High Performance Coach: How To Build Psychological Resilience - Dr Aria
02:06:58 Share

Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

Hey friends and welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week it's my immense privilege to sit down with academics and authors and creators and entrepreneurs and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help us build a life that we love. What you're about to hear is an interview between me and Dr. Arya. Now Dr. Arya is a clinical psychologist who specializes in psychological resilience. Dr. Arya: Resilience is the ability to accept

understand, process and grow through emotional pain. First of all, we have to accept and acknowledge it. Next, we have to release and process it. Then we have to understand it. And then we can grow through it. And the final A is to act in line with our values and our vision. He's worked with Academy Awards winners, high profile creative artists, global entrepreneurs and some of the world's most successful CEOs. And I've worked with individuals who've created multi-billion pound companies and products who

are deeply dissatisfied and discontent with where they are. It may be bringing in a huge amount of income, but they don't feel fully fulfilled

because they've lost something along the way. He's also the co-author of the best-selling book A Mindful Year and he regularly features in publications like The Times and The Telegraph and Men's Health. And in the conversation we talk about firstly our life quest and how we can find our truth, power of vulnerability and how to build greater resilience. We talk about the importance of struggle when it comes to growth and there were so many parts of the conversation where I literally got goosebumps from the way that he was describing the stuff. I was like oh my god this is like he's literally speaking truth so so that

hits my soul so much that I'm getting goosebumps. There's a storm coming and it's going to hit. The question is, will we be able to find the cam amidst the storm? Now, before we get into this episode, I've got a very quick announcement, which is that I'm launching a Telegram community for the podcast. Now, I'm going to be honest. Initially, the reason for starting this podcast was quite a selfish one in that I wanted to learn from cool and interesting people and apply their insights to my own life. And it's just generally easier to hang out with people if you invite them onto your podcast, rather than if you just want to have a chat with

them. But over the last 18 months of running this podcast, it's grown ridiculously fast. And actually, we've had so many messages and YouTube comments and emails and Instagram DMs and stuff from people talking about how much value that you guys have gotten from the episodes as well. And so we're planning to change direction a little bit in that instead of me just treating these conversations as a personal therapy session with the guests, which we might still do a little bit of, I actually want to learn more about you guys who are listening to the podcast or watching the podcast and understand what are the things that you would like to see from the podcast.

And I really want to better understand what challenges you're going through, what struggles you're going through, so that we can then kind of tailor the guests and tailor the questions to that. So that's why we're starting up this completely free Telegram community. If you hit the link in the show notes or in the video description, wherever you're watching or listening to this, you'll be able to sign up completely for free. It's always going to be free. You will never have to pay.

pay a penny. The group is called the Deep Divers, which I think is kind of funny. And it's basically a group where I'll be posting some of the behind the scenes stuff from the podcast. But also as we get new guests coming on, I'll be asking in that group if you guys have any specific questions for the guest so that can help inform the direction of the interview. I'm also going to be posting a few polls and questionnaires and surveys in that group. So if you're interested in kind of sharing more about you and about your life,

then you can do it through that group. And then again, that'll just help us figure out how do we best make this podcast as value add for you guys as possible. And we're also gonna be using the Telegram group to give away some freebies. Like for example, often authors on the podcast will come and they'll gift us like 50 of their books, for example. I don't need 50 copies of an author's book, but it's the sort of thing that we can absolutely send to people around the world completely for free. Anyway, if that sounds good and you'd like to join the community, then do hit the link in the podcast show notes or in the video description, wherever you're seeing this or listening to this. And now let's get on with the episode.

So, Dr. Arya, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Oh, it's a pleasure. I'm delighted to be here. So much to talk about around mindfulness, around high performance, around behavior change, around the things that we struggle with when it comes to behavior and things. But before we go there, I wonder if, for people in our audience who might not be familiar with your work or who you are, I wonder if you can just kind of blitz through your backstory in a few minutes. Like, how did we get here? What's the backstory? Yeah.

I was born and bred in Glasgow. So my father is Persian, he's from Iran, and his family were from Diplomatics close to the Shah of Iran and he studied medicine. And when he was 19 he moved to London and began to train in the UK. And my mum grew up in a very tough upbringing in Glasgow and her family said,

you know, if you wanted to go into the helping profession, you should be a nurse. But my mama said, no, I want to be a doctor. And she was the first person in her family to go to university. And she met my dad at medical school. So fast forward a number of years, I was born, my older brother,

And there was two of us for about 11 years and then we had a younger brother join us. He was, the joke is he was a surprise to my mum, or a surprise to my dad, but not to my mum. And we had a very, very close family, huge amount of love. My father put a huge amount of focus and credence on academia and developing yourself. My mum

I would say is almost like an angel. She's got a heart full of love and really taught me the values of compassion and understanding. And in terms of my career scope, initially school, and then I went to Edinburgh to study medicine. And that was really following the footsteps of my parents and was my first lesson in the difference between doing what society deems to be

what you should do versus following your intuitive wisdom and your heart, so to speak. My dad was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, so a type of cancer, and was grade four, it was very progressed, and he was given a pure prognosis of about 15% survival. And again, that was my first introduction to mortality or life not going the way that you would expect it to, and really dealing with a reality that you don't want to accept.

And my girlfriend went through a traumatic incident and that's the first time I think I really felt out of control where something's happening and you have no ability to change the outcome. And I spiraled into depression. I didn't know how to handle my emotions. From a kid growing up, I was very quiet. And if I felt anything, I'd push it down. I would just go into my head, create an internal world. And I really struggled. It just began to spiral down and...

I was at the point of considering suicide, I was on medication, and I had this moment where my brother, out of love, thought, "Look, let's get away. I'll take you to a beautiful place. We'll just have time together." And I remember I was standing on a beach in Mauritius with him and the sun was shining and the waves were rolling up to my feet. And I looked around and the scenery was beautiful and I was miserable.

And I didn't want to be here. And in that moment, I had this instant that no matter what is happening around you, there's two paths. There's the external journey and there's the internal one. There's inner peace and joy and meaning and fulfillment. And these two are not necessarily connected. And so I really made a spiritual intention to go on a journey to find

what at that time I could only describe as inner peace. How can I find that sense of serenity and calmness so that no matter what is happening to me, I can still remain standing. And so to try and get, yeah, fast track that I left university, dropped out probably more apt, began doing the only thing which I knew that I loved, which was working for charities.

began fundraising trained to be an actor because i struggled to find my own voice and i i learned a lot through that process and then one day i was actually on a pilgrimage with my father who couldn't continue the couldn't really carry out the uh the pilgrimage on his own so i was pushing him in a wheelchair and i just had this

whisper that came from my heart, which is go back and study psychology. So I literally changed tact, went back. I had six days before UCAS closed, sent up application, did a doctorate in UCL in clinical psychology, specialized in the overlap between physical health and mental health, particularly looking at

If you were dealt a hand at its very worst, individuals who were told they had a life-limiting disease or they had X number of months to live, how would you live out the rest of that time with as much joy as possible? And then I worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital with individuals whose children were given a prognosis of a terminal illness. And as a parent, whenever you're suffering this

immense emotional pain, how do you still turn up to your child? How do you still be there for them and squeeze any joy that is still left in that time that you have, which is so precious? And then I did my clinical research in sustainable weight loss. And then from then, it was another scenic route to high performance work. But I think that's probably taken about 14 minutes already. Wow, that's a...

It's quite a circuitous kind of path. I think often, I find this a lot with people on this podcast, where someone gets interviewed because they've made it in a particular field. And you would think that the path was like, oh, I knew what I wanted and I just kind of went for it because why not? But actually, there's a lot of windy twists and turns along the way to get somewhere. I see life as a... It's a quest. It's a quest to...

return to your truth. And along the way as you grow up, you pick up certain beliefs or ideas, your mind is conditioned in a certain way because of the accidents of birth, because of your personal experiences, and we build up all these layers and coping mechanisms and this armoury that we put on to protect ourselves. And this quest is an unravelling, a shedding to return to

who you truly are. And that's the path that we're all on. And there's a quote by A.H. Almas, which always stands by me, which is, all these conflicts, the difficult situations, the problematic situations are not chance or haphazard. They're actually yours. They're specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. And that part of you loves you

more than anything else, has created roadblocks to lead you back to yourself. And you're not going in the right direction unless there's something pricking you in the side, telling you, look here. And that part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures and it will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose. So it's like the obstacles that you encounter are not necessarily a sign that you're going in the wrong direction, but that you're going in the right direction.

The obstacles are fire, and in order to be refined, we need to apply heat. There is no growth without struggle. Painful experiences are why we change, and the difficulty is how we grow. Without it, we'll be staying in the same place, and the one principle of the universe is evolution. We evolve. The world evolves.

And it will continue to evolve and it's evolved for 13.8 billion years and it will continue to evolve, the estimates are, for hundreds of trillions of years. So this process will continue and we've been given this gift of a snapshot, literally just a micro blink in this history of this universe. And we are part of that evolution. And that's what I see our purpose here is to evolve.

One of the things I love about your story and the kind of when you've been on other podcasts and things is that you, I think, do a really good job of combining the woo side of life with like the science-y side of life. And I think a few years ago, I would have been very skeptical of all of the spiritual stuff. But recently I've started...

reading a bunch of Alan Watts, trying to understand the whole Zen thing, coming across the power of now and that kind of stuff. And then speaking to a bunch of guests on the podcast, sometimes during the conversation, sometimes outside of the conversation, a lot of people discover their route to spirituality through psychedelics or something like that to make them realize, oh, hang on, there's something bigger out there. But then you kind of take that side of things and combine it with the clinical psychologist approach.

I'm very similar to you. I grew up with academia and I grew up with science and I trained as a scientist practitioner and I value the mind so much.

And my expertise is in psychology, is in understanding how does the mind work? Why do we do what we do? And how can we develop greater self-awareness to be able to see that the mind is a tool? It's not who we are. It is an instrument. And we can use that instrument for immense good, or we can use it for atrocities. We can use it to

become closer and bring the best out of our partner and we can use it in a way that will end up devastating a relationship and hurting the partner. We've created the atomic bomb and we've created treatments for cancer. So it's a tool and how we use it is integral to the welfare of ourselves and others. And I always place so much importance on the mind and on science and

I'll be 40 this year, in the last couple of years what I've realized is that there is more to what we can see and there's more to what we can test in a laboratory. And I'm putting more value on what I feel and the experiences which I'm having which I cannot explain. Because the truth is we can only see a fragment of the light spectrum anyway and we don't see mobile waves or

infrared waves, we don't hear every sound there is. We're actually just having this limited splice of reality. And you can even bring in quantum physics. I used to, you know, I used to hear we're all connected. The Buddhists or the Hindus or the mystics would talk about oneness and experiencing oneness with all. And when you look at quantum physics, it's

On a subatomic level, 99.999% is space. There is actually no quantum physical difference between myself and this table. Whenever I'm tapping the table, it's the electrons in this electromagnetic field hitting off the electrons in the electromagnetic field of the table. But I sense it as being solid.

So the spiritual, I think, and the scientific are often intimately intertwined. And there's a way of holding both. And when we look at even clinical psychology and we look at cognitive behavioral theory or we look at third wave approaches to mental health, where do these come from? They actually grew out of ancient contemplative traditions. From cognitive theory grew out of Stoic philosophy.

Mindfulness-based approaches grew out of Buddhist and Hindu and yogic and meditative practices. So if we're going to ask ancient questions such as, what is the purpose of my life? Where do I find meaning in my life? How can I live a good life that is rich and full of meaning and joy and peace? Then really a lot of the ancient thinkers and ancient traditions were

hold hold vehicles which we we can begin to use to get closer to our own truth love it okay so many so many kind of um paths to go down here i wonder if we can kind of frame this in the almost with the with the lens of high performance so so you work with um kind of executive ceos founders like people running you know multi-million to multi-billion dollar companies and

So what are the problems that people like that, or actually, and I guess kind of more quote normal people, what are the problems that people face in their day-to-day life and their day-to-day work where you find that your experience kind of combining spiritual with the scientific can help? So individuals that I work with are...

highly brilliant, they have creative minds, they have very powerful minds, they are self-motivated, they're interested in self-growth, they often come from a place of care and compassion. And something will have happened where they feel stuck in their life right now. And it's not something they're used to. They're struggling with an aspect of their life. And it could be

that they wake up one day and everything from an external perspective looks impressive. But then they have this question which is nagging, which is, "Is this it? Is this what my life is all about?" Or they focus so much on career and on supporting people around them that they've lost that sense of balance.

And they've lost that sense of who they are. Or their relationships are suffering. Again, they've put so much focus that suddenly they've lost intimacy in the relationship. Or they've lost connection. And again, they wake up one day and they look at the person next to them and they know that they love them. And they know that they make a great team. And that they're amazing parents together. But it's almost like...

two individuals just living in the same house. They don't have that connection which they could see they had 10 years ago. And that is so tough because it's so tough whenever you know how you'd like life to be, but you don't know where to start. And what they've recognized is it's their own psychology, which is often the biggest barrier.

Your own mind can either propel you with such force or it can hold you back and keep you paralyzed and keep you stuck. And where I come in is I happen to have dedicated 10, 15, 20 years to understanding the mind because the mind follows certain principles and certain rules. And the more that you can intimately get to know your mind, the more you can actually begin to

take action or have clarity from your mind. So it's not about having peace of mind, it's about having peace from mind. And in those moments of stillness, life becomes so clear. You have clarity, you see what has gone wrong and where you should go next. So when someone comes to you as a new client or patient or whatever you call it, like a client,

Do they know what's up with them and what their problem is? What sort of questions do you ask them to unravel what's going on and what's keeping them stuck? They often have a very good idea of the pain that they're in or what they're suffering. And it could be that life has dealt them a hard hand at this point in the game of life.

And even bringing in Buddhist philosophy, one of the first noble truths is that life involves suffering. And from my perspective, there are three aspects of reality we cannot avoid. Life involves pain, it involves uncertainty, and it involves change. And we all face unexpected and unwanted events in life.

I went through three years ago where the woman that I loved who we built a life up together over 10 years, one day told me that she'd been having an affair with a man from work and is pregnant with his child. That was, for me at the time, one of the worst things I could have

imagined, just one of them, because it felt like I had lost this world that I'd built up. I'd lost my wife and our dog Alfie and the home we created and her family who became like family to me and this imagined life of growing old together. To see an old man and woman on the street, and I'd imagine that would be us together. And it just came crashing down.

Now that just happened to be my story. Everyone has gone through deep heartache and pain. So we lose someone we love, or we're a single when we'd love to be in a relationship, or we struggle to conceive, or we become pregnant when we didn't expect to, or we become unwell or a loved one does, or we just face these curveballs and challenges at work in our personal life that we have no control over and we didn't see coming. And so often people know what the problem is

But what they can tell is they feel overwhelmed or they feel isolated or there is a lack of security in terms of what is happening and they want to find a way from the darkness into the light. And that is the path that we go on. There's a storm coming and it's going to hit. The question is, will we be able to find the calm amidst the storm? The path involves cultivating that inner

strength and knowing and resilience and compassion in order to deal with whatever life throws at us. Because success doesn't depend on what happens to you, it's determined by what we do next.

And if we can cultivate that place of calm so that no matter what is happening, even if there's a storm raging, the stillest part of a hurricane is at center. And that place of stillness and calmness and serenity exists within all of us, deep down. It's a field of consciousness which we can access. And from that place of calmness and serenity, it doesn't mean that life isn't

difficult, but there's a sense of ease and we begin to flow with life and then life begins to change. The only constant life of change. The question is, are we fighting against it or are we going to flow with it?

All right, we're just going to take a quick break from the podcast to introduce our sponsor, which is very excitingly Huel. I have been a paying customer of Huel since 2017. So it's been about six years now that I've been using Huel fairly regularly. I started eating Huel in my fifth year of medical school. And I've been using Huel regularly ever since because, you know, I like to be productive. I've, you know, my calendar is full with a lot of things. And often I

don't have the time or don't make the time to have a particularly healthy breakfast or a particularly healthy lunch. My favorite flavor is salted caramel because for 400 calories, you get 40 grams of protein, which is absolutely insane. And you also get a decent healthy mix of carbohydrates and fiber and fat, along with 26 different vitamins and minerals, which are all very good for the

There's nine different flavors of this to choose from. My favorite is the banana version and also the salted caramel version. So what I do is I take my two scoops, I put them into my Nutribullet blender type thing, although you can just use a normal shaker if you want. I mix it up normally with water, but a little bit of milk to add a bit more of a milkshake like consistency to it. And then I just sip that while I'm on my desk doing my work in the morning. And it ensures that I get a very healthy breakfast in that's nutritionally complete rather than some high sugar cereal, which is what I would have defaulted to instead.

Also, Huel is ridiculously reasonably priced. Like a meal for 400 calories comes out to £1.68 per meal, which is super, super cheap compared to what the alternative would be if you were ordering takeout, for example. Anyway, if you like the idea of getting these cheap and healthy and nutritionally complete meals in your diet, then head over to huel.com forward slash deep dive. And if you use that URL, huel.com forward slash deep dive, they will send you a free t-shirt, which are quite nice, and also a free kind of shaker bottle type thing with your first order. So thank you so much Huel for sponsoring this episode.

This episode is very kindly brought to you by Trading212. Now, people ask me all the time for advice about investing because I've made a bunch of videos about it on the YouTube channel. And my advice for most people is generally invest in broad stock market index funds, which is exactly what you can do completely for free with Trading212.

It's a great app that lets you trade stocks and funds and ETFs and foreign exchange if you really want to. And one of the great things about the app is that if you're new to the world of investing, you can actually invest with fake money. You don't have to put real money in. They've got a practice mode where you invest fake money and then it actually tracks what the market is doing in real time. So you can see, had I invested £100 into this thing, what would my return have been? X weeks or X months further down the line. Once you've got some comfort with that, then it's super easy to deposit money into your Trading212 account. You can use Apple Pay like I do initially, or you can use a direct bank transfer.

And then once the money is in your Trading212 account, then you can invest it in basically whatever you want. The other really cool feature about Trading212 is their pies feature. So what you can do is you can follow people who've created investing pies. For example, someone might have a pie where, I don't know, 30% of it's Apple and 20% is Tesla and 10% is the S&P 500. And you can follow people on the app and see what pies they've created. And you can see the performance of those pies. And then you can just copy and paste a particular pie into your own account.

And so that means like, let's say you've got a hundred pounds to invest and you've put 50 of it into the S&P 500, but you want to be a little bit more experimental with the other 50 pounds. You can invest it into a pie where someone else who's generally a pro or someone in their bedroom who just loves the markets has already done all the homework for you. The app also lets you auto invest, which is a great thing because then you can automatically invest a percentage of your paycheck into the thing every month.

And so if you haven't yet started with investing and you want to give it a go, then you can download the app on the App Store. And if you use the coupon code ALI, A-L-I at the checkout, that will give you a totally free share worth up to £100. It's available on iPhone and Android, and you can check it out by typing in TRADING212 into your respective App Store. So thank you so much, TRADING212, for sponsoring this episode. When your, I guess, ex-wife broke this news to you a few years ago.

It strikes me that like you would have been more prepared than the normal than a normal person who's not studied this stuff to deal with that kind of turbulence. How to what extent did your prior kind of knowledge, understanding background in this kind of stuff help you to navigate that? And I guess how did you navigate it or was that something that just hit you from like left to field and you were like, oh, shit, like.

Things are not as easy as like Marcus Aurelius' book made it seem. Whenever it hit, all the principles which I've worked from just naturally came into play. It worked through me. I don't think it's something which I consciously began to think, okay, oh, I should bring this in or I should bring that in. It's something which I'd already begun to practice as part of my life

just the individual I am, I can only talk about something or teach or train something that I have lived by and that I do on a daily basis. Everything that I speak to you about with my clients, I do every day for hours every day. I'm continually wanting to focus on becoming present. This present is the only moment that exists. And in this moment right now, everything is actually okay.

All is well in this present moment. Where does suffering kick in? It's when our mind pulls us out of the present moment and then replays what has happened or creates a story or a narrative around what has happened. Oh, your wife has had an affair. It will then add on these layers of perception on top of reality. It's the reality that she's had an affair. This layer of perception is

I'll never be able to get through this. I can't handle this, it's too painful. There must be something wrong with me because this has happened. I could have prevented it. What should I have done earlier or quicker or sooner? It's this story, this narrative which the mind creates around it, which is like adding gasoline onto a fire and it would burn stronger and more brightly. And what I have come to experience is that continually coming back to the present moment,

is the first part. And acknowledging reality. A lot of the time we try and fight against reality, but reality will begin to sink in the more that we accept what has happened externally, but also internally, what's coming up within me. Where, and in the beginning, in that instance, there was so much sadness. And of course there was anger which was fused into it. And so it's then acknowledging the emotion,

and allowing it to pass. And that's a process. So I actually have an ARIA framework. So the A is to acknowledge what is happening around you and within you. The R is to begin to release this feeling, to continually let it flow through you, to recognize that the feeling is within you. Now, if a feeling is within you, it's then our responsibility to deal with it. It would have been too easy to say, do you know, you made me feel this way because of what you have done.

And so I'm going to blame you. But what happens in that instance is I give away all my power. Responsibility is the ability to respond. The ability to act is the definition of power. And so responsibility holds great power. If I hold my responsibility, I hold my power. Now, where the mind often fights against that is it conflates responsibility with fault. And the mind doesn't want to hold on to fault because it's too heavy for it. But analogy would be, let's say you're

Do you ever go walking or do you ever? I dabble. Yeah, if you're going for a little. I go for a stroll. A little stroll. I head down to Pret, use my Pret coffee subscription to get free coffee, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And so imagine you're going on a walk, but imagine, in fact, you're in the countryside. Yeah. And a storm will bring back the storm, a storm hits. Now, whenever you set off, it was sunny skies, rain.

It was a lovely light breeze, the sun was shining. Now a storm is hitting and it's torrential rain and high winds. The weather change is not your fault. It would be ludicrous to think it's your fault, but it is your responsibility how you're going to respond. Are you going to take out your jacket and put it on a waterproof? Are you going to find shelter? Are you going to even call for someone to pick you up?

Our feelings, it's not our fault. Okay. They've arisen. The sadness is natural based on what had happened. But it's my responsibility. How do I deal with and manage those feelings next? So acknowledge, release. Yeah. Then the I is to inquire into what this event is triggering within you. Because reality...

is okay. Everything is just unfolding. Like we talked about, the universe is just continually unfolding, and it has for 13.8 billion years, and it will continue to do so. What the mind does is it places a judgment on this event. This event is good or this event is bad. This is success or this is failure. And if we feel hurt, it will have triggered something within us.

There's something that your mind is probably personalizing or imagining will be the outcome. And our task is to figure out what that is. So to give you a little example, often what the mind will do is it will personalize what the person has done. So in this example, with my wife at the time having an affair, my mind will personalize it and say, there must be something wrong with me. I'm not mad enough or I'm not good enough or whatever that may be.

Truly, the principle I work with is that whatever anyone else says or does tells you nothing about you. It only tells you about what is going on within them, within their thoughts and their feelings. My wife at the time didn't take those actions because of how she viewed me. She took it because she was in a place of hurt and fear and we'd lost intimacy and connection.

Now, my responsibility, did I play into that context 100%? And I learned from that. And I did. And I looked at the part that I played that created a situation out of which she acted. But I'm not taking responsibility for her actions. That is more indicative of what she was going through.

So once we begin to, once the emotion has passed and we can begin to look at this, we can actually begin to learn and grow through it. The way that I define resilience is the ability to accept, understand, process and grow through emotional pain. First of all, we have to accept and acknowledge it.

Next, we have to release and process it. Then we have to understand it, inquire, what is my mind making this about? Learn from it. And then we can grow through it. And the final A is to act, to act in line with our values and our vision, with the place that we want to go to and the values that we want to hold close to us on our path. Because I've worked with

So many business leaders and visionaries and CEOs who, whenever something huge or detrimental happens, particularly to their business or in their personal life, they lose sight of their vision. And we all need something to move towards, something that is in a way aspirational. And how we do it is so crucial.

Royal Robins, one of my favorite quotes is from this pioneer in rock climbing and he'd scale Yosemite, but he was the first one to do it without anchoring or hammering pins into the rock surface and creating damage. And he said, getting to the top is nothing. The way you do it is everything. And I've worked with individuals who've created multi-billion pound companies and products

who are deeply dissatisfied and discontent with where they are because they're not proud of what they've created. It may be bringing in a huge amount of income, but they don't feel fully fulfilled because they've lost something along the way. And so the way we do something, staying close to who we are,

returning to who we are and moving from that place of freedom and integrity and grace is part of a fulfilling life for everybody we we've talked a lot about or you've mentioned quite a bit this thing around uh this idea of returning to who you are yeah and um you know we just talked about values and vision yes um how does one begin to figure out what their vision or values are

I guess I've come across exercises and things that you can do for companies. Like every company needs a mission, a vision, a value, values and all that jazz. How do you approach that for an individual? The simplest question would be, what would you love? Ali, what would you love? So if we looked at relationships, what would you love to experience in a relationship? Intimacy, closeness, intimacy.

together all these somewhat cliche sounding words that are making me feel a bit embarrassed even as i say them um and what is it about even talking about intimacy or closeness that is embarrassing i think well embarrassing may be the wrong word i think it feels it feels kind of cliche like what what do i want what what what would i love oh i love intimacy and closeness i feel like and what's wrong with cliche

What's wrong with cliche? I feel like I almost should be able to come up with something that feels less cliche, more true to myself. I guess I feel like I almost should know what I want and be able to describe that in more words than just throwing out a word like togetherness or something like that. So you just started by describing some of the most powerful, meaningful forces in life. Closeness.

intimacy, connection. I do not know any individual who would not love to experience closeness and connection and intimacy. That's beautiful. It's literally, it's like hearing poetry to me whenever you spoke about that. And then you undermined it. And then you completely undermined what you love and what is important to you. And actually holding and putting out there

Felt too scary. It was no just it was like yeah, keep it in here. Keep it in here. It's safer here Yeah, and potentially your mind might have even built up an identity around being unique and doing doing things differently and having a clear specific Idea of what something is for you and that creates a huge amount of pressure because you have to have everything figured out before you even start and

Try going into a relationship with that. It's going to be, it's going to create anxiety or it's going to hold us back from even taking a step into it because that's a huge ask. I wouldn't even know where to start with that. But if we go back to your truth, what was important to you was intimacy. What was important was connection and connection.

And for me then the work would be continually going, going back and knowing and holding our truth and beginning to act from that place of truth, expressing our truth. Because you can have intimacy in other areas other than just a romantic relationship or connection or openness. And we can look at, okay, what is it? Well, if I asked you, what is it that in a way would foster connection or intimacy? In a romantic context?

Or in any relationship. Yes. Yeah. Or you think about it. I guess, I guess for me, it's where we can enjoy each other's company without like, we can enjoy the moments where we're doing something, but also the moments where we're doing nothing. Yeah. Yeah. And there's something about that that feels like, yeah, that would be really nice. Yeah. Um,

I always have an image of, I love the idea of going on a long road trip and we're both listening to the same audio book and pausing it at moments where it's like, oh shit, did you, did you like that? That just happened. And kind of having that experience shared. So I think moments of sharing experience. And I think when I was at university, I always just liked studying with people in the room with me, even though we were all doing different things, but there was a sense of

a sense of closeness, togetherness, connection, sharing the same Wi-Fi, but doing different types of work that always felt really fulfilling and meaningful. And if I look back at my university experience, those were amongst the moments that I look back on with the greatest fondness. Those moments of all of us just sitting in the same room or in the same library doing our work. And I think that is some of the sense of connection that I would love to have in

Basically all all areas of my life. Yeah, that's beautiful. And what you described to me echoes what spiritual teachers and mystics have been saying for thousands of years. You described what it looks like. And what I heard from that is you can be with someone and you can be doing the same thing or you can be doing nothing. But you're you're there together and all is well. Yeah. Yeah. And in that there is.

Pure acceptance of the other you could be doing something together. You could be doing nothing, but you were seeing the person in front of you and you're fully Appreciating who they are and you're not trying to you didn't describe trying to control or change the other person you're seeing them and opening your heart and Experiencing the beauty of who they are in your presence even if that's doing nothing and that is love to see the other appreciate them and acknowledge

this beautiful person in front of you. And even in your description of being in a library where people are together and they're close to each other, but they're also independent. They might be doing their own work or they might be doing their own thing. You know, they're sharing the same Wi-Fi connection, but they're doing something with that Wi-Fi connection.

There's an ancient Persian poet, and he describes that love is not two becoming one, but two people being together in the same place, but drinking from their own cup. That love is actually like two pillars of a building. They're both part of the building, but they're independent.

That love is like the cypress tree and the oak tree, that are not too close together, that they're overlapping, they're not too far apart, that there's just so much distance, but they're not in each other's shadow. They're standing, they're close enough together, but they have their own independent sense of self. Everything you described there, some of the most beautiful, poetical, mystical minds have described in different ways. And that is truth.

And so whenever we have a better, when we can explore this and begin to understand it, it becomes so clear about what potentially the next path will be because we're returning to what we would love most. And that's our task for Ali to keep on returning to what you would love most. What would you love most? And we allow that to direct the way. So this might just be my failure of imagination, but

With the whole values thing, people often say that you want to find a partner who shares your values.

That has always been a bit like, surely everyone has broadly similar values, you know, living in the same society. If you go to med school with someone, chances are you value kind of traditional measures of success. Chances are you value honesty and integrity and you don't want to be with someone who's a liar. And those all seem almost like table stakes rather than something, I guess, quote, unique. Yeah.

What am I kind of missing here? Do people have their unique sets of values or? I'd say, like you're saying, at our core, there will be values of love, compassion, understanding. And that is part of human consciousness. You know, there's wisdom, there's creativity, there's an appreciation for the present moment. The difference is,

some of us have lost, most of us, all of us have lost or are not yet back to that place of truth. So if love is truth, it all comes back to really love or fear. There are two forces in the world, love and fear. And we're either moving from a place of love or we're moving from a place of fear. The quest, the journey that we talked about in the beginning is to return to that place of love because love is truth. So we're returning to our place of truth. When we're acting out of truth, we're moving from a place of love.

The mind is based in fear. So whenever someone is not acting out their values, it's because they're acting from a place of fear. They're acting from a place of mind. And we can see where we are from the way that we live our lives. I would say rather than listen to what someone says about their values, just watch them and see what they do. That will tell you so much more in terms of are they living from that place?

And so to make it simple, I would say I often go back to trying to determine, am I moving from a place of love or am I moving from a place of fear? And the more that we can move from a place of love, the more that we are in flow with life.

Life will still be difficult, life will still be challenging, but there'll be a sense of ease with what we're experiencing because we're not fighting it and we're moving through it with more wisdom, more compassion, more creativity, more innovation, more understanding, more forgiveness, more lightness. And that's the path.

Okay. It's a lot for a Thursday morning. This is why my brother says, look, when you go to dinner party, he always says, keep it light and fluffy, light and airy. And I'm like, I'll try. And then I'm there one-to-one with the person next to me and we're talking about, you know, what is the meaning of life? I'm a nightmare. This is great. This is great. All of this stuff that we've talked about, love is truth, et cetera. What does that have to do with figuring out what your own values and vision are?

If you go back to what you would love, that will be your vision. What you'd love to create. The meaning of life is to experience life. Okay. That's it. Fine. The meaning of life is to experience life. Experience what? This moment. When? Now. Yeah. That's it. This is it. I'm experiencing this moment with you. That in itself is everything. So then the question becomes, what kind of experiences do you want to have in life?

Well, what kind of experience do you want to have in life? What do you want to experience? That's such a, it's, I'm finding myself at a loss for words because it's almost too big a question to, and I'm kind of, in my mind, I'm tempted to break it. Well, then let's bring it down. So then in your career, what would you love to experience? Another way of thinking of it, what would you love to create and what will you be experiencing through that creation? What would you love to create in your career?

to create my career. What are you building? I think for me personally, it's about teaching. I love experiencing the feeling of learning something new, finding a way to synthesize it and to teach it to someone else. Hmm.

I would love to experience, which I kind of do, and I guess why I do this kind of stuff, the freedom to do so on my own terms, not tied to a Rota coordinator or an NHS foundation trust or whatever the constraint might be. And whenever you learn something new and you synthesize that information and you pass it on to someone else, what do you experience? How does it feel?

The first word that came to mind was joy. But then I thought, nah, too cliche. And then I thought, well, wait a minute. Totally. Yeah. The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, there's just been a documentary created on joy. Two of the greatest spiritual and political icons of our time sitting down to talk about the one word that you just talked about, joy. I shouldn't be embarrassed of using that word.

There's no reason to be embarrassed about anything, Ali. Like you have so much wisdom. You see truth and you talk about it, but then you undermine it and throw it away. Don't do that anymore, Ali. Don't do that. Don't undermine your power. The conference says the same thing.

Like I would say something, I would say a compliment and then I'd immediately undermine it by like kind of turning it into a bit of a joke. Yeah. And that feeling of like, oh, I can't be too sincere because that's weird. Yeah. Yeah. What would be the worst thing about being too sincere? What would it say about you? It would, it's,

I think it's a vulnerability. Right. Yeah. It's like putting my heart on the line. Totally. And leaving it open to being laughed at. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. I totally get that. That's ultimate vulnerability. Vulnerability is the ability to be hurt. So it's understandable that your mind will not want you to be hurt.

So anytime you're getting close to putting something out there that is going to potentially be laughed at or ridiculed or sniggered at or rejected or undermined or diminished, that's an act of vulnerability and your mind will protect you from it. So what will it do? It'll do it first. It'll do it first and it'll keep you safe.

But what do we lose by not sharing our truth? We lose everything. We lose connection. We lose intimacy. We lose our power. You have so much power. I can feel it in the room with you.

you're immensely powerful and you have such wisdom and you have such a brilliant mind and it's so astute and you can identify things and you can synthesize them and you can put them out there and you've achieved phenomenal success in what you're doing, even when your mind has been holding you back through certain fears. What would Ali be like if...

You were moving more and more away from the place of fear and a place of mind and allowing you to flow in its full force. Fuck, now I'm getting excited and I don't know anything about your life. It's like a river. Within all of us is a river. And if we look and the river isn't flowing as much,

then people think, "Oh, I need to try and increase the force of the river." No, no, no, you don't. Water has its own power. All we need to do is look upstream and see where are the rocks, where are the blocks, and take those out. We take those out, we disidentify with the mind, we dissolve those parts which are holding us back, that river will flow, and it will flow with more power and more force than we could ever imagine.

This episode is very kindly brought to you by WeWork. Now, this is particularly exciting for me because I have been a full-paying customer of WeWork for the last two years now. I discovered it during, you know, when the pandemic was on the verge of being lifted and I'd spent like the whole year just sort of sitting in my room making YouTube videos. But then I discovered WeWork and I

I was a member, me and Angus, my team members, we were members of the WeWork in Cambridge and they have like hundreds of other locations worldwide as well. And it was incredible because we had this fantastic, beautifully designed office space to go to, to work. And we found ourselves like every day, just at nine o'clock in the morning, just going to WeWork because it was a way nicer experience working from the coworking space than it was just sitting at home working. These days, what me and everyone on my team has is the all access pass, which means you're not tied to a specific WeWork location, but it means you can use any of their several hundred coworking spaces around London, around the UK, and also around the world.

And one of the things I really love about the coworking setup is that it's fantastic as a bit of a change of scenery. So these days I work from home, I've got the studio at home, but if I need to get some focused writing work done and I'm feeling a bit drained just sitting at my desk all day, I'll just pop over to the local WeWork, which is about a 10 minute walk from where I am. I'll take my laptop with me, I'll get some free coffee from there, I'll get a few snacks. And it's just such a great vibe and you get to meet cool people. I made a few friends through meeting them at WeWork and it's just really nice being in an environment almost like a library, but kind of nicer because there's like

a little bit of soft music in the background and there's other kind of startup bros and creators and stuff in there as well. And it's just my absolute favorite coworking space of all time. It's super easy to book a desk or book a conference room using the app. And it's a great place to meet up with team members if you're gonna collaborate and you'll live in different places. They've got unlimited tea and coffee and herbal teas and drinks on tap. And they've also got various kind of after work events that happen like happy hours and yoga and a few other exercise type things. And you can also take in guests. So often when guests will come over to visit,

I'll say, hey, let's pop into WeWork and we'll just work from there for the whole day and then we'll go out for dinner sometime in the evening. Anyway, if you're looking for a co-working space for you or your team, then I'd 100% recommend WeWork. Like I said, I've been a paying customer for theirs for the last two years, which is why it's particularly exciting that they're now sponsoring this episode. And if you want to get 50% off your first booking, then do head over to we.co forward slash Ali. And you can use the coupon code Ali at checkout ALI to get 50% off your first booking. So thank you so much WeWork for sponsoring this episode. I worked with a...

clinical psychologist slash executive coach slash more like yeah at one point last year and i kind of joked to him that like our sessions felt more like therapy than executive coaching and he was like oh man everyone says that don't worry about it but this is kind of feeling like a similar kind of vibe um but i'm curious so like for me i i kind of know that the

my, I guess, personal vision with my career is around this teaching idea and this freedom idea kind of coming together. But I'm not in anyone else's head. So I don't know what, like with, with your clients, when you ask them that question, like what, what, what sort of answers do you get from different people around what's their own vision for their career? It'll vary for everyone. And so the, what it looks like in a way doesn't matter. Yeah.

What matters is what do we think we will achieve through achieving this? What do we think this experience will bring? And sometimes when we return back to first principles, actually we see that the outcome is less important. What's much more important is can I begin to live these principles out now? You're doing it already. What's important to you? We're talking about what you're creating. It's to learn, synthesize, and then teach.

Beautiful, and you're finding different ways of doing that. You can do that on different scales. You could do it one-to-one or you could do it reaching millions of people. And it brings you a sense of joy. That's beautiful. We'll then just look at what are the blocks of the mind which are holding us back. And it was interesting, like you were saying, that we begin to hear different feedback from different people. And really, it's about identifying our fears. And it's about...

moving from a place of vulnerability because that's where our power is. Vulnerability is the ultimate strength because it's truth and you cannot hide truth. The Buddha said it for there are three things which cannot be long hidden, the sun, the moon and truth. And it's powerful. The truth connects with people. Whenever I did a podcast and I talked about the story of my ex-wife on the Diary of a CEO with Steve,

The number of people that have been in touch and openly and courageously shared similar experiences, similar stories, whether or not they were the one that experienced it or they were the one which carried out the affair, but they opened up and they show true vulnerability in sharing what they're going through. Because I believe the truth connects with people. If you share truth, it transforms people.

Whenever we're even in an argument with a partner, often we go in with anger. We go in with anger about something which has happened. Now, we get caught up in the level of the mind. I'll give you a personal example. I'm in a new relationship now. I've been in the relationship for about six months. And there was this one topic which I could sense just kept on triggering me. And it was triggering anger within me. And I couldn't figure it out.

And when I was coming in with anger, I was coming in with judgment. And when I was coming in judgment, she was feeling misunderstood, unheard, isolated. And her mind was feeling attacked because my mind was attacking hers. So then she would defend and she would attack. And then I would get more angry. And I would have to keep on...

taking a step back until I until I was able to see what this was about because if we're ever angry or hurt or upset there's something that's happening within us we're not seeing reality clearly there's something within us our mind is adding on to and I was taking I was taking something from the past of what happened into the present and when I truly shared how I felt the truth was

The truth was, I was scared. I was scared of getting hurt. I was scared of feeling that pain I felt three years ago because it was so excruciating that my mind will want to protect me from that. When I shared that, we take something from the unconscious into the conscious, from the darkness into the light. It dissolves.

Suddenly the fear begins to dissolve itself and the other person can connect. And then she approached with compassion and understanding and closeness. And we reached a deeper level of intimacy and connection and openness. But it only came from vulnerability. So for you, what could being vulnerable look like? I think in my relationship, it could look like feeling more free to say what I'm feeling.

feeling. And yeah, I think that's an area where I sometimes struggle to know what I'm feeling. And we kind of alluded to that earlier on in the conversation. I was going to follow that. I feel like often, like someone will ask me, how do you feel about X? And I would immediately construct a cognitive representation of that rather than

And, you know, like my sister-in-law might say something like, huh, it's interesting that that sentence started with I think rather than I feel. Totally. And I'll be like, goddammit, you're right. Yeah, I think I really struggle to articulate how I feel about stuff because I think the mind is always so, yeah, just in overdrive. Ali, you're not alone.

One pattern I've seen when you have an individual like yourself that has such a brilliant mind that's so intelligent and sharp and powerful, it begins to, in a way, rule the show. Because it's a phenomenal powerhouse of an engine. And the mind operates on a cognitive level.

So it will continually be pulling you into your mind and you'll be experiencing the world through your mind. And what does that mind do? It will create concepts and ideas and constructions and it will understand where things place in together. I valued my mind so much that I was always, again, living in my mind. And what I wasn't connecting to was how I felt. I had no idea how I felt for years. I had no idea. I wouldn't even know how to answer the question.

And in my 20s, what happened was all this emotion was built up. What would happen truthfully is I'd get drunk and it would all come out as rage, as anger. And I'd have these moments where in my 20s during the day, I would just seem so serene and calm. And then with alcohol, it would just, this anger would burst through because I didn't know how to connect to my emotion. I didn't even know where to start. I didn't.

know how to live from that space and that became part of my journey living from and connecting to my heart knowing what is here and over time we become more attuned to it and we can pick we can pick up even

more granularity with it. Gosh, something feels off or I can feel hurt or I can feel tightness or tension. And if you want, you can even start with the body. You can start to notice when do I feel tight or tense or something doesn't feel right. It's like something's a little bit off, just even beginning to start with the body. And then we can move to beginning to notice, oh, if there's something in my body, what do I feel? What do I notice is stirring there? We can just begin to attune to it a little bit more.

And it's with so many individuals that I work with, they're doing phenomenally well in their career. But often what has happened is, just like you described, their biggest challenge is sharing how they truly feel. And a lot of the time, there's actually a bit of a gender pattern, which I see. Men really struggle to know

what they feel and how they feel. And if they can identify anything, it's anger. But anger is a superficial emotion. It's almost like a secondary emotion. It'll be masking a deeper hurt. And then we'll explore with courage and with openness and with vulnerability safely what is underneath that. There will be hurt there that your mind's trying to protect you from. And it's easier to feel anger. Anger is very empowering, whereas hurt is very opening.

Or often with females, they know how they feel, but they're not sharing it. They're not truly sharing how they feel to the person they love or sharing truly what they're experiencing at work. And it's holding them back. And eventually, though we reach a point where we're sick of our sickness, we can't continue anymore because the pain of not connecting to our truth and expressing our truth is too much.

Because we go back to that quest, what will life do? It will bring more and more situations into your life to get you to look at this. Look at this, Ali. Look at this. I don't think it's a coincidence that your girlfriend said there are times that you share and then you pull it back. And I've said the same thing today. Life is saying to you, Ali, look at this. I love you, Ali. And this is part of your path. Take a little look. And it's beautiful that you have people around you and you have a partner who is...

Also to bring in another aspect of love can be a part of your emotional and spiritual and psychological growth. That's beautiful. Now you've got two people who see each other, who love each other, who share and are supporting each other to grow. And you can grow together. That's a blessing. Yeah. Yeah.

Doesn't mean it's easy though. Doesn't mean it's easy. And look, I made the same mistake. One of the aspects I've learned from most through my 10 year relationship and marriage is I didn't share how I truly felt because I was afraid of hurting the other person. I didn't want to create conflict. I didn't want to create pain for someone else. And I was afraid that if I said how I truly felt, that is what would happen. But instead I moved away from my truth and everything fell apart.

What's the balance there? Like, you know, people, some people would say the key to a relationship is to not share how you truly feel about everything. Like if she asks you if you if she looks nice in the dress, the answer is always yes. Kind of like there's that kind of people are clearly being, you know, a bit flippant when they say things like that. But I feel like there is like a truth there underneath that around that.

If you were to sample 24 times a day, how do I currently feel about my partner and about my relationship? That feels like an almost unhealthy level of sampling. To what extent do you agree or disagree? Any time we feel anger, frustration, resentment, disappointment, anything that we'd call a negative emotion towards something else, there's something wrong with you. Oh, okay. Interesting.

The mind will blame the other person. What I'm saying is there is something within... You're wearing a lens or a filter right now. We go through life with a clear lens and as we go through life, we're driving in the car, little bits of dirt flick up and they hit onto the windscreen. And now we're looking at the landscape saying, gosh, that bit's dark. Gosh, that bit's muddy. No, no, no, no. There's nothing wrong with outside. It's your lens. That's what we need to clean first. So...

It's about recognizing anytime I feel emotion, there's something happening within me. It's within me. It's my responsibility to look at. Where people go wrong is they think that sharing truth means, do you know what? You're really pissing me off because you keep on doing this and I feel like you don't care and I feel, and you're not respecting me.

and you're not good enough, essentially, is what we're saying, and you need to change. So we've got a little mini dictator in all our heads, and what it says is, reality isn't right. I want to feel safe and secure. So what I'm going to try and do is I'm going to try and control reality. I'm going to try and control what's happening around me. And I'm going to try and control you so that you don't trigger me. No, no, no, no, no, no. Where there's love, there's no control. Where there's control, there's no love.

Moving deeper, we want to see what is being triggered within me. What is the hurt really about? I'm sharing that I'm realizing that, for instance, I feel unloved. And that is not your fault. That is not just saying I want to share something and I'm not saying it's your fault. This is something I realize I need to work on. But there's a part of me that feels unlovable.

and feels like I don't deserve to be loved. And you know, I'm going to work on figuring out maybe where that came from. And I'd love to work on healing that. And whenever you say or do this, you're not doing anything wrong. And I understand, and maybe we'll get to know what your intention is behind it. But I personalize it or my mind personalize it and it makes it about something else. And you know, in those moments when I feel alone and hurt,

I'm going to try and not attack you and I'm going to try and share how I feel. Because when we share truth of how we truly feel, when someone opens their heart, it opens the other person's heart. Anytime you began to like open up a little bit about how you felt, Ali, I felt even more connected to you. And I was fascinated and I wanted to know more about it. And if we weren't making a podcast and I wasn't also wanting to bring something for people to listen to, I would just sit down and we would want to know more for hours.

Because it's beautiful, because truth is beautiful. Even amidst the pain and what we see as insecurity, there's still beauty. It's like Kintsugi, that Japanese art form, there's beauty and perfection in the imperfection. And so part of it is creating compassion for that. So I imagine you have clients who, for them, expressing their inner truth could potentially cause a drop in the value of their business. Yeah.

And I sort of just to use an example that I see a lot, we have however many students on our kind of this course that I run to teach people how to be YouTubers. And at the start of someone's journey, I'm always like, look, just share whatever you want, make videos about anything. It's not going to get views anyway, so don't worry about it. Like, you know, just lower the bar as much as possible.

But at some point, you get to an area where it's like, oh, damn, I've got an audience now. And I've built an audience by making videos about finance. But I really want to make a video talking about mindfulness or talking about yoga or talking about the power of psychedelics or something like that. But my business, my channel is about finance. And so while I might feel pulled to share my truth around meditation, I am worried that

the finance audience won't care and that it will cause my channel to become less good and the business to fall and stuff, all of that kind of thing. And I imagine if I were working with, I don't know, a billion dollar CEOs that they have to be very careful about the truth they put out into the world for fear that it will reflect badly on their brand or their business or their team. Like if I had a company of 50 people, my truth might be

I actually want to fire all of them and just go back to just being me making websites for freelance clients. But sharing that truth would be pretty disastrous for my company and everyone would mutiny and et cetera, et cetera. So I guess my question is, how do you balance the sharing of your internal truth and living true to that with the market as it were? Yes, yes.

It's an understandable situation. It's one that I see time and time and time again in multiple areas and multiple ways. We can even just take one example, one step back in terms of individuals who are leaving university. And you can be looking at two options and one pays very well and the other one doesn't. Jimmy Carr put it in a beautiful way. What's your price? How much would you have to be paid to give up on what you love?

50 grand a year when you're coming out, 100 grand a year, 150, 200. There'll be a point where without awareness, we'll pay the price. It's the same question at any level. What's your price? What are you willing to let go of to follow truth? And some people, the price is too high for them. 100 million, 200 million, 500 million. No, no, no. I'll...

I'll forgo truth for the external. And that's a choice. And it's not saying that it's a bad choice. There is no good or bad. Just both will have consequences. Now, does it mean, oh, suddenly you quit your company and everything falls apart? No, we also live in this world. It's about being...

in the world, but not of the world. So you may see that actually this is truly where I want to move into. And is there a more strategic way? Is there someone that I could bring in who could begin to take over the role that I'm doing? Or do I want to continue to grow on scale? Or would I be happy keeping the company at this level? Or is there a way of me doing both at the one time? Or is there, there could be

an infinite number of possibilities to even take a step closer towards you moving from a place of truth. I'm not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm not saying suddenly create radical change. You may, and that may work. But what I'm saying is if we can just take one step closer to connecting to your truth, things will begin to change in and of themselves. And I see it, and look...

There's a number of examples that come to mind and they reach a crossroads where literally they're out of critical juncture in their career and let's say the company, okay, well the company is worth 200, 300 million, but if they go down a certain road, we could be worth, we could go public, it could be four or five billion. The mind

will say, well, most likely go public. With awareness, I've met individuals who have chosen not to do that because they've lived it for the last one year, two years, three years, four years, and it isn't what they expected it to be. And yes, you have more wealth and you have more financial security and you have more and more and more, but inside there's less and less and less.

and you're feeling more disconnected and more out of a line with who you are. And we'll reach a point with these individuals where with awareness they say, no, that is not what my life is about. My life is not about keeping the 50 people in the company happy. My life is not about doing something for someone else because they say you're good at it. You're good at it, Ali, so do it and do it again and do it again and don't leave it. Don't change lane. And they see that actually, no, their power is

is in doing what they love and then whenever that may change they can they can they continue to move to what they love and often they end up being successful in that area too okay well i'm doing you know marketing and that might be worth x but who knows you could move into meditation and you could be making x to the power of four but your mind won't see it that way it wants to keep you safe so all i'm saying is

The more we have awareness, the more we can sense when we're coming from a place of fear and when we're coming from a sense of freedom and love. Then we can use the tool, which is the mind, which is brilliant. You'd have much better ideas about probably how you could pivot in that way because you understand the industry or you understand psychology or you have that intimate knowledge. You know how things work. You'll be creative. You'll be able to take two different parts and bring them together.

So you will then find a way, you then use your mind to say, okay, mind, this is what I would love to achieve. This is what I'd love to create. Help me find a way. Your mind will find it. It will work with you. Okay, Ali, this sounds like an adventure. Let's do it. So it's like your, you know, that question I asked earlier around how do you figure out your vision and your values? That's based on your own internal truth.

and then the journey of moving in that direction. Well, that's a path that the mind can figure out. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The mind will become your best friend. It will help you along the way. But it's continually moving back to seeing at what point am I now moving more towards a place of fear? Because the more that we create, the more we have to lose. In a way, it's easier when you're at the beginning of your career and you've got that happy-go-lucky, well, what's the worst that could happen? Yeah.

But then we build and we create and then we have structures which begin to keep us in place. Or we have structures in our relationships which begin to keep things static. But life is not static. Life continually flows. Life is like the river. Whenever we try and keep life as it is, it's like taking a bucket, going to the Niagara Falls, taking the water and saying, oh, I've got the Niagara Falls in my bucket. No, no, no, no. You just...

took away the magic of the water because you try to control it and put it in a box and keep it there but life flows so if you keep on flowing with your truth it will keep you and you will have you will often end up in a place that you never even imagined in the first place but it's

More brilliant and more bright and more fulfilling and more challenging than ever before But you love it because it's your choice and you lived your life on your terms With your agency and your independence and that's something that you even talked about before you want to be the author of your own story there's a I had dinner with a friend like last week and He runs this agency managing creators influencers youtubers and I asked him to analyze a few like a few a few YouTube channels of some other friends of mine and

And there was something he said around this, like he was, he was, he was analyzing a friend's channel and he was like, you know, this friend, um, he needs to, uh, be more experimental with his content. And he said at this stage, the guy's probably thinking, you know, I've got, I've got this type of video that's doing well, that's getting lots of views, but it's not really what I want to do forever. And he's probably feeling like he can't experiment now because he's got his lane and

And the advice that this guy gave who runs this agency, he was like, I've seen this time and time and time again. When you're early in your career, like as a YouTuber or whatever, you can take way more risks. At the point where every video is getting 500,000 views, it becomes way harder to take risks. And what he said is that, which mirrors almost exactly what you said, which is, what's your price? Mm-hmm.

Are you willing to pay the price of quitting your day job so that you've created a new day job for yourself in your YouTube channel where you're only allowed to make content about finance, even though you fundamentally don't want to do it? And if that's a choice you make, that's fine. But recognize that it's a choice. Yes. And recognize that there's a price. Yes. And I think that analogy, kind of the way you described it as well, connects to I just see so many occasions in my life where there's been a choice between two things. Both have different kinds of consequences.

One is more internal truth. The other one is more external validation. And in some cases, I've gone for the external validation choice. And in other cases, I've gone for the truth choice. And yeah, both have had consequences. And we live in a world of polarity in that the law of polarity is that we can only have north if we have south.

We can only have left with right. We can only have joy because we have sadness. We can only have lightness because we have darkness. We can only have external validation because internal security exists. And on this path, remember, we will experience and go through and see what it's like on one side to be able to return back to

to the last. So it's not even about judging the times that we do make the choice towards validation or attention or money or security or status or power. It's just seeing that that will be a part of our path. And through that, we can gain deeper insight and see what it brings and what it does not. And see that we have to experience this in order to

experience the other side and with greater awareness we can then move to what is most true and right for us and that's the path yeah holding both we don't it's not even rejecting one and demonizing one and then glorifying another it's just seeing which one sits well within me which one is the one that i want to begin to move towards which one

moves me in the direction that truly on an intuitive level is right for me yeah yeah i find that these days i try and like whenever i'm on a flight and that and i don't have wi-fi i sit down with like a journal or an ipad and journal and just like try and figure out you know i sometimes ask just like pose a question at the top of the page um what do i want from my business what do i want for my health what do i want for my relationships and i'll just kind of write it out

And there was one of these journaling sessions a couple, a few months ago that led to me realizing that what I want from the business is not to continue to run this YouTube course, even though it makes shit tons of money. Actually, what I want is the freedom to explore topics other than this, because I've been talking about this for three years. I was like, oh, interesting. And now...

We didn't just decide to pull the plug immediately, but we decided, you know what, let's make the next cohort the last one. Let's turn it into a, you know, the mind and the team found a strategic way of getting to that truth. And I was a bit worried that the team would be like,

no that's a bad idea but actually the team were like great it's really useful for us to know what you actually want so we can actually move towards that yeah and they were like you know we wish you would tell us more what you actually want i was like shit no it's surprising yeah yeah beautiful and powerful when you're describing that i had shivers down my spine and for me that's one of the signs when i hear truth i feel that it truly connects ali that's massive

You had this YouTube course which was bringing in X, which was a structure that had been created and was probably offering and does offer an amazing product and service. And stepping away from that is not easy. Like even to think about the courage that that takes to even contemplate it, to even allow it to grow as an idea, to even then explore and move in that direction. Because you essentially then connected to what would I love? This life is short.

I've lost people close to me that makes you realize how short life is like that. If we're going to give up who we are in our truth and moving from that place of love, to me that is something which is the greatest tragedy. But to take moments like that, like literally it opens my heart and it connects with it. And I'm like, that's beautiful, Ali. That's beautiful.

Not because of the outcome, but because of you are, you're following you, you're doing you. You're following the truth no matter where it takes you. You're following that truth and life reality will take care of the rest. You follow the truth and the rest will fall into place. That's our only task. You follow the truth and the rest will fall into place.

Even as I was describing this YouTuber example, my mind was thinking, oh, this is a bad example. It's too trivial. This guy's talking about kind of losing people and like wife cheating on him. And I'm just fucking talking about this shitty YouTube example. Like, why would anyone care? And then you said that you felt the truth. And I felt like validated. I was like, oh, maybe I should have shared that because that was my truth.

But the mind is still kind of thinking that. Yes. Yeah. Now remember, the mind will do that. That's the nature of the mind. You can't change the nature of a lion. The nature of the mind is that it will be fear-based and it will doubt what you are thinking about and it will judge it. I wouldn't expect any otherwise. That's what my mind would do. But I've created so much distance and separation from my mind and I've ignored it for so long it just stops talking. Yeah.

Just gone quiet. How do you create that distance? By continually recognizing when it is speaking, recognizing that fear, and then going down into that place of truth and still taking action. That's what you did there, right? Your mind said, oh, terrible example, but you still did it, Ali. And that's the point. You still did it. You still took that action and it connected with me. That's beautiful. That's powerful. That begins to...

show your mind that it's not in control, that actually you have a deeper wisdom. And for whatever reason that that example came to you and you shared it. I'm inspired by that. I'm now going to go back and think, what are the ways in which I'm getting tied into something and should be listening more to that truth like Ali did. Beautiful. You just changed my life. Literally, I'm going to go back and think on that because there will be ways that I am and I already have an idea of what it might be. What's the idea?

The idea is that what I'm, the way that right now I'm in my comfort zone in that I work one-to-one and I love it. And I work with people who I respect and admire. And it's such a privilege to be a part of that journey. And there's a part of me that's saying, share more in a way where you're serving by having conversations like this. I've not done a podcast in...

two years for me, this was one step to, I should say, I've done a podcast of this type before because it's a part of my mind that says, don't, Aria, stay small. Don't come in here and tell Ali who's got

you know, a huge following who's respected and admired in this area, don't begin to ask him questions. It's his fucking show. And what you're going to come and ask him questions about his life. My mind will, will, will do the same things for the things that it's most afraid about. So whenever I say, yes, it goes quiet, but then right now I can sense what, or that is at least what my mind would have said. Hmm.

I can tell already what my mind would have said. It will say all these things. It'll say, no, Ari, you're not. Who are you? Who are you to talk about truth?

That's so interesting. Yeah. Because for me, like what my mind was saying for this podcast was like, oh, damn, this guy's really cool. He's an expert. Like he's got he's got like the spiritual thing, the scientific thing. What the hell do I know about any of this stuff? Am I kind of going to be able to follow the thread of the conversation in a way that makes sense for the listeners and in a way that he feels like he's been respected and that I want him to go away thinking that this was a good interview and that like I knew my shit and I asked good questions and.

It's just the constant like, yeah. We both have human minds and we're both connected in our humanity by, by the nature of the mind. It's the exact same alley. We're like, there's just a mirror in front and most people you meet, it's the exact same. There's just a mirror in front and the path isn't remember getting rid of the mind. It's moving to a place where we then just follow truth. I've only been able to say what I said today because I'm just following my intuition.

And whether it was good or bad, or there were points that were interesting or points that were boring, or the points where the audience stays or they don't, it doesn't matter. Because it's about me moving from a place of truth. And if someone benefits from it, that's beautiful. And if they don't, that's okay too. And if they like me for it, that's okay. And if they hate me for it, that's okay too. Because that isn't real. The only thing which is real is truth.

So we're all on a journey. You're on a journey, Ellie. I'm on a journey. And there'll be parts that will be holding us back. And the journey never ends. As soon as we think we've achieved it, that's when we're in trouble and that's where we're going to get hit the hardest. No, it's continual growth. I have so much to work on, so much to grow through, so much to move from. And at the same time, I am exactly where I'm supposed to be. Exact same with you. And where you will go

It's just the beauty of life. The meaning of life is to experience life. It's like we're on a roller coaster. It's been unfolding for 13.8 billion years. It will continue for trillions of years. We're just getting to see what the next part of the roller coaster is, where it will take us. And that is a gift.

How did you get so good at this? Your vibe is, for want of a better word, very zen and wise. And when you said you were 40, I was kind of surprised because the way you're talking is kind of what I would more expect from someone like you.

a sad guru or you know a spiritual teacher who's like in their 70s or something like that uh when were you like this when you were like 20 or like how did how did how did this kind of that was a nightmare when i was 20. in order to find ourselves we have to lose ourselves and i and i lost myself and i've lost myself many times in multiple ways and and for whatever reason life is just continually

This will sound, "Ah, I was nearly going to do what you were going to do." I was going to say, "This is going to sound cliched." My mind was just about to undermine what I'm going to say because it judges what I'm about to say in terms of how it will be perceived. Life loves all of us and life loves itself. If life is the dancer, we are the dance.

And the sense that I've always felt is that God or the universe or life loves me. And even in the times when I've suffered the most, there's still love there and there's love that will support me through that. And again, it goes back to that sense of not God, why this is happening, but God, where are you taking me? It's a part of a bigger picture and I just can't see that picture right now.

Now the mind again, like we said, it tries to take a snap judgment and determine it as good or bad. There's a Zen story of the farmer. I don't know if you're aware of it, but essentially a farmer, his horse runs away.

and all the neighboring village people come and say, "Oh, such bad luck." And he says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" And they seem a bit perturbed by it, they're confused by it or bemused by it, and then the horse comes back, but it brings 10 other wild horses with it. The villagers say, "That's amazing, what good luck?" "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" Then one day his son is riding, trying to train one of the wild horses,

kicks off. He falls and breaks his leg. The villagers come. Oh, what terrible luck. Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows? The son is now lying in bed. He's injured. The army comes through and they're taking young men for conscription to the army. They see that he's injured, so they leave him. Villagers come. Oh my goodness, what amazing luck. We know the answer. Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows? The mind will assign each

moment as good or bad, success or failure. But we're not seeing the bigger picture. It would be like taking a book, opening up to a page, reading one line and saying, oh my goodness, this is a horrific book. This is a terrible book. This is awful. This is the worst book I've ever read. We've only read a line. We take another book and we open it up and wow, this is a beautiful book. I know exactly how it's going to end. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's just a line. We take this moment in our lives and we say,

This is awful. This is terrible. I can't get through this. No, no, no, no, no, no. Part of it is beginning to take a step back and see there is so much I do not know. And that's faith. That's trust. That's trust that this is unfolding. And not only that all will be well, but all is well. That moment of what happened, yes, at the time, I would say it was awful, terrible, painful. It's the best thing that ever happened to me.

I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't undo it. I had to go through that to grow and evolve as a person because I'd lost myself. I wasn't connected to my truth and now I will not give that up. Not for anything. And I've met in a beautiful relationship where I'm experiencing the depth of sharing a vulnerability I've never had before. I never would have had that because I was stuck in my structure and life came and said, you know what, Ari, you're not going to move. I wasn't going to.

I made a vow and I was too committed. I was staying there. It was the only way that life was able to shift me onto a different trajectory. And it happened and it happened through me. And it's led to this path, which is still continuing, still growing. And I don't know what will happen next, but as long as I follow the truth, reality will take care of the rest. We've talked a lot about kind of feelings, emotions and stuff. And the impression I get from the stuff you've said is that

you know, the feelings are almost the truth that we need to connect with. But then in, for example, stoicism and in some other schools of thought, there's the idea that, well, feelings are a bit of a myth. There are only really four feelings like, um,

disgust pleasure um salience and like inattention or something like that and everything else is uh the mind or culture or society putting labels and constructs on top of fundamentally just these four things what's your take on how true or quote valid or quote real feelings and emotions are um in this kind of in the in this arena i put more and more value on my experience

Are emotions real? I experience emotions and so that is a part of my internal reality. What we do with what we're experiencing is when the mind becomes involved it will then categorize and create delineations and structures in order to try and understand reality. And that is an act of the mind. With emotions we even know that

Labeling an emotion, for instance, decreases the intensity of the emotion. So on a neural level, if you're experiencing anger and you're able to identify, I am experiencing anger, it actually strengthens the circuitry in the prefrontal cortex and will dampen down

the older, more primal parts of the brain which are responsible for emotion like the amygdala. And so even labeling an emotion can decrease its intensity. The words that we have for an emotion impact our experience of it. There are tribes around the world that have labels for emotions that we don't even know. And the scientific understanding is that they will experience emotions that we don't because we don't even have a word for it.

And so we could get lost in this, but essentially what I bring it back to is what is most effective. Even if we tie it into high performance, high performance is taking effective actions at effective times. When we often make poor decisions is when we're acting from a place of emotion. When fear goes up, intellect goes down. So

If we're looking at wanting to make a strategic move within our business or we want to create something within our relationship, part of it is knowing and sensing and feeling the emotion that's there. Because I know that if an emotion is there, now is not the time to make a decision. In the beginning, you've got one problem and that could be the work issue at hand. As soon as the emotion gets involved, you've got a second problem.

which is all the feelings around it, the anger, the frustration, the disappointment, the feeling of disrespect. It's only once I've created space for the feeling and allow that to dissolve will I then look at what the initial problem in the world is. And I suppose as part of your RER framework, sort of acknowledge release, and then you can inquire as to what's the trigger here.

Precisely. The first step is the acceptance part. It's allowing the emotion to be there, to recognize it, to acknowledge it, and to release it, to allow it to flow through us. Only then do we have access to the greatest part of the brain, which is the

the part responsible for the judgment of a situation, holding multiple options in mind, assessing and weighing up the balance, impulse control, that executive control of what to do next. That comes into play and we can use the mind as a tool to reflect. And the Stokes would do that. They'd create times during the day where they would reflect on their life or on what makes a meaningful day or on...

what they're taking for granted or on where their work growth is. But the first part has to be the acceptance, the allowance before the change can take place. We can only change what we accept. Let's say you're working with one of your clients or even for yourself and you're having, I guess you're having an issue in the business or in your personal life where you're feeling kind of these emotions coming up and

taking you away from from the present moment what what are some examples of what this kind of acknowledge release inquire thing looks like can you think of a time where you felt maybe in the last week or two where you felt a difficult a difficult or challenging emotion a negative emotion where you felt anger or frustration or hurt okay so in my relationship for example

Often there'll be times where or sometimes there'll be times where she's busy with something or other at work and hasn't replied to a message for a while and My mind will start thinking. Oh, have I done something wrong? And usually like I feel like I've been drinking the stoicism kool-aid for like a decade and so I can

Then almost override that with another part of the mind with the voices of like, you know, Ryan Holiday and all of the original stoics in my mind being like, you know, control the things under your control. Like her response is not under my control. All of that kind of stuff would then come and make me, well, sort of somewhat override that. But I think the core feeling at it is still, oh, have I done something wrong here?

So it's a very simple example. But for instance, and in this case, the gender was the wife asking the husband, are you able to come home tonight at 5.45? And he's CEO of a company. And he was explaining this to me. He's like, I just felt so frustrated and angry because she knows I can't come home at 5.45 on a Tuesday because I've got

that board meeting and I was saying, look, why are you putting this pressure on me in order for me to be home whenever you know I can't? You need to be more understanding. And he got frustrated, angry at her, and then she got defensive and got upset with him and it led into a spiral. Whenever we began to break it down, what he was doing was he was acting from the emotions.

So there's three things or three traps that people fall into. One is they try and avoid the emotion, the emotional pain. We try and avoid it, reject it, negate it, push it down and just not feel it. But what happens in that instance is that it's like putting a suitcase into a basement. It's not disappeared, but we put in another suitcase and another suitcase and eventually our whole basement is filled.

and it's going to start coming out. We're not going to put anything else in. And a little bit like pressure building up in a volcano, eventually it then just erupts. So there are all these instances beforehand where he has felt frustrated and just said, okay, do you know what?

I'm just going to just stay calm, don't react. And he just moves on. But he hasn't connected to the emotion. And so it's still there. And it builds up. And over time, frustration and anger hardens and turns into resentment. So now we're seeing through a different lens and filter. So one is we try and avoid the pain. The second mistake is that we fuse with the pain. We create a story or a narrative around it.

"Ah, my wife doesn't understand. She doesn't care. She's not showing me the respect that I should have." And it's created a narrative around respect or not being loved. The third is we act out of the pain. And in that instance, the person then got angry or snapped and it led to conflict. And then that conflict leads to a rupture in the connection and the relationship.

Part of the path in this very simple example is to acknowledge what am I experiencing? Okay, there is anger or frustration. Remember, anger is the surface level. What is beneath that? Once we begin to acknowledge it and release it, and then he and I together can explore it, beneath the anger was actually guilt. The truth is he feels bad.

Why does he feel bad? He feels bad because there's a part of him that feels like, "I should be home at 5:45." And there's a part of him that feels like he's not being a good enough father or not being a good enough husband. Now the mind will try and protect us from that because that's a hard truth to hold. So what will it do? It will then turn it around and attack the other person saying, "You're making me feel like a bad

Husband, are you making me feel like I'm not doing enough? No, no, no, no, no. We can only experience what we judge ourselves. If we feel hurt by something, it's because part of us believes that it's true. So repeat that. If we ever feel hurt or upset or resentful or angry about something, part of us is holding that same judgment towards ourselves. If I said, Ali, you're a burrito. Mm-mm-mm.

How are you feeling? Kind of amused. Yeah. It's almost quite comical. What you will not say is, Ari, are you calling me a burrito? I'm not a burrito. No, no, no. How could you think I'm a burrito? I've never been a burrito. I don't have guac. I don't have beans. This is outrageous. How could you even think that?

No, you're not going to say that because there's no part of you that believes that you're a burrito. Yeah. No part of you. You know that that's not true. As soon as a partner says something which even intimates that I feel like you're not giving enough, that will only hurt if part of us feels that we're not giving enough to you. It's like with online comments. The only ones that sting are the ones that have a grain or more than a grain of truth to them. Yes. Like if someone says, Ali, your typing speed is really slow, I'd be like,

It's not. It does not in this life affect me. But if someone's like, Ali, you know, your content was better when you were actually a doctor and you were living a real life instead of just being a full-time content creator, I'd be like, oh, damn. He went there. Yes, completely. Completely. Now, whenever it hurts, again, remember, our mind will try and protect us from feeling that hurt. So we'll then...

defend and justify and excuse and try and convince the other person but truly itself why that is not the case because it doesn't want to hold that truth even if it's a one percent morsel of belief in that. But the level of our evolution is in direct proportion to the level of truth we can hold without running away. If you can hold that truth and see it

We can bring it from the darkness into the light, from unconsciousness into consciousness. And it begins to change on its own. Carl Jung said, "Until we bring the unconscious into the conscious, it will direct our life and we will call it fate." It's what we're unaware of, or do not accept, or judge, or push into the shadow side which ends up ruling us and dictating how we behave and act. And it won't be in line with truth, because we're rejecting truth. We're not holding truth.

So it all comes back together. Taking it back to the example, when he could truly see, do you know, I have guilt that I'm not being the husband and the father that I want to be. And he shares that with his wife and says, you know, when you asked me to come home at 5.45, I'm so sorry that I got angry and I attacked you because it isn't to do with you. It's to do with me because what it brought up with me is I feel bad and I feel like I should be home. And

There's part of me that's judging me for not being a good enough partner. And I'm sorry if that is the case and it's something I'm working on. That's a conversation. That's vulnerability. That's truth. That leads to change. That leads to two hearts opening and coming together and saying, I see you. And even that part that you shared, that's okay. You have a wound and that's okay because I love you. It goes back to you, the way that you described love, what we pulled from, because I see you.

And I see all the parts that you like and the parts you don't like, and it's okay. What's the balance between, I guess, being yourself versus choosing yourself?

In the sense of, for me, my default self, you know, we've talked about how the self is, you know, a result of accidents of stuff. My default behavior is often to prioritize work at the expense of everything else. I am the happiest person in the world if I've spent five hours in the evening on my laptop from 6pm to 11pm. But that's not really the person I want to be. I want to be a person who has more balance, who takes care of their health and their relationships and who

time spent with loved ones, not as a, you know, I'd rather be on my laptop, but more like I'm genuinely happy to be here in the present moment. So that's kind of who I want to be, but it's not who I am, if that makes sense. So how do we...

How do I know which one is more quote authentic? Because I find that my mum often says sometimes that, oh, you know, Ali, you're trying to change for other people and stuff. This was when at university, I made the active decision that I wanted to become more confident and charismatic and be more outgoing. Whereas in school, I was a massive nerd and played World of Warcraft all evening. And so to my mum, that was the real me. And she would say that, yeah,

you're fine as you are you don't need to change i'd be like no but i want to change like i want to i want to level up and it's just better i think to be more confident and i'm going uh yeah what do you reckon there is the conditioned self and there is true self there is the mind and identity and there is spirit

What we've come to identify as who we are is actually the construction of the mind. The mind has created an identity. We enter this world and then the mind is trying to understand who am I? What does that mean? Who are you? What is this world? How does it all fit together? And it creates an identity and it builds one and it builds certain understandings of the world and what people do and intentions.

And it's mapping out this internal world. And that is down to the accidents of birth. That is down to, like you're saying, your family, your cultural experiences, the place and time in this universe that we have this opportunity. The mind will always do that. Then there is true self, which is just consciousness. And the nature of consciousness is love, is truth.

The mind says, "I need to get everything in place and then I'll feel at peace." The soul says, "Be at peace and everything else falls into place." We've been living from our minds for the majority of our lives though. We've been living from that place and we've built up armory and we've built up coping mechanisms to navigate. The path is beginning to take off some of that armory.

to see that actually when I connect to truth and love, I will then see what it looks like. You don't need to figure that out. If you can just go down into that place of truth and love, you will see what it will look like. Because one thing we do know is that the mind is a terrible predictor of what will make us happy. It's got all these ideas. My life has to look like this or should look like this and then I'll be happy. We've got no idea.

We've got no idea. We don't even know what's going to happen in one minute's time. So to take away all the configurations of the mind, trying to even choose or a map or build or be a lot of self-improvement is talking about improving who you are or optimizing who you are, which is based on the premise that you are not enough. You're not good enough. You're not whole enough. You're not

You're not enough. So you've got to do more change to be better. We'll get caught in the same trap, move away from mind down into consciousness, into that field of consciousness, tap into that place of love and intuition and move from that place of truth. And then we'll see what it looks like.

So what does that look like in my confidence? I want to be confident because I feel like I'm not yet confident and I would like to be more that way. Yes. Yeah. This idea that you're not confident is an idea. Take away the illusion and then we'll find truth. So it's the more that we begin to...

drop out of the mind, the more that we create separation from the mind, we'll just begin to notice, "Oh gosh, my mind is just saying that I'm not confident. Gosh, my mind has created an identity of who I am. It's got its idea of who Ali is." And we can be curious about that and see it from a distance as if you're observing another person. So what is the identity that my mind has created about Ali?

Who does my mind say that Ali is? What does my mind say Ali can do and can't do? Gosh, what does my mind judge that would be inappropriate for Ali to do? We just begin to see it. We begin to see how the mind's created all these preconceived ideas and notions. Oh gosh, it says that he's not confident. The more that we create separation from it and we see it and distance from it, we will then just be moving from truth. And the truth is...

You are neither confident nor not confident. You just are. You are neither brilliant nor not brilliant. You just are. The mystics would just say, I am. That's all we can say, I am. And there is no label that we can attach to something which can capture reality. There's no label which can accurately capture reality.

ultimate power and love. There's no name for it. It's just pure power. You are pure power. You're pure. Even that's just a name or an idea, but you're just pure power and energy. And we'll see where that energy can go. But when we move from that place, even the idea of confident and confident doesn't make sense anymore. It's like what, you know, color is the number seven.

That doesn't make sense. That's not who I am. That's not what I am. It's just then more ramblings of the mind. You move from that place of power and all that will happen is there will be unfoldings and you'll just begin to change. So if we turn the confidence then into something more concrete, like ability to play fingerstyle on the guitar. Ability to play? Fingerstyle on the guitar. You know, that kind of music.

So that's an ability. Yeah. So you can accurately assess what is my level of ability in terms of playing the guitar. Yep. And I can choose to actively improve that ability or increase that ability if I want to. Yes. Similarly, if I like confident is a bit dodge, but if I were to think instead of being confident, which is like a, almost like a character trait that is, has a value judgment on it because more confident is generally better. Yeah.

uh as society judges but instead of it thinking of thinking of specific skill of public speaking while doing presentations specific ability to go up to a pretty girl and talk to her specific ability to whatever completely those are then areas in which i can decide okay i actually wanted to work on my presentation skills therefore i'm going to watch some youtube videos and do some practice yes but i'm not using that as a way of thinking therefore i am currently unconfident

Because anyway, that also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Completely. So we can build up individual skills. I'd say the key part though is just seeing when the mind is making judgments and being able to see that as just the nature of a mind, which is a tool. Because whenever you live from a place of no mind or just live from a place of presence, you're not even thinking about confidence or not confident. So if I think about me right now,

Am I coming across as confident or not confident? I'd have to make a judgment assessment. I don't know. Like potentially some people might say yes or no. It doesn't matter. I just need to be me. If I think about you right now, are you coming across as confident or not confident? Again, I think people have different... I would say you're coming across as, yeah, confident with...

with the way that you're holding yourself. Other people will say, "Oh, I think maybe he's holding back." It doesn't really matter. There's just Ali. You just be Ali, full stop. And we can only be who we truly are whenever we can truly connect to truth. When we return that quest, returning to who we are, the truth of who we are,

acting from a place of love. Maybe I'm being pedantic here, but let's say someone has an important presentation coming up at work and they're like, cool, I want to, I feel like I'm not particularly confident on stage. I'm not particularly confident with doing this presentation. Surely what you're not, what you're saying is not, oh, don't worry about practice. Just focus on being who you are and connecting to your internal truth. And then, or is that what you're saying? Or am I just misunderstanding? Yeah.

There'll be different roads, okay? And there's different routes. I'm talking about, if we're to get specific, but I'm talking about this lifelong spiritual journey. Okay. And that's something which we're continually working on. Are there shortcuts to putting on a good presentation? Absolutely. You could have a teacher and get them to show you the hand movements to make, the eye contact, the intonation, everything.

The choice of lexicon. Yes. And that could be a fascinating skill to develop. And so absolutely go on that road and go on that path. Will that, though, take away the real problem, which is the mind believing that we're not good enough? Okay, yeah.

will that really address the mind's doubt that I don't deserve to shine my light? That actually who I am isn't as good as other people. And actually I should stay small. And if I show vulnerability, I'm gonna get hurt. So don't put yourself out there. Don't go and speak to the person. Don't take that career move. Don't take that risk to move away from what's bringing money to move towards to what I love.

Yeah, nice. I like that. It's like the... I always chuckle when my YouTuber students are like, you know, I'm just waiting for a better camera to arrive. And then my videos will be good enough for me to make my first one. Yes. I'm always like, ah. Yes. Let's dig down into that. Yes. Because the camera is not the thing holding you back. Completely. There's individuals who I've met who've been close to me, incredibly close to my family, who are...

so powerful that when you're with them, you're just drawn in. It's like a magnet. And I've met people who can go on stage and speak with such clarity and with such connection that you're just lost in their words. And these individuals, I've not known to go and do a 12-week course on public speaking or to research

what to do they may have done that along as well as but what i know to be true it's because they are moving from their place of truth yeah nice i think that's a great place to end this aria thank you so much thank you i have so many other things to ask you about which will um would be lovely to do a part two talking about mindfulness and zen and kind of the things you learned being an actor and i have all this stuff around here around pain uncertainty change but we'll save all that for a part two um why can people learn more about you or find more of your stuff

You can check me on Instagram or my website. Cool. And we'll put links to all of those in the show notes or in the video description. Thank you so much. Ali, thank you for sharing your truth with me. It's been a privilege.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you want already, and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.