within us. There are better aspects of our personality. And when we...

Acknowledge the negative self-talk. Acknowledge it. Thank it for doing its job of keeping us safe, but let it know that you're okay. You're an adult. You got this. You start to give space for the better angels of your nature to come forward and say to you, Shane, you've accomplished amazing things. You never have to record a great podcast again. Imagine this new conversation that you're going to have.

That's going to reach out. And someone who's never listened to your podcast before is going to be motivated. And they're going to write to you and they're going to say, dude, you really made me think. And I went back and I listened to old episodes and blah, blah, blah. That's the better angel of your nature. Different source of motivation towards the same sort of goal. It's reaching for the stars.

You know this internet cartoon, this New Yorker cartoon where you see these kids sitting around a fire and one kid is sitting in a ragged old suit or one adult is sitting in a ragged old suit and he says, but for one brief shining moment, our profits were through the roof. And it's referencing climate change and the crazy state of the world and all of this stuff.

implicit in that cartoon, which is poignant and bitter, is this notion of what did you do with the life that you were given? Now, that's a hard thing to be motivated by. But I will tell you, I'd rather be motivated by that voice than the extrinsic voice that says, if you don't succeed, you're somehow a piece of crap.

I think that is a powerful motivator in terms of, and I often catch myself thinking about this, and it motivates me, and it also sort of like, it's the gap between where I am and where I see my potential. Yes. There is something powerful and purpose-driven in acknowledging and living in that gap between who we are

and who we'd like to be without getting sucked into guilt, without getting sucked into shame, because we're not living amongst the stars. But I'll be damned if I leave this earth not having tried. And that, to me, is the perfect antidote to the hollowness and the depression that I experienced in my late 30s.

Do you have a ritual around journaling? Do you ask yourself the same questions? What does your routine of journaling look like? And how is it powerful? Well, to be clear, I've been journaling since I was 13. And I turned 60 this year. So journaling is a fundamental part of who I am. What I do is I take stock of myself.

I'm tired or my back is hurting or I had a wonderful, like yesterday I had a wonderful phone call with my sister Ann and I told her about having visited our home, our childhood home in Brooklyn last weekend. And that brought up all sorts of feelings and we shared feelings that, and I wrote about all of that this morning in the journal.

And in a way, it's kind of like processing what happened for me. And then it clears the day. And then I meditate. And then I will exercise. And that tends to be the ritual. Now, I hesitate because I've often spoken about journaling and morning rituals. And there is a little bit of a tendency to

in our world right now to place a little too much emphasis on the form. Where do you journal? Oh, do you meditate? And I just want to bring people back to the function because the function is taking a fix on your life. How are you feeling right now? And how is it impacting your life these days so that we're raising consciousness

so that we're not operating on autopilot. Well, we need to go deeper on two things there, not operating on autopilot and processing emotions. When you say that, the words, I just sort of understand them. But when I think about what that means, I don't know if I do understand that. What does it mean to process your emotions? And what you're hitting upon, Shane, is the fact that we're not socialized

to pay attention to feelings. But feelings have consequences in our life regardless of whether or not we pay attention to them. For example, you might be feeling afraid of the market going down and you've lost money and you're carrying that feeling and you start your day and then your son comes to you and says, "Dad, I need 20 bucks. I'm going on to the thing." "What am I made of? Money?"

So now what we've just done is asked your child to bear the burden of your anxiety about money for which he is ill-prepared and totally not at fault. Or it could be job related, or it could be the world related, or it could be that you had a fight with your spouse, or it could be... And what ends up happening is this unprocessed stuff spills out and impacts other people.

Right. You could, you could, without processing it, you could go to the gym and be feeling really like, and you're not paying attention. And then you do a deadlift and all of a sudden you blow out your back because you're not present. I'm really trying to make pedestrian examples of unprocessed to, so that we could make sense of what it means. You ask the question, what does it mean to process the feelings?

It means to take them down, to examine them, and then to put them back so they don't plague you for the rest of the day. So that you can then be fully present for your colleagues, for your spouse, for your children, so that you can be the adult you want to be. You leave them on the page. You feel them. And that's what you're doing when you're writing them. So you let yourself feel them rather than suppress them.

By feeling them, they dissipate because there's a natural dissipation to feeling our feelings. If we suppress them, then they boil over in these weird moments where we overreact to everyday situations like the child and the $20. You just got it. What other morning rituals do you have? Silence is really important for me. It's part of the way that I process.

When I was in college, I was so busy. I worked three jobs and going to college at the same time. And it was, I didn't take enough time in the morning. And so I would always feel like I was just like running at full steam, full speed. And so I'd say writ large, the larger ritual for me is taking a few hours of just not thinking

engaging with the world. I typically wake early, somewhere between five and six, but I don't wake with like, oh, I'm going to be super productive and drink my bulletproof coffee. I don't do any of that stuff. Like this morning when I was meditating, we have a hundred plus year old cottonwood tree on our farm.

And there's a nice little platform underneath. And so that's where I meditated this morning. And I noticed that I had a particular nuthatch bird come visit, which is relatively rare in our part. And it was kind of neat to listen to its song. So what's my ritual? Paying attention. I want to come back to a word that has come up a lot in this conversation.

last hour or so, which is resilience. How do we as parents go about developing that in our kids? And more importantly, I think you're going to turn this around to we have to exemplify it. How do we do that in ourselves? How do we build our resilience? Well, let's start with the goal. Why do you want them to be resilient? What is it that you want for them? To handle the ups and downs of lives with equanimity.

So resilience isn't the goal. Equanimity is the goal. Resilience in terms of perseverance and keep going and being able to... Well, what if they keep going on the wrong thing? Okay, so what is resilience and how does it help us? Okay, so resilience without discernment can create stubbornness. Resilience with discernment and skill means being able to apply stick-to-itiveness, perseverance...

in the right ways. Okay. So you might have a son who wants to play hockey and the first game he goes to, he does poor job. Okay. Do you force your son to go back on the ice or do you help your son understand what's really at play? Well, I feel ashamed because I'm not as good as, well, maybe you can contribute to the team, even though you're not as good as Johnny.

Or maybe you just enjoy playing hockey. And so you're not going to play for the NHL. That's okay. You see the opportunity to really unpack that. And that creates what I think is the resilience that extends beyond the individual moment. The realization that things can go not as you planned and you're still okay. And that is equanimity. And so we develop...

that by shifting our focus, understanding what the benefit is and the cost. That's discernment. What's really motivating me? Why do I do this? I like that a lot. I want to take that to relationships and talk to me about how stubbornness manifests itself in a relationship where we end up sort of butting heads with somebody we love and we care about.

and we don't intend to, we're not consciously thinking about it. How do we get out of this loop where we're both being stubborn about something? I promise I won't ask you about your relationships. I think you're absolutely right that this shows up in there. And there's a couple of things that I would say about that. One, again, using the same tools of unpacking and understanding what's important to you. So for example, in my own life,

One of the trigger points for me that's very well known, and my partner Allie knows this very, very well, it's very important for me to be generous. And if I feel that my generosity is being taken advantage of, I go from being Spider-Man to being the Hulk. And that goes back to childhood where I felt that my...

compassionate, gentle nature was taken advantage of. Okay. So that is programming that lies deep with inside of me and I'm fully conscious of it and it will still run occasionally. So you asked, how does this discernment show up in, in good relational skills? One thing that I

my partner, Ali, and I practice that is very, very helpful. And this is a line that comes from Brene Brown. And it's simply the story that I'm telling myself.

So imagine a Hulk in me gets triggered with discernment, with the self-knowledge, with what I call radical self-inquiry. I know that that Hulk lives within me. And rather than naming that with shame, which I used to, oh, you're right. Oh, it's terrible. I've welcomed in that part of me and understand that that part of me shows up.

so that I don't feel taken advantage of, so that I feel safe. I now layer in a new line, which is, okay, the story I'm telling myself is that you're about to take advantage of me. The concomitant reaction, the supporting reaction from Allie will be, she'll look at me and she'll say, if you don't want to do this, you don't have to do this. I'm not manipulating you. I love you and I appreciate your generosity.

And all of a sudden, Hulk is just sniffing flowers and is happy and returns to Bruce Banner state. Now, I think we all have those old programmings. The key is taking a fix on those and really understanding where they're operating and being gentle with yourself when they show up so they don't have to have the power to overwhelm you. And then you give your partner a tool

When you say the story I'm telling myself, you're going to leave me. You're attracted to that other person. You're going to spend all our money. We're going to be homeless, right? Because usually the stories we tell ourselves are really pretty extreme. I really think that's a powerful tool. What's required to do that?

is psychological safety in a relationship. And I don't think many of us feel completely safe in a relationship. A few years ago, I had a breakthrough thought, and that is that love is safe. And if it's not safe, it's not love. And this is also a lesson that many of us grew up without really understanding. Now, I agree with you. We need to be psychologically safe in the relationship.

And that safety is not just the responsibility of the other person. For example, if I was socialized and raised as many young boys are to be distant from my feelings, when my partner says to me, well, how do you feel about? And I can't answer that question, that may feel unsafe just by itself. Yeah.

And so part of the work of adulthood is overcoming and really working with these constructs, what I often refer to as subroutines that we grew up with, so that we can then approach the relationship from a more adult self perspective. You have to come to that through yourself, right? Like you have to address yourself and then you're trying to create safety with another person.

And those are sort of two different things. And you can't be safe with somebody else if you're not safe with yourself. Like if you don't accept yourself, you know, another person is not going to give you what you need because then you're so, you're codependent, like you're totally dependent on them to. Yes.

And that's unfair to them and that's unfair to the relationship. - And unfair to your children because you're modeling something that's not a healthy relationship. But keep going. - If you wanna trust the relationship, you have to have the psychological safety together. And that psychological safety allows you to be vulnerable. It allows you to tell your partner what you're feeling. It allows you to tell your partner the story you're telling yourself. And it allows you to be your whole self. What are the steps that couples can take

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

My partner, Allie, and I, what happened was I was sitting at the dining table and, or she was sitting at the dining table and I passed behind her with a load of laundry in my hands. And I was headed down to the basement to do the laundry. And she poked her head up and said, the story I'm telling myself is that you're leaving me. And I said, hon, I'm just doing the laundry.

And it was a funny moment. But in that moment, she was able to reveal something that might have been shameful. Like, what are you crazy? She just named the feeling that came up for her because part of her old trigger is being abandoned. I'll turn it around and I'll tell a story about myself.

Just two years ago, you read Reboot, so you know that I grew up under pretty adverse childhood circumstances, a lot of violence in the family, which led to a very, I wouldn't call it full-on body dysmorphia, but a really complicated relationship with my own body. One day, I'm in our closet, and I'm getting dressed, and I pull on a pair of jeans. And Allie, who loves me, looks me up and down,

right? In her mind, she's saying, do those genes look good on him? And what triggered in me was shame. It was like a lightning bolt. It went right back to childhood and all sorts of negative experiences I had as a child. Now, I had a moment. I had...

a choice. My response was going to be Hulk-like and it was going to be, what's the matter with you? And she would have said, totally unsafe. What the hell's going on? This guy's a crazy man. But instead I put my hand on my heart and I said, I just went right back to childhood. You did nothing wrong. I'm 60. It took me a long time to develop that skill. But I will tell you,

that when we can live our life with that kind of discernment, we can create our own psychologically safe moments. So what could have been a really difficult conversation became an opportunity to bond even more. This is hard. I know anybody who's listening to this is saying, this is really hard, but I will tell you it's not impossible.

Do you think a lot of people are scared to be vulnerable because deep down they don't think they're lovable? If somebody saw all of them, they wouldn't be... That's the lesson I learned as a child. Yeah. And more than anything, they probably inherited that belief system from one or both of their parents or caregivers. And they, in turn, probably inherited it. And so on and so on and so on and so on.

The question for all of us is what do we want to pass on? What is the lineage we would like to leave? Whether we're talking about the planet or we're talking about society or we're talking about our internal family dynamics, what do you want to leave your descendants? When I think about that as purpose, it overcomes all of that mishigas, good Yiddish word, foolishness that says...

you didn't do enough. You didn't make enough money. You didn't have enough success. Your book's not a bestseller. Whatever it is, the story you tell yourself, enough. We use the word discernment a lot. And we've used that in sort of like the context of choosing. And that's part of being an adult, but also part of being an adult

which we haven't talked about that involves discernment is the people you surround yourself with, your friends. And why do we keep people in our lives that bring us down or that we know aren't right, but we're scared to detach and let go? And how do we change this? Well, I think you just answered your own question. We're scared to detach and let go.

Right? Because the first question I was going to, when we look at patterns in our lives and maintaining relationships that are not good for us is a good example of a pattern. I remember working with a client who was complaining to me about her boss and her boss's name was John. And one day I said, wait, wasn't your last boss named John? She goes, yeah. Yeah.

And the boss before that, wasn't he named John? Yeah. What's your father's name? John. When we look at those patterns, it is so useful to ask ourselves, without inducing shame or blame, what is the benefit? Why do I keep this relationship going when they hurt me?

It's like what we need to develop is a kind of, you know, body hacking device that tells us don't do that. You, you do that and you see this friend and all you feel is terrible about yourself. A, why do you persist in seeing this friend? And B, what is it about the relationship with this friend that makes you feel bad about yourself?

You see that discernment coming in again? That what I call that radical self-inquiry. You know, we go see that friend that makes us feel bad and then we come home and we feel bad and we take it out on our spouse. We don't ask the question, why did I go in the first place? Like I asked that CEO, well, who hired all these people who can't make a decision on their own? And what was the benefit to you? What do I get out of this?

No matter how much shame the answer produces. I like hanging around with that person because it makes me feel like I am just as rich as they are. And I like to be cool. I want to be a member of the cool kids club. Or I like hanging out with that person because I can drink and I'm not drinking alone. So I feel better about myself. Nicely done. So the real issue isn't a friend. Right. The real issue is your relationship with alcohol.

Or your relationship with money or... There you go. Like, how do you end that? Do you have a conversation with them? Do you just stop inviting them to things? What do you do? My impulse would be always to have a conversation because the practice of having the conversation, even if the conversation isn't well received, is a good muscle for you to develop. Mm-hmm.

But you let go of the hope of quote unquote changing the other person. You're not in the fix people business, but you can start the conversation that says, hey, Joe, I was thinking about our relationship and I realized that one of the values I get out of the relationship is that it feeds a part of me that I don't really want to feed anymore. The part of me that feels like it's cool to party and drink.

And there are aspects of our relationship that I really enjoy and I don't really enjoy that aspect. And you do not have to change Joe, but I'm changing my relationship with that part of me. If we're going to get together, we're not going to drink. I took responsibility and I shifted the dynamic. Now, if Joe says, well, that's fucking boring. I don't have any desire to get together with you. Well, isn't that revealing? Okay. Remember love is safe.

And if it's not safe, it's not love. Because if that was really love, it would be safe enough for you to say, hey, I don't feel like drinking. You can share if it's safe enough. The complicated reasons that it might be that you don't want to be drinking. I mean, my father was alcoholic. I don't like to be in even social drinking situations. That's me. I'm not judging somebody else. Yeah. That's what I bring to the equation. That's my responsibility.

A lot of us don't have practice with that conversation. Right? So we have these competing things going on in our head, which is, I want to be a good person. I want to be a good friend. I want to be there for people. I know this relationship isn't serving me.

But I also don't quite know how to end that and maintain the, I'm a good person. I'm a good friend. So Shane, in your observation, I think you see something really profound, which is that we talked about socialization as children and what we learned. We learn about outsourcing, if you will, a sense of self-worth.

to objects, to accomplishments, to goals. We talked about internalization of patterns in order to keep ourselves safe or loved or that we belong. We talked about inheriting certain patterns. Now you're talking about the fact that we tend not to teach our children how to speak in a way that is life-giving.

And life affirming. Yeah. Right? And then we wonder why relationships struggle. We wonder why we have toxic workplaces. Well, because we give power to people who don't know how to use their words. Think about our kids when they're kids. We don't hit, we use our words, but we don't teach them how to use their words.

And for many folks, especially folks socialized as men, as boys, we don't even give them the words for their feelings. 100%. Oh, you're angry. Oh, that's the word. Oh, you're sad. Oh, that's the word. We just feel the violence, the physical. And oh, you're crying? I'll give you something to cry about. Rather than creating these conditions, we're

Where we raise humans who can say, the story I'm telling myself is that you're going to leave me. Or this relationship isn't working for me. And it's not because you're a bad person or I'm a bad person, but because this relationship isn't working for me. For all sorts of reasons that I can now name because I have words. I think that's powerful, but we don't get taught that. I'm just speaking of myself. I mean, maybe other people do, but like,

Nobody sort of modeled how to end a relationship. Nobody sort of modeled how to have a difficult conversation with a friend. Nobody sort of modeled. In fact, it was just the opposite, right? It was like you avoid difficult conversations. You don't have them. And I think that the teenage boy thing is like you become an asshole until the woman breaks up with you. Exactly. We have two choices, basically, that we present. Mostly males of the species.

But a lot of folks say nothing and passive aggressively act out until you can't take it anymore and you active aggressively act out. And we have these two choices, okay? And there's a whole range of human experience in between that is bypassed, right? We don't teach children to say, I'm scared, right?

Or that we allow it until a certain age and then our expectation is somehow they're going to self-soothe their way from fears. There is no moment in time where we say, I'm done. Fully realized adult. Maybe the Buddha is. Maybe the Dalai Lama is. But I don't know many people who are totally free of these things.

But the practice of growing up, the practice of becoming the adult that we want to be, you want to know a secret? Shane, it's fucking glorious. Because every day, a little bit better. Every day, just feeling a little bit better. And I don't pretend that I have it all right. I don't. Far from it. But it's like after years and years and years of sitting on the meditation cushion, 18 years now,

I'm finally understanding what it means to meditate. I'm finally internalizing what discernment really looks like. I'm really happy for you. I think that's what I'm feeling right now. One thing I would be remiss if we don't talk about because I found it super helpful and I'd love for you to explain people is OFNR. This is a foundational component of something called nonviolent communications, NVC. And that was first...

promulgated by Marshall Rosenberg. My interpretation is not 100% in compliance with traditional NVC training, but you're right to make the link between OFNR and what we're doing here. So OFNR is an acronym, and the letters stand for four words, observation, feeling, need, and request.

And if we want to think about it, we can think about it this way. This is discernment in action. And this is self-responsibility in action. So to go back to an earlier story, observation. I was putting on my pants and Ali looked at me up and down. Okay. That is a value neutral statement. It is non-assumptive.

An assumptive blaming observation would be, Allie judged me when she looked me up and down. So the first molecule of this is a simple observation. Jerry walked past Allie carrying a load of laundry. Fact. Feeling. When Allie looked Jerry up and down,

It felt like she was judging his body. That another feeling brings up old feelings of being hyper criticized. Jerry has a need to feel safe in his body. So in the future, here comes the request. When you're judging whether or not the jeans fit, can you tell me what you're doing?

So I don't have to go through the whole cycle. You see how that works? The problem is Shane, that we confuse O and F all the time. You don't care about our relationship. You're always late to our lunches. That's a feeling.

And it's an interpretation. It's an assumption. So being late is the observation, but all of the subjectiveness to that is the feeling. And what do we react to? The subjectiveness, the story. We react to the feeling, the story we're telling ourselves. I often say that the story we tell ourselves is the most powerful story in the world. And if we, by breaking it up, and this is why you responded to OFNR, by

By breaking it up, we pull the action, the stimulus away from the response. And we create more space in that place. And the more space we can create between the stimulus and the response, the more beneficial our relationships are going to be. The more we'll interrupt the story, that powerful story that we tell ourselves.

holy crap, look at what I just did there. I just told myself that you're leaving me, even though I know you're going down to the laundry room. And in a way that the framework enables you to take the invisible and make it visible with your partner, with whoever you're talking to, right? You're taking these invisible thoughts in your head. It makes visible the invisible. It makes conscious the unconscious. So by making that visible,

you're allowing the other person to calibrate the visibility of these. No, that's not what I'm doing, right? So you're separating them into sort of like fact interpretation. And then the other person, they would agree with the facts because the facts are not subjective. But the feeling, which is the subjective part, by making it visible, you're allowing the other person to be like, no, they're calibrating

sort of, or they're giving you feedback on that feeling, which is like, you're responsible for your feelings, but they can tell you their intent and their, their sort of what they were. You're absolutely right. And what do you do for yourself when you do that? When you separate that? Cause you went to what you're doing to the other person and how it allows them to calibrate. What are you doing for yourself? Well, you're allowing yourself to distinguish between feeling and observation. Yeah.

Which then interrupts that story making that we do. Well, it allows you to go from reacting without reasoning, which is very animal, which is what we are. We are animals, right? So we do tend to react without reasoning in certain situations we get triggered, right? Especially when it comes to identity or territory or how we see ourselves or ego or safety. Right.

And you're creating that pause between stimulus and response when you do it. And you're allowing your sort of self to take a double take or a step on that. Yeah. I mean, I often visualize it as the prefrontal cortex grabs the wheel away from the amygdala. Right? And it's like, oh, wait, my adult brain kicks in.

because I separated stimulus and response. And I can see how the more power I have, maybe the greater responsibility I have to do that, right? Let's take it up to level. Imagine a president with nuclear power operating on the merged observation and feeling.

Oh, your ship crossed one of our ships. We're going to go to war. Literally, wars happen. Yeah. Yes. Yes, they do. Yeah. Unfortunately. Right? This is why this, I call this really a tool of discernment. And being able to do that radical self-inquiry to be able to say what's actually going on for me is a necessary first step to pulling apart observation, feeling, reaction. Right.

We always end on the same question, which is, I think really, I'm curious about your answer. We've touched on it a little bit throughout the episode, but it's what is success for you? It's really, really hard at this stage in my life to disconnect the notion of success from equanimity. What did I do yesterday? We have two fountains on our property around the house and one kept shorting out

And I went to Home Depot and I got a new plug and I found the short in the wire and I rewired that and I put it all together and the fountain's now working again without tripping the ground fault interrupt. Why do I tell that story? Because it was so satisfying. And I had a conversation with my son, Sam, that was philosophical in nature. He would love this podcast.

And it was so satisfying. And I talked to my sister, Anne, who's got her own struggles right now. And it was so satisfying. And Allie and I watched an episode, the latest episode of Alone, season 10, Alone in Saskatchewan. And it was so satisfying. That is a successful life. It's filled with enough. It's filled with love and safety and belonging. Notice what I did not say, the material stuff. Those things are important.

But they are the container, not the content. Success for me is content that makes me feel at the end of the day, not bad, dude. You did a pretty good job. That's a beautiful response. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you for the conversation today. This has been one of the most incredible conversations I've ever had on the podcast or not. Well, now you're going to make me blush. Thank you for the work that you do as well as for the invitation to come on the show.

Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project.

The Farnham Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog.com. Until next time.