#161 Jim Dethmer: The Pillars of Integrity
01:54:20 Share

So those are the four pillars of integrity. Take responsibility, feel your feelings, speak candidly, authentically, reveal, and be impeccable with your agreements. Now, in my experience, when I live like that,

I feel incredibly alive. Now, we could also talk about, you know, do you eat well? Do you get a good night's sleep? You know, are you exercising? All of that, of course, would be part of feeling fully alive. But it seems everybody knows that. We might not be doing it, but we know it. But not everybody is playing the game of let's be fully alive and play with integrity. Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.

This podcast is about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand-edited transcripts, including my personal highlights from the conversation, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link. My guest today is Jim Dethmer.

Jim is the co-founder of the Conscious Leadership Group and was previously on episode 60 of The Knowledge Project.

If you listen to that episode, which is one of our most popular, you'll see that we only started to scratch the surface of what we can learn from Jim. I wanted more. In this episode, we pick up with the four pillars of integrity, intimacy, what it is and how to have it, relationships and why men struggle, different types of trust, and we do a bit of a live coaching session as Jim explores my need for other people to have a good experience.

even when it's at the cost of my own experience. For anybody who has ever hosted a dinner party and wants everything to be perfect and runs around frantically wanting other people's experience to be amazing, this is for you. Jim walked me through it. I've seen the world different ever since then. I think you'll love this episode. It's time to listen and learn. ♪

The IKEA Business Network is now open for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Join for free today to get access to interior design services to help you make the most of your workspace, employee well-being benefits to help you and your people grow, and amazing discounts on travel, insurance, and IKEA purchases, deliveries, and more. Take your small business to the next level when you sign up for the IKEA Business Network for free today by searching IKEA Business Network.

When I was thinking about where to start with you, I listened to our last conversation. I was just struck by how timeless it was. And I think I want to start with integrity and sort of the four pillars of integrity. The four pillars of integrity I got from Katie Hendricks, Dr. Katie Hendricks. It's been a cornerstone of my life for 30 years or so. So let's begin by

just differentiating the way I want to speak about integrity from the way it normally gets talked about. You know, when integrity shows up as a value inside of a company, for example, and then you ask people, what does the value mean? The normal thing that people say is do the right thing, which is beautiful. I get that. Great. Integrity then tends to have more of a

like a moral or an ethical kind of orientation. And the way I play with integrity is none of that. But again, let's just do a little etymology here. So integrity from the root, same root as integer. So think of whole number, think of wholeness. So that's where I like to go. Think of wholeness.

So to me, integrity is energetic wholeness. Now, what that translates to very quickly for me is full aliveness. So when I am in integrity, I am energetically whole. I am fully alive.

We illustrate it sometimes with, it doesn't work so much anymore because I think they fixed this problem. But when I was a kid and you put holiday lights on a Christmas tree, kind of the deal was that if one of the lights went out, the whole strand went out, you know, first it might blink a little bit and then it all went out. And if you think about the circuitry of those Christmas lights being a circuit of wholeness

And then if one little light goes out, then they start to dim and dim and dim until they all go out. So what I work with in my own life for many, many years is, am I fully alive? I also love the question, what am I willing to risk for full aliveness? We'll come back to that because that's a fun question.

And then when I am not feeling fully alive, alive in my head, alive in my heart, alive in my gut, alive in my balls, if I can say it, alive in my spirit, if I'm not feeling alive, then I want to go check these four pillars because what reliably has been true for me is they are like the light on the strand. And if they get loose,

my aliveness tends to diminish. It doesn't go out all of a sudden, but it diminishes. So what Katie Hendricks articulated as the four pillars of integrity, the first pillar is radical responsibility. It's really the decision to move out of blaming and criticizing, out of being at the effect of the world,

and move into claiming responsibility or agency. A sure way for me to blunt my aliveness, my day-to-day experience of my vitality is to live in victimhood, blame the weather, blame the traffic. What I notice is if I stop blaming and I choose to move the locus of control back over here and I choose to have agency,

To be responsible for my experience, not the external world, but to be responsible for my experience, there's a surge of energy that comes back in the body. So that's the first pillar, radical responsibility. The second pillar is, am I willing to feel my feelings? I was a non-feeler.

much of my life. Now I came into the world, like I think everybody does, as a full feeler. So as an infant, I was a full feeler. I had access to my anger, to my rage, to my fear, to my sadness, to my joy, to my sexual energy. And then like most people, I got a little bit socialized out of that. But then I had some trauma in my life.

in my family of origin that came meaningfully to a head on my 17th birthday. This is really relevant to me and feelings. On my 17th birthday, I woke up about five in the morning to the experience of my dad having a massive heart attack. He happened to be sleeping in the single bed next to me. We'd gone to bed the night before watching a Chicago White Sox game. And I woke up with him having a fatal heart attack.

And I was a 17-year-old young man, kid, and I was all of a sudden introduced to the death process, which I'd never been introduced to before. And that was traumatic in and of itself. But then we followed the ambulance to the hospital and we walked into the hospital, into the emergency room, and my dad had been wheeled into one of the bays there. And then the nurse walked out.

The nurse walked out and handed me his watch and his ring, handed it to me, not to my mom who was there, and said, he's gone. He died. I walked away from my mom and I walked into a bathroom. And again, this was early in the morning. The hospital wasn't crowded. And I held my dad's ring and his watch in my hands. And I remember just melting down the wall, disintegrating into nothing.

grief and heartbreak and loss and complete unknowing. And then I, I love the phrase, I pulled myself together. I stood up. I walked out to my mother. My mom at that point was a functional, but a meaningful alcoholic and didn't have a lot. She hadn't matured to develop a lot of adult coping skills. So I was in a role of caretaker and helping her.

I picked her up. I held her. I helped her. Went home. I called my older brother, told him that my dad had died, called my sister. Neither of them were in the home. And it's like I made a contract with myself in that moment, Shane, which is it hurts too bad to feel these feelings. And I consciously, unconsciously, some dance there, locked them away until my late 20s, at least, probably early 30s. Here's what I didn't know is

is the amount of energy it takes to repress and suppress emotion. I tell people now, it's like your emotions are like a beach ball, you know? And you take them and you try to hold them under the water. And the more inflated the ball is, the harder it is to hold under the water. And if, you know, one beach ball is sadness and one beach ball is anger and one beach ball is fear. And after a while, you're holding these things together

Under the water, you get exhausted. And I got exhausted. I was actually, I think, mildly depressed. And a reason was that I was depressing my feelings. So now this second pillar of integrity is I just ask myself every day as part of my morning rituals,

Is there a feeling here that wants to be felt? And I've learned that these feelings can be felt very simply and efficiently and beautifully. And the thing that I was terrified of was being overwhelmed by the feelings doesn't occur at all. They become a natural enlivening part of life. They actually allow life to appear in technicolor and not black and white. They allow life force to come back into my body. So that's the second pillar. The third pillar is candor.

So if I want to be out of integrity, if I want to dampen my aliveness, all I have to do is start accumulating withholds. Things that I'm not saying, thoughts that I'm having, wants that I have, judgments and opinions that I have, beliefs that I have. All I have to do is start holding back

being authentic, being revealed, I will immediately feel less alive. When people reveal, when they become more authentic, they immediately feel more alive. Now, I just want to put a little asterisk by this. They also usually immediately experience chaos.

Because I and we have been withholding for good reason. I put air quotes around that because it made sense to withhold. So I'm not questioning whether there's a reason to withhold. What I'm questioning is its effect on integrity and its effect on aliveness. And when we talk about integrity in relationships,

And does the relationship have integrity, whether it's a personal relationship or a public relationship, a professional relationship? One of the questions we want to explore is how revealed are we? We say we use this little formula when you withhold, then you withdraw and then you project, which means you disconnect from relationship. So when we look at high performing teams, one of the things we see is they don't have many withholds.

Everything is transparent to the decision process. Okay. And then the fourth pillar of integrity is, am I impeccable with my agreements? So an agreement is just anything I've said I would do or anything I've said I wouldn't do. Real simple. It's just who's going to do what by when.

And I find that one of the ways people bleed off life energy is they don't make clear agreements. When they make clear agreements, they break their agreements, which creates a life force diminishment. It also creates drama in relationships. They rationalize, justify, and explain why they didn't keep their agreements rather than just taking responsibility for it. And they don't get back into integrity.

I just find it so beautifully simple and enlivening to go, we agreed we'd meet at the top of the hour. Let's just meet at the top of the hour. There's no, yeah, but you're not wondering, you're not having to email or text me. So those are the four pillars of integrity. Take responsibility, feel your feelings, speak candidly, authentically, reveal, and be impeccable with your agreements. Now, in my experience, when I live like that,

I feel incredibly alive. Now, we could also talk about, you know, do you eat well? Do you get a good night's sleep? Are you exercising? All of that, of course, would be part of feeling fully alive. But it seems everybody knows that. We might not be doing it, but we know it.

But not everybody is playing the game of let's be fully alive and play with integrity. There's so many rabbit holes I want to go down right now. I'm trying to think of how to organize this. I think we'll just start with the first in terms of taking radical responsibility and sort of ending blame. It's one thing to know that, yes, I should do that. What does it look like to do that? It actually begins before there is a given stimuli in this moment.

It begins when I'm sitting on my chair in the morning or I'm in a silent retreat or I'm away with my team or my intimate partner. And I'm asking the question, how do I want to live life? So it begins with a foundational commitment. Commitment, again, not being ethical or moral, commit being more energetic. In other words, it begins by me saying, declaring commitment.

I want to go to San Francisco, not Austin. So I get real clear. I get on the web and I buy a ticket to San Francisco. And I know the difference between San Francisco and Austin. So it begins in quiet reflection or it begins on retreat or it begins, like I said, with a team deciding, do we want to play the blame game or do we want to take responsibility? So it begins with me declaring to myself and deciding, I want to play a different game in life.

I want to play the responsibility game. I don't want to play the blame game. That's really important because only then

Do I know how I'm going to be with life when it shows up? Now, let's keep pressing the analogy of an airplane. So let's say I decide I'm going to San Francisco, not Austin. So I buy the ticket to San Francisco, which means I'm going to claim responsibility for my experience. Now, I've been told that no plane flies straight and true. So it drifts off course. You know, it's always course correcting. It commits to San Francisco, but then it drifts and then it shifts back on the course.

Great. So now I start living my life. I have gotten my ticket to San Francisco. I want to play the no blame game. I want to play the responsibility game. Debbie does something. Debbie looks at me a certain way. That look that an intimate partner can have, which is not a look that says, I love you. I adore you. I want to be close to you. It's that look that says, oh, you know, that look. Okay. Now I get a pop quiz. Boom.

All right, so now I get to go, okay, am I going to claim responsibility? In other words, her face is not the cause of my experience. This is what radical responsibility is. In the blame game, her face, that frown, the particular, you know, brow that she has, that particular way she's forming her eyes. In blame, I go, why are you looking at me like that?

I didn't do anything because I think the cause of my uncomfortable experience on the inside is her face. So then, of course, what I want to do is I want to get her to change her face because I believe that if she looked at me differently, I'd be OK. I'm not OK because she's looking at me the way she's looking at me.

Claiming responsibility goes, she is looking at me. And you know, a video camera would record a particular mouth structure or a particular brow structure, you know, those little micro expressions in her video camera would record something, but it is not what the camera's recording.

that is causing my experience. It's an internal mechanism inside of me that is generating my fear. It's a mechanism that goes something like this. Oh no, Debbie is disapproving of me. I can't be okay if Debbie is disapproving of me. I've outsourced my need for approval to Debbie.

That's victimhood. And by the way, I want to distinguish between being a victim and victim consciousness. This is a really important distinction. There are genuine victims in the world. Victim consciousness is if I'm 70 years old and I'm still blaming my mother, my brother, and my father for my current experience in life.

So I want to stipulate there are real victims. Now, let's fast forward. Debbie's making that face. I'm not a real victim at that point. The experience I'm having on the inside of nervousness, apprehension, anxiety, fear, resentment, anger, I am the cause of that because I'm believing I'm the source of a belief about Debbie.

And about my needs for approval and about my needs for control. There are these core wants, approval, control, security, and oneness. And at that moment, I think those core wants are being threatened because of Debbie's face. I've outsourced them to her. Okay, now I'm in the pop quiz. I'm on the airplane. It's drifted off course. Now I get a choice. I can say, why are you making that face? I didn't do anything.

I told you I might be a little late. I told you the golf game might run long. Now I'm justifying, explaining, rationalizing. Now I'm fully in victimhood. Now I get to go back to the commitment I made a day, a week, a month, a year earlier and say, hold on a minute. I chose to end blame and criticism. And I chose to take responsibility. It's not going to happen in that moment.

It's not. You can practice till it gets to where it does. But at first, it might be an hour later after I've said to her, don't make that face at me. Then an hour later, I go, uh-oh, I drifted off course. I went back into the blame game. No problem. An hour, a day later, I recommit. And what that looks like is I come back to Deb and I say, hey,

I drifted off of my commitment to end blaming criticism, and I was blaming you, whether outwardly, inwardly. I saw myself as a victim at the effect of your energy. I take responsibility for that, Deb. I was the cause of my experience. You didn't do that to me. When I drift, I just recommit. So it begins with a clear commitment inside of yourself.

Then it begins with growing in self-awareness so you can feel the difference between blaming and criticizing and taking responsibility. And then it moves to a very simple practice. And the simple practice is this. I'm triggered. It always begins with noticing I'm triggered. Because when we blame, we are triggered. I'm in a threatened state.

Right now, as you make that face, Debbie, I feel threatened. Again, it's a threat to my wanting to be approved of, to have control over her, a threat to my safety and security, and a threat to my wanting oneness. I feel threatened. So the first thing I do is I go, I'm triggered and I feel threatened. No big deal. Just acknowledge it. And then I say, well, that's all because I'm scared. And can I just accept myself for being scared for just a moment?

Acceptance is the antidote to fear. And until the fear gets met and faced and felt and relaxed, there isn't an option for a non-reactive behavior. It's a really important principle. So then I accept myself. Then I say, am I willing to choose claiming responsibility? And then we have a set of questions we go through when we're claiming responsibility. Questions like, how did I create this experience?

How is this familiar? How is this a pattern in my life? What are the payoffs I'm getting from creating this experience? How do I keep this experience going? These are insight-oriented questions that create a whole new learning that is never available to us as long as we're in a blame and criticize mode. So we commit. When we drift, we recommit.

We become aware of being triggered. We accept ourselves for being in a threatened, fearful state. And then we reclaim responsibility and start asking a series of questions. By the way, it could happen again in the intimate relationship. Could happen on a team at work. Hey, we missed our quarterly numbers. Great. We could blame and criticize. But we agreed we were going to go to San Francisco.

So in our post-mortem, let's actually start to look at how we co-created the experience.

And then we'll get massive learnings. Oh, wow. Yeah, this is great. I love the depth and the insight you're providing here. There's a couple areas that I wanted to sort of follow up with here. One was the nature of the airplane and constant adjustments. It's like there's an active stability to it.

You need to be conscious and active in order to stabilize. And then the other thing around the core wants that you said, so approval, control, security, oneness. Can you explore those a little bit? So I first heard about these from Hale Dwoskin, who is the teacher of the Sedona Method. It's a really great method. And he, I believe, got them from his mentor, Lester Levinson.

They're not original, I'm sure, but that's where I heard them. I want to give credit. So the four core wants of all human beings, and these are natural. They're not wrong. They're natural. They're instinctual. The first core want is approval. It's the desire to be liked, loved, valued, respected, wanted. The second core want is for control.

It's just simply the desire for the world to be the way we think the world should be. All of us have a belief about the way the world should be. And the world could be how fast my computer's running. The world could be my desk. The world could be my children. The world could be economic stability.

variables going on right now. We all have a way we think the world should be and a way the world shouldn't be. Control is just our desire to make the world be the way we think it should be. So I say to people all the time, we're all control freaks. Our very survivability is at threat when we lack approval and when we lack control. If we get cut out of the clan, ostracized from the tribe,

Because we're not approved of, that's a death sentence. So it's natural and normal that we are looking for approval, love, connectivity. When we feel out of control, it's threatening that third one, which is security, safety, survivability. Literally, it means I don't want to die.

But it's not just that. It's I don't want to experience harm. I don't want to experience ego dissolution. I want my identity to survive. These are all just as natural and normal as can be. And then the fourth one is oneness, which is just simply a sense of connectivity. It's probably ultimately connected.

A deep thirst for spiritual oneness, if you don't like that word, just a connection to the transcendent. A sense that I am not fundamentally alone, fundamentally alienated. So these are the four core wants that human beings have. After about the age of four to six, we forget that we already have all of these on the inside.

And so we outsource them and we spend the rest of our life thinking that if we get enough money, we'll feel safe and secure.

If we get ourselves bulletproof at work so that we can't get canceled, we'll feel safe and secure. If we get enough alarm systems on our house or enough guns or enough, if we get enough passports to live in other countries in addition to our dual citizenship here, if we have the resources to buy a secure place on an island in the Northwest where we have all the fresh, you know, there's

We start thinking, if only I could get secure, then I would feel secure. Of course, anybody who's run that racket down very far, you go, uh-oh, that didn't work. If only I could get so-and-so to like me, so-and-so to value me, so-and-so to want me. If only I could get my mother to finally say she loves me before she died, then my desire for approval would be sated. I wouldn't need that anymore.

If only I could get control of fill in the blank, but it never works. So the ultimate outsourcing is outsourcing our core needs and wants to people's circumstances and conditions. And

The growth path of life, I've been playing a lot with these four stages of life. And what happens in the third stage, you know, the first stage is learning. The second stage is doing. The third stage is mentoring. The fourth stage is arriving. As I move out of the doing stage, which is all about ticking the boxes of approval, control, security, and oneness, that I think will stabilize you. I love the word you use, stabilize my sense of okayness.

If I'm self-aware, I start to go, uh-oh, it worked in the short run, but it hasn't really stabilized it. So now in the third dimension of life, I get to see, actually test, is there an okayness on the inside? So now I stop outsourcing it. I start resting it. And this is not a belief. It's not a theology. It's not an orthodoxy. It has to be a direct experience or it's of no good whatsoever.

But if I can actually experience a profound sense of okayness related to those four things, the entire game changes. That's what happens in the third and fourth stages of life. If I'm outsourcing approval to Debbie's facial expression, I'm vulnerable to being disrupted. If I have a profound sense of approval on the inside, then I might get momentarily triggered by Debbie's facial expression.

but I don't need Debbie's approval to be okay. It doesn't mean that it doesn't feel good, but I don't need it. So I don't become reactive and hyper-reactive and I can come back into a higher learning state. So that's how the four core wants relate to being triggered and how to come back off of drifting. You use the word stabilize. In a Buddhist tradition, they talk about first you recognize something,

Then you realize it. Then you stabilize in it.

First, I recognize that I've lost my ship. I've outsourced approval, control, and security. Okay, great. And then I have a momentary recognition, not in that moment, but maybe the next morning when I'm sitting quietly or that night when I look up at the stars, I lose a sense of self and everything is okay. Maybe I have a momentary taste. I recognize it, but I don't yet realize it's my natural state.

So I have to do practices to create realization and enough practices, and then it becomes stabilized. I love that. I think, you know, as I was thinking about this, I was thinking sort of in terms of our biological instincts and our, you know, we're all hierarchical, we're all self-preserving, we're all territorial, right?

And we tend to think of those things like a dog sort of pees and, you know, marks its territory. And so we conceptualize these things as like a physical territory, but it's not. It's our identity as part of our territory. So when somebody infringes on our identity, our sense of self, something that we see as part of our core self, we tend to react without reasoning, just like an animal, because it's embedded inside of our biology.

For most people, the infringement is actually not like the infringement of a dog. It's not territorial. This isn't true of everybody who's going to listen to this podcast. Some people live in a world where the infringement actually is that.

But for most of the people you and I know, they've created a world where they're safe and secure enough that the infringement isn't that. The vast majority of the infringement is the infringement on the identity. It's the infringement on the ego identity. And here's the deal. As long as I think I am my identity,

then it will be infringed upon. It has to be. That's one of the gifts, actually, of having our identities infringed upon, not in the early stages of development, but later, one of the gifts of having our identities infringed upon, in other words, being disrespected, for example. The gift of that is, later on in the journey, is

It invites you to go, oh, it happened again. I re-identified with an identity that I am smart or that I am, you know, famous or that I am kind. Whatever comes after the I am is always an identity.

I re-identified with an identity. It got questioned or threatened and I went into a reactive state. That's great. Then later in life, you just go, oh, thank goodness. Now I can disidentify from that a little bit and come back to the deeper truth of what I am because I'm not my identity. So what you're saying is actually true.

The goldmine that you get that it's not territorial infringement, it's the infringement on the ego identity, what Locke Kelly, one of my friends and teachers, calls the mini-me. I love that phrase. It's a little mini-me that we think lives someplace between the front of our head, the back of our head, and our two ears, this little identity who's craving approval, control, security, and oneness.

Who does it by identifying. And then when the identity gets threatened, it just goes batshit crazy. I love this. What's the counterbalance in terms of how do we get the proper perspective in order to step back from this infringement? Because the infringement is going to happen. We're going to be triggered.

How do we add? I mean, most things, most problems come from blind spots. Most problems come from misunderstanding. And if you understood, you would have the patience to sort of see things through without reacting. That comes with perspective. How do we, what's the counterbalance to add the perspective that we need to sort of like let the situation diffuse instead of escalating in the moment? If what we're doing here is we're exploring our identity and it being triggered.

And I'm suggesting that that happens when we have over-identified with a role that we play in life or with a notion of who we are. Okay, good. So the deep work that needs to be going on all the while in life is practices where we actually understand the truth of who and what we are. I would put a plug in for meditation practices

that are not just about developing concentration. They're not just about being able to focus on the breath or a mantra or a candle. So now we would be looking at practices in the Dzogchen tradition or the Mahamudra tradition in practical terms. I'm a huge fan of Locke Kelly, like I mentioned, and I'm a huge fan of Sam Harris. Nowadays, I recommend waking up.

because of what we're talking about right now, that everything on that app, including the momentary glimpses and the 10-minute practice, but also the library of stuff that Sam has got. By the way, I don't know Sam. I'm not advocating for him for any personal reason whatsoever, just the efficacy of the app. The practices rooted in there, when done in a reliably disciplined way,

Help us move through the illusion of thinking we are our bank account or we are our reputation. Every day for a few minutes, we reconnect. We recognize for a moment the truth of who we are. 10 minutes, 20 minutes a day, maybe once a month doing a little bit longer, maybe once a year going on some sort of retreat. Again, where I'm seeing through the illusion of my identity,

Now, here's what happens. Now, when the identity gets triggered, I have an understanding that I am not that. I am that which is actually always already safe, which is actually always already fully approved of.

I am that which is already totally in control of anything that needs to be controlled. And anything that I'm not in control of doesn't need to be controlled. It's an already always experience of that. Do a damn practice every day. Sit your ass in a chair for 10 minutes because that will lead you over time.

all the way to the most profound understanding of what you really are. This is why Ramana Maharshi taught us inquiry. And his inquiry was real simple. It was just basically, who am I?

Or another way of saying it is, what am I? That's a profound inquiry. Because as long as I think I am a man, a 70-year-old man, a 70-year-old white cis man, a 70-year-old white cis rich man who lives in Michigan, as long as I think I am a grandfather, as long as I think I am, those might be roles that I play. Those might be things that I occupy periodically, but they're not the truth of who I am. As long as I'm confused about that,

In your words, until I understand the truth of who I am and what I am, I am always vulnerable to destabilization. So the practice is destabilization.

Do those basic simple things so that you start to stabilize and understand the truth of who you are. Two things here. One, you said in a reliably disciplined way. So it almost indicates that rituals are the counterbalance to sort of some of this. Yes, absolutely. And I love the word rituals. I love that you're using that. I'd love to actually probe with you what ritual means to

how you use it, because to me, it's like a semi-technical term. And I make a distinction between discipline with practices and devotion to rituals. And they're very different things in my experience. Go deeper on that. What do you mean by that? So a practice is just something that I do, that I have a desired outcome, and I want to accrue a benefit.

So it could be that I, you know, want to do cardio training three days a week. So now that becomes a practice. I'm going to do a hit or something like that. Now, discipline is that I'm going to show up and get on the bike with some regularity. And discipline, of course, is the whole idea that I'm going to postpone gratification. That's the basic idea of discipline.

So to me, the difference between a practice and a ritual is if you look at the word ritual, you know, it comes from traditions, often spiritual traditions, ecclesiastical traditions. And what a ritual was, was something that I or we did in the physical realm that pointed to something in the other realm. Rituals, they're actually beautiful things, right?

So there's a big difference between whether I'm doing a practice or a ritual and whether I'm exercising discipline or devotion. So the difference between discipline and devotion is discipline is this idea of delayed gratification. I love it. It's essential.

Devotion is this idea, it's like I'm offering, I'm offering something. It's a very different energy. And when I'm devoted or in devotion, I'm offering my attention. I'm offering my time. So let me illustrate a couple of different ways.

So at our home in Michigan, where I spend most of my time, we live in the woods and I love to wander in the woods. I love to go for walks in the woods. Okay. I could be disciplined doing a practice. Let's say I want to get 10,000 steps or some amount of climb or elevation. And, you know, I want to do that X number of days a week. So I'm disciplined. I get up, I put on my shoes, I go for my walk. That's disciplined in a practice and there's real value in

Devotion to a ritual is a very different thing. And the way that I now normally encounter the woods is as a ritual. The woods are an invitation to something beyond. I have on my desk almost always a poem that I first heard David White. David didn't write it. I think it's David Wagner who wrote it, but it's called Lost.

And a lot of times before I head into the woods, I'll just reread the poem. Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here. And you must treat it as a powerful stranger. Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen.

It answers. I've made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again saying, here, no two trees are the same to the raven. No two branches are the same to the wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still.

The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. When I take that as my presence and then I move into the woods in devotion, I'm offering the woods my time and my attention. I could go get my 10,000 steps, disciplined in my practice, walking through the woods and listen to a podcast.

But that's so different than offering the woods my attention, my time. And then when I move through the woods in this practice, I'll still get the same four, four and a half miles in, let's say, but I often pause and I listen. That's very different. I'll give you another illustration. Debbie and I do a sauna most every day that we're in Michigan. And I intentionally got a wood burning sauna because as opposed to

an electric one, because I wanted the ritual of starting a fire every morning in the dark. Okay. So I have a ritual around starting the fire and that reminds me of a whole lot of things. And then Debbie and I enter into the sauna. So I prepare the sauna and we enter in and it is devotional time. I'm there giving Debbie my full attention and vice versa.

We're not covering the logistics of the day. We're there in a devoted, usually 15 to 20 minutes, practice of really getting with each other. And we're using the heat and the fire to create a context where the devotion of what our relationship is, the mystery beyond just a man and a woman in a sauna, is being reflected.

I listened to Huberman long ago on heat treatment and cold treatment. I have a cold plunge right next to it. So some days I just go to the heat treatment and cold plunge. It's great. That's discipline in a practice. Devotion to a ritual is a very different thing. The last illustration I'd give Shane is how do you spend time with your children? So many people know the value of being with their children and they do it as discipline in a practice. And it has all of the attendant energy of that.

versus devotion to a ritual. The ritual is that I am seeing them as sacred beings. It's a way that I attend to them. I don't enter into the ritual of being with them for whatever period of time while checking my phone if it goes off or while watching TV over their shoulder. There is the devotion, the giving of my full attention, the giving of my time.

which is devotion to a ritual of seeing them and seeing the essence of who they are. That's a great distinction. The difference between discipline, which implies willpower,

And devotion, which implies a wholehearted offering. It doesn't take willpower for me to give my attention to Debbie in the sauna or stand still in the woods or get fully present to my grandchild while he plays a game. Very different energy. And I just want to say, in my world, obviously not everything is ritual.

But I'm clear that there are some things that are ritual, the operative term being what's happening in the physical realm is a portal, a window, a passageway into something beyond that. The material is a representation of the immaterial.

There's a reason for millennia people have had rituals. And of course, rituals can be bastardized and turn into fundamentalism and all that. But when they are what they were designed to be, I think they were designed to give us in the individual and the collective a direct experience of something bigger than ourselves. Yeah, to hand ourselves over to something else. Yes. You know, rituals, when they're done,

in that way, they create awe. They create wonder. They create a sense of... Well, positive ones, too. Yes.

Yes. Okay. So we've started talking about the pillars of integrity and the four pillars were sort of taking radical responsibility, being revealed and not concealing, feeling feelings and being impeccable with your agreements. We went down the rabbit hole of taking radical responsibility and that's how we ended up here. I want to reorient, go back up. Let's talk about being revealed and not concealing. So again, if we review, integrity is...

being energetically whole, no interruptions to flow. Another way of saying that is being in a fully alive state. All right. Just think about when you tell a lie and you know you tell a lie.

Almost everybody can feel a contraction in their body. They can feel a dampening of their energy. They can feel their life force dwindling, which can show up in the form, unless you're a sociopath, can show up in the form of guilt or something like that. Okay. What most people don't always feel is that when I am not revealed, I have stepped away from being fully alive.

So, again, if I go back to me in depth, the model that I like to use is there are kind of two columns. Imagine two columns. On one side is when I withhold. So this is something that I'm thinking, feeling, wanting. It could be a judgment, a perception, whatever.

It could be any of those things. It's occurring over here in me, and I'm withholding it from Debbie. By the way, usually when we withhold, me personally and most of us, it's because we're scared of the consequences of being revealed.

That's normal. I'm scared that if I reveal this thought, it's going to affect Debbie a certain way. Or what I'm really scared of is if I reveal this thought and it affects Debbie a certain way, then she's going to react and that's going to affect me a certain way. Or I think, you know, God, we've had this conversation before. It's not worth having this conversation. So I withhold.

Now, what happens in relationships is right after I withhold, I withdraw from the relationship. Now, the first step back is subtle. It's just a little bit of withdrawing. Now, the other side, the other column starts with I reveal.

And that revealing is always risky. Now, it's not I revealed to her like this morning, we did our ritual of sitting together as we do and connecting with each other. And at some point I said, I'm going to reconnect with Shane today. Well, that wasn't risky. But there's almost always something that if I were to reveal to her, it would feel risky.

Like here'd be an example. We're talking a little bit about Thanksgiving and we're counting. We're going to have like 16 people for Thanksgiving. And then I had the thought to ask my daughter if she wanted to bring somebody she's in relationship with right now. I didn't know whether he was available. She wrote back and said he was. So I said to Deb, now I got a little bit scared, just a little bit scared because she's managing the dining room table. Got it. And this is a, this is an important thing for her. So it was like a little pinch in my body.

to go, "Guy, you know, he's available. I'd really like him to come." Okay. Now it wasn't a major risk, but it was a little bit of a risk. And I could feel, I could withhold that for another hour, another day. I don't have to say it right now. I could slip it in later and that would be a withhold. Then I'd withdraw. I'd be a little cautious that she might find out through my daughter or something. But I just say it, I just risk, "Hey, he's available. I'd really like him to come." Okay. That's the risk.

Then the next thing that happens when I withhold, I withdraw. When I reveal, I connect. So I'm either withholding and withdrawing or I'm revealing and I'm connecting. I'm opening myself up for connection. Candor is the gateway to connection. And the last thing that happens when I withhold, I withdraw and then I project.

So let's say I have a judgment about Debbie. What would be a judgment I might have about Debbie? A real judgment. Sometimes my judgment about Debbie is she doesn't make decisions soon enough. So I would have this judgment that you don't make decisions. You got to make some darn decisions. Okay. If I withhold that and I don't reveal my judgment of her, then I withdraw. I back up a little bit. Then the next thing that happens is I project onto her my judgment as though it's right. Right.

I project onto her that she's a slow decision maker and she should be different. Now, from that place, I start seeing her through the lens of being a slow decision maker. And guess what? I find confirming data to prove that. When I see that, I withhold that, I withdraw, I project. Now I'm in the death spiral of a relationship. Withhold, withdraw, project.

I said it to her the other day. So I revealed my judgment is that you're slow in making decisions here. I open myself up for connection because once I reveal myself, now what I want to do is sit with her while she has her experience. Does she get angry? Does she get scared? Does she get sad? Does she react defensively? I stay present and I'm available for connection. So I reveal, I connect. And now here's the last step in this column.

I own my projection. So I look over there and I see her being slow in decision-making and it's bothering me. Then I say, let me see in my life, where am I not making a decision? So I eat my projection and how's it bothering me? Then I get insight from my projection and I can share it with her. Or I could go the opposite way. How am I addicted to making decisions without giving them the time to actually come to full maturities?

So now when I reveal and I connect, then I get learnings that I can offer back into the relationship. Now,

integrity is full aliveness. In relationships, you're either withholding, withdrawing, and projecting professionally or personally, or you're revealing, you're connecting, and you're owning, which creates aliveness. I know this because over the years, the hundreds and hundreds of couples that I've coached, whenever they're a little bored in their relationship, whenever there's a little deadness, whenever they're starting to look outside the relationship for something else,

almost always I'm certain that they are not being candid with each other. There's something they're not revealing because I guarantee you, if you practice the pillar of being revealed, of speaking authentically, you won't be bored in a relationship. You won't be bored. It might be chaotic and messy, but you won't be bored. So that's the second pillar. Am I revealed in life? And of course,

It doesn't mean that I move through life revealing to everybody. I don't reveal necessarily to the barista every thought that I have as I order my latte. But when I'm in a relationship with somebody where we are co-committed, as we talked about, co-committed, we're both going to San Francisco and we both want to practice being revealed and not concealed so we can be fully alive. Then I'm in devotion to the ritual of revealing.

Because it's a portal to intimacy and connection and aliveness. Wow. I mean, just wow. I think where my reaction goes is that we tell ourselves a story about somebody else and we see confirming evidence of that story.

And if we don't ever bring that story to light, it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy effectively. And to your point about withdrawing, the more we're telling ourselves this unchecked story, this fiction, right? Because it's not sort of standing the test of bringing it up. But the more we tell ourselves this story, the more we take a step back

in a relationship, whether it's friendship, your partner, customers, anybody, coworkers, colleagues. And that space creates an opportunity for not only does it reduce intimacy, but it creates an opportunity for somebody else to enter that relationship.

Because if somebody feeds you in the way that you've withdrawn, and now they're affirming a part of you, then I can see how that would spiral really quickly. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, if you want to go the other way, I love what you said, you know, we make up a story about somebody. Well, a real simple hack here is just to say,

Hey, Shane, just so you can know me over here on planet Jim, this is the way I'd say it, over here on planet Jim, this planet where it has its own view of reality, its own rules, its own way of seeing the world. I'm making up a story about you. And I just want to reveal my story so you, A, you can know me.

So I won't withdraw from you. And in some cases, I just want to check out my story with you. So we did this actually on because this podcast, this is we're recording part two. It'll be part one for everybody who is listening. Like it'll all just be seamless. But we had a hiccup in the first recording and we had to delay the second sort of recording.

And I was talking about my experience and sort of like how I felt bad about this not working out. I was projecting onto you and I was revealing and not concealing. But walk me through that conversation again from your point of view and how you saw that. Because I was stating my, you know, I'm...

I guess, stereotypically Canadian, right? I'm always like, how is the other person feeling? How do I make them feel better? I want everything to go right. I want it to be perfect. And if it doesn't go perfect, then somehow I haven't done all the things within my control to do. Yeah, I haven't done everything within my control. And I remember the details. You might have to cover some of it with me. But it began with you, I think, apologizing. I'm sorry. I feel bad.

I said, now, hold on a second, because we had just talked about responsibility. And I was telling myself a story, right? This is what triggered this memory of this. Yes. Yes. You were telling yourself the story that it was a bad experience for me. You actually said at one point, you said, you know,

It's your time, you know, like your time is valuable, you know, and like we're taking your time or we're wasting your time, something like that. So you're over here making up a story about my experience that because we were having technical difficulties and we're going to need to gather back again, that I was having a bad experience, that I was in some way upset, frustrated, something like that, and that you were in some way wasting my time.

So you made up that story and you didn't check it out. Yeah. You assumed you were the cause of my experience. All right. So from assuming that you were the creator of my first, you assumed I was having a bad experience. Then you assume that you were the cause of my bad experience. And then from there, you apologized and you felt bad.

Okay, that's normal human interaction. Yes, Canadians have a, you know, like a PhD in that. That's true. But we all have a version of that. Here's the way that could have gone. So you say, you start with you and you might've said, hey, I'm feeling bad over here. And you could have dissected what is the exact feeling? Are you scared? Are you sad? Are you angry? Is it some combo? You're having an experience over there. I'm making up the story, Jim,

that this is a bad experience for you, that you're in some way upset about that. And the other thing I'm doing is I have this little self-blamer who thinks that I'm responsible for your experience. Okay, now you're playing above the line, that term we use, or you're playing from presence because you're revealing yourself.

All right, now remember when we talked about 100% responsibility? Here's what it looks like in relationships that I'm in, and I'm in a relationship with you. Here's what I'd say to you, Shane, get me about this. You are not the cause of my experience. You're not. However much we ever relate in life, you are not the cause of my experience. I would say it this way. I actually won't grant you that power. I am the cause of my experience.

You act, and in this case, technology acted and it stopped working. Yeah, there was an action.

But you didn't cause anything over here. Okay, that'd be the first thing I'd say. So therefore, you don't need to step over there and try to make me feel better as though you were the cause of it. That'd be the first thing. The second thing, you could check out your story. Hey, Jim, I'm making up the story that this is a bad experience for you. You know, you're a busy guy. You know, you got a finite amount of time. You know, you give it. And I want to check out my story about you.

Is this technical glitch a bad experience? Well, if you had done that, because this is what I said to you, I actually said, you know, I said to you, it's not a bad experience over here at all. None. In fact, I'm glad before we knew it wasn't going to start again. I said, I'm glad, you know, I've been expending some energy. I'd like to get a drink.

Nice place for me to pause, feel energetically how we're doing. It's not a bad experience at all. Over here on planet Jim, I'm present, I'm happy. So if that's the case, there's absolutely no need for you to be apologizing. In fact, apology seems like a silly thing. In fact, if you want to take responsibility, you could say, I feel happy because the technical glitch is allowing you to take a breath, pause, get present, and have a sip of water.

And then the other assumption was you had this assumption that time is something that I have and that time is something that is scarce and that therefore you're intruding on the management of this finite resource. Now, you might believe all those things about time. I don't believe any of those things about time, any of them.

So again, we could come back to presence and you would just say, hey, I feel bad, sad, scared, maybe a little bit. I'm making up the story that you're having a bad experience. I can feel myself wanting to rescue you from having a bad experience. And I just want to tell you about all that and check it out. That's candor. That's actually speaking authentically. And then I can say, thank you for telling me all that. Now, if you want to know me, here's what's going on. I'm having a great experience.

And I've been chewing on that conversation ever since, especially the times when I catch myself in like a host role with friends or something. And I'm about to say, oh, I'm sorry. And I'm like, oh, this is that thing again, right? Like this is me projecting and giving myself a,

unwarranted agency over your experience as well, right? Like, but this is what we do all the time. Not only, not only we do it both ways though, right? In one way we do it is like, we assume that we're the responsibility for other people's

experience. The other assumption that we make is that we have no agency over our own experience and somebody else is the reason that we're not happy or we're not in a good place or our day's not going right or things didn't work out and we blame people and we blame circumstances. Yes. Yes. And that's why the first pillar of integrity is that 100% responsibility where you get to take your 100%, just your 100%,

and I get to take my hundred, and then from a place of co-creation, we get to have our experience. If we come back to the idea that integrity is aliveness,

There's so much more aliveness available to us when we're playing that game. If you're over there feeling bad, blaming yourself because you hosted a party and something didn't go exactly the way, you're guilting yourself. You're out of presence. You're actually out of presence. You're not available to your guests because you're in your own mind doing your racket.

Or if I'm over here going, you know, you invited me over for dinner. I told you I was allergic to shellfish and you served shellfish. I feel disrespected. You disrespected me, which, you know, some people would relate to the world that way. Okay. At that point, I'm out of presence.

So if we're both out of, and you say, oh God, I feel so horrible. Now we're in some drama-based cycle that doesn't allow for maximum learning.

Whereas if we take responsibility and I let you have your experience and I have my experience and I have agency for mine and you have agency for yours, then we get to learn. By the way, I just want to catch this because some people, when I say I grant you agency for your experience, that's not, it doesn't live in me as a license for me to be an asshole.

It doesn't go there. It doesn't say, well, you're responsible for your own experience. If you're upsetting yourself, that's your problem. So I'll talk to you however I want. It's not that at all. There's something I better be aware of underneath that. So I grant you the right to be responsible for your experience. And I want to come toward you with you from a spirit of fill in the blank, love, appreciation, openheartedness.

Taking 100% responsibility isn't a license to be, you know, to be a mean person. It's not that at all. That makes sense. And the next one is sort of like feeling feelings. And we've sort of touched on this a little bit. But I think you have more you want to say on that. Well, in my mind, this is a huge one. Again, if I understand your audience, especially for many of the people who...

really, really join you in your podcast. Many of them have fantastically developed IQs. They've really leveraged their thinking center. It's been key to their success, their ability to discern, to distinguish, to make decisions. They're just brilliant at that, absolutely brilliant at that. But they're a little more cut off from their EQ, from their heart space, from their emotional center. And in my experience, I've

greatly cut off from their BQ, their body intelligence. A great way to cut yourself off from energetic wholeness or from aliveness is to repress or suppress feelings. Feelings are these gifts that allow life to move out of black and white into full color.

Feelings are just sensations. If you actually break it down, all a feeling is, is a sensation or set of sensations in and on the body. That's all they are. They often arise with a thought accompanying them. So there's a cognitive stimuli, but then there's an emotive experience. That's the sensations in the body. Now,

What we find is people are used to being with those sensations because if you bring your full attention to the sensations, let's say anger arises in your body. Anger usually arises as a set of, it could be heat. It could be tension in the jaw, you know, gripping in the fists. It can be tension in the back of the neck, the shoulders, down the back, on the top of that. That tends to be the anger zone.

Now, there's a thought like that person shouldn't have cut me off in traffic. That's the stimulating thought. Then anger arises. OK, most people either express the anger or they repress or suppress. Most people don't know how to be with the anger.

with full attention to experience it until it releases. And it releases in a fairly short period of time, which is just, wow, my face feels hot. I'm gripping the steering wheel so hard I could snap it in two. Take a breath. Now, I'm not trying to get rid of the feelings. I'm just saying, could I just let the body feel what it feels? Could I actually be so present to let all those sensations be there? And then what we discover is,

The half-life of any set of sensations tied to an emotion is fairly short. It's minutes, maybe even seconds. It's not hours and days. And then I'm alive. The same with sadness or the same with fear or the same with joy. People repress and suppress because they didn't know how to feel their feelings. Most of us were getting better at this with children. We can say, honey, you look like you're really angry.

I'll just sit here with you while you feel your anger. In fact, if you want to take a wiffle ball bat and go hit the couch and feel your anger and scream, dad will just sit here with you. I'll just witness your anger. I wasn't raised with people like that. So we were taught to suppress and repress. And then that cuts off our full aliveness. Now, again, if I come back to relationships, there has to be a shared commitment to feel feelings.

and to do it in a way that is safe and friendly for me, for you, and for the environment, meaning our house.

So as an adult though, if you weren't brought up in an environment where that was okay. And I read somewhere that feelings last like 60 seconds if you actually let yourself feel them and you suppress them. And that comes out as like passive aggression or aggression, aggression in some cases, right? Like you, you suppress so much and then the littlest thing goes wrong. And all of a sudden it's, it's, you know, every, the whole world is out of your way and wants to run away. And,

And it wasn't that one thing that triggered it. It's the series of all these little suppressions. But if we haven't been taught how to do that, how do we learn to recognize the physiological signs that, okay, we're having a feeling, whether it's we're sad, we're angry, we're happy, and then allowing ourselves to feel that. Is that sort of...

Like a pause or ritual or something that we do where we can just be like, okay, I noticed these tingling sensations I noticed that, you know, my blood pressure or my heart rate is beating faster. I'm just going to take a breath, close my eyes and be with this sensation until it passes.

Yes, yes. Okay. So like many of these things that you and I are talking about, first, I like to have people practice in a way that feels friendly and safe. So let me show you what that might be.

Would you be willing to let me coach you for just a second? Yes. Oh, gosh. Nothing like doing this in front of a half million people. We're not going to do any big thing here. We're going to do a little thing, but I want to make sure it feels friendly to you. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. So all you need to do is just take a breath and then just allow to come into your consciousness a situation or a person

And when that situation or that person comes into your mind, you feel irritated. You feel a little frustrated, maybe even a little bit angry. And you don't have to say what it is. So just do you have one? Yes, totally. Okay, beautiful. Great. So the first thing we're going to do is I'm just going to ask you to let the movie play. So go ahead and see the person or persons play.

If they're talking, go ahead and hear them. Or if they're doing whatever they're doing, go ahead. Great. So we're actually using the mind to stimulate, to bring up a feeling state. Good. So there's some irritation, frustration, anger here. Good. So now we're going to move from the mind. Where do you feel it in your body? And this is not a big one, I don't imagine, unless it is, which is great too. Where do you feel the irritation, frustration,

frustration in your body? My jaw. Beautiful. Great. And just so everybody can ride along here, what do you feel in your jaw? Is it hot, cold, tense? It's like tense. It's like not relaxed. It's on. It's working harder than it should be. Beautiful. So I feel tension hard. It's on. It's working. Okay. So now here's the magic move. Bring your attention to your jaw now.

And as best you can, just let the tension be there. So I'm not trying to get rid of it, change it. I'm actually just giving it a little bit of attention, almost welcoming the tension. Oh, there's tension. And as you bring your attention to your jaw and you just allow the jaw to have its experience, tell me what's happening. Is it getting more intense, less intense, moving? It goes away.

It just goes away. Great. Now, this is exactly what we're talking about. So we use a cognitive stimulant. You thought of someone or something. That's great. We use that simply to prime the pump to get the body having a feeling, which is going to be sensations. Now, this is really important. Then we interrupt the thinking.

We stop thinking about that person and we move our attention from our thought to our sensation. We rest our attention on the sensation and we just watch it do what it does. In your case, in probably a few moments, it went away. Now, I do want to say this. In some cases, it'll get more intense first. It'll get hotter.

It'll start to quiver. It's okay. What I'm doing is just resting my attention and letting the body do its thing. Now, what that will do is it will release that wave of feeling. It'll release that. Okay. So,

Actually on our website, and we can link to this, I've recorded a meditation which is doing exactly what I just did with you. I think it's like a 10 minute meditation where you can just sit and practice this with anything. We could do the same thing. Think of something in your life that makes you sad. Think of something that makes you scared. We stimulate it with the mind. The body gets activated. We bring presence, awareness, acceptance,

loving attention to the body, the body releases. Okay. Now here's what happens. So now we've got the cognitive stimuli, the body reaction. We interrupt the stimuli, bring our attention to the body, the body relaxes. Now, if I said, think about that situation again, you could think about it and you'd check, does the body light up again? If it does, you relax the body. Now, eventually here's what we go. Cause then you're in what we call a cognitive emotive loop.

Cognitive a thought, emotive the body feels something. This is a really important thing for people to learn who want to experiment with this. When you're in a stimuli, the person cut me off on the road, they shouldn't have cut me off, the body is in anger or scare. I stop the mind from judging the person. I bring it back. I let my body relax. Then I go up and I deconstruct the thought.

I have to do a work on the thought where I see my attachment to being right about my belief. And it's my righteous attachment to being right that is stimulating the feeling. So people can spend years in a cognitive emotive loop.

My father-in-law disrespected me when he walked out of last year's holiday celebration. I could think that thought, see him walking out the door. I could get pissed off again. Now, here's the deal. I don't complete it in my body. My body lights up. I don't complete it. I actually use the energy in my body to fuel the thought.

That son of a bitch. How dare he walk out? Now I'm literally back in the scene again. Yeah. The body lights up some more. I don't complete it in the body. I use that to fuel the mind. That turns into this cognitive motive loop, which you can stay in for years. And to your point, that turns into a mood. It's not a feeling anymore. Now it's not a feeling of anger. It's a mood of resentment. It's a mood of bitterness.

Now it becomes a posture all because I didn't release the energy out of my body by giving it a moment of attention. And I didn't deconstruct the thought to become free from my righteous beliefs. Well, before you practice with your father-in-law, the next time he shows up or somebody cuts you off in traffic, just, I might say for a couple of weeks, just do a little morning practice, a couple of days a week where you do just what I did with you.

So you get real familiar at, okay, yesterday I did an anger thing. Today I'm going to do a sad thing. Just think of something in your life that brings up sadness. See the picture, really let the movie play. Where is sadness? Okay, it's in the front of my chest. It's in my neck. It's in my eyes. Could I just let the sadness be or the sensation? I don't make it bigger till it goes. Do the same thing with fear. Do the same thing with joy.

And you're learning to let the body have its experience without interrupting it. By the way, this is something our children knew right from the beginning. You watch an infant, they do this automatically. We just had to socialize them out of it because we were afraid it would be too chaotic if everybody just kept feeling their feelings. And this brings up a really interesting point, I think. You know, we think about

Allow me to explain this a lot here for a second. So we think about these big moments in life, like marriage and what job you have and how much of an impact they have on your life. But it's really these, the series of these ordinary moments that accumulate into sort of your position, right? So if I, in this case, you know, I get angry over my stepfather or father-in-law or whatever,

And I allow that to eat me. I'm spending energy on this and all the energy I'm spending on this could go to something more productive, something more productive for myself, more productive for society, more productive for this relationship. At some point I have to, like maybe I don't, but if I'm going to, I have to expend a lot of energy to repair this relationship.

So, so I've now spent a lot of energy that didn't do anything for me. And my relationship is now in, in this worse situation if I don't repair it. So it's fragile, right? So I'm not well positioned to withstand the next sort of slight or a front. So I'm increasingly get into getting in a worse and worse position. And so it's,

I think these ordinary moments that nobody thinks about and nobody talks about and nobody teaches you how to handle turn into extraordinary results or almost like a death spiral. And it's how you handle these moments, these sort of like decisive moments, if you will, or whatever you want to call them.

That nobody's ever talked about and nobody ever teaches you, but these are the moments that sort of determine your future. Are you getting closer to what you want? Are you getting further away from what you want? Is your trajectory improving or is your trajectory declining?

Are you taking steps towards being the type of person you want to be? Or are you walking away and making that harder and more difficult? And then if you are making it more difficult unintentionally, because I don't think this happens consciously, unconsciously,

And eventually the gap becomes so large that you just bury your head in the sand. So if you're, you have a slight with somebody in a relationship context, whether it's your partner, your kids, you know, somebody at work, somebody driving, it doesn't matter, but you don't repair this. You don't get it back to equilibrium. Then you're in this spot where things just go wrong, right? And they start going wrong in other areas of your life.

And I think we just don't think about these ordinary moments because we all put all this effort into who you marry and what job you take. And we're taught to be rational about these decisions. But it's sort of like it's almost like a micro these these micro moments have more of an impact on your life than that in a lot of ways. Because, you know, if I I might pick the right spouse, but if I don't turn these ordinary moments into extraordinary outcomes, then

It doesn't matter. Like that whole choice is like a multiply by zero. I can pick the perfect person, but these ordinary moments are what makes that relationship amazing or terrible. Well, people are just listening unless they're watching. I have a huge smile on my face and my heart feels like, I just want to go because it's such a profound insight that it's a million little moments that

that I didn't handle. It's not that I didn't have the slight. It's not that. It's not about creating a life free from slights. You use that word. It's that I didn't know what to do with the slight, or I just handled the slights the way my personality automatically handles slights.

And then one slate became a whole accumulation. And it could be in an intimate partner. It could be with my business partner. And then you have these

dozens and dozens of little slights that slowly over time corrode the partnership, the connection, the intimacy. And now this is where we're back to integrity being wholeness and aliveness. Now, all of a sudden, I'm not fully alive. I'm sleepwalking my way through life. Now, I want to grab one more thing that you said.

You went like, you know, okay, so now I've got this disrupted relationship with my stepfather and my father-in-law. Okay. It's taken a ton of energy to get to this place because I had these slights, these resentments, and you know, I've repressed it, suppressed it. I've held a position and now it's going to take a ton of energy to fix it. Now, what do I do? I do want to say something. There are two dimensions to repairing that relationship.

One is literally repairing it with the other person, but there's a repair that can occur that doesn't require or even need to involve the other person. That's incredibly important because I don't need the other person to cooperate and to be co-committed to repairing our relationship for me to repair myself and

on the inside so that I'm free. And again, there are many other tools we could use, but we'll just stay with these four pillars. I don't need the other person to do anything for me to claim agency and stop living in victimhood. I can take responsibility. I don't need the other person to be involved for me to feel my feelings all the way through to completion.

I don't need the other person to be involved for me to bring up all of my thoughts, judgments and reveal them. I don't even need to reveal them to the person. I've learned over the years, if you pick a surrogate and reveal them to the surrogate, you will experience the liberation of candor. So you can repair that.

meaningfully just by yourself, then from a repaired place, you can decide, do I want to have a relationship with my stepfather or not? The answer might be no, but here's the deal. If I say no to having a relationship with him, I still get to be alive on the inside. My wholeness isn't damaged. I've done my work.

And then we can decide if we want to repair the relationship, but that's going to take a cold commitment to repairing the relationship. So here's the, like, I like this. When you talk about deciding, it's so interesting because that is,

implies you've thought of this as a decision. And what we're talking about with these ordinary moments, like if somebody were to tap you on your shoulder as you're having an argument with your partner at home and said, you're making a choice in this moment to escalate or deescalate the situation.

Your rational brain would sort of kick in and be like, I don't want to do this. It's not worth it. I don't even know what I'm upset about. I'm just reacting without responding. I'm an animal, right? This is what we are. We're animals. We're reacting without reasoning, which is what animals do other than humans.

And if somebody were to tap you, you'd be like, yeah, I'm opting out. And both partners or both parties in this sort of situation would opt out, right? Everybody would see what's going on and their ability to think rationally would kick in. And when you think about decision making, it's so fascinating to me because we have a gazillion books on decision making and they all imply that we're not rational.

If only you were more rational, you would make better decisions. But I think as we're talking about this and we're sort of working this out a bit in public here, it's not that we're not rational. It's that we don't even know that these ordinary moments are decision points that, again, make the future easier or harder, move us towards who we want to be or who we don't want to be.

And they sort of aggregate over the period of our relationship. Yes. So how do we interrupt the pattern when it's occurring? Because like, how do we metaphorically tap ourselves on the shoulder? That's, you know, you said, what if somebody tapped you on the shoulder? You'd go, hold on, man, let me take a breath. Yeah, this is crazy what I'm doing. How do we do that? Okay, again,

That tap on the shoulder, that interruption, that pause doesn't occur naturally. We have to train for the pause. You have this fight. You both get into your pattern. You know, you're going, that pattern you've been to a million times before. Okay. The next day or a week later on your next date night, you say, hey, would you be willing to have a conversation with me?

where we can take a look at the pattern. We're not going to review the content of last Tuesday night's fight.

Because the content just, the content changes. Actually, we recycle the same content all the time, but the content can change. Can we look below the content? Can we see what we do? So now we're doing a post-mortem, we're deconstructing. Now, the way we do that is I take responsibility for looking at my pattern. You take responsibility for looking at your pattern. We look at the third pattern, which is the pattern of the relationship. Okay, so we start to get some awareness. Then, like I said last time,

We have one of these conversations where we say, hey, I want to play a different game with you. I really do. And I want to check, would you be willing to play a different game? And the game I want to play is I just want to begin to end blame and criticism. I want to value value.

responsibility and curiosity. I want to start to value appreciation over in time. I just want to play a different game. Okay. So now we have started to learn our patterns. We've co-committed to a different game. Okay. Now it's the next Tuesday night and we're back in the fight.

In my experience, most people still won't tap themselves on the shoulder in the midst of the fight because it's the pattern is there again. And we're in the grip of the pattern. That's great. But now on Wednesday morning, when I'm having a little bit of meditation or I'm doing my journaling, I say, oh, I did it again. Hey, honey, I said I was going to shift out of blame. I was in blame and criticism. I want to back up. Okay. So now I'm learning after the event.

Okay. The next time I learn an hour later, the next time in the midst of the event, and this is, you know, what we've done in the world is we created all kinds of tools that you actually use real time, like the drama triangle. You put it on the floor and you say, we're in it. We're in our pattern. Let's exaggerate it and make it bigger by getting in the drama triangle. So now we're doing it real time.

And then eventually we can start to feel the stimuli come up and we can interrupt that with a different breath pattern, something like that. So we're training, training, training. So that, and that's in my experience, the way we do this in relationships.

I think that's super powerful. Are there other tools? You mentioned the drama triangle. What do you do in the moment? What's another tool that's really effective in the moment where you said you have a physical sort of like these cards or whatever it was that you put on the table to get people out of this? What are the other things in the moment we can use or one other tool that's really effective? There are a couple of other tools to shift on the fly in the moment when you're in the midst of the conflict. By the way,

You have to have pre-decided that we're going to shift. So like in our relationship, either of us can call the game whenever we want. Either of us can't.

It's like we have a card we can play, which says we're going to stop this conversation and we're going to do something different. Now, that's just an agreement that we have. A lot of teams that we work with have this agreement. OK, now, when I call the game real time, we've pre-decided we're going to do this. Here's a couple of on the fly shift moves. First of all, we're going to do some conscious breathing.

Because we are animals. And when we are triggered, there is a blood and brain chemistry that is running the show. So the first thing I have to do is I have to deal with my blood and brain chemistry. Otherwise, I'm just going to stay in fight, flight, freeze, faint reactivity. So it might be we're going to do four, seven, eight breathing, or we'll do four by four breathing or just for 30 seconds or a minute. We have like seven different breathing techniques.

that we're just going to bring our attention away from the conflict and to our breath. Okay, now that changes my blood and brain chemistry. The next shift move to do in the midst of conflict is to say, hey, I stopped listening to you 15 minutes ago. You said these words and I got reactive. Now that I've come back to a stable blood and brain chemistry,

I want to recommit to listening to you. So I'm going to practice conscious listening. Debbie and I, we don't get in drama much anymore. Hardly ever, maybe never. But when we used to, one of us would say, sweetheart, I stopped listening to you, you know, like a day ago. I just wanted to argue with you and prove I was right. So I'm going to back up.

And I want to deeply listen to you. Would you tell me again what it is you're saying? And then we just use conscious listening techniques where I might say, what I hear you saying, is that right? Is there more? And then I might drop into my heart and say, God, when I hear you say it, I imagine you feel scared. And then I drop into my belly and I might say, it sounds like what you really want is this. And my whole purpose is to get her.

So interrupt, change breathing, choose conscious listening. The drama triangle really is big. That's Karpman's drama triangle. I'm holding up my plastic cards. They're in my office. I have them in my bedroom. They're in our kitchen. There are three cards that say victim, villain, and hero.

We throw these down on the floor. We start a timer for two minutes. And here's the key. You exaggerate the fight. You don't stop the fight, but you stand on the bases and you make the fight bigger. You know, Diana Chapman, you've had her on. And Diana is my partner at CLG.

She is world class at turning drama into play. And I've learned so much from her. And the drama triangle is one way to, by the way, kids love the drama triangle too. So that would be another one. And then I'll give you one more little shift move, which is incredibly useful. And that is, okay, let's separate fact from story here. We're having this conversation about money.

Let's deconstruct. What are the facts? Unarguable. Video camera would record. Unarguable facts. And what are the stories we're making up about the facts? Because here's what you learn. Facts never cause drama. Stories cause drama. And then you learn that you are the source of your stories and that your drama is caused because you're wanting to be right about your stories, prove you're right, and make the other person wrong.

So Deb and I, or Diana and Eric and I, my business partners, we do this all the time. We'll differentiate fact from stories. The facts are these. Let's just write them on a whiteboard, put them up. Now let's all tell each other all the stories we're making up.

And that distinction between fact and story relaxes us and brings us back to responsibility because I'm making up a story. By the way, you'll make up stories based on your ego structure, your personality, things like that. So those are four shift moves. Breathe, conscious listen, drama triangle, and differentiate fact from story.

Some of them are instant shift moves and some of them are practices that can start to create a different dynamic about how we're being in relationship.

That's so powerful. Thank you for sharing that with us. I want to come, I'm not losing sight of this. I know we're going down a lot of rabbit holes here and a lot of asides. I think it's incredible. I want to come back to sort of the fourth pillar of integrity, which is being impeccable with your agreements. What does that mean? So an agreement, let's just start there. An agreement is anything I've said I would do or wouldn't do. That's an agreement.

And an agreement, I can make agreements with myself. I make an agreement with myself to work out every morning at whatever time, something like that. But agreements often exist between two or more people. So an agreement is anything I've said I would do or wouldn't do. And an agreement involves who's going to do what by when. So a lot of drama in life is caused because we have unclear and unkept agreements. Just think about it.

So much drama is caused. So much energy is wasted. You're in a team meeting. You say, I thought you said you'd give me that report by five o'clock. And the person says, no, no, I said be next Tuesday or the truth of the matter is we never said when it would be. So I just assumed it would be five o'clock. And I thought the scope of the report would be this. And you thought the scope of the report would be that. And so we're just wasting.

wasting massive amounts of energy with unclear agreements. So the first key to being impeccable with your agreements is make clear agreements. Who is gonna do what by when? So simple. When people in teams get aligned to be impeccable with agreements, they start keeping about 90% of their agreements. Now, when you go in and you look at a relationship or a team that's working together and you say,

What percentage of agreements do you guys keep with each other? Usually it's down in the 30 to 40 range. And I just want them to know how much energy they're wasting on explaining, justifying, criticizing, rework, missed opportunities. So one, make clear agreements you have a whole body of yes to. Two, keep your agreements. Three, as soon as you know you're not going to keep an agreement,

let the other party know and renegotiate. So let's imagine that this morning at, or let's imagine yesterday afternoon, I realize, ah, something's come up. You know, I would like to renegotiate our start time from 11 to 1130. As soon as I know, I reach out to you and I say, Shane, we have an agreement to meet at 11 o'clock. I would like to renegotiate our agreement to 1130. Now that's not a unilateral announcement, right?

It's a bilateral relationship. Are you available to that? You say, sure, no problem. We renegotiate. So trust doesn't get ruptured. Now, if I'm renegotiating 80% of my agreements, you won't find me trustworthy. But if I'm periodically renegotiating, you'll find me trustworthy. You'll count on me. And then the fourth thing is if I break an agreement, technically I broke our agreement today because I don't think I was on Zencaster to like 1101 or 1102.

This is really important to me because Tom Peters years ago had that great quote, there's no such thing as a small breach of integrity. Well, there are different consequences for integrity breaches, but energetically, there's no difference. So I was out of integrity. So I get on with you at 1101 and I clean it up. I just said, hey, man, we had an agreement to be here at 11. I was here at 1101. I take responsibility. I didn't pay attention to Zencaster. I went to Google Meet. Now, here's the key.

I just want to know if that affects our trust at all. I imagine you'd say, no big deal. But if I did that all the time, if I was always 15 minutes late, we'd have a trust problem. So what we find is energy goes up dramatically.

When I make clear agreements, I have a whole body yes with. When I keep 90% of them, when I renegotiate ahead of time, and when I clean up broken agreements without making excuses, justifications, or rationalizations, I just take responsibility. What happens is my aliveness goes up and our trust goes deep. A major reason trust is where it is in many relationships is because we're not impeccable with our agreements.

I love this concept. I want to dive a little deeper at something you said at the start here, which is you handle people who you don't know if they can keep their agreements. I think you use the word untrustworthy in a different way. And I'm curious as to what that is, because I know for many people, myself included, there are people in your life who are chronically late. Yeah. And

It really, it's one of the few things that drives me crazy for some, I don't even know why, right? I've often like tried to think about why does this bother me? And I think it does come to the agreement, right? Like we made an agreement. I'm here upholding my end of this agreement. And it's also been a source where I've chosen to let people out of my life because of their un,

Uh, inability, I guess, to keep their agreement, especially in this, if you're chronically late and it drives me crazy, like I just don't want any part of that because I'm sitting there, you know? So I had this one person years ago where I would actually tell him that we were meeting a half hour before we were actually meeting. And one time he showed up and it was hilarious because he showed up five minutes before I got there.

And, uh, he was like, I thought you said we were meeting at like six 30 and it's like six 55. And I had said six 30 cause I knew he'd be there at seven. And I was like, yeah, I mean, like, I just, I just thought you'd be late. And so I planned around it. And he's like, how long have you been doing this? And I've been like years.

So great. And it really, it opened his eyes too, right? Into this sort of, he's like, I didn't. And I was like, because otherwise I'm sitting here for a half hour. Like that's not...

you're breaking the agreement at the time that we had planned, right? And so I'm curious as to how you handle these. Here are three things you can do. Let me, I can illustrate with a couple of, a casual one and then a meaningfully important one. So like I get used to, he's gone now, but the person right around the corner, I'm in downtown Chicago now, the person right around the corner cut my hair.

And so I went to him and I formed a relationship with him. And, you know, I started noticing I'd show up to get my haircut at 11 o'clock or whatever it was. And he, you know, after two or three times, I noticed he shows up at like 1110, 1115 and says, OK, I'm ready for you. So I go, great, no problem. So I sit down in the chair and I said to him, let's say his name was Ben or whatever it is. I say, Ben.

This is going to sound a little weird to you, I imagine. But the way I like to live my life is I like to make agreements around time and then keep them. I just found that it works really easy for me in life. And so it's the way I want to live my life. It's not the way everybody wants to live their life. It might not be the way you want to live your life. You get to live your life however you want. But when we're in relationship together, I wonder if you'd be willing to keep your agreements with me around time.

So if we have an 11 o'clock appointment, I'd like to be seated and ready to go at 11. Now, you notice there was not a lot of judgment or criticism. He gets to live his life however he wants, you know? That's so much better than what I do. Well, he thought about it a little bit and he said, yeah. Six months later, there was a time I had, let's say, metaphorically an 11 o'clock appointment. I get a text saying,

From the person who works at the front desk saying he's running 10 minutes late. I thought I never even talked to him about renegotiating agreements. He's renegotiating. I show up, I say, Ben, thank you so much. Okay. I'm illustrating this because option number one.

you can talk to people in your life and you can invite them, not from a harsh, judgmental, time cop place, but from a place of presence in our relationship, would you be willing to play this game with me? Now, I've found loads of people who want to do that. You know, I've coached a lot of, you know, meaningfully high-powered CEOs, some of whom are notorious for being late. Well,

I remember I was in it the first time I had an experience with this one CEO, you know, fairly common household name. I'm in the meeting room. His whole senior team is there. He walks in. He sits down in his chair. He's about 10 minutes late. Now we'd already contracted to coach and he wanted feedback. So he starts the meeting and they're having been working on their computer. So I get there and I said, Hey, before we get started, I just want to clear something with you. We had an agreement to start at 11 o'clock. We were all here. You weren't here. Those are the facts. There was an agreement. A video camera would record.

So I notice I feel angry and I want to use that anger to get into right relationship with you. And I want to ask if you'd be willing to keep your agreements with me around time. And then I said, and I wonder if this is a pattern for you, at which point his whole team is laughing because the way they actually ran their lives were, we'll show up, but the meeting never starts till he shows up.

And then, you know, now we start, he shows up 10 to 15 minutes. Now I start, now we've just got a shit show going on. He looks at me, pauses and goes, it was really great because he got present. He said, I will do that with you. And I still coach this guy. This is like six, seven years later. He's impeccable with his agreements with me. Okay. So we can ask people to get into right relationship with us. That's option number one. Option number two, this happened with one of our kids.

One of our kids is notorious for not keeping time agreements. I mean, he just, he just full of life and there's always one more fun thing to do. And we were, he at that point lived out in Newport, California. I was out there doing a workshop or something and we were going to meet for dinner and he showed up. Now here's what I, I talked to him a couple of times about it and I said, Hey, listen, here's the deal. I want to be in relationship with you. I do. And I,

I don't want to be in drama in my own mind about whether you're going to keep your agreements around time. So I'm going to count on you. I'm going to trust you to not keep your agreements around time. Notice the way I said that. I'm going to trust you to be you.

I'm going to show up taking care of myself. So because I like to keep my agreements, if we're going to meet at seven, I'll still be there at seven, but I'll bring a book or I'll listen to music or I'll listen to podcasts or I'll just admit it doesn't matter. But I won't be sitting there going, where is he? Because I trust you to not be there on time. No drama. Now, I did say sometimes if it goes a particular length of time, I might choose to leave.

Just because I didn't want to sit there any longer. And I'll give you a heads up that I'm leaving. Okay. Now this is option two. Stay in relationship with people who don't keep their agreements, but don't suffer. This is the key. Suffering is optional on my part. And one way to suffer is to think that they should be different.

or that they're going to be different. That's a formula for suffering. It's a way I could destroy my relationship with him. Instead, I just trust you to be who you are. Keeping your agreements around time isn't important to you. Great. I still want to be in relationship with you. That's option two. Option three is the one that you mentioned, which is, oh, many times in my life,

After having the conversation, hey, again, just over, and I always say something like this, just over there on planet Jim, I just like to keep my agreements around time. And especially people in my inner world, I populate my life with people who keep their agreements. It doesn't look like that's the way you want to live your life with me as evidenced by the results. So I want to ask you, would you be willing? Oftentimes they will say yes.

And then what I basically do is after the third time of them not keeping their agreement, I say, listen, I hear that you want to keep your agreements, but you're unwilling to keep your agreements as evidenced by the results. So I'm going to go ahead and end our relationship.

I still value you, like you, love you. I still think you do great work or whatever it is. I'm not blaming you for what's occurring. I'm just saying I'm going to choose to be in a different kind of relationship with you now. And it sort of takes the blame or not the blame is the wrong word, but the agency off you because you're not really doing anything. You're just sort of like

Why do I have to end this? No, this person's ending this relationship. I'm just the one who's going to tap them on the shoulder and tell them that as a result of their behavior, if it continues, this is the path that we're walking. I'll still love you. I still think you're a great person, but this is a type of agreement that I can't.

you know, that we have that we need. And we all have these relationships in our life. And to your point about energy, they consume so much energy because they're constantly in our thoughts, right? Even when you're booking a meeting with these people, like they're, they're probably like laughing right in their head because they book a meeting and they're like, he's not going to show up for 15, 20 minutes. Um,

Right. And so it becomes a joke, too. And when it becomes a joke, it also takes on this power and it causes resentment and it causes passive aggression. And over years, it wears on you to the point where you start acting differently, behaving differently.

And then at work, you're not fully present. Work becomes a job instead of something where you're all in and you're committed because you don't feel like you can be all in with somebody who's violating or not maintaining their agreements with you, who's not showing you respect by keeping their time. So how can I go all in for this person? I'm not going to go all in for them. I'm going to work nine to five.

And I'm going to do my job and I might do it really well. But you're never going to get that 5x or 10x performance because you're never going to get that all-in attitude that you need to get that. Oh, God, that's good. I'm reminded one of my favorite quotes by, I've mentioned Gay Hendricks before, one of my favorite quotes by Gay, because it's such a profound statement. And then you can test whether it's true for you. All drama in relationships. It would just start with that. All drama in relationships.

is caused by unaligned commitments and or unclear and unkept agreements. So remember at the beginning, we talked about commitments are a big idea about what you're aiming for in life. It's the San Francisco. Okay, so it's like, I imagine, you know, you and I have only met this way, but if we were gonna become friends and really good friends, I think we would have a conversation which looks like, hey, I commit to take responsibility

I commit to be responsible for myself and let you be responsible for yourself. And you'd say, yes, same thing. So now we're co-committed. So now if we do that thing where you apologize and think, you know, it was a bad situation, I'd say, hold on a sec. We co-committed. Let's back up. Great. We back up. We commit to be candid. So we're really revealing our judgments and opinions about each other.

We do it. So we're co-committed. Drama occurs when we're not both going to San Francisco. One's going to San Francisco, one's going to Austin. Okay. And then the second thing is exactly what you were pointing at.

We don't have clear agreements and we don't keep them. So all drama comes because we didn't get aligned on where we're going and we're not impeccable with our agreements. And I really offer to you and to others, test that. Almost all drama is caused by one of those two things. There are other things that get implicated in it, but those are really big ones. I think that's such a powerful concept. Jim, I could talk to you forever.

I think this is a good place to end this particular conversation because we've hit on the four pillars of integrity. I know if we go into another topic, we're going to be here another two hours and I'm conscious of not mixing these things into, I think this is a great, this is one of the best episodes we've ever recorded. Thanks, Shane. I just, I love co-creating with you. It's really fun. It's like there's a,

You know, it's a one plus one equals four experience for me. I just love it. So thank you. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog slash podcast, or just Google The Knowledge Project. Until next time.